The Sword of Unlimited War

To his well-established reputation as a narrator of the military events and an analyst of the military personalities of the Civil War, Bruce Catton is now adding a crowning accomplishment. He has acquired the rare facility of seeing the war as a whole—as a political as well as a military phenomenon—and the even rarer facility of keeping his reader constantly aware of the interplay of cause and effect on the demands of the battlefield and those of the political arena. Almost on a day to-day basis the reader of Terrible Swift Sword is reminded not only of the ebb and flow of the tides of war, the accomplishments and the shortcomings of the generals, but also of the political pressures which bore upon the Federal and the Confederate governments and hence on the political consequences of victory or defeat, of action or inaction.

In the period covered by this volume—from the summer of 1861, just after First Bull Run, to the late fall of 1862 after the final relief of General G. B. McClellan as commander’ of the Army of the Potomac— we see how a war that both sides at the outset meant to be a war of limited objective was inexorably transformed into an unlimited war of revolutionary character. McClellan’s departure “marked not so much a change in commanders as another change in the war itself. So far the war had been chaotic, formless, a vast tumult which might conceivably be won, lost or adjusted before it got altogether beyond control. It had been what McClellan always supposed it to be: a limited war for a limited end. Now it was going to be unlimited, and the people who fought it would have to look far into the future for a guiding light because they were bidding goodbye to the past.”

GE

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George Fielding Eliot

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To his well-established reputation as a narrator of the military events and an analyst of the military personalities of the Civil War, Bruce Catton is now adding a crowning accomplishment. He has acquired the rare facility of seeing the war as a whole—as a political as well as a military phenomenon—and the even rarer facility of keeping his reader constantly aware of the interplay of cause and effect on the demands of the battlefield and those of the political arena. Almost on a day to-day basis the reader of Terrible Swift Sword is reminded not only of the ebb and flow of the tides of war, the accomplishments and the shortcomings of the generals, but also of the political pressures which bore upon the Federal and the Confederate governments and hence on the political consequences of victory or defeat, of action or inaction.

In the period covered by this volume—from the summer of 1861, just after First Bull Run, to the late fall of 1862 after the final relief of General G. B. McClellan as commander’ of the Army of the Potomac— we see how a war that both sides at the outset meant to be a war of limited objective was inexorably transformed into an unlimited war of revolutionary character. McClellan’s departure “marked not so much a change in commanders as another change in the war itself. So far the war had been chaotic, formless, a vast tumult which might conceivably be won, lost or adjusted before it got altogether beyond control. It had been what McClellan always supposed it to be: a limited war for a limited end. Now it was going to be unlimited, and the people who fought it would have to look far into the future for a guiding light because they were bidding goodbye to the past.”