30 November, 1861: Saturday

England
British Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell writes Lord Lyons, Minister to the United States. England considers the seizure of Confederate commissioners Mason and Slidell as aggression against Britain and instructs Lyons to inform the US government that the two men be turned over to British authorities, along with an apology. If no apology is made within 7 days, Lyons is to leave Washington with his legation and return to London.

Russell also orders British Navy to to be on the alert, but to refrain from any act of hostility.

Missouri
A skirmish takes place at Grand River, Missouri.

Western Virginia
A skirmish takes place at the mouth of the Little Cacapon River.

Maryland
Baltimore: A female passenger on a steamer at Baltimore is found to have gloves, stockings and letters intended for the South. A small boy is found to be carrying quinine. Both are allowed to proceed after these items are confiscated. This is "just one of numerous such incidents."

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

Society of Civil War Historians

Here's their website: http://scwh.la.psu.edu/

From their website:
The Society of Civil War Historians encourages scholarly activity and academic exchange among historians, graduate students, and professionals who interpret history in museums, national parks, archives, and other public facilities. The Society sponsors an annual banquet (held during the Southern Historical Association conference) and a newsletter. Membership includes a subscription to the quarterly Journal of the Civil War Era and the opportunity to attend a biennial conference. Annual dues are $50 for regular members, $25 for students, and there are also institutional, life, and founder memberships.

The Society seeks to bring greater coherence to the field by encouraging the integration of social, military, political, and other forms of history and generally promote the study of the Civil War era. The Society also plans to sponsor a “first book” prize to raise the visibility of the next generation of emerging historians. We also will have a regular, meaningful forum for promoting increased, systematic conversations among academic and public historians.

Florida Atlantic University serves as the organizational home for the Society of Civil War Historians and Penn State’s Richards Civil War Era Center will now serve as a co-sponsor to handle the journal and the conference planning.

We welcome questions and comments from members or inquiries about becoming members. The Society remains an organization committed to promoting both scholarship and fellowship among Civil War era historians.

Writers of Civil War History: James McPherson

From Wikipedia:
James M. McPherson (born October 11, 1936) is an American Civil War historian, and is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor Emeritus of United States History at Princeton University. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Battle Cry of Freedom, his most famous book. He was the president of the American Historical Association in 2003, and is a member of the editorial board of Encyclopædia Britannica.

Born in Valley City, North Dakota, he graduated from St. Peter High School, and he received his Bachelor of Arts at Gustavus Adolphus College (St. Peter, Minnesota) in 1958 (from which he graduated magna cum laude), and his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1963. Currently he resides in Princeton, New Jersey, and is married with one child.

Scholarship
McPherson's works include The Struggle for Equality, awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Award. In 1989, he published his Pulitzer-winning book, Battle Cry of Freedom. And in 1998 another book, For Cause and Comrades, received the Lincoln Prize. In 2002 he published both a scholarly book, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam 1862, and a history of the Civil War for children, Fields of Fury.

Unlike many other historians, he has a reputation of trying to make history accessible to the public. Most of his works are marketed to popular audiences and his book Battle Cry of Freedom has long been a popular one-volume general history of the Civil War. In 2009, he was the co-winner of the Lincoln Prize for Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.

McPherson was named the 2000 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities by the National Endowment for the Humanities (replacing the first selection, President Bill Clinton, who declined the honor in the face of criticism from scholars and political conservatives). In making the announcement of McPherson's selection, NEH Chairman William R. Ferris said:

James M. McPherson has helped millions of Americans better understand the meaning and legacy of the American Civil War. By establishing the highest standards for scholarship and public education about the Civil War and by providing leadership in the movement to protect the nation's battlefields, he has made an exceptional contribution to historical awareness in America.

In 2007, he was awarded the $100,000 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military history--the first person to be awarded the prize.

One of his most recent books is This Mighty Scourge, a series of essays about the Civil War. One essay describes the huge difficulty of negotiation when regime change is a war aim on either side of a conflict. “For at least the past two centuries, nations have usually found it harder to end a war than to start one. Americans learned that bitter lesson in Vietnam, and apparently having forgotten it, we’re forced to learn it all over again in Iraq.” One of McPherson’s examples is the Civil War in which both the North and the South sought regime change. It took four years to end that conflict.

