Word: catton
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...good reason for this is that Catton conscientiously strives to find the fresh detail or revised insight that can make each old story new. Prodigious is the only word for the research that went into his centennial trilogy: all the battlefields revisited, 3,500 different sources consulted, 9,000,000 words of fresh notes. Like its two predecessors, The Coming Fury (1961) and Terrible Swift Sword (1963), Never Call Retreat can be read pleasurably and usefully even by someone familiar with all of Catton's other works...
...Perspectives. This final installment opens on the battle of Fredericksburg and closes with Lincoln's assassination. "It was the heaviest bullet, all things considered," writes Catton, "ever fired in America." Wherever possible Catton finds new perspectives along that blood-soaked two-year trail. Of Chickamauga, he writes: "The Union government sent 37,000 soldiers to Tennessee: the Confederacy sent Jefferson Davis. The contrast does not reflect different ideas about what was needed: it simply measures the extent of the resources at hand. Each government did the most it could...
Gentle Wisdom. As always, Catton deals gently with the profound errors in generalship that, on both sides, tragically upped the cost in blood. The worst he can find to say of the Union's Ben Butler, who never once did the right thing on any battlefield, is that his "military operations defy rational analysis...
...same wisdom leads Catton to a singularly gentle conclusion about the war's finish and about those who lost. Lee might have commanded his men to melt into the hills, there to wage an endless guerrilla warfare that, in Catton's opinion, could have "ruined America forever." One of Lee's officers proposed this course, but Lee rejected it. Lincoln might have imposed vengeful terms on the defeated South...
...standard," writes Catton, "this was an almost unbelievable way to end a civil war, which by all tradition is the worst kind of war there is. Living for the rest of their lives in the long gray shadow of the Lost Cause, Lee's men were nevertheless going on toward the future. Pride in what they had done would grow with the years, but it would turn them into a romantic army of legend and not into a sullen battalion of death...