Fife, Drum & Battle Din

GRANT MOVES SOUTH (564 pp.) -- Bruce latton-- Lltfle, Brown ($6.50).

Since almost everyone agrees on what happened and why, the writing of Civil War history becomes increasingly an exercise in orchestration. Authors turn out regional cantatas along the lines of Moriaghan's Civil War on the Western Border, surging tone poems in the manner of Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, or elegiac symphonies such as Freeman's sonorous R. E. Lee.

This new book by Bruce Catton, a veteran composer on Civil War themes (A Stillness at Appomattox] represents the second movement in a planned symphonic trilogy on Ulysses S. Grant. It is scored for the gentle woodwinds of camp life and hearthside as well as for the big brasses and percussion of battle. Taking over the work begun by the late Lloyd Lewis with Captain Sam Grant (1950), Author Catton deals with Grant's astonishing growth in two years from hesitant commander to superb tactician.

Chomped Cigar. In appearance, Grant was usually the antihero. He trudged through the war chomping a cigar, wearing an old slouch hat and a short blue coat without insignia. One perceptive Union officer saw him as a man with "no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain businessman of the republic, there for the one single purpose of getting that command across the river in the shortest time possible." Grant learned by doing, and learned slowly. Leading his regiment against the Confederates for the first time, he was beset by a "cold, unreasoned sort of panic," and would have turned back except that he "lacked the moral courage" to give the order. When he discovered that the enemy forces had abandoned their position, he learned his first lesson: "The other fellow had just as much reason to be afraid as he had."

In his first battles Grant was repeatedly taken by surprise. He was beaten at Belmont and just barely held the field at Fort Donelson and Shiloh. These near disasters taught him a second lesson: "In every battle there may come a moment when each side is fought out and ready to quit." At that moment, victory goes to the man who attacks. His determination was always to destroy the enemy, not just to defeat him, and his terms of "unconditional surrender" have often been part of U.S. strategy since.

Apologist Needed. Historian Catton writes of Grant with passion and admiration. Yet he accepts the new evaluation of Grant's superior, General in Chief Henry Halleck, that was strongly advanced by Historian Kenneth Williams in his massive Lincoln Finds a General. Halleck had long been dismissed as a well-intentioned duffer, but Catton, like Williams, concedes that "on balance" he did Grant more good than harm.

Historian Catton also joins most contemporary historians in discounting the tales of Grant's alcoholism, and fiercely defends Grant for his brusque handling of the volatile politician-soldier, Major General John McClernand. The book gives credit to McClernand for his conception of the Vicksburg enterprise. Catton even concedes that McClernand had "some reason" for believing that Grant and the other West Pointers on his staff had "ganged up" to get rid of him on the eve of Vicksburg's surrender, but he argues that Grant was right.

McClernand seems sorely in need of an apologist, and with Civil War buffs continuing to write on everything from Grierson's Raid to Lincoln's opaque Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, he may yet find one. As for Grant, no historian, apologist or otherwise, has equaled the capsule description by his wife Julia: "He was happy in the fight and the din of battle, but restless in the barracks. He could no more resist the sound of a fife or a drum or a chance to fire a gun than a woman can resist bonnets."

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