Pride in Popular History: The Case for Holding the Course

Abstract

7e was perhaps the greatest writer ever to tackle the story of the Civil War, and he was born less than three months before the turn of the 20th century. It is easy to forget that he had known Civil War veterans, and that he had grown up amid their Decoration Day commemorations and talked to them as a young man. In those days, Michigan boasted a proud plethora of such Union veterans. In the preface to the centennial edition of his landmark Army of the Potomac trilogy, Bruce Catton wrote in Mr. Lincoln’s Army: As a small boy I had known a number of these men in their old age; they were grave, dignified, and thoughtful, with long white beards and a general air of being pillars of the community. They lived in rural Michigan in the pre-automobile age, and for the most part they had never been fifty miles away from the farm on the dusty village streets; yet once, ages ago, they had been everywhere and had seen everything, and nothing that happened to them thereafter meant anything much. All that was real had taken place when they were young . . . . This was too much for an adolescent to understand. Perhaps it is too much for anybody to understand, in a skeptical age. 1