Bruce Catton was the most popular Civil War scholar of his generation. During the middle decades of the twentieth century his free-flowing narrative histories were read avidly by tens of thousands of ordinary Americans. By 1967 Catton had accrued royalties totalling “somewhere between $600,000 and $700,000” with his New York publisher, Doubleday.Footnote ¹ These impressive figures were generated largely by sales of his Army of the Potomac trilogy, which made his name in the early 1950s; This Hallowed Ground, a lucid account of the Union war published in 1956; a three-volume Centennial History of the Civil War, which cemented his reputation in the 1960s; and the handsome American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, which had an initial print run of at least a quarter of a million copies. A chronicler rather than an analyst, he did more than any other single individual to spark popular interest in his country's most divisive and significant conflict after the bloodletting of 1941 − 45. Contemporaries lined up to acknowledge his formidable achievements. “No finer narrative history of the Civil War has ever appeared,” declared a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times after the third volume of the Centennial History was published in 1965. For an admiring commentator in the Houston Post, the Centennial trilogy was simply “masterly history.”Footnote ² The respected British historian Alan Taylor paid tribute to Catton's talents in a laudatory review of This Hallowed Ground for the London Observer. “The quality which made ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ unique as a war-film,” wrote Taylor, “has been transferred here to the printed page. Nothing like this has been achieved not only for the Civil War, but for any of the great wars of modern times.”Footnote ³

This essay argues that Bruce Catton was a “middlebrow” intellectual who played an influential role in forging the culture of Cold War America between 1950 and 1970 by helping to inculcate a sense of moral purpose among ordinary Americans. A left-leaning progressive whose hopes for social change in World War II were thwarted by what he saw as his own government's limited commitment to democracy, Catton shook off his disappointment to join the liberals' domestic struggle against communism and McCarthyism. He shared the view of other middlebrow writers that the United States could not defeat its totalitarian foes with military force alone. Only by demonstrating the superiority of its democratic value system could victory be achieved. While Catton worked under several constraints, he labored consistently to implement his belief that neither nihilism nor inertia was an acceptable American response to the individual's plight in the atomic age. This was especially true with regard to his efforts in the profoundly political sphere of antiracism. As a number of scholars have demonstrated, African American civil rights constituted a critical domestic battleground in the late 1950s and 1960s which bore directly upon the United States' ongoing struggle against communism and on American liberals' concomitant shift in focus from structural reform to the rights of women and minority groups in society.Footnote ⁴ In late middle age, Bruce Catton did not find the transition from reform-oriented New Deal liberalism to the incipient rights culture of the 1960s particularly easy. He was a patriotic and authentically American democrat whose primary concern was the Ordinary Joe. Yet in his writings and his public pronouncements he groped towards a way of making his liberal faith relevant in a rapidly changing social environment.

Born in 1899, Catton was reared in what he called the “rather bleak and desolate” denuded lumber district of northern Michigan.Footnote ⁵ In his home town of Benzonia he encountered aging Union veterans whose tall tales and Decoration Day rituals instilled in him a lasting fascination for a conflict that always seemed peculiarly immediate to him (and one whose immediacy he would convey so brilliantly to modern readers). He escaped a constricting family environment, dominated by his stern Presbyterian father, first by attending Oberlin College in Ohio (from which he never graduated) and then serving an unremarkable stint in the US Navy in World War I. During the interwar period he worked as a journalist in several northern cities, including Cleveland, Boston and Washington.Footnote ⁶ During the New Deal he was regarded as “a progressive” and took the side of journalists in a dispute with employers in 1935. Too old to fight in World War II he was employed by the federal government in several capacities, notably as director of information at the War Production Board (WPB).

