Bruce Catton QUOTES

46 " Perhaps it was not really possible for slavery to die peacefully and quietly, while everyone waited hat in hand for the mills of God to finish their grinding. Perhaps the essential fact about slavery was that it could neither be kept alive nor done to death rationally. Its foundations went far down into the pit, down to blackest wrong and violence, and when the foundations were torn out, wrong and violence would surely be loosed for a season. The institution's defenders had both overplayed their hands and overstayed their time. "

― Bruce Catton , The Coming Fury

48 " Wherever caste lives, wherever class power exists, whether it be on the Thames or on the Seine, whether on the Ganges or on the Danube, there the South has an ally.… Never until we welcome the Negro, the foreigner, all races as equals, and melted together in a common nationality, hurl them all at despotism, will the North deserve triumph or earn it at the hands of a just God. "

― Bruce Catton , Glory Road

50 " General Lee ruled it out, not only because he was General Lee but also because he had never seen this war as the kind of struggle that could go on that way. He understood the cause he served with complete clarity. His South had meant neither revolution nor rebellion; it simply desired to detach itself and live in its own chosen part of an unchanging past, and Mr. Davis had defined it perfectly when he said that all his people wanted was to be let alone. "

― Bruce Catton , Never Call Retreat

52 " Slavery, said Yancey, was an institution necessary to the prosperity of the South and to that of the North as well; and, furthermore, it was nothing any Northerner need worry about. “It is an institution, too, that doesn’t harm you, for we don’t let our niggers run about to injure anybody; we keep them; they never steal from you; they don’t trouble you with that peculiar stench which is very good in the nose of the Southern man but intolerable in the "

― Bruce Catton , The Coming Fury

54 " war is tragedy, it is better to live than to die, young men who go down to dusty death in battle have been horribly tricked. "

― Bruce Catton , Mr. Lincoln's Army

56 " Halleck wrathfully wrote to Sherman: “It seems but little better than murder to give important commands to such men as Banks, Butler, McClernand, Sigel and Lew Wallace, and yet it seems impossible to prevent it. "

― Bruce Catton , Grant Takes Command 1863-1865

58 " Yet in a sense the good chaplain was quite correct. He had put his finger on something which contained the germ of much history. Whether he was in fact commenting on an effect of the war or on a strange, elusive symptom of something which had actually helped to cause the war may be another matter. At the very least he had spotted something important, and he was justified in using exclamation points. He had seen one side of the war very clearly. "

― Bruce Catton , Mr. Lincoln's Army

60 " Before long the meeting at headquarters got down to a serious discussion of how General Bragg was to be dealt with, and Howard suddenly realized that he had never attended a strategy conference like this one: matters were not handled so informally in the Army of the Potomac. Grant and Thomas and Sherman simply talked things out, putting a whole campaign in review—Sherman bubbling with ideas, as always, Thomas full of solid facts about the roads and mountains and rivers where they would have to fight, Grant listening to both men and now and then putting in an observation of his own. Howard, who was not especially fanciful, felt that it was almost like being in a courtroom: Thomas was the learned judge, Sherman the brilliant advocate, and Grant was the jury whose verdict would settle everything. "

― Bruce Catton , Grant Takes Command 1863-1865