The OHIO HISTORICAL Quarterly
VOLUME 65 ?? NUMBER 3 ?? JULY 1956
A New Horizon in History
By BRUCE CATTON*
When Ulysses, the wise old man of Greek
mythology, prepared
to take off on his final voyage beyond
the sunset, he summed up his
knowledge of life in the one remark,
"I am a part of all that I
have met."
By this, I suppose, Ulysses was simply
saying that history was not
a thing apart from him. He had lived; he
had contributed his bit
to the life of his times, and in turn
had been shaped by that life
around him--and he had been part of it
all, he had been a living
figure in the history of his time, an
actor in what later would be
seen as the grand pageant of the Homeric
Age.
There seems to be very little of Homeric
scope or grandeur
to the life we have known, here in the
Middle West of America;
yet we still live by Ulysses' watchword,
for we must say, with him,
that we too have been a part of all that
we have met--that is, that
we do not exist apart from the daily
life that moves about us--
and we may as well go on, with Ulysses,
to say (in the words
Tennyson gave him), "And all
experience is an arch where through
gleams that untraveled world whose
margin fades forever as I
move."
I would like to suggest that in these
words we have nothing more
nor less than an appreciation of what
history is: an understanding
* This is the text of an address
delivered at the seventy-first annual meeting of the
Ohio Historical Society on April 28, 1956.
Mr. Catton is the editor of American
Heritage: The Magazine of History and the author of a number of books on the Civil
War, including A Stillness at Appomattox.
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THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
of what the historic process really
means to us, regardless of whether
or not we care to use the word
"history."
For we are a part of all that we have
met, and what we have
experienced is little more than a medium
by which we can look ahead
into the future. Life, in other words,
is a continuous process. The
present grew out of the past, and the
future will grow out of the
two put together.
In these troubled times we want very
much to know where we
are going. We are worried about the
future, and rightly so; for
in our own lifetime we have seen a good
part of mankind turn its
back on the standards and the values
which, however imperfectly,
the human race has tried to follow during
the past thousand years
and go off on a strange new tack which
is obviously unpredictable
and very possibly full of profound
danger. We have also seen that
the human race has unexpectedly laid its
hands on a force which,
if used wrongly, may destroy mankind in
its entirety and return this
globe to its primal condition of a
whirling mass of flaming gas.
The old familiar guide lines seem to be
gone. More than ever
before, the whole future of mankind
appears to be hidden in a grim
uncertainty wherein the least that can
be said is that we can destroy
both ourselves and the earth which we
inhabit if we do not use
pretty good judgment.
This nagging, chilling fear is a thing
our generation is being
compelled to learn how to live with--and
I would like to suggest
that it is perhaps the principal reason
for the immense revival of
interest in history which has developed
in this country during this
last decade.
The revival of interest is very genuine.
I am speaking as a man
who wrote several books in the field of
history and came to discover
--to his delighted surprise--that a
certain number of people were
actually prepared to buy them--a
phenomenon which has nothing
to do with the intrinsic worth, or
otherwise, of the books themselves,
but which simply reflects the existence
of a widespread desire on the
part of the general public to
familiarize itself with the American
past.
Much more significant has been my
experience with the magazine,
American Heritage.
A NEW HORIZON IN HISTORY 223
This magazine is devoted to the pleasant
task of presenting
American history to the general reading
public. When we began
to print it, we were not at all certain
about the reception we would
get. We hoped that we could attain a
circulation of perhaps as
much as sixty or seventy thousand--it
did seem that if we presented
American history properly, we should be
able to find that many
people who would be willing to pay for
the privilege of reading it.
We have found, I am happy to say, that
we underestimated the size
of our audience. Currently, the magazine
has a circulation of more
than 150,000, and there seems to be good
reason to believe that if
we do our part properly it can rise
substantially above that figure.
So when I say that there is a broad new
interest in history in
America, I believe that I know what I am
talking about. That
interest does exist; and to all of us
who work in the field of history,
it presents a challenge that calls for
the best and most intelligent
effort we can make in response.
I suspect that it is a challenge that
needs to be met very simply.
By this I mean that the public which
wants to know more about
history is not especially interested in
seeing history presented in the
traditional manner. I believe this
public has learned to look on
history as essentially a somewhat dull
subject. It fears that to be-
come familiar with history may mean
being called on to memorize a
great many dates, to be compelled to
carry in the mind dry details
about treaties, acts of congress, and
similar matters--that there is
something about this discipline which is
both as taxing and, essen-
tially, as lacking in human interest as
an exercise in higher
mathematics.