In 1948 Catton published what historian Alan Brinkley describes as “a bitter memoir” based on his experiences at the WPB.Footnote ⁷The War Lords of Washington was a trenchant account of how the hopes of left–liberal reformers for genuine social change had been thwarted by the US government's persistent willingness to prioritize the needs and expertise of businessmen when mobilizing the country's resources for war. Catton's antipathy towards the “hide-bound businessmen” coopted into the federal bureaucracy, his insistence that World War II was a people's war, and his support for labor leader Walter Reuther's “revolutionary” plan to involve American workers in corporate decision-making via the creation of factory-based industrial councils marked him out as a committed reformer sympathetic to the broadly corporatist objectives of radical New Dealers like Mordecai Ezekiel, an economist who advocated the introduction of “effective democracy into many economic areas where no democracy exists today.”Footnote ⁸ Catton's constant plaint in War Lords was that politicians and bureaucrats had failed repeatedly to engage ordinary Americans in the war effort because they did not have faith in them. In essence the book's central thesis was that the war had been a missed opportunity to render the United States a true democracy. “Communism is a revolutionary force,” concluded Catton:

War Lords was a modern morality tale and perhaps a rather simplistic one at that. But it identified Bruce Catton as a crusading liberal at a decisive moment in American history when the liberal creed was being transformed by economic prosperity, the incipient civil rights movement and, crucially, the evolving Cold War contest against Soviet Communism.

From the late 1940s onwards, America's political elite grew increasingly concerned that the United States' ability to lead the free world's crusade against the Soviet Union and its allies was being corroded by a range of debilitating factors. These included postwar affluence, suffocating matriarchy (so-called “momism”), insidious homosexuality (linked in many minds with communism), and “teen-age” disaffection with established authority. The chief results were deemed to be complacency, apathy and an attendant loss of identity and mission. Liberals, no less than conservatives, worried that the American people were losing their drive, that they had gone soft. As John F. Kennedy phrased it in his inaugural address of March 1961, “Too many Americans have lost their way, their will, and their sense of historical purpose.”Footnote ¹⁰

As Christina Klein has shown, middlebrow intellectuals responded vigorously to fears that the anticommunist excesses of the late 1940s and early 1950s had weakened Americans' understanding of what they were actually fighting for (as distinct from what they were fighting against).Footnote ¹¹ Middlebrow culture was characterized by its leading exponents' determination to persuade ordinary people that they could and should play an active and meaningful role in the fight against communism. In order to do this they adopted a number of strategies. First, they sought to diffuse their views widely by making their work as accessible as possible without actually dumbing down their message. Second, they encouraged Americans to engage actively, intelligently and sensitively with the world around them, including the world beyond the United States. Third, they purveyed a universalist belief in the essential oneness of humanity underpinned by a commitment to antiracism that would not only assist the United States in its bid to secure the backing of nonaligned countries in an era of decolonization but also nurture a much-needed sense of moral purpose at home. Many middlebrow intellectuals consciously wrote within a sentimental framework, rightly concluding that invoking “feeling” would spark memories, empathy and action.

Klein's loose collection of middlebrow writers was preoccupied with refashioning US relations with Asia. The group (which defied easy political categorization) included liberals such as James Michener, Pearl S. Buck and Oscar Hammerstein, as well as conservatives like DeWitt Wallace and Henry Luce, the respective editors of Reader's Digest and Time magazine. Regardless of their political persuasion, these middlebrow practitioners embraced the view that Americans could only win the Cold War by wholeheartedly embracing their newfound leadership of the free world. “As a cultural formation,” writes Klein, “the middlebrow represented roughly the same alliance of groups that comprised Truman's Cold War alliance. It worked out the same synthesis of the traditions of left and right internationalism and embodied the same political convergence toward [what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. termed] a ‘vital center.’ ”Footnote ¹²

Bruce Catton exhibited little interest in Asia but he shared a commitment to the quintessential middlebrow objective of invigorating American democracy as part of the wider struggle against communism. His remarkably accessible, career-forging accounts of the Army of the Potomac – Mr. Lincoln's Army (1950), Glory Road (1952) and A Stillness at Appomattox (1954) – earned rave reviews in part because he was an early practitioner of history from the bottom up. His books focussed readers' attention on the experiences of ordinary Union soldiers rather than on politicians and generals. If World War II had not turned out to be the people's conflict Catton had wanted it to be, he found what he was looking for in the Civil War. Judging by the popular acclaim with which the trilogy was received, many of his compatriots were looking for the same thing: an affirmation that individual action in pursuit of a grand collective cause could make a difference. They learned by reading Catton's carefully crafted accounts of the soldiers' hardships and courage that Union victory, the prime source of national greatness in the modern age, had been built on the dogged determination of unheralded Americans to see a difficult but necessary task through to the finish. A failed novelist as well as former journalist, Catton understood his readers' thirst for knowledge and understanding in the troubled present. He gave them what they wanted: strong plotlines and vivid human-interest stories couched in pellucid, elegiac prose that blended historical explanation, excitement and felt emotion in equal measure; “your books are extremely valued in my household,” gushed one admirer, “they seem to possess souls.”Footnote ¹³

