A Stillness at Appomattox

Army of the Potomac #3

by Bruce Catton

Mr. Catton has combined historical accuracy with poetic insight to present the story of the Army of the Potomac in the final year of the Civil War. Writing from the point of view of the citizens who found themselves soldiers he has reaffirmed the great American tradition of a peace-loving people who, faced with necessity, can also produce greatness in war.

Genres: History, Civil War, Nonfiction, American History, American Civil War, War, Military History

438 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

Bruce Catton was a distinguished American historian and journalist, best known for his influential writings on the American Civil War. Renowned for his narrative style, Catton brought history to life through richly drawn characters, vivid battlefield descriptions, and a deep understanding of the political and emotional forces that shaped the era. His accessible yet meticulously researched books made him one of the most popular historians of the twentieth century.
Born in Petoskey, Michigan, and raised in the small town of Benzonia, Catton grew up surrounded by Civil War veterans whose personal stories sparked a lifelong fascination with the conflict. Though he briefly attended Oberlin College, Catton left during World War I and served in the U.S. Navy. He later began a career in journalism, working as a reporter, editor, and Washington correspondent. His experience in government service during World War II inspired his first book, The War Lords of Washington (1948).
Catton achieved national acclaim with his Army of the Potomac trilogy—Mr. Lincoln’s Army (1951), Glory Road (1952), and A Stillness at Appomattox (1953)—the last of which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Award. He went on to publish a second trilogy, The Centennial History of the Civil War, and contributed two volumes to a biography of Ulysses S. Grant, begun by Lloyd Lewis. His other notable works include This Hallowed Ground, The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, and Waiting for the Morning Train, a memoir of his Michigan boyhood.
In 1954, Catton became the founding editor of American Heritage magazine, further shaping the public’s understanding of U.S. history. In 1977, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Catton’s legacy endures through his vivid portrayals of America’s most defining conflict and his enduring influence on historical writing.

Reviews

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a book. It is a holy thing.

It's holy for what it says, how it says it and how well it understands it.

It is not read, it is lived. It is experienced in short bursts and set aside, so that you can close your eyes and imagine and contemplate and feel, and pay all proper homage -- as you try to grasp its enormity. I've been to Civil War cemeteries where thousands of headstones radiate in all directions, endlessly, but even that does not make me feel the accumulated weight of death and struggle and pain like this book does.

Bruce Catton felt the Civil War down to his very marrow. It percolated and boiled hot in his blood and animated his very being. It inflamed his imagination. His love for it was passionate. His rumination on it was deep and profound. His feeling for it created electricity that shot to his fingers and moved them to write beautiful words about a terrible and momentous time.

And because of that, he wrote this; this inexpressibly beautiful and moving account of horror and hope. It is one of the very greatest books I have ever had the pleasure to read.

This, my friends, is how it's done.

Trotting out superlatives for this is like someone who's too late for the party arriving with appetizers. What can I possibly add that hasn't already has been said? The book is famous, and justly so, and it's actually a relief to see that it is this good, because my elevated hopes were not only not dashed but amply fulfilled and exceeded.

Catton set a standard for popular histories that is rarely equalled (yes, I know, Mr. Shelby Foote; he is imminent). But there I am, with the superlatives I said I wouldn't attempt. I was moved, not just by the content, and not just by how beautifully it was stated, but by the fact that someone wrote this, period. I was moved by the fact that someone achieved this in a book. The achievement alone moves me.

The book opens dreamily at a celebratory ball where soldiers and their most-favored ladies danced in a makeshift, large pine-scented hall, arrayed with flags and chandeliers. (There are pencil illustrations of this ball on the Library of Congress website that match Catton's description; and seeing them makes for a haunting supplement to the reading). It was the Washington's Birthday Ball of Feb. 22, 1864. Its soldierly participants had no idea their war would drag on for another year, and this evening of finery and dance and civility was an attempt to suspend time and sublimate, if just a little, the inevitability of the savage battles soon to come, for they had no way of knowing that General Grant was about to unleash a new kind of war rarely seen in the memories of history. It would be total war. There would be no quarter, no letup, no mercy, and scorched earth, and all to the last man if necessary. Catton makes us know that very few of the men dancing on this night would long last, and that the women with whom they danced would lose them.

From there, Catton introduces leaders, battles, incidents, and issues that often seem so disparate that they shouldn't fit so smoothly together into a flowing narrative, and yet they do without pause. It is the mark of someone who knows his subject -- this war -- inside and out; who knows it so well that telling it with absolute mastery, authority, and with more than a little poetry is second nature to him. These are words written not just out of duty to scholarship but in the service of love. Catton loved his subject. And this is a love letter to it. A bittersweet love letter from someone who sees the terrible beauty in unimaginable pain and in stubbornly clutched hope.

Some might say this is a "history written by the victors" text, and certainly the book's slant is Northern. The book is, after all, largely about the trials and tribulations of the much-aggrieved Army of the Potomac. But there is balance aplenty, because Catton respects all of his combatants, and his over-arching poetry is the driving sensibility here, not how many column inches are devoted to this or that side. This is about how the war was won, by dint of a thousand cuts to all.

The Germanic-order gene in me says I am doing all wrong starting with the third of Catton's Army of the Potomac trilogy instead of starting with the first and proceeding therefrom. But I don't listen to that spoilsport anymore. Besides, I read Catton's The Civil War reduction overview primer of the war in advance so I knew my place in the order of things. I have context.

I am glad I have finally come to the Civil War, and to Catton. I will be returning to him, with hat in hand, and properly humbled.

(KevinR@Ky 2016)

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rereading A Stillness At Appomattox

Bruce Catton's "A Stillness at Appomattox" was the first adult Civil War book I attempted after, many years ago, I was captivated by a series of Civil War stories geared to pre-teens. Since that time, I have continued to read about the Civil War and recently have recaptured something of my boyish fascination with the subject -- I hope at a more thoughtful level. I was reluctant to struggle with this particular book again because of the memory of my struggle with the book as a child. But I needed at last to go back to it to round out my reading of other works by Catton.

Catton's book tells the story of the Civil War in the East beginning in the winter of 1863 following the Battle of Gettysburg. The first thing to notice about the book is the clear, lyrical quality of the prose which somehow frustrated me as a child. Catton writes in a propulsive forward-moving style. He tends to like long sentences joined with series of "ands". This makes his account move quickly although sometimes a bit stringingly. Also Catton has a gift for lyrical metaphors to drive home his points -- whether in describing the fields or in describing the emotions of the men. His writing at its best has a poetical, moving quality. Most importantly, Catton writes lucidly. His descriptions of the battles and of troop movements are relatively easy to follow. Many of the accounts I have read since I first tried this book are detailed and ponderous. This is never the case with Catton. He gives a good, basic picture of the battles he describes which will stand the reader looking for more detailed accounts in good stead.

Besides the quality of the writing, "A Stillness at Appomattox" is notable for the story it has to tell. Broadly speaking, Catton focuses on how the Civil War changed after its first two years, and he explains why. Although the carnage of the first two years of the war was immense, the scope of the war increased markedly following Gettysburg. The Civil War became the first total war, bringing trench warfare, sustained fighting, destruction of property, and hardship to noncombatants in its wake. Many later writers have also made this point, but Catton unforgettably drives it home.

