Michigan’s Bruce Catton: Voice of History

sparked public interest in the conflict. For the last volume, Catton won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1954.

Catton’s Civil War knowledge didn’t come only from libraries: Born in Petoskey in 1899, he was raised in the village of Benzonia, about 30 miles west-southwest of Traverse City, where he heard real stories from old men who, in their youth, were engaged in the great civil war.

about the Civil War, Bruce Catton made it real. Catton not only told us how and why it happened; he made us feel it. He brought to his writing an extraordinary combination of scholarship, literary skill and intimate concern.”

“Here in Michigan, perhaps more clearly than in most places, can be seen the enormous increase in the speed of society’s movement.”

Bruce Catton, Waiting for the Morning Train, 1972

August 28, 2023 marks the 45th anniversary of the passing of Michigan’s noted writer Bruce Catton. An acclaimed artist with the English language, Catton wrote with simplicity and color, especially in histories of the Civil War and Michigan.

In the early 1950s, Catton wrote his first commercially successful effort, the Army of the Potomac trilogy. Its three volumes remain his most recognized work and a standard among Civil War histories. The trilogy, Mr. Lincoln’s Army (1951), Glory Road (1952), and A Stillness at Appomattox (1953) detailed the war from beginning to end and

Catton shared the story of his youth in Waiting for the Morning Train (1972). More than 50 years after its publishing, it still beautifully depicts the wonder of a boy growing up in rural western Michigan, including long days of chores, swimming, fishing, baseball, and trips with his brother and father to nearby lumbering operations and sawmills.

Before his career as a historian, Catton was a newspaper editor and reporter for over 30 years. In 1954, he became the founding editor of American Heritage magazine. Oliver Jensen, Catton’s successor in the role, said “No one ever wrote American history with more easy grace, beauty and emotional power, or greater understanding of its meaning than Bruce Catton.” New York Times writer Webster Schott added “As much as anyone who has ever written

Catton knitted together seemingly unrelated ideas until the connections became evident to the reader. His knowledge of history was intertwined with his knowledge of science and the Bible. Frequently prescient in his writing, his description in the 1960s about the decline of Detroit’s auto industry remains true today. His description of the two-mile-thick layer of glacial ice receding from prehistoric Michigan with its “tamarack bogs and barren tundra” foresaw the 2008 discovery of concentrated artifacts from Clovis people found in St. Joseph County who camped at the site 13,000 years ago.

Catton characterized Michigan as a “harvested” state in which the fur trading and trapping industry of the 17th and 18th centuries yielded to lumbering that cleared millions of acres of forest, which in turn was replaced by mining of massive copper and iron reserves which in turn were also exhausted.

In the Bicentennial year of 1976, each of the 50 states was allowed to select an author to write its history. Michigan selected Bruce Catton. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Gerald Ford in 1977 and received 26 honorary degrees from colleges and universities. Catton wrote at least 40 books. Since 1984, the Bruce Catton Prize has been awarded for lifetime achievement in writing history.

Tony Ettwein