Catton's standing as one of the most accomplished middlebrow writers of his generation was confirmed not only by the content and popularity of his early books, but also by his decision, in the summer of 1954, to accept an invitation from the energetic Columbia University historian Allan Nevins to edit a new illustrated journal of popular history entitled American Heritage Magazine. Nevins was a leading figure in the Society of American Historians (SAH), a group of academic and nonprofessional scholars dedicated to the production of high-quality historical writing for a popular audience. Nevins and his liberal anticommunist allies were deeply troubled by the excesses of McCarthyism. They believed that an “enlightened citizenry” was “democracy's greatest strength” and that ordinary Americans were “hungry for guidance, for orientation, since the very confusion of these times leads to the asking of questions and a search for understanding.”Footnote ¹⁴ Catton represented an ideal choice for Nevins. He was a historian with a proven ability to write books that people actually wanted to read and a man of politically progressive instincts sympathetic to the present-minded aims of the SAH. The supporters of the venture, Catton told one correspondent, believed that “nothing nowadays is much more important than the business of taking a look at what our country amounts to.” Readers would gain an understanding of the country's past and glean “a picture of a people who can't be licked, doing a job of enormous importance for the whole human race.”Footnote ¹⁵ Catton expanded more explicitly on this Cold War theme in a prospectus for the new journal: “the real problem that faces all of us these days,” he wrote, “is not how to escape from the world crisis but how to meet it … it is precisely because the present is so difficult and the future so uncertain that a detailed understanding of the American past is vitally important.” That past, he averred, was the source of Americans' liberal faith – “that there is something undefeatable in human beings – something that shapes soaring dreams in spite of doubt and discouragement and then goes patiently on, adding piece by piece to the dream until at last some essential part of it turns out to be real.”Footnote ¹⁶

The magazine proved to be a roaring success. By the fall of 1958 it was attracting around 300,000 subscribers, each paying twelve dollars a year to read pithy, discursive articles on various aspects of American history. The majority of readers belonged to the country's prosperous postwar middle class; significant numbers were children “both of the ’teen-age and pre-’teen variety.”Footnote ¹⁷ This discernibly middlebrow product was not to everyone's taste, however, especially not of those on the political left. Kenneth Rexroth, writing in The Nation, denounced American Heritage for burnishing the role of big business in US history and peddling an outdated view of Reconstruction. “[M]ost of us,” steamed Rexroth,

The criticism was harsh but not entirely wide of the mark. Although Catton did not commission the kind of tub-thumping essays that would have satisfied hardline right-wingers (his goal was always to encourage what he and Nevins regarded as an intelligent patriotism) he certainly aimed to foster a broadly consensual view of the nation's history in order to strengthen the American people's attachment to liberal democracy.

In common with other middlebrow intellectuals in the 1950s Bruce Catton was particularly concerned that ordinary Americans were so bewildered by the state of the world around them that they were losing their commitment to fundamental values. Such a loss, he (and they) believed, would have devastating consequences for the country's ability to fight the Cold War effectively. Catton articulated his views in a series of speeches. “When we look around in the gray period at the end of 1956,” he told an audience at Union College, Schenectady, “we do not see much that is encouraging.” “Flatly,” he said, “we are in a desperate fix and there is no guarantee that we shall ever find our way out of it.” But instead of yielding to despair, Catton insisted with a Rooseveltian flourish, Americans must retain their resolve and continue to dream their dreams: “The outlook is frightening, but fear is not the final answer.”Footnote ¹⁹

He connected his argument to the Civil War in an address to students at Duke University in February 1957. The soldiers of that conflict, he said,

Fretful modern-day Americans should take inspiration from these men, young once, who passed their personal test “without thinking very much about it.” “First and foremost,” contended Catton, “we learned [from them] that the American people can meet a challenge when it presents itself.”Footnote ²⁰ Seen in this context the Army of the Potomac trilogy is best read as an accomplished middlebrow historian's contribution to the cultural Cold War. Standing up to communism was tough, conceded Catton, but the courage, resilience and resolve of the common soldier in the 1860s was evidence that their progeny were built of the same metal.