Catton thus describes the final Union campaign in the East (There is little in the book on the Western theatre of the War.) of the Army of the Potomac from the Wilderness through Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and Appomatox. He describes the desperate, harsh nature of these engagements under the leadership of U.S. Grant. Catton also pays a great deal of attention to Philip Sheridan, to the destruction he wrought in the Shenendoah Valley Campaign, and to his key roles in the Battle of Five Forks (Petersburg) and the final race to the Appomattox Court House. Catton's discussion of Sheridan brought home to me the cruel all-out nature of the final stages of the War.

Catton also integrates well the military aspects of the Civil War with the political aspects. There are good pictures of Lincoln and of the war-weariness of the North which threatened the military efforts of the Armies until the last phases of the conflict. Catton's work emphasizes, in line with recent scholarship, the critical role of African-American soldiers in the Union's war effort. But he also tends to support a reconciliationist approach following the end of the conflict rather than what might have been a more committed attempt to protect the rights of the Freedmen. Although Catton writes from the Union side of the line, he clearly is impressed with the military and personal character of Robert E. Lee and with the valor shown by the Army of Northern Virginia under the most trying of circumstances.

I was enthralled by the pace of the book, by Catton's writing, and by his love for and knowledge of his subject. This is a book to come to as an adult. It will encourage the thoughtful reader to reflect upon the Civil War as the watershed event in our Nation's history.

Robin Friedman

[Eric Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Appomattox, one of “the homely American place-names made dreadful by war.” Appomattox Court House has a homeliness, but Wilderness Tavern, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor - the Virginia killing fields of Grant’s overland push - those sound entirely sinister. And then you have the fight-grounds and sites of massacre from three centuries of Indian Wars, which seem to fall on either side of a fine line separating the comical (Tippecanoe, Little Big Horn) from the weirdly resonant (Fallen Timbers, Wounded Knee).

I could read about this war indefinitely—especially the final twelvemonth scourge. Every new narrative makes me a rapt listener at the Homeric campfire. Tell me again how it went. (Next to chant: Melville and Whitman, the former’s dark little poems on Shiloh and ghostly guerrillas, the latter’s army hospital recollections in Specimen Days and painterly, Winslow Homer-ish vignettes—“Cavalry Crossing a Ford”—in Drum Taps.) “Up-to-date” is idle praise for a book on this war, because it’s the original, partial accounts that make one’s flesh creep, and they are rediscovered and rearranged to varying effect by later writers. Every American generation beginning with the one that fought has done some kind of literary justice to this transformative conflict—our Great War and catalyst of modernity, as Gertrude Stein saw it. Catton, writing in the early 1950s about black troops at the Crater, is less sociologically comprehensive but just as affecting as Slotkin, a dedicated scholar of race relations, writing in 2009.

As a storyteller, Catton makes particularly his own the weariness of the men. They hiked rough country blindly at night, during the day launched and repelled savage assaults, all for an entire Somme-like month—May to early June 1864—at the end of which everyone who hadn’t been shot was mad or nearly so with shell-shocked fatigue. Catton is also very eloquent on the disappearance of celebrated units under the wheels of war. This or that decimated regiment, brigade, division or even whole corps (two were wrecked at Gettysburg) would be struck from the army’s rolls, its few disbanded survivors scattered to other formations whose commanders sometimes indulged the aggrieved pride of the exiles by allowing them to continue carrying their bullet-riddled banners, on which the names of old battles—various -burgs and -villes, and mysterious Indian-named rivers—were sewn.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have long wanted to read this Pulitzer Prize winning book, a history of the last year of the Civil War. April 9th was the official date of the surrender, so April seemed like good timing.

It was not only a detailed account of Grant's pursuit of Lee through Virginia, but at times moving and always excellently written. Catton wrote from the viewpoint of the Northern Army of the Potomac, but as he was from Michigan that was logical from him. For the Southern viewpoint you need to read Shelby Foote, a Mississippian. However, Catton did not sugarcoat the failings of the northern army and their generals, and he gave much credit to the hard fighting Rebels.

My only disappointment with this book was where it ended. It was the end of fighting, yes, but it would have been complete only by describing the meeting of Grant and Lee inside Wilber McClain's home for the signing and terms of the surrender. That was the most poignant and heartbreaking part of that bloody four years, and I felt a little cheated to have missed out on it.

All in all though, an excellent history of that last year.

[Paul Haspel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still, Bruce Catton is with us. The Michigan-born historian whose works of Civil War history were wildly popular during the Civil War Centennial of 1961-1965 remains one of the most widely read and respected historians of the war of 1861-1865. He is perhaps best-known for A Stillness at Appomattox (1953) – a book that, while it was the third volume of a trilogy, truly took on a life of its own.

As a young boy, Catton listened to the testimony of the very old Union veterans in his hometown of Petoskey, Michigan; and as an adult, he drew upon his fascination with the stories he was told to craft works of popular history that were characterized by a mellifluous literary style and a rigorous reliance upon primary sources for evidence.

A Stillness at Appomattox was, as mentioned above, the third volume of a Civil War trilogy titled The Army of the Potomac. The first volume of this work, Mr. Lincoln’s Army (1951), examined the history of the largest Union army in the war’s Eastern Theatre, from its formation after the Union defeat at Bull Run in July of 1861 through the exceptionally bloody Union victory at the Battle of Antietam in September of 1862. The second volume, Glory Road (1952), took the reader through the agonizing Union defeats at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, forward to the momentum-changing victory at Gettysburg, and then on toward when General Ulysses S. Grant would take command of the AOP.

In the process of recounting all this history, Catton sets forth his major theme – that the Army of the Potomac was a military force blessed with good soldiers but cursed, for too much of its history, with commanders who were, for various reasons, not up to the task of commanding those good soldiers in battle. Some of those commanders, like George B. McClellan and Ambrose Burnside, were irresolute in the moment of crisis; others, like John Pope and Joseph Hooker, approached their task with overconfidence, only to be thrashed by Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia.

Only when the army gained commanders worthy of its soldiers – George Gordon Meade at Gettysburg, and then General Grant the following year – did the AOP begin to move forward toward decisive victory. And even late in the war, when salutes were being fired for various Union armies and various Union victories, “no one was ever firing salutes for the Army of the Potomac. Its role was inglorious, as men then figured glory. It won no victories and earned no applause; its job was just to hang on and fight and make final victory possible” (p. 324). It was, for Catton, the army that got no respect.

A Stillness at Appomattox begins with an account of an ill-fated cavalry raid against the Confederate capital at Richmond. In the context of the raid’s failure, Catton sets the context for the narrative and thematic focus of this book, writing that “Victory could no longer be imagined as a bright abstraction, lying like the sunrise at the end of a shining road. It was an ugly juggernaut that would crush and smash many values and many lives into the everlasting mud, and it was the only thing that counted nowadays” (p. 9). There would be nothing dashing about this last phase of the American Civil War: it would be a long, grueling, muddy, and exceptionally bloody slog.

As General Grant is shown preparing to lead the Army of the Potomac southward for the Overland Campaign of Spring 1864, Catton reminds the reader that Grant “was simply a man infinitely more complex than most people could realize” (p. 40). Like no other general before him, he realized what the campaign against Lee’s army would involve. “The goal now was not to capture Richmond but to fight the Army of Northern Virginia – to begin to fight it as soon as possible, and to keep on fighting until one side or the other could fight no more” (p. 57).