Politics and advocacy
McPherson is known for his outspokenness on contemporary issues and his activism, such as his work on behalf of the preservation of Civil War battlefields. As president in 1993-1994 of Protect Historic America, he lobbied against the construction of a commercial theme park at the Manassas battlefield. He has also served on the boards of the Civil War Trust and the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites, and on the Civil War Sites Advisory Committee.

McPherson signed a May 18, 2009 petition asking President Obama not to lay a wreath at the Confederate Monument at Arlington National Cemetery. The petition stated:

The Arlington Confederate Monument is a denial of the wrong committed against African Americans by slave owners, Confederates, and neo-Confederates, through the monument’s denial of slavery as the cause of secession and its holding up of Confederates as heroes. This implies that the humanity of Africans and African Americans is of no significance.

Today, the monument gives encouragement to the modern neo-Confederate movement and provides a rallying point for them. The modern neo-Confederate movement interprets it as vindicating the Confederacy and the principles and ideas of the Confederacy and their neo-Confederate ideas. The presidential wreath enhances the prestige of these neo-Confederate events

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Democracy Now interview & UDC boycott
McPherson's political views have led to charges of bias against him and at least one boycott of his books. In 1999 McPherson drew the ire of Confederate heritage groups when he and Ed Sebesta had an interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on the left wing Pacifica Radio network's Democracy Now! program. The topic of the interview was then-candidate George W. Bush's financial support of the Museum of the Confederacy, and its Lone Star Ball fundraising event, as well as his views of the historical Confederacy. During the interview, guest Ed Sebesta discussed the Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy, which Sebesta argued were created with the motive of celebrating the Confederacy, including the use of slavery in the Confederate economy, and white supremacy. The interview with McPherson followed in another segment, where McPherson stated:

"I think, I agree a 100% with Ed Sebesta about the motives or the hidden agenda, not too, not too deeply hidden I think of such groups as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. They are dedicated to celebrating the Confederacy and rather thinly veiled support for white supremacy. And I think that also is the again not very deeply hidden agenda of the Confederate flag issue in several southern states."

In the same interview, McPherson clarified his position that the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia had changed its orientation, from its original purpose of celebrating the Confederacy:

"[O]ver time, and especially in the last decade or two, it has become a much more professional, research-oriented, professional exhibit-oriented facility."

He continued,

"I think the motives of people who fundraise money for the museum, and who attend balls in period costume and so on, probably range from celebratory to genuinely historical. So there is a dimension to that. But I do think that the Museum of Confederacy is now a research and professional museum in the same category as other highly regarded museums around the country."

McPherson said:"If I implied that all U.D.C. chapters or S.C.V. chapters or anyone who belongs to those is promoting a white-supremacist agenda, that's not what I meant to say," he said. "What I meant to say is that some of these people have a hidden agenda of white supremacy, (which) they might not even recognize they're involved in."

Members of the UDC were similarly offended by these comments. The Virginia UDC responded in their newsletter that "Far from apologizing for his baseless accusations of racism, (McPherson) has now added ignorance to the list of sins that we have committed." The group has not announced an end to their boycott

Writers of Civil War History: Shelby Foote

Shelby Dade Foote, Jr. (November 17, 1916 – June 27, 2005) was an American novelist and a noted historian of the American Civil War, who wrote The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume history of the war.



Early life
Foote was born in Greenville, Mississippi, the son of Shelby Dade Foote and his wife Lillian Rosenstock. Foote's paternal grandfather, a planter, had gambled away most of his fortune and assets. His maternal grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Vienna. Foote was raised in his father's and maternal grandmother's Episcopal religion.

As his father advanced through the executive ranks of Armour and Company, the family lived in Greenville, Jackson, Vicksburg, Pensacola, Florida, and Mobile, Alabama. Foote's father died in Mobile when Foote was five years old; he and his mother moved back to Greenville. Foote was an only child, and his mother never remarried. When Foote was 15 years old, Walker Percy and his brothers LeRoy and Phinize Percy moved to Greenville to live with their uncle - attorney, poet, and novelist William Alexander Percy - after the death of their parents. Foote began a lifelong fraternal and literary relationship with Walker; each had great influence on the other's writing.