Although Catton's rhetoric sometimes confirmed his guarded readiness to support military responses to the communist threat, his avowal that Civil War soldiers' common enemy was “war itself” indicated his aversion to right-wing super-patriotism.Footnote ²¹ Catton put this aversion into practice by serving as a director of the Fund for the Republic, a progressive think tank created in 1953 by the Ford Foundation as a contribution to the liberals' counteroffensive against McCarthyism. Two weeks after his appearance at Duke, he told a dinner hosted by the Fund in Washington, DC that the American tradition of freedom came under attack periodically during times of stress. That tradition was under attack in the present, he contended, from “people who insist they are trying to defend it.” “We have seen some highly discouraging things in recent years,” he admitted, and the “pressures of conformity are still strong in many places.” “Yet,” he insisted optimistically, “the crest of the wave is passing … because the American people are responding once more to that deepest and most profound of all their instincts – the instinct to defend the tradition of freedom when it comes under attack.”Footnote ²² In common with other middlebrow practitioners, Catton's commitment to the cause of liberal democracy in “The Age of Anxiety” led him to espouse the cause of antiracism.

His support for African American civil rights, it must be acknowledged, was by no means unequivocal. As David Blight observes, Bruce Catton proved extremely reluctant in his writings to assault the potent Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War that underpinned much of the aggressive neo-Confederate opposition to the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. In an essay entitled “The End of the Centennial” which Catton wrote in 1965, the year of Martin Luther King's watershed Selma campaign, he could be found praising the Civil War as the source of American unity and exulting in northerners' embrace of Robert E. Lee and other pillars of what he called “the Confederate legend.” This myth of the Lost Cause, he contended, “has been an asset to the entire country … [and ultimately it] saved us.”Footnote ²³ Catton's troubling willingness to embrace Lost Cause totems such as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis reflected the residual power of the dominant master narrative of the late brothers' war – a remarkably pervasive and durable fiction that helped to foster sectional reconciliation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bolstered by the persistence of racial segregation in the United States, most historians in the 1940s and 1950s continued to blame the coming of the Civil War on “fanatical” abolitionists and secessionists − just as they had done in the interwar period. They also lamented the conflict as a tragic bout of fratricide, accepted that northerners and southerners had fought for causes they believed to be just, welcomed (grudgingly in the case of its southern exponents) the ultimate reunification of the country, and bemoaned postbellum attempts by vindictive Radical Republicans to impose black rule on the vanquished South. African Americans had long been and, in the early 1960s still were, victims of this national mythology which minimized or erased completely the evils of slavery, the significance of emancipation, the role of black men in the Union armed forces, and the brutalities of southern “Redemption.”

Catton was no bigot. Nevertheless he was a prisoner of his era's blinkered historiography. In the 1950s he denied agency to black actors, ignored the role of race leaders like Frederick Douglass in Union enlistment, and marginalized generally the part played by African Americans in the Civil War. His account in Stillness at Appomattox of “Ferrero's dark battalions” before the battle of the Crater in 1864 contained hints of Brown-era liberalism, but most readers below the Mason–Dixon Line found little to object to in his Army of the Potomac trilogy.Footnote ²⁴ In fact, white southerners responded positively to Catton's sustained attempt to humanize the Yankee foe. Clifford Dowdey, a struggling historian of the southern war effort, reported that Catton “would be gratified … to know of the deep response to your work from devout neo-Confederates who would never before read a line by a non-Southerner.”Footnote ²⁵

