Books: To Sorrow & Glory

THE COMING FURY (565 pp.)—Bruce Catton—Doubleday ($7.50).

In the beginning, the rebel leaders were an unlikely lot. Alabama’s William Lowndes Yancy was as mild a fellow as anyone would want to meet—until, upon arising to speak, he became the “Prince of Fire-Eaters” who had made it his life’s work to lead the South from the Union. Georgia’s Alexander Stephens was a sickly 100-pounder, known as “The Little Pale Star,” who saw the future with terrible clarity: “Mark me, when I repeat that in less than twelve months we shall be in the midst of a bloody war.” Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis, blind in one eye and haggard with headaches, was a moderate who could say to his wife, even after the Confederacy under his presidency had fired on Fort Sumter: “Separation is not yet, of necessity, final. There has been no blood spilled more precious than that of a mule.”

In the North, the leading figures were just as disparate. Massachusetts’ egg-bald, cockeyed Congressman Benjamin Butler in April 1860 was a Southern sympathizer and a devoted backer of Jeff Davis for President of the whole U.S.; he lived to be military governor of occupied New Orleans and became known throughout the South as “Beast” Butler. Illinois’ Senator Stephen A. Douglas, with his massive head and dwarfish body, was a man in the middle; in his efforts to please North and South, he became anathema to both. Illinois’ Republican Representative Owen Lovejoy had seen his older brother, an abolitionist, killed by an Alton mob, and he knew what he thought about slavery: “It has the violence of robbery, the blood and cruelty of piracy, it has the offensive and brutal lusts of polygamy, all combined and concentrated in itself.”

Surviving Two. These are a few who people the pages of Journalist-Historian Bruce Catton’s The Coming Fury, first of a three-volume “Centennial History of the Civil War” commissioned six years ago by Doubleday and the New York Times (Researcher E. B. Long was hired for the project, has traveled 50,000 miles compiling 15,000 pages of notes). It is Catton’s thesis that such leaders, with their passions and vacillations and helplessness against the rip tides of controversy, helped bring on the tragedy of civil war. Then, in the crucible of conflict, they melted away, until only two were left who counted. Writes Catton: “Of all the leaders, two men had the terrible capacity to make men love them and to strike with unrestrained furv—Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln. These two would be followed to the bitterest end, to the sorrow, the glory, and finally the salvation of their common country.”

In recent years, the Civil War has become almost a minor industry in itself within the book trade. One historian after another has trampled out his own vintage from the fabled grapes of wrath. The boom dates roughly from 1934 and Douglas Southall Freeman’s R. E. Lee; it picked up momentum in 1942 with Freeman’s Lee’s Lieutenants (which still sells thousands of copies a year), and has been surging ever since. In 1961. the Civil War’s 100th anniversary year, more than 250 Civil War books have been published, and even the most trivial of them command audiences of around 5,000.

Gentle & Clean. But even in the fat Civil War field, Bruce Catton, 62, onetime Washington correspondent tor the Newspaper Enterprise Association and later a WPA publicist, is a phenomenon. The three books that make up his full-length study of the Army of the Potomac—Mr. Lincoln’s Army (1951), Glory Road (1952) and A Stillness at Appomattox, which won him a 1954 Pulitzer—have sold, among them, more than 132,000 copies. This Hallowed Ground, a one-volume history of the war published in 1958, has passed the 90,000 mark; Catton wrote the 60,000-word text for last year’s American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War—which retails for $19.95 and incredibly, has sold more than 310,000 copies. The Coming Fury is the Book-of-the-Month Club selection for November, with a first printing order of 150,000.

Among Civil War historians, Catton is less scholarly than Allan Nevins, who this year produced the sixth of his laborious, ten-volume The Ordeal of the Union (Nevins made all his notes available to Catton for The Coming Fury and its successors). Catton’s books are neither as thorough nor as thoughtful as Frank Vandiver’s 1957 Mighty Stonewall or Shelby Foote’s massive first volume of his Civil War trilogy. But Catton has a rare facility for entertaining the buffs while enticing the tyro. A clear, clean writer, he is also a gentle one: few villains appear in his books—only humans, tossed by events.

The Coming Fury is characteristic Catton. It opens with the April 1860 Democratic National Convention in Charleston,

S.C., where Northern delegates could hear the sound of drums each evening, a warning to Negroes that they must be off the street during the hours of darkness. That convention ended in Democratic schism, and from that moment the road to war led straight. “Politics had lost its flexibility,” writes Catton. “and the loss reflected grass-roots sentiment. Too many leaders had dug in for a last-ditch stand—whether for high principle, for practical political profit, or for a blend of both—and although it was increasingly clear that the result was likely to be disastrous, everybody felt that the necessary concessions ought to be made by somebody else.”

Picnic’s End. In the riotous election campaign of 1860, there were four major candidates for President—Republican Lincoln, Northern Democrat Douglas, Southern Democrat John Breckinridge and Constitutional Union John Bell. Of them, only Douglas took an outspoken public stand on the issue that was already overshadowing that of slavery itself—secession. But Douglas was doomed; in the Democratic split lay the certainty of Republican victory, and in that victory lay the certainty of war: “The tragedy of the leaders of the North had been that they could not see that a Republican victory would almost automatically mean secession of one or many of the states of the Deep South; and the tragedy of the Southerners was that they were not able to see that secession would finally mean war.”

Upon becoming President, Abraham Lincoln had one firm policy: he was willing to tolerate slavery where it already existed, but he would resist the dismemberment of the Union by force of arms if necessary. Yet his election automatically caused the secession of South Carolina, followed by its sister cotton states. There remained only the political maneuvering to see who would fire the first shot—before the cannon thundered at Fort Sumter.

The Coming Fury ends on the field of Bull Run. Both Northerner and Southerner had marched onto that field, as though to a picnic, the young Yankees breaking ranks to pick blackberries. Many of them died with the berries still staining their lips. For these and the nation, the picnic was over, and Catton is already hard at work on the next volume describing the years of bitter fury that lay ahead.