A Stillness at Appomattox (1953)

A really fine history book by a master of the genre. Pulitzer Prize winner for history and rightfully so. Brings the Civil War to life. Grant takes over the Army of the Potomac and slowly and then suddenly conquers the gallant but hungry and decimated Army of Northern Virginia. Sedgwick, Sheridan, Custer, Chamberlain, Pickett, Lee, Early, A.P. Hill. Wow. Just a great read. Highly recommended as blue ribbon history. ( )

This third volume in the Army of the Potomac trilogy is a marked change from the first volume. The supreme civil war buff that wrote, and very often entertained us, in the first volume, has transitioned in each following volume to become a most competent professional historian. While the genuinely fascinating anecdotes that highlighted the first volume have diminished, this final volume is constantly and consistently still very interesting, blending more smoothly the "stories" with the facts and analysis. Also, this final volume no longer gives the impression of blindly looking at the history from an unnecessarily one-sided perspective, a problem that occasionally marred the first two volumes. Perhaps the biggest highlight of many in this volume is the telling of General Philip Sheridan's actions during the Battle of Cedar Creek: extraordinarily stirring without embellishment. I'm looking forward to reading more from this author. ( )

If you're going to see things with just one eye, which eye would you choose?

Bruce Catton's writings were devoted almost entirely to the American Civil War, and -- because he was such an excellent writer -- he wrote many, many books on the conflict. Most are very good, and most are quite popular, but to distinguish them, he had to write from different perspectives.

This book, and the series which contains it, isn't really a history of the war. It isn't even a history of the war on the Virginia front. It's a history of the Union's Army of the Potomac -- and of the peculiar circumstances which caused it to fight so well as a group of soldier and be so unsuccessful as an army. It is, in a way, not a history but a psychological study.

To manage that, Catton supplies many anecdotes, about raiders and freed slaves and slaves killed and minor men who succeeded or failed in unusual ways. As often as not, these stories are about things which really didn't affect the outcome of the war at all. What they supply is the feeling -- the frustrations of the men, the confusion of the officers, all the things that made the Army of the Potomac what it was. Sometimes, I find this a little too cutesy. But I am very much a just-the-facts type. And even I think it's a good book. If you like all those human interest touches, you're likely to regard this as a great book. ( )

Final chapter of trilogy - covers Grant years. ( )