Catton's characteristically middlebrow empathy (in his case, for southern whites) sometimes led him into dangerous territory when it came to matters of race. In his address at the 1957 Fund for the Republic dinner he illustrated his point that freedom was challenged periodically in the United States by alluding to the persecution of Brigadier General Charles Stone by the Republican-dominated Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War after the disastrous Union assault at Ball's Bluff in October 1861. Stone's offense, claimed Catton, had been to offend “powerful and suspicious Abolitionists” by returning fugitive slaves to their owners. He presented the episode as evidence “of the way in which fear and hysteria, operating together, can lead even a committee of Congress to narrow the area of American freedom and justice.”Footnote ²⁶ Although most members of his liberal audience doubtless appreciated this sideswipe at McCarthyism, one listener was puzzled. How, wondered Phineas Indritz, special council for the liberal American Veterans Committee, could congressmen possibly be criticized for restricting freedom when their objective was the emancipation of the slaves?Footnote ²⁷ Catton was hoist by his own petard. By implicitly endorsing the lilywhite master narrative on the Civil War (which demonized Radical Republicans of the kind who went after Charles Stone) he had unwittingly uncovered the racial myopia at the heart of American liberalism in the early Cold War era. Catton's response – that Stone had been wrongly persecuted for obeying orders – was limp, to say the least.Footnote ²⁸

There is no question that Bruce Catton was a man who gave off mixed messages on race to his readers and listeners. In part this reflected his dilemma as a racial moderate. A staunch patriot, he wanted America to defeat the Soviet Union by winning hearts and minds. As an important step toward winning the Cold War he used his histories to promote what he took to be quintessential American values such as pragmatism, individualism, resolve and tolerance. His middlebrow desire for purposeful consensus was clearly evident in his redemptive, revelatory interpretation of the Civil War, which emphasized the common courage and mutual respect of the ordinary soldiers on both sides. This interpretation, couched as it was in a captivating prose style designed to stir emotional responses among his readers, enabled him to fashion a broadly pro-Union narrative that did not denigrate the Confederacy. His dilemma (like that of other white liberals at this time) was generated by the increasing pressure placed upon domestic consensus by the emerging civil rights movement. Segregationist opposition to racial integration in the second half of the 1950s triggered a number of well-publicized racial incidents. Violent outbreaks in places like Chicago and Levittown in the North and Montgomery, Clinton and Little Rock in the South signaled to the outside world that all was not well in the Land of the Free and furnished the Soviets with powerful material for their propaganda war against the United States. By 1960, the year of the first south-wide sit-ins, it was clear to many American liberals that Jim Crow was an incubus in the Cold War and that steps must be taken to remove it.

Bruce Catton never fully resolved his racial dilemma, which was exacerbated by an understandable reluctance to alienate his many southern white fans. However, he made attempts to resolve it and cannot therefore be condemned for failing to act upon his own counsel: that Americans must not remain inert in the midst of crisis. To be sure, as so-called “massive resistance” began to take hold in many southern communities after the Brown decision, his initial response was a cautious one. He told a correspondent in late 1955 that “I still think that the Federal side [in the Civil War] was right, and that a substantial moral issue was involved in the war, but I don't feel any need to let my own blood pressure rise over it at this late date.”Footnote ²⁹ It was not long, however, before his “blood pressure” over the “moral issue” of racial emancipation had begun to increase. He told a Connecticut audience in October 1956 that the Civil War taught two lessons: first, that human society was “indivisible, interconnected,” and second, that “human freedom is something that goes all across the board, something that applies to men of every race and creed and condition.” Admitting that there would be “many setbacks along the way” and that there would be times “as we have had to witness during the last twelve months,” he was nevertheless at pains to insist that bitter-end segregationists who sought “to preserve some remnant of the old theory that some of us belong to a master race … are fighting a rear-guard action and they cannot win. The decision was made nearly a century ago and it cannot be reversed.”Footnote ³⁰

Catton explicitly connected the developing civil rights struggle to both the Civil War and the Cold War two months later when he spoke at his alma mater. The emancipation of the slaves, he told a group of Oberlin alumni, had finally made Americans “face up to the race problem,” but the Civil War was only “a beginning, rather than an end.” The modern world, he continued, was an anxiety-inducing place:

The best thing Americans could do was to visit a Civil War battlefield in order to derive “from it a new dedication to the unfinished task which falls on all of us.”Footnote ³¹

The conjunction of the upcoming Civil War centennial and the “classical” period of the modern civil rights movement posed the greatest test for Catton's commitment to antiracism. It would reveal whether he would meet his personal challenge posed by the burning issue of African American freedom.