And Grant, like no other general before him, enjoyed the confidence of President Abraham Lincoln, who shared Grant’s sense that the war could not end until Lee’s army was rendered unable to fight another day. Lincoln and Grant both realized that “the war had been prolonged because of the timid, restrictive caution that could paralyze action – the habit of mind that was always too busy weighing risks to grasp opportunities” (p. 271).

Not that that task would be easy. The Battle of the Wilderness (May 5-7) that opened the campaign “caused more casualties than Antietam itself had caused” (p. 101) – almost 18,000 Union soldiers killed, wounded, captured, or missing – and the Battle of Spotsylvania (May 9-21) inflicted comparably heavy casualties, and followed so closely upon the Wilderness battle that “the fighting at Spotsylvania began before any of the men who had been wounded in the Wilderness had been got back to Fredericksburg” (p. 105). And yet, as Catton emphasizes, Grant pressed on toward Richmond, resolute and unyielding.

Catton clearly admires Grant’s strategic and tactical acumen, but he also acknowledges when Grant made mistakes. At Cold Harbor, north of Richmond, Grant abandoned the war-of-maneuver approach that he had utilized so well over the past month, choosing to launch a direct frontal assault that he hoped would break the rebel lines, wreck the Army of Northern Virginia, and open the way to Richmond. And yet, as Catton emphasizes, “The hard fact was that, by 1864, good troops using rifles and standing in well-built trenches, and provided with suitable artillery support, simply could not be dislodged by any frontal assault whatever” (p. 155). The truth of this proposition was proven when seven thousand Union soldiers were killed or seriously wounded in half an hour on June 3 – almost four wounded soldiers per second.

Grant, as Catton makes clear, learned from that mistake. Returning to a war of maneuver, he once again moved south and east, crossing the James River and placing the strategically important city of Petersburg under siege. At Petersburg, Catton reminds us, the front “was five miles long, and the Rebel line was exactly like the Union line, and there was not the remotest chance that any part of either line could be taken by storm so long as a handful of defenders remained on duty and stayed awake.” Accordingly, amidst the heat and the dust and the constant sound of rifle and artillery fire, “A good many men were killed and wounded every day, to no particular end except to warn the survivors that they had better dig deeper and stronger trenches and hide in them every moment of their lives” (p. 202). And yet it was not futility or stalemate. From the Union point of view, placing Petersburg under siege meant that Richmond was also under siege, and that the Confederacy’s ability to continue the war effort was diminishing by the day.

The same thing was happening in other areas within the AOP’s theatre of operations. With regard to General Phil Sheridan’s operations in the Shenandoah Valley, Catton writes that “The only aim now was to hurt the enemy, in any way possible and with any weapon – to destroy not his will to resist, but his ability to make that will effective. The will might remain, and be damned to it; if the will and the bitterness could be made impotent, nothing else mattered” (p. 276).

Ordered to ensure that the fertile Shenandoah Valley could no longer supply wheat and other foodstuffs to the Confederate Army, Sheridan and his troopers turned the Valley into what Catton calls “a blackened waste” (p. 303) – a place of “Heavy smoke, and blackened earth, and unending fires at night; and with the army as it moved there was an increasing stream of refugees, as if some emigrant train were off on an unimaginable journey” (p. 304). Among those refugees were hundreds of African American “contrabands” who knew that following the Union Army meant following a road toward freedom.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, A Stillness at Appomattox reaches its climax just as the footsore, starving remnants of Lee’s army have arrived near Appomattox Court House – surrounded by their Unionist adversaries, and on the verge of annihilation. A young Confederate officer rides out from his lines, bearing a white flag, and the response of the Union soldiers is telling:

All up and down the lines, the men blinked at one another, unable to realize that the hour they had waited for so long was finally at hand. There was a truce, they could see that, and presently the word was passed that Grant and Lee were going to meet in the little village that lay now between the two lines, and no one could doubt that Lee was going to surrender. It was Palm Sunday, and they would all live to see Easter, and with the guns quieted it might be easier to comprehend the mystery and the promise of that day. Yet the fact of peace and no more killing and an open road home seems to have been too big to grasp, right at the moment, and in the enormous silence that lay upon the field men remembered that they had marched far and were very tired, and they wondered when the wagon trains would come up with rations. (p. 379)

A Stillness at Appomattox, which ends with Grant and his generals riding toward the farmhouse where Grant will negotiate with Lee the terms for the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, got much more of a reception than the two prior volumes of Catton’s The Army of the Potomac. Volumes 1 and 2, Mr. Lincoln’s Army and Glory Road, were critically praised and commercially successful. Yet A Stillness at Appomattox went far beyond its predecessors, winning a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. It’s as if readers and critics had to see all three volumes together – all 1,227 pages of The Army of the Potomac, not counting bibliographies and footnotes – to understand what Catton had achieved.

Historical context may also have had something to do with the rapturous reception that this book received. A Stillness at Appomattox was published in 1953, the year when the long and bloody Korean War was finally moving toward an armistice that would stop the fighting and the killing on the Korean Peninsula. It makes sense, perhaps, that a book chronicling how American soldiers found their way forward toward the end of another long and bloody war would find an eager U.S. readership in those times.

More than 70 years after its initial publication, A Stillness at Appomattox remains a great work of popular history. Any student of American Civil War history, and indeed any reader who appreciates history that combines scrupulous accuracy of documentation with a sense of the sweep and drama of great events, should seek out this classic of American historical writing.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is simply no way I could give this book the review it deserves. It is so good, a gut-wrenching tour from the lowest point in early 1864 as the North is tired of war to the overwhelming power of the Northern armies and the desperate fighting by the South in 1865. So many lost chances, terrible casualties, terrible leadership and brave soldiers. A Stillness at Appomattox is a Pulitzer Prize winner when that meant something great, not the “woke” stamp of approval it has become. This was a reread but I devoured it with fresh eyes. A permanent place on the classics of war shelf. I’ll let these extracts give you an idea of how good this book is:

In the spring of 1864, the Army of the Potomac marches to Virginia and will not be turning back…ever: The men of this army left books and letters behind them, and in these there is a remarkable testimony that the men who marched away from winter quarters that morning took a last look back and saw a golden haze which, even at the moment of looking, they knew they would never see again. They tell how the birds were singing, and how the warm scented air came rolling up the river valley, and how they noticed things like wildflowers and the young green leaves, and they speak of the moving pageant which they saw and of which they themselves were part. “Everything,” wrote a youth from Maine, “was bright and blowing.” It would never be like this again, and young men who were to live on to a great age, drowsing out the lives of old soldiers in a land that would honor them and then tolerate them and finally forget them, would look back on this one morning and see in it something that came from beyond the rim of the world.

Not everyone was anxious for battle, any excuse would do:
There were the age-old attempts to wangle furloughs. An Irish private one day went to his regimental commander, explaining that his wife was ill and the children were not well and that it was necessary for him to make a short visit to his home. The colonel fixed him with a beady eye and said: “Pat, I had a letter from your wife this morning saying she doesn’t want you at home; that you raise the devil whenever you are there, and that she hopes I won't grant you any more furloughs. What have you to say to that?”

Quite unabashed, the soldier replied that there were “two splendid liars in this room” and that he himself was only one of them: “I nivir was married in me life.”