Foote edited The Pica, the student newspaper of Greenville High School, and frequently used the paper to lampoon the school's principal. In 1935, he applied to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, hoping to join with the older Percy boys, but was denied admission because of an unfavorable recommendation from his high school principal. He presented himself for admission anyway, and as result of a battery of admissions tests, he was accepted.

In 1936 he was initiated in the Alpha Delta chapter of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. Interested more in the process of learning than in earning an actual degree, Foote was not a model student. He often skipped class to explore the library, and once he even spent the night among the shelves. He also began contributing pieces of fiction to Carolina Magazine, UNC's award-winning literary journal. Foote returned to Greenville in 1937, where he worked in construction and for a local newspaper. Around this time, he began to work on his first novel.

In 1940 Foote joined the Mississippi National Guard and was commissioned as captain of artillery. After being transferred from one stateside base to another, his battalion was deployed to Northern Ireland in 1943. The following year, Foote was charged with falsifying a government document relating to the check-in of a motor pool vehicle he had borrowed to visit a girlfriend in Belfast - later his first wife — who lived two miles beyond the official military limits. He was court-martialed and dismissed from the Army.

He came back to the United States and took a job with the Associated Press in New York City. In January 1945, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, but was discharged as a private in November 1945, never having seen combat. During his training with the Marines, he recalled a fellow Marine asking him "you used to be a[n] Army captain, didn't you?" When Foote said yes, the fellow replied, "You ought to make a pretty good Marine private."

Foote returned to Greenville and took a job with a local radio station, but spent most of his time writing. He sent a section from his first novel to the Saturday Evening Post. "Flood Burial" was published in 1946, and when Foote received a $750 check from the Post as payment, he quit his job to write full time.

Novelist
Foote's first novel, Tournament, was published in 1949. It was inspired by his planter grandfather, who had died two years before Foote's birth. For his next novel, Follow Me Down, (1950) Foote drew heavily from the proceedings of a Greenville murder trial he attended in 1941 for both the plot and characters.

Love in a Dry Season was his attempt to deal with the "so-called upper classes of the Mississippi Delta" around the time of the Great Depression. Foote often expressed great affection for this novel, which was published in 1951. In Shiloh (1952) Foote foreshadows his use of historical narrative as he tells the story of the bloodiest battle in American history to that point from the first-person perspective of seven different characters.

Jordan County: A Landscape in Narrative, was published in 1954 and is a collection of novellas, short stories, and sketches from Foote's mythical Mississippi county. September, September (1978) is the story of three white Southerners who plot and kidnap the 8-year-old son of a wealthy African-American, told against the backdrop of Memphis in September, 1957.

Although he was not one of America's best-known fiction writers, Foote was admired by his peers—among them the aforementioned Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, and his literary hero William Faulkner, who once told a University of Virginia class that Foote "shows promise, if he'll just stop trying to write Faulkner, and will write some Shelby Foote." Foote's fiction was recommended by both The New Yorker and critics from the New York Times book magazine.

Historian
Foote moved to Memphis in 1952. Upon completion of Jordan County: A Landscape in Narrative, he resumed work on what he thought would be his magnum opus, Two Gates to the City, an epic work he'd had in mind for years and in outline form since the spring of 1951.

He had trouble making progress and felt he was plunging toward crisis with the "dark, horrible novel." Unexpectedly, he received a letter from Bennett Cerf of Random House asking him to write a short history of the Civil War to appear for the conflict's centennial. According to Foote, Cerf contacted him based on the factual accuracy and rich detail he found in Shiloh, but Walker Percy's wife Bunt recalled that Walker had contacted Random House to approach Foote. Regardless, though Foote had no formal training as a historian, Cerf offered him a contract for a work of approximately 200,000 words.

Foote worked for several weeks on an outline and decided that his plan couldn't be done to Cerf's specifications. He requested that the project be expanded to three volumes of 500,000 to 600,000 words each, and he estimated that the entire project would be done in nine years.

Upon approval for the new plan, Foote commenced to write the comprehensive three volume, 3000-page history, together entitled The Civil War: A Narrative. The individual volumes are Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958), Fredericksburg to Meridian (1963), and Red River to Appomattox (1974).

Foote supported himself during the twenty years he worked on the narrative with Guggenheim Fellowships (1955–1957), Ford Foundation grants, and loans from Walker Percy.

