Quotes from Bruce Catton

The war was being fought in an era of unlimited suspicion, and as Smith had so bitterly pointed out, simply to be suspected was just about as bad as to be convicted.

At the request of his government, then, Lee wrote to Grant: explaining, first, that runaway Negroes who owed service or labor to Confederate citizens still owed it, that the Confederate government would see to it that they paid what they owed, and that Confederate policy in this matter had abundant historical and constitutional justification.

This army lived and moved under the weight of a peculiar curse. So many incompetents wore shoulder straps, and there was so much lost motion between orders and their execution, that unless the commanding general did spend part of his time looking into the matter of his soldiers' rations, those rations were going to deteriorate very swiftly. 6 As with rations, so with weightier things.

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

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

In this respect early youth is exactly like old age it is a time of waiting for a big trip to an unknown destination. The chief difference is that youth waits for the morning limited and age waits for the night train.

Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made.

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.

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.

A certain combination of incompetence and indifference can cause almost as much suffering as the most acute malevolence.

In the 1860s the leaders of the cotton belt made one of the most prodigious miscalculations in recorded history. On the eve of the era of applied technologies, in which more and more work is done with fewer people and less effort, they made war to preserve the day of chattel slavery - the era of gang labor, with its reliance on the same use of human muscles that built the pyramids. The lost cause was lost before it started to fight. Inability to see what is going on in the world can be costly.

We lived in Indian summer and mistook it for spring.

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.

And so that generation was deprived of the one element that is essential to the operation of a free society-the ability to assume, in the absence of good proof to the contrary, that men in public life are generally decent, honorable, and loyal.

They were teaching Hunt the lesson which artillerists have to learn anew in each generation—that a bombardment which will destroy buildings will not necessarily keep brave defenders from fighting on amid the wreckage.

They were learning the reality of war, these youngsters, getting face to face with the sickening realization that men get killed uselessly because their generals are stupid, so that desperate encounters where the last drop of courage has been given serve the country not at all and make a patriot look a fool.

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. It is slack-jawed, with leering eyes and loose wet lips, with heavy feet and ponderous cunning hands; now and then, when something tickles it, it guffaws, and when it is made angry it snarls; and it can be aroused much more easily than it can be quieted. Mike

In the four years of its existence the Army of the Potomac had to atone for the errors of its generals on many a bitter field. This happened so many times—it was so normal, so much the regular order of things for this unlucky army—that it is hardly possible to take the blunders which marred its various battles and rank them in the order of magnitude of their calamitous stupidity.

From first to last the Army of the Potomac was unlucky. It fought for four years, and it took more killing, proportionately, than any army in American history, and its luck was always out; it did its level best and lost; when it won the victory was always clouded by a might-have-been, and when at last the triumph came at Appomattox there were so very, very many of its men who weren't there to see it.

Haupt's head swam at the thought of dumping this howling mob down on a battlefield. Orders were orders, to be sure, but he was enough of an army man to know that there are ways and ways of rendering obedience. He delayed the train as long as he could; then, when he finally sent it off, he wired the officer in command at Fairfax Station to arrest all who were drunk.

But the miracle of the spirit which takes thousands of young men, ties them together in strange self-forgetfulness, and enables them to walk steadfastly and without faltering into the certainty of pain and death was wearing very thin.

If the hardtack got moldy it was usually thrown away as inedible, but if it just got weevily it was issued anyway. Heating it at the fire would drive the weevils out; more impatient soldiers simply ate it in the dark and tried not to think about it.

they put a special meaning on such a word as "patriotism"; it was not something you talked about very much, just a living force that you instinctively responded to.

Be brave, be orderly, and if any man or woman stand in your way, blow them to hell with a chunk of cold lead." The sheriff then led the posse into town and the fun began.