There were unwritten rules on the front lines whenever battles were not raging. I always marvel at these stories:
One day the Union General Crawford came out to the picket line and stood up on a parapet and began examining the Rebel line through field glasses. A Reb scribbled something on a sheet of paper, wrapped the paper around a stone, and tossed it over into a Union rifle pit. The Federal soldier who picked it up found that the Southerner had written: “Tell the fellow with the spy glass to clear out or we shall have to shoot him.”

When they were left to themselves the men in this particular sector faithfully observed the rules of their informal truce. There was a day when some recently conscripted Southerner was assigned to duty down here, and being full of the ideas his officers had drummed into him he leveled his musket and fired at the first Yankee he saw. The other Federals jumped into their holes and prepared to shoot back, but the Confederates called out: “Don’t shoot—you’ll see how we fix him.” Thereafter, for the rest of the day, the ardent Southern recruit was. seen pacing back and forth along the firing line ignominiously shouldering a fence rail, and the supposed enemies lounged on the grass, went for water, exchanged gossip, and kept a wary eye open for officers.

The Army of the Potomac had marched off to war after a heartfelt sendoff. The butchers bill would be paid in the Wilderness and many other battles. Those young men saw the real face of war:
There had been that dance for officers of the IT Army Corps, in the raw-pine pavilion above the Rapidan on Washington’s Birthday, and it had been a fine thing to see; and it had been a long good-by and a dreamy good night for the young men in bright uniforms and the women who had tied their lives to them. Most of the men who danced at that ball were dead, now; dead, or dragging themselves about hometown streets on crutches, or tapping their way along with a hickory cane to find the way instead of bright youthful eyes, or in hospitals where doctors with imperfect knowledge tried to patch them up enough to enable them to hope to get out of bed someday and sit in a chair by the window. There had been a romance to war once, or at least people said there was, and each one of these men had seen it, and they had touched the edge of it while the music played and the stacked flags swayed in the candlelight, and it all came down to this, with the drifting dust of the battlefields blowing from the imperfect mounds of hastily dug graves.

Under Grant, there were no retreats and no rest stops as there were under all the previous commanders. The terrible toll on the good officers began to show after so many were killed:

In the 24th Michigan, which now had fewer than 100 men, there was one company with a total strength of two, one sergeant and one private—and on drill or parade & man remembered that “it afforded amusement to witness the evolutions of this little company.” A man in the 12th New Hampshire said that his regiment had been under fire every day, and every night but one, over a period of seventy-two days, and a headquarters clerk in the V Corps wrote the age-old complaint of the soldier: “How often the words ‘cruel war are uttered, and how glibly people beyond the reach of its influence talk of the misery caused by it . . . but not one thousandth part of the real misery is even guessed at by those who are not eyewitnesses of its horrors.”

Many men who had not been hit became unfit for service simply because they were worn out....Some men, he said, who had been noted for their bravery and leadership when the campaign began, became timorous, unstable, and all but useless toward the end of it. For a time the 150th Pennsylvania contained a unique detachment known as “Company Q,” made up of line officers from other regiments who had been court-martialed and broken for cowardice but who were given the chance to serve as private soldiers and, if they could, redeem themselves. Company Q turned out to be a good fighting unit, and most of the men in it ultimately regained their commissions.

The battles were terrible to behold:
The men at the front were given no time to worry about what happened behind the lines. For a long time they had told one another that the one thing they wanted (aside from an end to the war) was a fighting general in command. Now they had him, and they were learning that there were elements in the bargain on which they had not counted. The trench lines in the country around Spotsylvania Court House grew longer and longer, and as they did so the men began to see that the heavy. fighting had hardly so much as started, and that what had begun in the Wilderness was to go on and on with no end to it. There was no more maneuvering for position, no more tapping a line cautiously to find a soft spot. Men were simply lined up and sent forward, and sometimes it was like the Wilderness fighting all over again, rival lines colliding drunkenly in the dusk of pine thickets, no order or plan to the battle, armies fighting like infuriated mobs.

When the battle was on, the Rebs and the Yanks fought like demons:
There was an obscure bit of ground here called Laurel Hill, and both sides wanted it, and a man in the 20th Maine recalled how they fought for it:

“The air was filled with a medley of sounds, shouts, cheers, commands, oaths, the sharp reports of rifles, the hissing shot, dull heavy thuds of clubbed muskets, the swish of swords and sabers, groans and prayers...Many of our men could not afford the time necessary to load their guns...but they clubbed their muskets and fought. Occasionally, when too sorely pressed, they would drop their guns and clinch the enemy in single combat, until Federal and Confederate would roll upon the ground in the death struggle.”

The battle near Spotsylvania Court House raged:
….men were seen to spring on top of the logs and fire down on their enemies as fast as their comrades could pass loaded muskets up to them. Each man would get off a few rounds before he was shot, and usually when one of these men fell someone else would clamber up to take his place. Dead men fell on top of wounded men, and unhurt men coming up to fight would step on the hideous writhing pile-up.

Emory Upton had his thinned brigade in ‘beside the Vermonters. He was riding his horse back and forth just behind the firing line, the only mounted man in sight, going unhurt by some miracle—every man on his staff was either killed or wounded. He was proud of the way his men were fighting, but he felt that they would do even better if they had the help of some artillery, and he sent back for a section of guns. In a few moments two brass fieldpieces from a regular battery came splashing madly up through the rain, wheeling about to unlimber within literal whites-of-their-eyes range—artillery charging entrenched infantry, as if all roles were reversed in this mad war.

The gunners sent double charges of canister plowing through the Confederate ranks, and at this close range the effect was fantastic. Inspired by it, the gunners laid hands on their pieces and ran them forward until they touched the very parapet, and then they resumed firing and kept it up as long as the guns could be manned, which was not very long. When the guns at last fell silent they could not be removed because all of the horses were dead, and of the twenty-four men who came on the field with them only two were on their feet unwounded.

The infamous Bloody Angle was the scene of terrible fighting:
…fired more than four hundred cartridges apiece, from start to finish. Finally, somewhere around midnight, it died out. The Confederates had at last finished the cutoff line at the base of the salient, and they slipped quietly back to it, and in the darkness the entire salient disappeared. The exhausted Federals got a drugged sleep in the rain, and in the morning, they went cautiously forward to take a look at the ground they had won. There was nothing remarkable about it, except that the region around the Bloody Angle offered the most horrible sights of the war. In places, the trenches held corpses piled four and five deep, and sometimes at the bottom of such a pile a living wounded man would be found. The firing had been so intense that many bodies had been hit over and over again and were mutilated beyond any chance of identification. One of Wright’s staff officers remembered that once during the previous day he had ordered some guns up to an advanced position, and he could not remember having heard anything from them thereafter, so he went out to look. The two guns, he found, had reached the designated position, and each piece and caisson was wheeled halfway around, but the guns had never got into battery. A burst of Rebel fire had caught them in mid-turn and every man and horse had been killed, “and they lay as if waiting the resurrection.”