The Civil War centennial of 1961–65 was a train crash waiting to happen. Planned as a consensus-building celebration of American unity overseen by a federal commission and allied state agencies, it was doomed by the organizers' inattention to blacks and propensity to emphasize entertainment and profit over education and commemoration. In March 1961, a year after student sit-ins had kick-started the civil rights movement, the US Civil War Centennial Commission (CWCC) failed to act decisively when it discovered that a black woman delegate to its convention in Charleston, South Carolina would not be accommodated in the racially segregated conference hotel. African Americans and white liberals responded furiously. The CWCC immediately became front-page news for all the wrong reasons. Several northern state commissions demanded a boycott of the centennial, inducing President Kennedy to criticize the CWCC publicly for failing to implement “the Constitutional rule of equal treatment to all Americans, regardless of race or color.”Footnote ³² The commission narrowly survived this crisis by belatedly agreeing to transfer its meeting to Charleston's desegregated US Navy Yard. However, it was soon in trouble again when, in July 1961, it was party to a well-attended but over-commercialized reenactment of First Bull Run on the battlefield at Manassas, Virginia. Once again the CWCC came under fire in the press. Recognizing correctly that the entire commemoration was in danger of becoming a national embarrassment, intelligent members of the agency engineered a coup to oust director Karl S. Betts from his post. The commission's elderly chairman, Major General Ulysses S. Grant III (like Betts, a right-wing Republican), quickly resigned in protest. By the end of the year the CWCC was headed by two sober-minded historians, Allan Nevins and James “Bud” Robertson. Together they guided the commemoration safely through further shoals to its low-key conclusion in 1965.Footnote ³³

These events impinged directly on Bruce Catton because he was one of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's appointments to the all-white and nearly all-male federal commission in late 1957. There is every reason to accept as genuine his initial claim to be “very enthusiastic about the work this commission will do.”Footnote ³⁴ Not only was he, the most famous Civil War historian in the country, ideally qualified for the post, but the approaching centennial seemed likely to promote his ideological aim of strengthening public resolve in the ongoing fight against communism. The event received Congressional sanction in September 1957 precisely because it promised to unite people of all ages in an exciting four-year commemoration of the conviction, bravery and sacrifice of Union and Confederate troops – all now defined as patriotic Americans who had fought for their particular version of freedom.Footnote ³⁵

Bruce Catton did not play a leading role on the federal commission. Although his willing, albeit underpaid, assistants, E. B. (“Pete”) and Barbara Long did most of the research for the Centennial History of the Civil War, he spent much of his time writing the three eagerly awaited volumes: The Coming Fury (1961), Terrible Swift Sword (1963) and Never Call Retreat (1965). He also continued to hold his position as editor of American Heritage Magazine. Catton was not present at the disastrous Charleston conference, nor did he attend the August 1961 meeting of the CWCC that voted to eject Betts from his director's post. It is highly probable that he was, in the words of the Emory historian Bell Wiley, “dodging the issue” by not participating in the rebels' carefully plotted coup.Footnote ³⁶ Catton wrote privately in September that Grant and Betts “are friends of mine,” adding, “I do regret the way the whole business turned out.”Footnote ³⁷ Despite his association with Allan Nevins, the new head of the CWCC, Catton made little attempt to influence the agency's policymaking for the rest of the centennial period. As he told Bud Robertson in December 1963, he had “felt like a fifth wheel” at the commission “since the day the thing was organized … [but] since I am busy enough anyway I really had not meant to complain.”Footnote ³⁸

Catton's failure to play a decisive role on the federal commission does not signify that he played no part in the four-year national commemoration. He engaged with the centenary in several ways: through his involvement in the New York Civil War Centennial Commission, his speeches and, of course, his writings. This engagement highlighted his continuing efforts to promote the Cold War cause of liberal democracy, particularly in the field of antiracism.

