Quotes from Bruce Catton

The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you.

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.

Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery.

To learn to get along without, to realize that what the world is going to demand of us may be a good deal more important than what we are entitled to demand of it - this is a hard lesson.

There is a rowdy strain in American life, living close to the surface but running very deep. Like an ape behind a mask, it can display itself suddenly with terrifying effect.

The 1860 election became a referendum on the southern way of life.

Soldiers who had been in the army long enough to know what a bloody swindle war really is would begin to feel that army life was really kind of fun, as long as [General Philip] Sheridan was up front.

Say this for big league baseball - it is beyond any question the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America.

Progress is the sum of small victories won by individual human beings.

Early youth is a baffling time

And there is the headlight, shining far down the track, glinting off the steel rails that, like all parallel lines, will meet in infinity, which is after all where this train is going.

Young men then went to war believing all of the fine stories they had grown up with; and if, in the end, their disillusion was quite as deep and profound as that of the modern soldier, they had to fall farther to reach it.

Out of Bull Run would come an effort so prodigious that simply to make it would change America forever. In the dust and smoke along the Warrenton Road an era had come to an end.

Because of that final sentence, no Confederate soldier, from Lee on down, could ever be prosecuted for treason; in effect, this was a general amnesty. There could never be a proscription list to poison the peace with the spirit of vengeance and hatred. Grant had ruled it out.

A nation, from internal resources alone, carrying on for over eighteen months the most gigantic war of modern times, ever increasing in its magnitude, yet all this while growing richer and more prosperous!"1

To one point of view war meant boom times, intense activities, and good money in the pocket; to another it meant slow death for sacred American ideals. And to still another it meant personal opportunity, with sure advantage coming to him who was canny enough to play the angles correctly.

There is no other legend quite like the legend of the Confederate fighting man. He reached the end of his haunted road long ago. He fought for a star-crossed cause and in the end he was beaten, but as he carried his slashed red battle flag into the dusky twilight of the Lost Cause he marched straight into a legend that will live as long as the American people care to remember anything about the American past. - Bruce Catton

Like most presidents, Lincoln was forever being given dramatic compositions by men in high positions with the assurance that his signature at the foot of the paper, his nod of approval to the man who had written it, would solve everything and enable him to sleep quietly of nights.

There is no other legend quite like the legend of the Confederate fighting man. He reached the end of his haunted road long ago. He fought for a star-crossed cause and in the end he was beaten, but as he carried his slashed red battle flag into the dusky twilight of the Lost Cause he marched straight into a legend that will live as long as the American people care to remember anything about the American past.

Kearny had probably seen more fighting than any man on the field. He had served in Mexico as a cavalry captain; had remarked, in youthful enthusiasm, that he would give an arm to lead a cavalry charge against the foe. He got his wish, at the exact price offered, a few days later, leading a wild gallop with flashing sabers and losing his left arm. He once told his servant: "Never lose an arm; it makes it too hard to put on a glove.

You were apt to go from one extreme to the other, in a truly pious environment; which is why ministers' sons in that day were more less expected to become loose livers when they grew up.

The radical bloc, demanding the kind of warfare which only such men could provide, was actually making it harder for the administration to find these men and use them: for it was providing an ideological qualification for purely professional jobs, and instead of inquiring about men's competence it was asking about their loyalty. The

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.

And there it was. Grant could not make a routine military appointment without reflecting on the presidential election; indeed, the political tide was so strong and so confusing that routine military acts all became extraordinary, as if something great had to be fought out in men's minds before anyone could act on the battlefield.