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Author: Bruce Catton
Quotes of Author: Bruce Catton

Bruce Catton _ Mr. Lincoln's Army
And so that generation was deprived of the one element that is essential to the operation of a free society-the ability to assume, in the absence of good proof to the contrary, that men in public life are generally decent, honorable, and loyal.
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Bruce Catton _ Mr. Lincoln's Army
What it really means is that the general must understand that he is not a free agent and cannot hope to become one. He has to work within the limitations imposed by the fact that he is working for a democracy, which means that at times he must modify or abandon the soundest military plan and make do with a second-best."
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Bruce Catton _ A Stillness at Appomattox: The
himself came along the slope to rally
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Bruce Catton _ Mr. Lincoln's Army
And a wild, primitive madness seemed to descend on the men who fought in the cornfield: they went beyond the limits of sanity and endurance at times, Northerners and Southerners alike, until it seems that they tore at each other for the sheer sake of fighting. The
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Bruce Catton _ Mr. Lincoln's Army
was the Civil War term for rookie. The idea was that some of the new recruits were of such fantastic greenness that they did not know the left foot from the right and hence could not be taught to keep time properly or to step off on the left foot as all soldiers should. The drill sergeants, in desperation, had finally realized that these green country lads did at least know hay from straw and so had tied wisps of hay to the left foot and straw to the right foot and marched them off to the chant of "Hay-foot, straw-foot, hay-foot, straw-foot." Hence: straw-foot-rookie, especially a dumb rookie.}
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Bruce Catton _ This Hallowed Ground: A
The land was used to peace, and in the ordinary way its experience with military matters was confined to the militia muster - awkward men parading with heavy-footed informality in the public square, jugs circulating up and down the rear rank, fires lit for the barbecue feast, small boys clustering around, half derisive and half admiring - and if war came the soldier was a minuteman who went to a bloodless field where it was always the other fellow who would get hit. Just before Fort Sumter the Michigan legislature had been debating an act permitting the governor to raise two new regiments of militia.
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Bruce Catton _ The Coming Fury
It would slowly become evident that when they committed themselves at last to secession, not as a threat but as an accomplished fact armed for violence, the devoted men who wanted to preserve the Southern way of life had made a tactical error. The ultimate fate of their cause would be largely determined by what was done in Washington. Leaving Washington forever, they had fatally surrendered the initiative. Now their enemies would seize it.
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Bruce Catton _ Mr. Lincoln's Army
Young men then went to war believing all of the fine stories they had grown up with; and if, in the end, their disillusion was quite as deep and profound as that of the modern soldier, they had to fall farther to reach it.
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Bruce Catton _ A Stillness at Appomattox: The
such manner as shall seem most likely to conduce to the furtherance of the interests of the Confederate States of
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Bruce Catton _ Mr. Lincoln's Army
The barn by the Roulette house was jammed with wounded men. Screams, prayers, and curses made it a horrible place, with hundreds of anguished men packed together on the straw begging the surgeons to attend to them-surgeons bare-armed and fearsomely streaked and spattered with blood, piles of severed arms and legs lying by the slippery operating tables, the uproar of the battle beating in through the thin walls.
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Bruce Catton _ This Hallowed Ground: A
So had the eminent clergyman, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who had told the world that a Sharps rifle was a greater moral agency than a Bible, as far as Kansas was concerned.
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Bruce Catton _ Mr. Lincoln's Army
On the contrary, I thought he was rather lucky. He carried with him forever the visible sign that he had fought for his country and had been wounded in its service. Probably only a very backward boy could have thought anything of the kind.
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