Clearly, the ground that had been won was not worth what it cost, either from an esthetic or a military standpoint. The Rebel line had been broken but it had been mended again, and the armies were just about where they were before. The Federals had gained a square mile of quite useless territory at the price of nearly 7,000 casualties. Rebel losses, to be sure, had been heavier, but that was cold comfort. The big push had been made and it had not quite worked. Yet perhaps all of that did not really matter. Something inexorable was moving, and old words like victory and defeat did not have the same meaning

There was little or no mercy for cowards or shirkers, but there were some humorous stories:
Yet, if the soldiers would readily kill or humiliate cowards, they could also laugh at them. A standard army joke was the story of the notorious slacker who bragged that when the battle was at its worst he could always be found where the bullets were thickest—far to the rear, safely hidden under an ammunition wagon. The army also liked the story about the Irish private (a good story was always pinned on an Irishman in those days, if possible) who used as his own means of escape from action the shopworn excuse that he had to help a wounded comrade to the rear. In one battle, according to this story, the soldier undertook to help a comrade who cried that his leg had been shot off. Bending down, he got the wounded man over his shoulder and started out. As he stumbled along a cannon ball came out of nowhere and took of the head of the man he was carrying. After a time the Irishman got to a dressing station and offered his burden to the doctors, who asked him what he expected them to do for a man who had no head. Dumfounded, the soldier looked at the corpse and cried indignantly: “The deceiving creature he told me it was his leg!”

When the fight was on, each side fought without restraint. When they weren’t fighting, there was a certain camaraderie:

That was one side of the coin. For the other side, there was the fact that the pickets constantly arranged informal truces, meeting between the lines to trade knives, tobacco, newspapers, and other small valuables, and as they traded, they talked things over. One of these peaceful meetings, unhappily, broke up in a row. A Confederate asked a Yankee who was going to win the Northern presidential election, and the Yankee said that he reckoned he himself would vote for Old Abe.

“He,” said the Southerner, “is a damned abolitionist.”

This immediately brought on a fist fight, and officers had to come out to break it up. Still, men who felt enough at home with each other to argue about politics and fight with their fists over it were hardly, at bottom, sworn enemies estranged by hatred.

A Massachusetts soldier on the II Corps front told how his regiment made friends with a Confederate regiment opposite it and worked out a fairly extended cessation of hostilities, and he said that if the enlisted men of the two armies had power to settle the war, “not another shot would be fired.” The friendly Confederate regiment was at last moved away from there, and just before it left a soldier stood up on the rampart and called out a warning “Keep down, Yanks—we ‘uns are going away.”

At the end near Appomattox, the armies call a truce. The atmosphere was sober:

Later there would be frenzied cheering and crying and rejoicing, but now . . . now, for some reason, the men sat on the ground and looked across at the Confederate army and found themselves feeling as they had never dreamed that the moment of victory would make them feel. “I remember how we sat there and pitied and sympathized with these courageous Southern men who had fought for four long and dreary years all so stubbornly, so bravely and so well, and now, whipped, beaten, completely used up, were fully at our mercy—it was pitiful, sad, hard, and seemed to us altogether too bad.” A Pennsylvanian in the V Corps dodged past the skirmish line. and strolled into the lines of the nearest Confederate regiment, and half a century after the war he recalled it with a glow: “…as soon as I got among these boys I felt and was treated as well as if I had been among our own boys, and a person would of thought we were of the same Army and had been Fighting under the Same Flag.”

The end is almost anticlimactic. Grant goes to meet Lee:

Down by the roadside near Appomattox Court House, Sheridan and Ord and other officers sat and waited while a brown-bearded little man in mud-spattered uniform rode up. They all saluted him, and there was a quiet interchange of greetings, and then General Grant tilted his head toward the village and asked: “Is General Lee up there?”

Sheridan replied that he was, and Grant said: “Very well. Let’s go up.”

These extracts are a small sample of Catton's powerful writing. I admit to having tears in my eyes after his account of the Battle of the Crater. 5 Battle Stars

[Faith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was not just battle strategy as I had feared that it would be. It was very readable and felt like the author had actually interviewed the troops. It explored the personalities behind the successes and failures. The battle accounts were quite vivid. I intend to read more of his books.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-read this classic as research for a novel I'm writing.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third installment in Bruce Catton's great Civil War trilogy. Similar to the first two volumes, "A Stillness at Appomattox" continues the style of writing history for modern readers, concentrating on the human motivations central to important events. These books are as readable and enjoyable today as they were originally in the 1950's. Beyond the broad appeal inherent in them, these three volumes, and especially "A Stillness..." were important components in the mid-twentieth century's rediscovery of the American Civil War, and the awakening of enthusiasm for the epic struggle, which continues.

This volume runs from early 1864 until the end of the war in April, 1865. The populace supporting each side in the conflict was becoming extremely war-weary, but the events of the previous few years showed that General Robert E. Lee's Confederate army was willing to suffer any hardship and keep fighting as long as the slimmest hope for survival existed. President Abraham Lincoln finally found the individual who would be capable of leading his army to ultimate victory. He placed Ulysses S. Grant in charge of all of the armies of the United States. Although this position involved huge organizational responsibilities, the commanding general would not spend the rest of the war behind a desk in Washington, D.C. Grant's previous brilliant field leadership in the western army theater would be needed to directly manage the army on the ground. He established his headquarters with General George Meade. Meade was thanked by a grateful nation for his effective leadership at Gettysburg, and he retained the role of commanding general of the Army of the Potomac. However, he would be kept under direct, daily supervision by his superior, Grant, who would be in charge for devising and carrying out the army's strategies.

The overall strategy at the beginning of 1864 would be similar to earlier Army of the Potomac plans, namely, to get the army into Virginia and defeat the Confederates in the field, enabling the capture of the Confederate capital, Richmond. The significant difference this time was that the federal army was not going to return home until the job was done. There would be no fighting the enemy to a bloody standstill, followed by a disengagement by both armies to prepare for the next battle, until the changing seasons allowed all of the forces to go into winter quarters and contemplate the next year's objectives. Grant, and his core leadership cadre, consisting of generals who fought with him in the West the last several years, infused the spirit of winning into the army. The federal army's existing leaders, including Meade, were forced to re-think their approach to fighting a war. The basics of this new way of thinking rapidly spread through the ranks and became the foundation for a surge of wide-spread higher morale and tenacity among the soldiers.

Catton describes the ensuing clashes between the two armies as Grant tried to maneuver between Lee and Richmond, and Lee worked his characteristic magic of constantly falling back with his army in time to prevent the federal army from forcing an end of the war with its superior strength. The death tolls mounted in battles as bad, if not worse, than some of the scenes of horror already enacted in previous years. Thus, Catton tells us how events unfolded at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, and Cold Harbor. Lee finally stopped Grant's advance at Petersburg, just outside Richmond, and the war settled into armies fighting from entrenched, fixed positions. Catton shows how, when the end finally came with Lee breaking out of his fortified position in the spring of 1865, and having his exhausted army's movements finally blocked at Appomattox Court House, the prevailing mood in the Army of the Potomac was relief instead of jubilation. So much would happen during the time period covered in this volume, and Catton tells it masterfully.