Foote labored to maintain his objectivity in the narrative despite his Southern upbringing. He deliberately avoided Lost Cause mythologizing in his work. He gained immense respect for such disparate figures as Ulysses Grant, William T. Sherman, Patrick Cleburne, and Edwin Stanton. He grew to despise such figures as Phil Sheridan and Joe Johnston. He considered United States President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest to be two authentic geniuses of the war. He stated this opinion once in conversation with one of General Forrest's granddaughters. She replied, after a pause, "You know, we never thought much of Mr. Lincoln in my family."

The work received generally favorable reviews, though scholars criticized Foote for not including footnotes and for neglecting subjects such as economics and politics of the Civil War era.

Later life
After finishing September, September, Foote resumed work on Two Gates to the City, the novel he had set aside in 1954 to write the Civil War trilogy. The work still gave him trouble and he set it aside once more, in the summer of 1978, to write "Echoes of Shiloh", an article for National Geographic Magazine. By 1981, he had given up on Two Gates altogether, though he told interviewers for years afterward that he continued to work on it.

In the late 1980s, Ken Burns had assembled a group of consultants to interview for his Civil War documentary. Foote was not in this initial group, though Burns had Foote's trilogy on his reading list. A phone call from Robert Penn Warren prompted Burns to contact Foote. Burns and crew traveled to Memphis in 1986 to film an interview with Foote in the anteroom of his study. In November 1986, Foote figured prominently at a meeting of dozens of consultants gathered to critique Burns' script. Burns interviewed Foote on-camera in Memphis and Vicksburg in 1987. In 1987, he became a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

When Burns' documentary aired in September, 1990, Foote appeared in almost ninety segments, about one hour of the eleven-hour series. Foote's drawl, erudition, and quirk of speaking as if the war were still going on made him a favorite. He was described as "the toast of Public TV," "the media's newest darling," and "prime time's newest star," and the result was a burst of book sales. In one week at the end of September, 1990, each volume of the paperback The Civil War: A Narrative sold 1,000 copies per day. By the middle of 1991, Random House sold 400,000 copies of the trilogy. Foote later told Burns, "Ken, you've made me a millionaire."

Foote's commentary in the Burns film made many substantive comments about battles, generals, and issues. He also explained a puzzling question on nomenclature: why does the same battle often have two names? Foote's answer: Northerners are usually from cities, so rivers and streams are noteworthy; whereas Southerners are usually rural, so they find towns noteworthy. Some examples:

First and Second Battle of Bull Run/First and Second Manassas;
Battle of Antietam (Creek)/Sharpsburg.

Foote professed to be a reluctant celebrity. When The Civil War was first broadcast, his telephone number was publicly listed and he received many phone calls from people who had seen him on television. Foote never unlisted his number, and the volume of calls increased each time the series re-aired. Many Memphis natives were known to pay Foote a visit at his East Parkway residence in Midtown Memphis. In 1992, Foote received an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina.

In the early 1990s, Foote was interviewed by journalist Tony Horwitz for the project on American memory of the Civil War which Horwitz eventually published as Confederates In The Attic (1998). Foote was also a member of The Modern Library's editorial board for the re-launch of the series in the mid 1990s. (This series published two books excerpted from his Civil War narrative.

Foote was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994. Also in 1994, Foote joined Protect Historic America and was instrumental in opposing a Disney theme park near battlefield sites in Virginia. Along the way, Burns asked him to return for his upcoming documentary Baseball, and he appeared up to 10th Inning, where he gave an account of his meeting the legendary Babe Ruth.

In one of his last television projects, Foote narrated the three-part series The 1840 Carolina Village, produced by award-winning PBS and Travel Channel producer C. Vincent Shortt in 1997. "Working with Shelby was a genuinely illuminating and humbling experience", said Shortt. "He was the kind of academician who could weave a Civil War story into a discussion about fried green tomatoes -- and do so without an ounce of presumption or arrogance. He was a treasure."

On September 2, 2001 Shelby Foote was the focus of the C-Span Television program In-Depth. In a 3 hour interview, conducted by C-Span founder Brian Lamb, Foote shows off the library of his home, working room, writing desk and details the writing of his books as well as taking on-air calls. The program can be viewed online here: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/165823-1

Foote died at Baptist Hospital in Memphis on June 27, 2005, aged 88. He had had a heart attack after a recent pulmonary embolism. He was interred in Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis. His grave is beside the family plot of General Forrest.

