So there now. Twenty years have come and gone and I can say with Chaucer, “Farwel my book and my devocion.” All through the second of these two decades — the drawn-out time it took to write this third and final volume — my debt to those who went before me, dead and living, continued to mount even as the Centennial spate diminished to a trickle and then ran dry. Previous obligations were enlarged, and new ones acquired, on both sides of the line defining the limits of the original material: especially on the near side, where the evidence was assembled and presented in general studies, biographies, and secondary accounts of individual campaigns. Chief among these last, to take them in the order of their use, were the following: Red River Campaign by Ludwell H. Johnson,Lee’s Last Campaign by Clifford Dowdey, Autumn of Glory by Thomas L. Connelly, Jubal’s Raid by Frank E. Vandiver, The Decisive Battle of Nashville by Stanley F. Horn, Sherman’s March Through the Carolinas by John G. Barrett, and two recitals of the Appomattox chase, An End to Valor by Philip Van Doren Stern and Nine April Days by Burke Davis. Similarly, my long-term obligation to works on naval matters was extended by Virgil Carrington Jones’s Civil War at Sea: The Final Effort and Edward Boykin’sGhost Ship of the Confederacy.
No one who has read or even scanned these books can fail to see my debt to them, as well as to the biographies cited earlier, two of which had concluding volumes that came out just as the need for them was sorest: Hudson Strode’s Jefferson Davis: Tragic Heroand Bruce Catton’s Grant Takes Command. Having had them, I cannot see how I could have managed without them, and the same applies to J. G. Randall’s Lincoln the President, completed after his death by Richard N. Current in Last Full Measure, and Jim Bishop’s Day Lincoln Was Shot. Clifford Dowdey’s Lee brought his subject into sharper focus, and T. Harry Williams filled a sizeable gap with his Hayes of the Twenty-third, as E.B. Long did many others with The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac. Nash K. Burger’s and John K. Bettersworth’s South of Appomattox helped get me down to the wire, and Kenneth M. Stampp, who was with me at the start in And the War Came, was also with me at the finish in The Era of Reconstruction, another old friend among the many I know only through their work.
To all these I am grateful, as I was and am to those mentioned in the end notes to the first two volumes of this iliad, most of whom continued their contribution through the third. Originally I intended to list my obligations in a complete bibliography here at the close of the whole, but even this chore has been spared me — along with a considerable added bulkiness for you — by Ralph G. Newman and E. B. Long, whose 1964 pamphlet, A Basic Civil War Library, first published in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, enumerates by category the 350-odd books I owe most to, old and new and in and out of print. Other such compilations are readily available, including a much fuller one in Long’s own Almanac, yet this one is to me the best in its inclusion of the works I mainly relied on, at any rate up to its date of issue. While I hope I have acknowledged my heaviest contemporary debts in this trio of notes, there are two I would like to stress in particular. One is to Bruce Catton, whose Centennial History of the Civil War was finished in time for its third volume, Never Call Retreat, to be available, together with his earlier Stillness at Appomattox, as a source and guide all through the writing of my own third volume. I was, as Stonewall Jackson said in another connection on his deathbed, “the infinite gainer” from having him thus meet his deadline even as I was failing to reach mine. My other chief debt is to the late Allan Nevins, whose close-packed Organized War to Victory, the last in his four-volume War for the Union, was similarly available during the past two years. Both gave me a wealth of useable material, but at least as valuable was their example of dedication and perseverance, double-barreled proof that such an undertaking could be carried to a finish. In that sense my debt to them is personal, though not as much so, nor as large, as the ones I owe my editor, Robert Loomis, and my wife, Gwyn Rainer Foote, both of whom bore with me all the way.
Perhaps in closing I might add that, although nowhere along the line have I had a “thesis” to argue or maintain — partly no doubt because I never saw one yet that could not be “proved,” at least to the satisfaction of the writer who advanced it — I did have one thing I wanted to do, and that was to restore a balance I found lacking in nearly all the histories composed within a hundred years of Sumter. In all too many of these works, long and short, foreign and domestic, the notion prevailed that the War was fought in Virginia, while elsewhere — in an admittedly large but also rather empty region known vaguely as “the West” — a sort of running skirmish wobbled back and forth, presumably as a way for its participants, faceless men with unfamiliar names, to pass the time while waiting for the issue to be settled in the East. I do not claim that the opposite is true, but I do claim that it is perhaps a little closer to the truth; that Vicksburg, for example, was as “decisive” as Gettysburg, if not more so, and that Donelson, with its introduction of Grant and Forrest onto the national scene, may have had more to do with the outcome than either of the others had, for all their greater panoply, numbers, and documentation. In any case, it was my hope to provide what I considered a more fitting balance, East and West, in the course of attempting my aforesaid purpose of re-creating that war and making it live again in the world around us.
So, anyhow, “Farwel my book and my devocion,” my rock and my companion through two decades. At the outset of this Gibbon span, plunk in what I hope will be the middle of my writing life, I was two years younger than Grant at Belmont, while at the end I was four months older than Lincoln at his assassination. By way of possible extenuation, in response to complaints that it took me five times longer to write the war than the participants took to fight it, I would point out that there were a good many more of them than there was of me. However that may be, the conflict is behind me now, as it is for you and it was a hundred-odd years ago for them.