[Jason Herrington · Rating 5 out of 5]

Catton tells the story of the last year and a half of the Civil War with vivid detail. From the long marches of the regiments to individual battles to the colorful characters that make up the leadership of the North. He focuses on the union army and it’s strategies and failures, particularly in communication that led to some major losses. But he also talks about some of the challenges of the war beyond the obvious massive loss of life, such as the difficulty of getting soldiers to enlist and the disagreements between leadership in general.
I’ve not read much on the Civil War, but I really enjoyed this one.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

I re-read this a few years back, and it's simply one of the best history books I've ever read. Grant's brutal sledgehammer campaign, Lee's ferocious response, it's all here, but written in a way that comes across, at times, like some sort of dark war poetry. I think I saw on Goodreads where someone said that Catton was a historian with great heart. I couldn't agree more. And as a Virginian, I love the way Catton captures a familiar landscape, since I actually live only a few miles from the Chancellorsville and Spotsylvania battlefields.

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first Catton trilogy, "Centennial History of the Civil War," was excellent. This is the third book in his other trilogy, "The Army of the Potomac." I've read other books on the Civil War, but never with such rich details and moving drama. U. S. Grant appeared, of course, another hero of mine. But also "Little" Phil Sheridan, the amazing cavalry general who would arrive at a gallop, urge on the retreating soldiers, and save the day! More than one day, actually.

I've been living the Civil War for a long time now, through Catton's books and others. When Sheridan cut off Lee's army near Appomattox and the Rebs waved a white flag -- finally! -- it was a very emotional scene! Especially when a Pennsylvanian crossed the "battle" line and mingled with the now-friendly Rebs. To steal a line from Al Stewart: "I'm coming home, I'm coming home, now you can taste it in the wind, the war is over."

Highly recommended if you want details and drama.

[Riannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I guess I read this book out of order, I didn't realize it was the third book in a trilogy. That being said, it worked just fine as a stand-alone book.

The last few months of the Civil War were really brought to life for me by this book (sorry for the cliche phrase). It's well-written and reads like a novel, but it also contains a lot of quite interesting historical information. I've always found the Civil War a fascinating subject, and knew a moderate amount about it before reading this book, but the heights of bravery and cowardice attained by regular troops, the ineptness or heroic nature displayed by their commanders, and the terror of being under fire, were all thrown into vivid relief by A Stillness at Appomattox.

I'd recommend this book to anyone, whether particularly interested in the Civil War or not. I could only wish that it had been assigned as reading for my high school history class in lieu of the reading material on the Civil War we were actually provided with!

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appomattox is one of the classic narrative histories of the Civil War. The third in Catton's Army of the Potomac trilogy, it follows the war's final year in the Eastern Theater in lyrical detail. Catton's book has an elegiac tone, showing the Army of the Potomac as having devolved from cheerful volunteers and hardened veterans through brutal attrition to conscripts and bounty hunters with little motivation, along with immigrants and African Americans eager to prove their worth as citizens. All this before the Wilderness Campaign, where Ulysses Grant led the Army in a punishing battle of attrition, losing almost 50,000 men in little over a month before settling into a grim siege at Petersburg. Catton is one of the most gifted battle writers of modern times; he has an eye for both the sweep of a conflict and the human cost. He's equally good with character sketches of men from Grant down to individual foot soldiers, creating an immersive empathy few military writers can attain. Some of the book's individual chapters - an opening depicting Ulric Dahlgren's doomed cavalry raid against Richmond, a gruesome recounting of the Battle of the Crater - are mini-masterpieces of historical writing; the whole is equally satisfying. One of the best books about the Civil War ever written

[Robert Snow · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read "A Stillness at Appomattox" while touring the Richmond / Petersburg area at the end of May 2016. I now understand why it took the leadership of a man like Grant to beat the Southern gentry of a man like Lee. This was killing on a grand scale when the industial might of the North just out produced the South in everything from food to armaments. This is a good book to read in order to understand the command structure, the middle leadership of the Army and the logistics of getting an Army ready to attack and then pressing forward, failing and pressing forward ever so slowly cutting supply lines and turning Lee's flank around Petersburg. Bruce Catton brings to life this last year of the Civil War and the men who fought it!

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say about Bruce Catton and this book? I became a life-long lover of all things history because of Bruce Catton. I read these in my early twenties and I can still recall the sweet pleasure I got from realizing that history was actually FASCINATING when written by someone who seemed to sense the past as present.

Life-changing for me.

If you would like to know more about the Civil War and are a beginner - I suggest you start with Catton.

If you need to remember why it is you became fascinated with the Civil War years ago, I suggest you re-read Catton. It will all come back to you.

[Paul Gaya Ochieng Simeon Juma · Rating 5 out of 5]

"If their is ever again any rejoicing in the world it will be when this war is over." That quote summarises the feeling of most of the people who fought in the American Civil War. This is the third book in Bruce Catton's novels about the War. Just for the record, I have not read the other two.

Here, the War has grown old and insane. But what was beginning was more than what was ending. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant had joined General Meade and the Potomac Army. He was the remorseless killer. All the hopes and fears of the Union now rested on him. He was considered another Napoleon who was going to win the war. A new spirit was brewing among the soldiers. The war was getting started.

Soon, the air was filled with a medley of sounds, shouts, cheers, commands, oaths, and sharp reports of rifles. The Whitehouse was the real storm center. President Lincoln hopefully expected that the seceeding stated would be brought back to the Union before they were beaten to death. He had spent a lot of sleepless nights worried and in fear. But, the war had grown and their was very minimal chances of peace. Men died and many were wounded, sometimes, right in front of the president's door in Washington. Never before on earth had so many muskets been fired. There was nothing but death, death in the wholesale, death in all its forms, death in hospitals, in the blazing thickets, in ridges, in dust, and in smoke. But, the Yankees were pressing on.

Word was being spread that every man who falls fighting that great battle of liberty was going to go to heaven. They were not going to allow themselves to be discouraged. The war had to be won, and it had to be won soon. That feeling had to reign supreme in all who wanted victory. From the Biblical Daniel, men believed that they were going to "stand up against the King of the South" who would "fall" eventually. This is their story, written from the yankees perspective. Superb!

[Tom Mathews · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this about fifty years ago as a teenager. At the time, Bruce Catton was the most well-known, or should I say 'best-selling' Civil War historian out there. I really enjoyed it then and I really enjoyed rereading it again now. The main difference between my two readings is that I have since learned much more about American history in general and the Civil War in particular, having read books by such fine authors as Shelby Foote, Doris Kearns Goodwin,T. Harry Williams, and David McCullough and have learned that there are more points of view to this conflict that can be seen by the officers and men of the Army of the Potomac.

Bottom line: This is an excellent book but if you want to learn about this conflict, it is only the beginning.

My thanks to the late Mike Sullivan, aka Lawyer, and all the folks at the On the Southern Literary Trail group for giving me the opportunity to read and discuss this and many other fine books.

[Colin Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

The final book in Bruce Catton’s excellent,” The Army of The Potomac “ trilogy. The story moves on with Grant taking command of all the armies and pressing down through the Wilderness a further battle at Chancellorsville, bloody fighting at Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and into the trench systems around Petersburg. Sheridan finally puts his army south of Early in the Shenendoah Valley, lays waste to the countryside and is finally able to rout Early’s army. Sherman takes Atlanta, Richmond falls and Grant has Meade’s troops surrounding Lee and the final surrender.
This is a book written for the general reader as well as the scholar and keeps you enthralled to the end. The book shows what mess politicians make and how inept command prolongs war with useless waste of life. This was a lesson the Europe failed to heed in later campaigns.
A series recommended to all those with an interest in the subject.

