Lincoln’s Army (1951) tells the story of the Army of the Potomac’s formation under the command of the gifted yet deeply insecure George McClellan and how his conflicts with President Lincoln over military operations and political policy became irreconcilable. Library of America restores the entirety of this essential classic to print in a deluxe, single-volume collector’s edition, with full-color endpaper maps, a color insert with battle maps, and an introduction, detailed endnotes, and a newly researched chronology of Catton’s life and career by Civil War scholar Gary W. While painting vivid, still unrivalled depictions of famous battles, the trilogy’s groundbreaking achievement is in its quieter passages, recreating the lives of common soldiers: the food they ate, the shelters they built, the songs they sang while thinking of home.

But its true heroes are the rank and file, the men who triumphed despite years of death, hardship, and incompetent leadership. “These old gentlemen, drowsing out the greater part of their lives in the backwoods, had once been lifted beyond themselves by an experience which perhaps was all the more significant because it was imperfectly understood.” No writer has done more to convey the reality of that experience than Catton.Ī masterpiece of historical storytelling and a landmark of Civil War scholarship, The Army of the Potomac Trilogy offers incisive portraits of the Army’s generals. Bruce Catton (1899–1978) grew up in a small Michigan town, listening to Union veterans tell stories of the Civil War.

A stillness at appomattox first edition