Marriages
Tess Lavery of Belfast, 1944–1946
Marguerite "Peggy" Desommes of Memphis, 1948-1952—one daughter, Margaret, born 1949
Gwyn Rainer of Memphis, 1956 until his death—one son, Huger, born 1961

Bibliography
Fiction
Tournament (1949)
Follow Me Down (1950)
Love in a Dry Season (1951)
Shiloh: A Novel (1952)
Jordan County: A Landscape in Narrative (1954)
September, September (1978)

Non-fiction
The Civil War: A Narrative
The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville
The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian
The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol 3: Red River to Appomattox
[edit] Titles excerpted from The Civil War: A Narrative
Stars in Their Courses: The Gettysburg Campaign, June-July 1863
The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign, December 1862-July 1863

Other
Foote edited a modern edition of Chickamauga: And Other Civil War Stories, an anthology of Civil War stories by various authors.

Foote contributed a lengthy introduction to the 1993 Modern Library edition of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (which was published along with "The Veteran", a short story that features the hero of the larger work at the end of his life). In this introduction, Foote recounts the biography of Crane in the same narrative style as his Civil War work.

Writers of Civil War History: Bruce Catton

From Wikipedia
Charles Bruce Catton (October 9, 1899 – August 28, 1978) was an American journalist and notable historian of the American Civil War. He won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia.

Catton was a "narrative historian" who specialized in popular histories that emphasized the colorful characters and vignettes of history, in addition to the simple dates, facts, and analyses. His works, although well researched and supported by footnotes, were generally not presented in a rigorous academic style. In the long line of Civil War historians, Catton is arguably the most prolific and popular of all, with Shelby Foote his only rival. Oliver Jensen, who succeeded him as editor of American Heritage magazine, wrote: "There is a near-magic power of imagination in Catton's work that seemed to project him physically into the battlefields, along the dusty roads and to the campfires of another age."

Life
Catton was born in Petoskey, Michigan, to George R. and Adela M. (Patten) Catton, and raised in Benzonia. His father was a Congregationalist minister, who accepted a teaching position in Benzonia Academy and later became the academy's headmaster. As a boy, Bruce first heard the reminiscences of the aged veterans who had fought in the Civil War. Catton wrote in his memoir, Waiting for the Morning Train (1972), that their stories made a lasting impression upon him, giving:

...a color and a tone not merely to our village life, but to the concept of life with which we grew up ... I think I was always subconsciously driven by an attempt to restate that faith and to show where it was properly grounded, how it grew out of what a great many young men on both sides felt and believed and were brave enough to do.

Catton attended Oberlin College, starting in 1916, but he left without completing a degree because of World War I. After serving briefly in the U.S. Navy during the war, Catton became a reporter and editor for The Cleveland News (as a freelance reporter), the Boston American (1920–24), and the Cleveland Plain Dealer (1925). From then until 1941, he worked for the Newspaper Enterprise Association (a Scripps-Howard syndicate), for which he wrote editorials and book reviews, as well as serving as a Washington, D.C. correspondent. Catton did try twice to finish his studies, but found himself repeatedly pulled away by his newspaper work; Oberlin awarded him an honorary degree in 1956.

At the start of World War II, Catton was too old for military service and, starting in 1941, served as Director of Information for the War Production Board and later held similar posts in the Department of Commerce and the Department of the Interior. This experience as a federal employee prepared him to write his first book, War Lords of Washington, in 1948. Although the book was not a commercial success, it inspired Catton to leave the federal government to become a full-time author.

In 1954, Catton was offered the position as founding editor of the new American Heritage magazine, and took the post, encouraged among others by his friend, the historian Allan Nevins. Catton served initially as a writer, reviewer, and editor. In the first issue, he wrote:

We intend to deal with that great, unfinished and illogically inspiring story of the American people doing, being and becoming. Our American heritage is greater than any one of us. It can express itself in very homely truths; in the end it can lift up our eyes beyond the glow in the sunset skies.

On August 16, 1925, Catton married Hazel H. Cherry. In 1926, they had a son, William Bruce, who taught history at Princeton University and at Middlebury College, Vermont, where he was the first Charles A. Dana Professor of History.