[Tom M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Americans killing Americans in such gruesome ways and numbers took me several weeks to complete. This History of the last year of the Civil War was painful to read and the reason it took almost 4 weeks to get through less than 400 pages.
I’m not sure if a writer can make a Civil War novel read any easier.
This will be the last one I read for a while.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the third book of the famous Bruce Canton trilogy about the Civil War. Published about 65 years ago it is much heralded and maybe the most famous telling of the story of the Civil War. And I did find it mostly compelling reading although I am far from a fan of Civil War history. The portions of the book which retold battle strategy and the movement of troops etc. etc. were most arduous for me. And there was a lot of that. But the stories about what was going on inside the heads of the people was often compelling and fascinating. The book is told predominately from the union point of view Which must be particularly irksome for southern readers. But it just confirms what most everyone knows which is that the winners get to tell the story of the wars. I have just recently read a biography of Robert E Lee so I had a little bit of that point of view in my head.

I always thought trench warfare began in World War I. But in reading the biography of General Lee and finding that he was trained as an engineer and relied heavily on digging trenches and digging in artillery, I was not surprised. Possibly the biggest difference between trenches in the Civil War and in World War I were how close they were to each other. Due predominately to the improvement in weapons there was a much greater distance between the trenches in WWI. In the Civil War the trenches were sometimes very close to each other.

One of the more interesting things shown was the occasional camaraderie between soldiers on opposite sides. The final confrontation between the two sides at the very end ended without gun fire with opposing sides faced off. Out pops a rebel with the white flag and both sides end the fighting to let the generals work out the details.

I gave this book 3 stars instead of four mostly because this is just not a book that I enjoyed a lot. It’s not really my kind of book. But I was left feeling amazed that you could get thousands of men to stand up and run across the field while people on the other side shot at you. And there were of course the incredible descriptions of bodies piled up two or three high. Incredible and unbelievable.

The story of Grant and Lincoln meeting once it seemed like the outcome was determined but not yet reached has probably been told over and over. They both favored fighting all out until the war was finished but then taking a fairly “let bygones be bygones” with the south once the war was over. The story of how they would get that to happen is left for another book. The opposing soldiers on the battlefield seemed willing to slap each other on the back and say they were all the same when it came right down to it but the bigger picture between the north and the south after the war was hardly so positive.

I live in Lynchburg Virginia, a town that is very close to Appomattox and is mentioned quite a few times in the book as just being up or down the road. Lynchburg was apparently always trying to be prepared for the onslaught of the war but was primarily used as a location for hospitals and treating the wounded. This book does make me want to learn a little bit more about the role of Lynchburg but somehow I think I won’t do it because ultimately I’m just not drawn to the topic.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I suppose I went into this backwards. This is the final volume of the Army of the Potomac trilogy written by Bruce Catton about the Civil War. After spending some time visiting historical sites in and around Richmond, VA, I particularly wanted to read this account of the last year of the Civil War. In 1954, it won both the Pulitzer Prize for history and the National Book Award for non-fiction.

In A Stillness at Appomattox, Catton walks his readers through the various battles that took place during that final bloody year of the Civil War. We gain glimpses into the character, relationships, military movements, and stratagems of major players such as Grant, Sheridan, and Lee, as well as of numerous more minor characters in that great tragedy. We see moments in which, but for this or that misstep, the way could have ended months (maybe years) earlier, saving untold thousands of lives.

The Battle of the Wilderness, the Bloody Angle, the numerous battles in and around Cold Harbor, the massively destructive explosion (and squandered opportunity) of the Crater, and many others come to life through Catton's writing. Just a few days before reading this book, I had been wandering through these same battlefields, imagining the troop maneuvers and encounters, picturing to myself the circumstances in which so many men with differing loyalties, but similar values, found themselves. Standing near the edge of the Crater, I could almost see the stunned expressions on the faces of those who saw the land rupture and explode from within, and hear their anguished cries.

My only disappointment was that there wasn't more about the immediate aftermath of the war, the encounter of Grant and Lee at the courthouse, and the dissolution of the armies. I would like to have learned a bit more their experiences following the war. But that is a very minor complaint when held up against the vast sweep of the Civil War saga thoroughly and expertly covered in Catton's account. Well done!

[Austin Barselau · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1954, Civil War historian Bruce Catton won the Pulitzer Prize for History for A Stillness at Appomattox (1953), the third installment of The Army of the Potomac Trilogy. Covering the brutal campaigns on the Virginia front during the Civil War's final year, the book is both a masterful military history and a moving tribute to the Army of the Potomac's endurance. With his characteristic driving, lyrical prose, vivid battlefield descriptions, and extensive use of first-person sources—including unpublished letters from Union soldiers and manuscript diaries— that capture the soldier’s experience, Catton reconstructs the army's final campaigns with such immediacy that the reader feels embedded within its ranks.

Catton picks up the story as the Civil War enters its fourth year. The Army of the Potomac, after years of bloody experience against Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, has evolved—through conscription, training, and hard campaigning—into a seasoned professional force. In March 1864, Ulysses S. Grant assumes overall command, and the Army of the Potomac effectively becomes "Grant's army." True to his relentless temperament, Grant is determined not merely to defeat Lee in battle but to destroy his army through continuous, unyielding pressure. One soldier remarked that Grant always looked like a man "who had resolved to ram his head through a stone wall," an image that perfectly captures Catton's portrait of his command style. With Grant at the helm, Catton writes, there was a "perceptible tightening up" throughout the army, "as if someone who meant business had his hands on the reins now."

The brilliance of A Stillness at Appomattox lies in its harrowing depictions of combat—the confusion of offensive maneuver, the staggering scale of casualties, and the indomitable resolve of two exhausted armies locked in a contest of endurance. By 1864, warfare had changed fundamentally. The era of open battlefield maneuvers had largely given way to entrenched positions, rifled muskets, artillery, and siege warfare, making frontal assaults both futile and catastrophically costly. Catton vividly recounts the defining engagements of the Overland Campaign—the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, the Bloody Angle, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and the Battle of the Crater—each exacting appalling casualties while yielding only incremental strategic gains. In the weeks leading up to Spotsylvania, there were about 2,000 casualties every 24 hours. At Cold Harbor alone, Union forces suffered roughly 7,000 casualties in barely thirty minutes during what Catton memorably describes as "a wild chain of doomed charges." The Battle of the Crater, where Union engineers tunneled beneath Confederate lines before detonating a massive explosive charge, inflicted roughly 4,000 Union casualties and culminated in one of the war's most humiliating Federal defeats, prompting Catton to conclude that "never before had the army met so completely an ignominious defeat."

Catton brings each of these battles to life, capturing the relentless waves of attacks and counterattacks that consumed thousands of men with seemingly little respite. His description of the fighting in the tangled Wilderness is especially memorable:

“Never before had the Army of the Potomac thrown so many men into one assault as were thrown in here. Twenty-five thousand soldiers were moving up in one stupendous charge, and most of them were battle-trained veterans. Yet what they had learned in other battles seemed to be of little use here, and in the Wilderness numbers did not seem to count. They were fighting a strange, desperate fight, without color and without drama. The whole thing was invisible. It was smothered down out of sight in five miles of smoking wilderness, and even men who were in the storm center of it saw no more than fragmentary pictures—little groups of men moving in and out of a spooky, reddish luminous haze, with rifles flashing indistinctly in the gloom, the everlasting trees and brush always in the way, the weight of the smoke tamping down everything except the evil lames that sprang up wherever men fought…There was no more war in the grand style, with things in it to hearten a man even as they killed him. This was all cramped and close and ugly, like a dual fought with knives in a cellar far underground.”

