This Hallowed Ground by Bruce Catton – A Book Review

For any writing about history to be of the slightest use to us readers, it’s got to gather background information and trends which allow readers fresh insights about the period or event of interest. As long as an author’s work can continue to achieve this, it must remain valuable to us, until another author can improve on it.

If we apply this test to Catton’s book, even though he wrote it seventy years ago in 1953, it still passes with ease.

Insights? For example, I have never really understood the disagreement that persists to this day about whether the Civil War was primarily about preserving the Union or about destroying slavery. These two objectives never seemed so similar me that anyone could easily mistake one for the other. Yet it still happens all the time, today. Just go up on YouTube for a minute or so.

Catton let me see quite clearly how this “mistake” was possible: It happened because initially most people at that time saw the cause of the conflict in terms of the threat to the Union of states. That is how many leaders on both sides chose to present it at the time. Only slowly did this emphasis shift during the War, until, nearer the end, the War was very clearly and emphatically about the survival of that “peculiar institution”-slavery. There were a number of reasons for this profound shift.

One particular reason was the result of a condition that could only have accumulated over the path of events occurring after the start of the War. Each battle freed more and more slaves, if only temporarily. Gradually, both sides suffered from worse and worse labor shortages, but only Union forces had the slightest chance of putting these refugees to work in camp or even in some cases, arming them.

Although Catton did most of his work before Barbara Tuchman (one of my all-time favorite historians), their very broad approach is similar, as is their refreshing lack of agenda. When you read this book, you will see places where it applies immediately, easily and naturally throughout the US, right now, for the simple reason that we have yet to fully digest the differences that created the Civil War. Some days it looks like we have made no progress in resolving these differences at all. As hard as these problems remain for us survivors today, at least we have writing like this to provide a little light. Many millions of new readers have been born in the US since 1953, and they may well feel that trustworthy information is just as sparse for them as it was for readers in1865.

Stephen says, “check it out”!