His truth is marching on: The Army of the Potomac trilogy, by Bruce Catton

Thanks to Ken Burns, Shelby Foote gets a lot of good press, and James MacPherson and Kenneth Stampp are no slouches either, but to my mind Bruce Catton is the forgotten historian of the Civil War. His powerful trilogy, The Army of the Potomac, is military history in grand form and played no small part in my decision to concentrate in U.S. History in college.

Mr. Lincoln's War, the first volume in the trilogy, recounts the heady days of the war, when the Union Army was led by its golden boy, George McClellan. Catton takes us inside the ranks, making large-scale tactics eminently understandable and both Union and Confederate soldiers remarkably true-to-life (without, mind you, any Sam Waterston voiceovers). The book follows McClellan's rise and fall, through the Peninsular campaign and both battles of Bull Run.

The story continues in Glory Road, Catton's second volume, which ranges from McClellan's dismissal to the Gettysburg Address. Here,
Catton ably distills the confusion and weariness seeping into the war effort, as the Army of the Potomac shuffles leadership through Generals Ambrose Burnside, Joe Hooker, and George Meade. Moreover, in his retellings of Chancellorsville, Fredericksberg, and ultimately Gettysburg, Catton once again makes vivid the fury, horror, and tragedy of civil warfare.

A Stillness at Appomattox completes Catton's trilogy, relating the 1864 elections, a plebescite on the war effort, and the gradual movement toward modern war, as Grant and Lee play deadly cat-and-mouse through trenches at Cold Harbor, Spotsylvania, and Bloody Angle. As with his first two volumes, Catton realistically details the spirit of the war, the times, the nation caught in its grip, the families rent asunder by its talons, and the men who fought America's bloodiest war to its conclusion.

Throughout the hard-to-find Army of the Potomac trilogy, Catton brings a journalist's eye for detail and a historian's understanding of consequence to even the smallest skirmishes in the Eastern theater of the Civil War. His accounts of battle, particularly the grim slaughter of the 1864 campaign, are as real and blood-curdling as the melees of the recent Black Hawk Down, recounting the Battle of Mogadishu. Overlooked by a generation of historians that have rightly valued the relatively newer branches of social and intellectual history over the older disciplines (in fact, I believe the first volume may now be out of print), Catton's trilogy nevertheless represents military history writing at its finest.