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Quote by Bruce Catton

“The enduring realization that when a great challenge comes, the most ordinary people can show that they value something more than they value their own lives. When the last of the veterans had gone, and the sorrows and bitterness which the war created had at last worn away, this memory remained.”

Quote by Bruce Catton

Author

Bruce Catton was an American historian renowned for his works on the American Civil War. His writing style, marked by clarity and narrative power, made complex historical events understandable to a broad audience. Catton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1953 for his book 'The Civil War: A Narrative'. more

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“Here was the greatest and most moving chapter in American history, a blending of meanness and greatness, an ending and a beginning. It came out of what men were, but it did not go as men had planned.”

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Book:The Civil War

Source: The Civil War

“It began with one act of madness, and it ended with another. John Brown heard history's clock strike in the night and tried to hurry dawn along with gunfire; now John Wilkes Booth heard the clock strike, and he tried with gunfire to restore the darkness. Each man stood outside the human community, directed by voices the sane do not hear, and each kept history from going logically... The line from Harper's Ferry to Ford's Theater is a red thread binding the immense disorder of the Civil War into an irrational sort of coherence.”

“Nathan Bedford Forrest ... used his horsemen as a modern general would use motorized infantry. He liked horses because he liked fast movement, and his mounted men could get from here to there much faster than any infantry could; but when they reached the field they usually tied their horses to trees and fought on foot, and they were as good as the very best infantry. Not for nothing did Forrest say the essence of strategy was to git thar fust with the most men.”

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Book:American Heritage History of the Civil War

Source: American Heritage History of the Civil War

“The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places, from Valverde, New Mexico, and Tullahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albans, Vermont, and Fernandina on the Florida coast. More than 3 million Americans fought in it, and over 600,000 men, 2 percent of the population, died in it.”

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Author:Bruce Catton

“Between 1861 and 1865, Americans made war on each other and killed each other in great numbers - if only to become the kind of country that could no longer conceive of how that was possible.”

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Author:Bruce Catton

“What began as a bitter dispute over Union and States' Rights, ended as a struggle over the meaning of freedom in America. At Gettysburg in 1863, Abraham Lincoln said perhaps more than he knew. The war was about a new birth of freedom.”

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“The 1860 election became a referendum on the southern way of life.”

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“The Confederate Constitution was almost identical to that of the United States.”

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“Like most Rebel soldiers, Sam Watkins owned no slaves.”

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“Shiloh had as many casualties as Waterloo, and yet there were another 20 Waterloos to come.”

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Author:Bruce Catton