Yet, at the same time, this public which
is looking to us for light
does very much want to know what only
history can tell it; and
what it wants to know, I think, can be
summed up in a few fairly
simple questions. Such questions as: How
did we get where we are
today? What is there in our past that
may shed light on the future?
How have people behaved before in times
of great stress? What,
in short, has our human family been up
to--has it ever been through
an equal time of peril before, and if so,
what can we find out by
reading about it?
To answer these and similar questions we
need all of the knowl-
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edge which our study of history has
given us, and we need to use all
of the techniques which the discipline
of history affords. But I be-
lieve that above all else we need to
understand that it is the human
story which our audience is demanding.
In simple terms, what people are asking
of us today is that we
present history as a simple, interesting
subject that has a direct bear-
ing on the American present and the
American future. They are
not especially worried about the
details, and I do not think they need
to be worried about them. For instance,
I do not believe that any
American really needs to be letter
perfect about the exact dates,
names, and details regarding the Civil
War battle of Antietam. I
do think, however, that he very much
needs to know what the real
meaning of that battle was--what came
out of it, how it affected the
course of the life he himself is leading
today. If we can show him
--and of course I am taking one example
at random and taking it
simply because it happens to be one with
which I have intimately
concerned myself--how that prodigious
fight in the fall of 1862
led to the Emancipation Proclamation,
and so involved all of us in
the tremendous obligation to solve the
race problem in this country,
I think we have given him what he really
needs.
I don't think we give that sort of thing
to him by a lot of solemn
talk about trends, economic currents,
and so on. I think we do it,
finally, simply by showing that the
great events in history turn on
what ordinary men and women do when the
pressure is on. The
story of history is in the end nothing
more than the story of people.
Many people meet many separate
challenges--and, at last, we realize
that because this is so the race itself
has met a great challenge.
That has happened over and over again in
the past. I suspect that
it is happening again today. Out of many
small triumphs a great
triumph can develop. Out of the
individual human being's ability
to dare, to endure, and to hope, come
reason for courage, for en-
durance, and for hope for all the race.
All of which means that the little bits
and pieces of history are
important. What, for instance, was life
like for the men and
women who had to live through it on a
central Ohio farm in the
1820's? What did people have to put up
with when they left estab-
lished homes in the East and came West
to open a new country?
A NEW HORIZON IN HISTORY 225
What did they have to eat; what were
their houses like; how did
their children get an education; what
was a frontier storekeeper up
against; what sort of games did people
play and what sort of songs
did they sing? All of these things are
history--not "sidelights on
history," as people sometimes
condescendingly say, but history itself.
They are the story of the American
people--doing, and being, and
becoming--and anything we can learn that
sheds new light on any
of that is the kind of contribution to
history for which people are
looking to us. We can tell the story by
writing books and articles,
by exhibiting pictures, by displaying
old tools and bits of furniture
and toys, by presenting songs or pageants,
by recreating old houses
--it does not matter. What does matter
is that we make human
life in the past real and interesting to
human beings in the present.
I believe that this means there can be,
and must be, a substantial
expansion in all of the things which
local history groups do. We
need to get at the past more
intimately--through diaries, old rec-
ords, artifacts, all of the materials
which can be dredged up on the
local level--and having done so we need
to present it in every way
possible--verbally, visually, by
displays, or by re-creations--so that
the life of the past can be seen and
felt and understood. For when
we really succeed in opening a new vista
into the everyday life of
the past, we are very likely to find that
we are opening a vista into
the future as well.
I hope I may be pardoned if I talk
briefly about my own experience
in this field. I do it simply on the
theory that a man who talks in
public ought to know what he is talking
about, and therefore it seems
to me to be safest to stick to my own
field.
I undertook, a few years ago, to try to
write about the experience
of northern soldiers in the American
Civil War. I may add that
when I began that venture it never once
entered my head that I was
going to be writing history. I
simply wanted to find out how the
war looked and felt and smelled to the
ordinary soldier of the
1860's--and through him, to the people
back home, who had to
stand the gaff and foot the bill. But
this search led me, ultimately,
I think, to a new understanding of what
the American people are
all about, and what they bought for us,
and for our descendants, by
their response to those terrible years
of challenge.
