A Stillness at Appomattox

A Stillness at Appomattox follows the Army of the Potomac through the last year of the Civil War, from the moment Grant comes east in the spring of 1864 to the silence at Appomattox Court House in April 1865. In between lie the battles whose names became bywords for slaughter: the Wilderness, where the woods caught fire around the wounded; Spotsylvania and the Bloody Angle; Cold Harbor, where soldiers pinned their names to their coats before the assault; the Crater at Petersburg, a mine explosion followed by a botched attack that Grant called the saddest affair he had witnessed in the war. Bruce Catton concludes his Army of the Potomac trilogy here, after Mr. Lincoln's Army and Glory Road, and his method is what made the trilogy famous. He built the story from soldiers' letters, diaries, regimental histories, and memoirs, and told the war from the point of view of the citizens who found themselves soldiers, as the National Book Award citation put it, praising a narrative that combined historical accuracy with poetic insight. The generals are here, Grant most of all, unglamorous and unstoppable, but the book's real subject is the army itself, a community of ordinary men learning how much they could endure. Catton's prose has an elegiac music that no Civil War historian has matched, and the closing pages, in which the shooting stops and the two armies simply look at each other, earn the title. The book won both the 1954 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 1954 Pulitzer Prize for History, and it turned Catton into the most widely read Civil War historian of his century.