This Hallowed Ground (1956) (edit title/settings)

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• “When Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney issued a writ of habeus corpus to set one of these free, President Lincoln blandly ignored it.... Maryland was not going to go out of the Union, and what Maryland might have done if all of the legal niceties had been observed made no difference at all.”

• “Romantic Fremont was gone, of course, and the petulant David Hunter who had taken his place was himself superseded shortly afterward by a flabby, moon-faced general who was to become one of the minor enigmas of the Civil War--Henry Wager Halleck, known to the regulars as "Old Brains," a solemn, rumbling-portentous pedant in uniform who had the habit of folding his arms and rubbing his elbows whenever he was the least bit perplexed, and who took into high command a much better reputation than he was finally able to take out of it.”

• “They were not really armies, although that is what men called them. They were just collections of very young men, most of whom knew nothing at all about the grim profession they had engaged in, all of them calling themselves soldiers but ignorant of what the word really meant. Day after tomorrow they would be soldiers, but now they were civilians, gawky in their new uniforms, each one dreaming that battle would be splendid and exciting and that he himself would survive; and they came from North and South, from farm and canebrake cabin and from small town and busy city, trudging the dusty roads and tensing themselves for the great test of manhood which seemed to lie just ahead.”

• “Grant had been bitterly criticized because he had not entrenched at Shiloh. Halleck would not lay himself open to the same criticism; accordingly, whenever his vast army halted, it entrenched, turning each camp into a minor fort. It spent so much time digging trenches, indeed, it had little time left for marching.... There were times when it appeared that Halleck was going to burrow his way to Corinth.”

• “What hurt most was the intervention of a humorless, gawky, fire-and-brimstone Presbyterian, with a killer's blue eyes looking unemotionally out from under the broken visor of a mangy old forage cap: Thomas J. Jackson, known to fame as Stonewall. Jackson was the sort of general that Lincoln would have wanted, if that makes any difference: a dedicated hard-war man in whose eyes the enemy were a people to be exterminated with Old Testament fury.”

• “McClellan had nearly all of the gifts: youth, energy, charm, intelligence, sound professional training. But the fates who gave him these gifts left out the one that a general must have before all others--the hard, instinctive fondness for fighting.”

• “The soldier who had fought with all the odds against him had taken hair-raising risks and had won; the soldier who had had all of the advantages had refused to risk anything and had lost; and now the last chance that this ruinous war could be a relatively short one was gone forever.”

• “Bragg was a fantastic character, as singular a mixture of solid competence and bewildering ineptitude as the war produced. He distrusted democracy, the volunteer system, and practically everything except the routine of the old regular army, and just before Shiloh he complained that most of the Confederate soldiers had never fired a gun or done a day's work in their lives. He was disputatious to a degree, and in the old army it was said that whenever he could not find anyone else to quarrel with he would quarrel with himself. A ferocious disciplinarian, he shot his own soldiers ruthlessly for violations of military law, and his army may have been the most rigidly controlled of any on either side.”

• “The Kansans, rejoicing in the nickname of "Jayhawkers," were the most notorious freebooters and pillagers of all, and where they marched in Missouri or Arkansas they left a red scar on the land. They brought a personal venom into the war; they remembered the bitter lawlessness of the border troubles of the 1850s, they felt that they had a grudge to pay off, and anyway they tended to be a rowdy untamed crew operating under an uncommonly sketchy discipline. So notorious was their reputation that even their own army was wary of them.”

• “Nevertheless, Vicksburg was all-important. As long as it held out the Mississippi was closed, and the administration was being warned that unless the river could be opened fairly soon the farmers of the Middle West, who felt, with reason, that the eastern railroads were gouging them mercilessly, might become highly sympathetic to the Confederacy. Furthermore, Vicksburg connected the two halves of the Confederacy; if it fell the South would automatically lose an irreplacable part of its strength.”

• “One canal, one lake-and-river waterway, two stabs at the Yazoo Delta; all had failed, and <Grant> was still on the wrong side of the river and the wrong side of Vicksburg, spring was coming on, press and country were demanding action, and his army was camped in a fifty-mile swamp where dead bodies oozed up through the clammy mud and where men sickened and died, day after day, of everything from malaria to smallpox.”

• “The Army of the Potomac had reached and held its objective -- continuous contact with Lee's army, which could no longer make the daring thrusts that in the past had always upset Federal strategy. From now on to the end of the war Lee's role would be defensive. The Army of the Potomac was half destroyed, with its brigades led by colonels, its regiments by captains, and its companies, often enough, by sergeants; but it was carrying out its appointed assignment. Somewhere far ahead there would be victory, even if most of the men who had made it possible would not be around to see it.”

• “And it began to look to many folk in the North that the Confederacy perhaps could never really be beaten, that the attempt to win might after all be too heavy a load to carry, and that perhaps it was time to agree to a peace without victory. This sentiment would affect the presidential election, which was only a few months away. Conceivably--even probably, as things looked in midsummer--it could bring about the election of a President who would consent to a divsion of the country if he could get peace in no other way.”

• “The Army of the Tennessee went to work to ruin Atlanta before beginning the march to the coast.... Sherman had ordered that no fires be lit except when he himself was present; he wanted the destruction confined strictly to warehouses, factories, and the like. But flames from these buildings spread to others, wandering bands of carefree privates lit fires on their own hook, and an Illinois veteran who had a part in these forays said afterward that "several general officers were there, but they stood back and said nothing, allowing the soldiers to pursue their course." The firing went on all night long, with the band of a Massachusetts regiment playing gaily in an open square.”

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• Instead of trying to convert one’s opponents it was simpler just to denounce them, no matter what unmeasured denunciation might lead to.

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• Men who were whipping themselves up to the point where they would refuse to try to get along with one another were, at the same point of time, doing precisely the things that would bind them together forever whether they liked it or not. The impulse to disunion was coming to a land that, more or less in spite of itself, was in the very act of making union permanent.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Tennessee River
• Washington
• Vicksburg
• Mississippi
• Richmond
• Virginia
• Fremont
• Kentucky
• Chattanooga
• Missouri
• Illinois
• Ohio River
• Cumberland
• Atlanta
• Potomac
• Fredericksburg
• Nashville
• Georgia
• Memphis
• St. Louis
• Corinth
• Indiana
• Wisconsin
• Union
• South Carolina
• Iowa
• America
• Maryland
• Cairo
• Alabama
• Savannah
• Arkansas
• Gettysburg
• Knoxville
• Petersburg
• Massachusetts
• Charleston
• North Carolina
• Yazoo
• United States
• Cleburne
• Shenandoah Valley
• New York
• Missionary Ridge
• Lookout Mountain
• Antietam
• Chickahominy

First Sentence edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• poop: A short deck built over the after part of the spar deck of a vessel of war.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Bruce Catton (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Fletcher Pratt Award (1956)
• National Book Award (Finalist, 1957: Nonfiction)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 973

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › History › Americas › United States › Civil War
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Genre Fiction › Historical
• Books › History › Military › United States
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary