"America Goes to War by Bruce Catton"
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"America Goes to War" is one of the masterpieces
on the American Civil War by Bruce Catton (1899-1978)
Introduction to the Book
Whether a reader is an amateur to the Civil War writings,
or a mature one, Bruce Catton is as simple to understand,
as he is interesting to read till the end. Most readers
choose this book simply because of its writer. Twenty
years after his death, Bruce Catton continually reasserts
himself on being "The" author to be read on
Civil War writings.
America Goes to War contains general overtures, as would
have been written for lectures delivered at Wesleyan
University in 1958, that Catton had probably presented
when he was alive. Like the title implies, passages
are simple, yet written in a beautiful manner. The book
discusses such topics as the role of the citizen soldier,
overlap of outmoded battle tactics with new weapons,
and the political context of the Union's military strategy.
Among other varieties, the author takes his readers
through topics that generally include politics, Abraham
Lincoln, and the terrible price of victory. The layout
of the book is in lecture format, but this does not
at all takes the reader away from what he / she is reading
about.
Being a collectible item, "America goes to War"
belongs on every war story reader's Civil War shelf.
Major Idea and Theme
To take a line from page 68 of the book: "We are
a people to whom the past is forever speaking."
The main idea that Bruce Catton has tried to convey
in "America goes to War" is the fact that
the Civil War is not a closed chapter in the dusty past
of America. Rather it is one of the greatest datum points
in American history. According to Catton, The American
Civil War is the one place from which Americans can
properly measure the dimensions of about everything
that has happened to them ever since. The event can
neither be reverted, nor be forgotten, along with all
of its pros and cons. [Bruce Catton, Pg 68]
Analysis of the Book
The book relates to the happening of Civil War as beginning,
instead of an ending, accompanied with its lights and
its shadows, its rights and its wrongs, its heroic highlights
and its tragic overtones. The war opened an era instead
of closing one; and has finally left every American,
if not with a completion, but at least with a bit of
unfinished business. This unfinished business, according
to Catton, is of very lively concern today and shall
continue to be of the same concern after all of the
countrymen have been gathered to their fathers in the
Afterlife.
"Forget the swords-and-roses aspect, the deep sentimental
implications, and the gloss of romance; here was something
to be studied, to be prayed over, and at last to be
lived up to." (Bruce Catton, 1992)
What gives The Civil War its terrible
significance is the fact that it was the first of the
really modern wars of the world. The supreme fact about
modern war - greater than its frightful devastation
and its calculated, skillfully applied inhumanity -
is that it never goes where the men, who start it, intend
that it should go.
Catton believes as he writes that, "Of all the
incalculable which men introduce into their history,
modern warfare is the greatest. If it says nothing else
it says this, to everyone involved in it, at the moment
of its beginning: Nothing is ever going to be the same
again." (Bruce Catton, America Goes to War, Pg
14)
Conclusion
"America Goes To War" describes The Civil
War as an open chapter in the American history. It refers
to it as an unfinished business that the United States
is still grappling with to date. To Catton, a victory
was of democracy winning over a fatally constrictive
limitation and not of the North over The South. Hence
it was the war of right over wrong, and not, in true
sense of a Civil War, the battle of the Northerners
with the Southern Americans.
Catton tries to explain the reader, as he would have
lectured his students that destroying the war machine
of an enemy are not what it takes to win a battlefield.
War is a matter of absolutes where one just cannot stop
anywhere short of complete victory. The goal is only
achieved when one has destroyed all the social and economic
mechanisms that support the army of the foes.
The Civil War was a beginning, rather than an end, simply
because it knocked out one of the erroneous things on
which American society had been built.
References
Catton, Bruce. America Goes to
War: The Civil War and Its Meaning in American Culture.
Wesleyan University Press. 1992.
Pg 15 and 68.
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