A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton
If you wanted to explore the works of Bruce Springsteen, you wouldn’t start with, say, The Ghost of Tom Joad would you? Sure, it’s a fine album, and it’s filled with much of what makes Springsteen such a critically and commercially acclaimed talent, but let’s face it, it’s not Born to Run, it’s not Darkness on the Edge of Town.
And yet, this is how I approached my introduction to Bruce Catton, reading his very fine, but nonetheless unspectacular, American Heritage single volume history of the Civil War. You can read my review of that book to see why I started there, but it was clear early on that A Stillness At Appomattox was where I needed to head next if I really wanted to understand what made Catton such a beloved writer.
Afterall, this was the book that won Catton a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954, and it’s what many consider to be one of the finest works of the period.
Right from the beginning, I could see why this book is so special and revered by so many. Catton opens his narrative of the war’s final year in dramatic fashion, recounting a daring cavalry raid on Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, led by Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick’s plan seemed born from a Hollywood screenplay, and no doubt captured Catton’s imagination as well. As Catton describes it, the idea was to:
“slip through General Lee’s defenses, get down to Richmond before the Army of Northern Virginia could send reinforcements, free all of the Union prisoners, and in its spare time distribute thousands of copies of the President’s proclamation [of amnesty to all who would surrender and return to the Union.]”
Of course, things don’t go as planned, and the war drags on for another year. But Catton’s telling of this tale immediately had me sitting up in my chair, rapt with wonder at his narrative.
The genius of Catton’s book is not only his beautiful prose, consider passages such as this one describing a black regiment of newly freed slaves:
“They were men coming up out of Egypt , trailing the shreds of a long night from their shoulders , and sometimes they sang in the wild imagery of a despairing journey through parted waters to a land of promise…”
But also the countless details he explores of common soldiers’ experiences in the war. This is where Catton truly sets himself apart. Reading his accounts of campaigns from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, to Petersburg, you feel like you’ve lived with these men and sampled just a bit of the dread, weariness, hunger, fear and also camaraderie and humor that they must have experienced.
It’s easy to assume that the two sides, Union and Confederate, must have hated each other, and oftentimes they certainly did. But shared experience and mutual suffering bred mutual respect and admiration as well. Catton tells this story of two picket details in the Spring of ‘64:
Physically, they were not far apart, and the pickets often got acquainted. One Federal picket detail which was ordered to hold certain advanced posts by day but to pull in closer to camp at night, discovered that a deserted log hut which it was using by day was being used by Rebel pickets at night, the Confederate arrangement here being just the reverse of the Federals ’. Two groups of rival pickets met at this hut one morning, the Confederates being tardy in starting back to camp. There was a quick groping for weapons, a wary pause, then a conversation; and the Southerners said that if the Yanks would give them a few minutes to saddle up they would get out and the old schedule might go on. It was so arranged, with a proviso that each side thereafter would leave a good fire burning in the fireplace for its enemies.
He recounts another charming story of the 118th Pennsylvania and the 35th North Carolina spending a day sitting on the opposite banks of a narrow stream fishing and chatting.
At Petersburg, the long siege had both sides feeling empathetic amid the constant carnage, exemplified by a rebel soldier, having noticed a Union general spying on their lines with binoculars, tossing a note wrapped around a stone that read, “Tell the fellow with the spy glass to clear out or we shall have to shoot him.”
But of course, most of the time, the two armies were pitted against each other in brutal, horrific combat. None worse, or more masterfully told, than the so-called Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania. This was perhaps the most riveting account of battle I have ever read in any book, fiction or nonfiction. This is how Catton sets the stage:
This was the Bloody Angle, the place where a trench made a little bend, and where the two armies might have clasped hands as they fought; and it was precisely here that the war came down to its darkest cockpit. It could never be any worse than this because men could not possibly imagine or do anything worse. This fighting was not planned or ordered or directed. It was formless, monstrous, something no general could will. It grew out of what these men were and what the war had taught them—cruel knowledge of killing, wild brief contempt for death, furious unspeakable ferocity that could transcend every limitation of whipped nerves and beaten flesh. There was a frenzy on both armies, and as they grappled in the driving rain with the smoke and the wild shouting and the great shock of gunfire all about them this one muddy ditch with a log wall running down the middle became the center of the whole world. Nothing mattered except to possess it utterly or to clog it breast-high with corpses.
I mean…wow. Later in the battle, when the fighting reaches fever pitch, Catton captures the brutality with heartbreaking, explosive prose:
It began to rain again, and the men in the trenches stood to their knees in bloodstained water, and the ground outside the trenches, trampled by massed thousands of men, turned into a stiff gumbo in which bodies of dead and wounded men were trodden out of sight. […] dead and wounded men were hit over and over again until they simply fell apart and became unrecognizable remnants of bloody flesh rather than corpses. […]
And Catton’s recounting of soldiers’ memories of the battle are shattering:
A Massachusetts soldier wrote that the firing continued “just so long as we could see a man,” and a Pennsylvanian agreed that “all day long it was one continuous assault.” A man in the Iron Brigade probably spoke for every man in the army when he called this fight at the Bloody Angle “the most terrible twenty-four hours of our service in the war.” An officer in the VI Corps, trying to describe the fight afterward, wrote that he had only confused memories of “bloodshed surpassing all former experiences, a desperation in the struggle never before witnessed.” Trying to sum up, he concluded: “I never expect to be fully believed when I tell what I saw of the horrors of Spotsylvania, because I should be loath to believe it myself were the case reversed.”
But also there are moments of exhilaration; acts of hope and heroism amidst the slaughter. These moments read like the finest passages of an epic novel, such as Sheridan’s dramatic victory at the Battle of Cedar Creek:
The Vermonters drew up behind a stone wall to catch their breath, and suddenly a company officer gestured with his sword and cried: “Boys! Look at that!” Beyond the lower ground in their front and to their right, two or three miles away, distinct in the clear sunset light, they saw what one man recalled as “a sight to be remembered a life-time”—two divisions of Yankee cavalry massed in solid columns, drawn sabers flashing in the sun like streaks of flame, thundering down at a full gallop to strike the flank and rear of the Confederate line. Southern artillery fired desperately to break the charge, but the charge could not be stopped.
You just can’t help but get swept up in it.
I quote so much of the book in this write up because these were some of the most memorable, page-turning, emotional and mesmerizing passages I’ve come across in all of my readings.
A Stillness At Appomattox is an extraordinary achievement. It is simply one of very best books I have ever read.
Pulitzer prize for fiction