Unable to break Lee's formidable trench system through direct assault, Grant ultimately sought to sever the Confederates' remaining lifelines. To accomplish this, he turned to Philip Sheridan. First, Sheridan devastated the Shenandoah Valley, destroying the agricultural base that sustained Lee's army. Possessing the "driving combativeness" Catton so admired, Sheridan left a path of deliberate destruction behind him. As Catton evocatively writes, he "peeled the Shenandoah Valley as a man might peel an orange. The blue tide ebbed, leaving wreckage behind it, pillars of smoke rising by day and pillars of fire glowing by night to mark the place where they had been." Sheridan then returned to Petersburg to threaten Lee's flanks and force him from his entrenchments. By the end of 1864, the Confederacy's strategic position had become untenable: the Shenandoah had been lost, Sherman was advancing through the Carolinas, Mobile Bay had fallen, and Richmond stood increasingly isolated. As Catton observes, "the Confederacy was visibly failing—in manpower, in rations, in equipment."

By March 1865, the Army of the Potomac had only days of fighting left. Forced to abandon Petersburg, Lee attempted to escape westward and unite with Joseph E. Johnston's army in North Carolina. He never reached it. Harried relentlessly by Sheridan's cavalry and Grant's pursuing infantry, Lee's exhausted, hungry, and increasingly desperate soldiers found every avenue of escape closing before them. "The Army of the Potomac," Catton writes, "had never been driven as hard as it was being driven now." At Appomattox Court House, surrounded and without hope of relief, Lee surrendered to Grant, bringing the war in Virginia to an end and preserving the Union.

Although many of the campaigns Catton describes appeared, viewed in isolation, to accomplish little beyond appalling bloodshed, he demonstrates how their cumulative effect steadily exhausted the Confederacy's capacity to resist and achieved Grant's mission to destroy Lee's army. Through vivid prose, astute military analysis, and an unmatched ability to convey both the horror and endurance of war, A Stillness at Appomattox illuminates this historical contest of wills in one of the most memorable military narratives.

[Monte Lamb · Rating 5 out of 5]

If there is a better writer on the Civil War then Bruce Catton, I have not found him. If he has written a better book than this one, I have not read it. This book covers the last 14 months of the war with the Army of the Potomac. While it covers all the details and events, its strength is how it puts the events in a greater context of how it affected our country's future.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Catton is an amazing writer, and this book on the period in which Grant took charge of the Army of the Potomac to defeat Lee was, at times, exciting. But for much of the time, it fell into that trap of many Civil War histories, becoming boring because it is just reciting this endless series of troop movements without really explaining what they meant or why they mattered.

[Michael Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written decades ago, A Stillness at Appomattox remains one of the best histories ever written of the last year of the Civil War. The book is the final in a comprehensive trilogy of the war by Catton and it was the most widely recognized of the trio winning both the National Book Award for nonfiction and the Pulitzer Prize for History.

Although other historians since have undoubtedly brought new insights and perspectives to Civil War history, Stillness remains for me one of the most insightful. In particular, Catton focuses on the trio of Northern Generals that led the Union to victory in the war. Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan were very different men. Sherman intense and demonstrative, Sheridan at times volatile, and Grant quiet and unemotional, they each shared the one thing that the North needed to win - a commitment to press the fight at all costs with no room for retreat or caution.

By the final year of the war, it was clear that the south could not win the war militarily. But the population of the North was weary of the fighting and Jefferson Davis and Lee (and to some extent Lincoln and Grant) believed that if the war could be extended long enough, the politics of the North might require a negotiated peace.

Grant's plan was to press the North's military advantage unrelentingly and to destroy the Confederate Armies before public opinion turned. In this, he was successful. But what Catton also highlights is that Lincoln, Grant and Sherman, all believed that when the surrender finally came, it must be done in a way that kept the door open to future repair of the societal rifts. Lincoln's political opponents wanted revenge upon the South with executions and the taking away of Southern rights. But both Lincoln and Grant believed that the pathway to restoring the union did not lie that way. Although they were both warriors, the agreed with Nelson Mandela's view that taking revenge upon one's enemies does not lead to peace. Yet, in retrospect, we also know that with Lincoln's death, the South was allowed to move from open slavery to Jim Crowe discrimination. Who knows how history might have changed had Lincoln not been assassinated.

Stillness is a long book, but it is an extraordinary look at the final battles of the war; the ones that decided the fight. It focuses primarily (although not exclusively) on the military history rather than the political, but it's an excellent recounting of three Generals, one President and the end of one of the bloodiest conflicts in U. S. history.

An exceptional read and highly recommended for all those who enjoy Civil War history.

[Spectre · Rating 4 out of 5]

This third and final volume of Bruce Catton's Civil War trilogy follows the Union Army of the Potomac as U.S. Grant takes command of all federal armies locating his headquarters alongside the command of George Mead. The brutal overland campaign is covered in detail as a near continuous battle waged from May 1864 until the surrender of Robert E Lee's Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox nearly a. year later. The maturation of the Army of the Potomac from the beginning of the war is tested in the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, Five Forks, and finally the pursuit ending in the Confederate Army'S surrender. Catton's trilogy is really good reading especially for those just beginning their Civil War studies.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone interested in the Civil War or American history in general, author Bruce Catton's trilogy of books should be on your short list of 'must reads'. "A Stillness at Appomattox" is Catton's final book on the Army of the Potomac. This book follows the army from 1863 when U.S. Grant took command to Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865. The first two books, "Mr. Lincoln's Army" and "Glory Road" take the reader through the first two and a half years of war. Together, these three volumes are a masterpiece of historical narration.
In my opinion, this third volume, "A Stillness at Appomattox" is the best of the trilogy. Catton's writing, research, and use of primary resources (diaries, letters, and original records) is excellent. He describes the army's actions and movements in detail, and relates that to the experiences of individual soldiers, officers, and leaders in superb detail. His prose draws the reader into the emotional and physical experiences of the people involved and paints vivid pictures of the horrors of this war. At the end, if you don't have a catch in your throat as the armies realize the killing is finally over, you haven't paid attention. A 6 star read and highly recommended!

[Susan Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to the audio version of this book, and it took me quite a few miles to finish. It is epic in scope and quality. The battles in Virginia during the last year of the Civil War were, according to Catton, chaotic and bloody beyond imagination, nothing glorious about them, just a colossal and clumsy waste of human lives. I needed a map to refer to, and probably more interest in military maneuvers, but I appreciated the beauty and clarity in the narration of these battles, the men who led the charges, and the soldiers who fought, deserted, fled, and died. Some of the most memorable scenes were Sheridan’s ruthless destruction of the Shenandoah Valley, the Union’s miserable failure in the Battle of the Crater, the awkward incorporation of blacks into the Union army, the descriptions of trench warfare, and the portraits of Grant, Lee, and Lincoln that emerge. A must-read if you are interested in learning more about the most disastrous war in the history of the US.

[Avarill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing history of the Army of the Potomac, with details of life from the privates to the generals and the president and his cabinet. If you are interested in the US Civil War and haven't read this work... what are you waiting for?