A Stillness at Appomattox
Can you tell from the paucity of postings, that I'm hip-deep in student manuscripts? It's true, but I've been grabbing bits and pieces of personal reading time, and have finally finished my second title for the year (pathetic, just pathetic): A Stillness at Appomattox, by Bruce Catton, originally published in 1953, so I've been putting off reading it my whole lifetime.
Which was a mistake. I'm afraid I perpetuated this mistake on the basis of a false assumption, that this book would be written in the same style as Catton's trilogy narration of the entire Civil War. Those are fine books, and I've read them all twice, but I decided not to read this oft-mentioned book on the assumption that it would just be an expanded version of the same thing. It isn't.
What helped save me from my error was these two paragraphs from Chapter 14 of David McCullough's Brave Companions, the chapter being about Washington DC, but the paragraphs being about what spurred McCullough to write:
If asked to name my favorite book about the city, I would have to pick Margaret Leech's Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Reveille in Washington, first published in 1941, a book I have read and reread and pushed on friends for years.
It is Washington during the Civil War, a chronicle of all that was going on at every level of government and society. I read it initially in the 1960s, in those first years of living here, and it gave me not just a sense of that very different Washington of the 1860s, but of the possibilities for self-expression in writing narrative history. Like Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appomattox, it was one of the books that started me on the way, first reading Civil War history, then thinking more and more of daring to try something of the kind of my own--if ever I could find a subject.
Now when David McCullough tells me the names of the two books that inspired him, I listen. I had purchased both within 48 hours of reading those lines. Like most book purchases, they've been seasoning in my piles for a couple of years, but I'm delighted I got to this one, finally, and will be reading the other sometime this year.
I've been happily retelling this book to my wife whenever she comes within twenty feet of me, so, yeah, I think you can assume I'm recommending it. It's history, but also it's lyrical and thoughtful and keeps its eye on the main point. It's the story of how Grant transformed the Army of the Potomac, and ended the War in Virginia. Also, it's the third volume of a trilogy Catton wrote, purely about the Army of the Potomac, but there is no requirement to read the others first (I haven't). It stands alone.
I'll quote only two paragraphs, and not the most representative, but they're two I read aloud to poor, suffering Bernadette. They describe the last meeting between Lincoln, Grant and Sherman, at City Point, when they discussed the kind of surrender terms that the generals might offer in the field.
When the Southern armies surrendered the two generals would be the ones to say what the terms of surrender must be, and they would take their cue from Lincoln. If the terms expressed simple human decency and friendship, it might be that a peace of reconciliation could get just enough of a lead so that the haters could never quite catch up with it. On all of this Lincoln and Grant and Sherman agreed.
It was a curious business, in a way. The Confederacy had no more effective foes than these men. Lincoln had led the North into war, had held it firmly to its task, and had refused to hear any talk of peace that was not based on the extinction of the Confederate Government. Grant seemed to be the very incarnation of the remorseless killer, and Sherman was destruction's own self, his trail across the South a band of ruin sixty miles wide. Yet it was these three who were most determined that vindictiveness and hatred must not control the future. They would fight without mercy as long as there must be fighting, but when the fighting stopped they would try to turn old enemies into friends.
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The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed.
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
Books and Libraries, and Democracy and Other Papers, James Russell Lowell