In spite of his evident commitment to universalism and civil rights, Catton's moderate instincts inclined him to favor a gradualist approach to integration in the United States – one that would promote racial progress without endangering the domestic consensus on which American strength in the Cold War depended. The nonviolent direct-action tactics of the civil rights movement, however, soon exposed gradualism as a hopelessly ineffectual response to black assertiveness. Although he never stopped telling audiences that the Civil War had engendered national unity, Catton's words and actions betokened a deepening commitment to black equality. In the introduction to a series of nationally syndicated articles keyed into the Civil War centennial, he informed readers in February 1961 that the great conflict was “the continental divide of American history” which obliged the country “to build on the broad base provided by its original assertion of independence: on the belief that a democratic society knows no grades or classes in its ranks.” The fact that the Stars and Stripes had been “a living symbol of hope and freedom” to Negro slaves, he contended, “takes on a profound meaning. Very few of our assets today have a greater latent value than this one. We can still build something unshakable on it.”Footnote ³⁹

Catton, however, had not learned from his encounter with Phineas Indritz. This was partly because scholarly verdicts on the antebellum antislavery movement remained almost universally hostile at this date. By no means an original thinker, he struggled to liberate himself from the shackles of Civil War orthodoxy. In his syndicated articles for the New York Times Magazine he propounded the view (set forth at greater length in The Coming Fury) that a more moderate approach to slavery might have averted conflict in 1861. At least one commentator pounced on the contemporary implications of this argument. How could one be a moderate on something as evil as slavery? asked Harry Golden. The same mistake had been made by Eisenhower when he yoked together civil rights activists and segregationists as extremists: “Is it an extreme position to say segregation is immoral, irreligious and unconstitutional? In this world today it is the only position both practical and moral.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Bruce Catton destroyed most of his centennial-related correspondence, so it is difficult to judge precisely what he did to promote civil rights as a member of the nation's centennial establishment.Footnote ⁴¹ As chairman of the New York Civil War Centennial Commission (widely known as “the Catton Commission”) he was certainly privy to the agency's plans to exhibit the state's copy of Abraham Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. These plans were not unconnected to the pro-civil rights stance of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a liberal Republican, but they accurately reflected his own desire to foreground emancipation alongside unity as a primary result of the war. Segregationist actions drove him on. In January 1962 he resigned from his private club in Washington when it denied membership to the prominent African American journalist Carl Rowan.Footnote ⁴² That spring, at a meeting of the CWCC, he proposed that the agency's 1963 convention should be held in Boston, home of many nineteenth-century abolitionists whom some commentators were now beginning to compare to present-day civil rights activists. As well as recommending that the occasion should include a North–South flag swap to “symbolize with dramatic impact the unity of the nation,” he suggested that it “might in part honor Robert Gould Shaw.”Footnote ⁴³ Shaw, a patrician white officer, had commanded a regiment of US Colored Troops in a failed attack on Battery Wagner near Charleston, South Carolina in July 1863. He had died leading his men to immortality and was memorialized with them on Augustus Saint Gaudens's monument to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry on Boston Common. Up to this point the CWCC had shown a pronounced reluctance to irritate white southerners for fear of torpedoing what remained of its grandiose project. Catton's advice, though couched in typically balanced terms, opened up the possibility – at a critical moment in modern American history – of using the centennial to mark the then little-known role that armed black men had played in saving the Union.

The CWCC did hold its May 1963 meeting in Boston but predictably avoided any attempt to laud the abolitionists. However, in a speech delivered at Boston College on 25 May, Catton praised Colonel Shaw for laying down his life for the cause of black freedom. He went on to urge his listeners to live up to Shaw's example by making plain their horror at the segregationist violence recently unleashed by police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor upon peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama. Modern Americans, he said, might not be called to repeat Shaw's sacrifice but