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THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
What were these men doing in our Civil
War? They were
fighting, of course, for causes which
they did not talk about very
much but which they nevertheless
believed in with all their hearts--
independence and states' rights for the
South, union for the North.
But that was only the smallest part of
it. Ultimately, they were
fighting to pay off a terrible debt
which they themselves had not in-
curred--fighing to pay a price which, in
God's providence, was de-
creed for the people of America to pay
on their way to greatness.
For the Civil War was the fearful
payment America had to make
on its road to the future. It is idle to
talk of victory and defeat,
as if we were discussing a football game
or a prize fight. How
could "we" have won? We were
fighting ourselves. We were not
driving back a foreign enemy; we were at
grips with our own spirit,
paying the terrible price that had to be
paid to bring us a few steps
closer to final realization of the
American dream. It is hardly pos-
sible to overestimate the cost; a nation
less than one fifth the size
of our nation today lost 500,000 lives
in that struggle, and left a
heritage of misunderstanding,
resentment, and antagonism of which
we are still feeling the effects.
And yet, somehow, it was worth it. For
two reasons.
First and foremost, we learned that the
American people can
meet a challenge when it presents
itself. Those young men who put
on the blue or the gray and went out
laughing under the flags to
meet agony and disillusion and
heartbreak and extinction--they
proved something for us, once and for
all. They faced the worst
men can face, they did it without
heroics and without indoctrination,
they fought to the death without giving
way to hatred; and because
they were able to do that, all of us are
better off today. For we
know now what our American soil can
breed. It can produce
character, a carefree and debonair way
of walking up to fate and
daring it to do its worst, an ability to
respond to a challenge, which
is the most priceless possession any
race can have. A wise man said,
long ago, "The readiness is
all." Those boys were ready. They
confirm our faith in the American
character.
But there is more to it than that. If we
paid a great price in the
Civil War, what specifically did we pay
it for? What did we get out
of it, beyond certain intangibles, that
we can carry into the future
A NEW HORIZON IN HISTORY 227
with us? It is all very well to say that
this was what we paid for
nationhood; precisely what does that
mean?
I think it means simply this: that we
got, from the Civil War, a
commitment to two of the loftiest ideals
that any people in all
history were ever committed to. These
are the concept that human
society is indivisible--that no man
lives for himself alone, that we
get along better working together than
we do if we work separately,
that we are members one of another, and
that there is no way to
escape from that bond--and the concept
that human freedom is
something that goes all across the
board, something that applies to
men of every race and creed and
condition. On those two ideals we
can someday build the final greatness of
our American democracy.
We shall not reach our goal for
generations to come, probably, but
we have to keep working toward it. That,
in the last analysis, is
what the war of the 1860's meant to us;
that is why we can say that
it was worth its fearful cost. However
hard it may be to travel, and
however long it may take us to get to
the end of it, our path has to
lead toward the stars. Too many young
Americans died to let
it lead anywhere else.
It is hardly necessary to remark that we
have not yet come even
moderately close to the realization of
this ideal. It may well be that
generations will have to pass before we
can be even partly satisfied
with our progress in that direction. But
the 500,000 graves which
were filled by the Civil War are
significant markers along the road.
By the infinite grief and sorrow which
the filling of those graves
cost, we are committed to an eternal
effort to reach this goal. We
will have many setbacks along the way.
There will be times when
the hideous old banner of racial
superiority is raised afresh--when
men born in America will deny everything
America stands for in
order to try to preserve a remnant of
the old theory that some of
us belong to a master race and that some
of the rest of us were born
to inferiority and oppression. But men
who raise this banner are
fighting a rear-guard action and they
cannot win. The decision was
made nearly a century ago, and it can
never be reversed.
That is the sort of thing we learn from
our study of history. We
see today as an outgrowth of the past,
and we see tomorrow,
whatever it may be like, as something
that will grow inexorably
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out of what we are and do today. That is
why there is such an
intense interest in history in this
country today. That is why we, as
members of the historical fraternity,
are under the highest obligation
to meet this interest in every way we
can. History is not simply a
matter of the backward glance. It is a
study of the worth and the
prospects of the human race itself. Like
Ulysses, we are a part of
all that we have met--of the experiences
of our forefathers, of all
that men before us have dared and hoped
for and achieved. History
is a continuous process, because life is
continuous. Out of what we
can tell people about the road that has
already been traveled, we
can give them a priceless measure of
assurance that the road ahead
will continue to lead upward.