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Any list of top Civil War books is bound to be subjective—there are 60,000 and counting—but Civil War historian Glenn LaFantasie offers his top 12 choices.

In his opinion, the best book ever written on the Civil War is by Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Catton: A Stillness at Appomattox.

My top choice did win a Pulitzer for its author, Bruce Catton. For those who aren’t familiar with his works, which are plentiful, he was probably the 20th century’s foremost American writer of narrative histories, most of which were about the Civil War. Published in 1953, A Stillness at Appomattox details the experiences of the Army of the Potomac during the final year of the war, but it is much more than a retelling of an often told tale. In fact, one could say this book is a prose poem to the Army of the Potomac and the men who fought in it. As a child growing up in Michigan, Catton knew and spoke to Civil War veterans in his small hometown. Although a good part of his career was spent as a newspaper journalist and columnist, he took up writing Civil War books in the 1950s, became the senior editor of American Heritage magazine, and gained great fame as an author until his death in 1978. Catton wrote not only with a journalist’s eye, but also with a novelist’s sensibilities (although he only ever published one novel on the Civil War for juvenile readers). Today his name—and the quality of his work—is largely forgotten, although Civil War historians and enthusiasts still heap high praise on him for his long list of highly satisfying Civil War books and biographies. A Stillness at Appomattox stands out from all the rest of his writings. As this fine book reveals so expressively, Catton forged a trail for later Civil War historians by writing his account of the Army of the Potomac from the point of view of soldiers in the ranks. By means of lilting sentences, adroit portraits of men and their peccadilloes, and iron-hard descriptions of men in battle, Catton turns the Army of the Potomac into more than a mass of men in wartime; his picture of the army and its soldiers convinces you that he was there with them, which of course he wasn’t, but you feel that anyway because his narrative carries you back into the world in which those soldiers lived and died. Beneath the surface of Catton’s chronicle runs the awful specter of the tolls of war—how war dehumanizes, stultifies, and yet breeds camaraderie, trust and even love among those who wage it. Long before academic historians turned to highlighting the “face of battle” in their military studies of the Civil War, Catton sketched accurately and effectively the dour features of that face. More to his credit, Catton discussed—in this book and in others—how slavery was the cause of the war, the plight of slaves and freedmen as the war wore on, and the importance of the Union cause as a driving force behind the determination of Northern soldiers to win the war and reunite the country. This book leaves sharp images lingering in the reader’s mind, largely because Catton expertly sets scenes, describes people in human terms, and refuses to disguise the ugly, malevolent and heartless aspects of war. Yet, in the end, the book is surprisingly uplifting, a splendid tale of victory, no doubt because Catton so adeptly uses irony and compassion to tell the Army of the Potomac’s story. Walt Whitman once famously said, “the real war will never get in the books.” He was wrong. The real war, in all its dimensions, can be luminously found in this, the best book ever written about the Civil War.

HT: Joe Carter

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