This may have been Bruce Catton's finest hour. It was certainly one of his most courageous moments and clearly demonstrated the extent to which he had been galvanized by the movement's strategic application of nonviolence in a Cold War context. Traces of the movement's influence can also be found in his writings. The first volume of his Centennial History was clearly the work of a white liberal historian writing under the influence of Civil War orthodoxy. The Civil War, he suggested, was somehow the result of a slave system that had become “comparatively benign” by 1860 but it was a conflict that could have been avoided if all parties had not forgotten basic American values like moderation and pragmatism.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, in Volume II, entitled Terrible Swift Sword (published in 1963), Catton argued that by issuing the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln had placed freedom, “the most vital, disturbing and unforgettable word in the language … at the center of the nation's ideas about the future. Nothing would ever be quite the same after this.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The title of the final volume, Never Call Retreat (1965), underlined Catton's attachment to this central theme. He had to condense the entire second half of the war into this text and found only very limited space for African Americans. But when he did take note of blacks he did evince an understanding, heightened by the activities of the civil rights movement, that blacks had been active agents in their own liberation. He wrote that to the slaves Lincoln's edict meant “freedom now!”Footnote ⁴⁷ In another present-minded passage he observed that when a black man donned the blue uniform of the United States “it followed logically that at last he had a country.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Although Catton resisted whatever temptation he might have had to play up the military significance of black troops, he did observe that the latter proved their usefulness under fire, wrote positively about what he saw as President Lincoln's growth on racial issues, and even began to develop a more rounded portrait of the Radical Republicans.

The critics seemed to get the message. One reviewer of Terrible Swift Sword, writing after the events in Birmingham, observed that the Civil War was “the end of a beginning; and there was much unfinished business; business which, as recent events in the South show, remains unfinished.”Footnote ⁴⁹ This, of course, was not only the message that Catton wanted his readers to imbibe but also the one that civil rights leaders themselves sought to inculcate. For a brief moment in American history, black freedom fighters and white liberals were united in their conviction that racial equality under the law was at least one hundred years overdue.

Bruce Catton was no civil rights radical but nor was he an unreconstructed apologist for the Lost Cause. Although he did embrace Robert E. Lee and championed Confederate President Jefferson Davis, he did not at any stage of his career regret that these men had been on the losing side. By the mid-1960s no intelligent reader of his books could have doubted his commitment to the view that morality, history and national interest combined required an end to segregation and neo-Confederate posturing. In the fall of 1967 Catton received a letter from a student at South High School in Denver. Shari Crandall fretted that her school was still flying the Confederate battle flag after years of the flag's abuse by segregationists. What did the country's most famous historian of the late unpleasantness advise the school to do? Catton could have avoided answering this distress call by consigning it to the waste bin or by replying in the blandest of terms. But, although he chose his words carefully as always, he chose not to evade this challenge to his invigorated liberalism. “As a Northerner born and bred,” he replied,

Bruce Catton's interventions as a middlebrow intellectual in the raging domestic debates over the meaning of freedom in Cold War America were measured yet purposeful. It is true that he struggled to think through his position on the Confederate Lost Cause. That failure was a product less of racial prejudice than of the constraints imposed by a crumbling but still potent Civil War orthodoxy, his work-related empathy for southern whites, and his own attachment to the goal of domestic consensus. His personal commitment to American democracy remained undaunted even if the liberalism underpinning his political faith had been largely shorn of its New Deal-era radicalism by economic growth and the fight against communism. The flaws inherent in that rights-oriented liberalism were evident to a growing number of contemporaries, many of them African Americans, by the mid-1960s. The author James Baldwin was a caustic critic of those northern liberals who failed to see the failings in their own society because they considered themselves “already saved.”Footnote ⁵¹ He was also contemptuous of the sentimental style on which middlebrow do-gooders often relied. Sentimentality, he wrote, was “the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion,” and “the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.” Well-intentioned “protest novels,” Baldwin contended, served only to conceal the truth and make authors and readers feel good about themselves: “ ‘As long as such books are being published,’ an American liberal once said to me, ‘everything will be all right.’ ”Footnote ⁵² Bruce Catton, however, was wise enough to know that books alone, no matter how well meant, would not make a better America. Unlike those self-righteous northern liberals despised by James Baldwin, he knew instinctively that the North enjoyed no “Treasury of Virtue” where racial prejudice was concerned.Footnote ⁵³ His personal brand of modified liberalism proved sufficiently adaptable, progressive and potent to assist the black freedom struggle in its decisive modern phase. Alongside the courageous efforts of civil rights activists his achievement was a decidedly modest one. From the vantage point of the Civil War sesquicentennial, however, it looks to have been a significant one nonetheless.