In 1959, Catton was named senior editor of American Heritage, a post he held until his death.

In 1977, the year before his death, Catton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, from President Gerald R. Ford, who noted that the author and historian "made us hear the sounds of battle and cherish peace."

In cooperation with American Heritage Publishing Company, the Society of American Historians established the Bruce Catton Prize Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Writing of History, a biennial award to honor an entire body of work, from 1984-2006. The prize included a certificate and $5,000 (later $2,500). The prize was awarded to David Herbert Donald (2006), David Brion Davis (2004), Gerda Lerner (2002), Bernard Bailyn (2000), Richard N. Current (1998), Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1996), John Hope Franklin (1994), Edmund S. Morgan (1992), Henry Steele Commager (1990), Richard B. Morris (1988), C. Vann Woodward (1986), and Dumas Malone (1984).

Bruce Catton died in hospital near his summer home at Frankfort, Michigan, after a respiratory illness. He was buried in Benzonia's township cemetery.

Major works
Army of the Potomac trilogy
Mr. Lincoln's Army (1951) — The first volume of the history of the Army of the Potomac, from its formation, the command of George B. McClellan, the Peninsula Campaign, the Northern Virginia Campaign, and the Battle of Antietam.
Glory Road (1952) — Continuing under new commanding generals from the Battle of Fredericksburg to the Battle of Gettysburg.
A Stillness at Appomattox (1953) — Catton's first commercially successful work, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history and the National Book Award for excellence in nonfiction in 1954, it described the campaigns of Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia during 1864 to the end of the war in 1865.

These three books have recently been bound into a single volume reprint titled, Bruce Catton's Civil War, which incorrectly implies that it addresses the entire war (as he does in his Centennial History of the Civil War trilogy) rather than just the Army of the Potomac.

Centennial History of the Civil War
The Centennial of the Civil War was memorialized from 1961 to 1965 and the publication of Bruce Catton's trilogy highlighted this era. Unlike his previous trilogy, these books focused not only on military topics, but on social, economic, and political topics as well.

The Coming Fury (1961) — Explores the causes and events leading to the start of the war, culminating in its first major combat, the First Battle of Bull Run.
Terrible Swift Sword (1963) — Both sides mobilize for a massive war effort and the story continues through 1862, ending with the Battle of Fredericksburg.
Never Call Retreat (1965) — The war continues through Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and the bloody struggles of 1864 and 1865 before the final surrender.

Ulysses S. Grant trilogy
Catton wrote the second and third volume of this trilogy, following the publication of Captain Sam Grant in 1950 by historian and biographer Lloyd Lewis, making extensive use of Lewis's historical research, provided by his widow, Kathryn Lewis, who personally selected Catton to continue her husband's work.

Grant Moves South (1960) — Shows the growth of Grant as a military commander, from victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, to Shiloh, and Vicksburg.
Grant Takes Command (1969) — Follows Grant from the Battle of Chattanooga in 1863 through Virginia campaigns against Robert E. Lee and the end of the war.

Other Civil War books
U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition (1954) — There have been over 600 Grant biographies written, and this is considered one of the best short ones (under 200 pages).
Banners at Shenandoah: A Story of Sheridan's Fighting Cavalry (1955) — A book for juveniles about Union cavalry commander Philip Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864.
This Hallowed Ground (1956) — This history, told from the Union perspective, was reviewed as the best single volume history of the war at that time and received a Fletcher Pratt award from the Civil War Round Table of New York in 1957.
America Goes to War (1958) — A study of how the American Civil War became one of the first total wars.
The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War (1960) — Catton wrote the narrative portion of this book, which also included over 800 paintings and period photographs. It received a special Pulitzer citation in 1961.
The American Heritage Short History of the Civil War (1960) — Catton wrote this fast-moving narrative that covers both the military and political aspects of the war.
Two Roads to Sumter (1963) — Written with his son, William, this book recounts the 15 years leading up to the war, seen through the vantage points of the two leading politicians involved in the conflict: Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis.
Gettysburg: The Final Fury (1974) — A slim volume on the Battle of Gettysburg, dominated by photographs and illustrations.

Other books
The War Lords of Washington (1948) — An account of Washington, D.C., in World War II, based on his experiences in the federal government.
Four Days: The Historical Record Of The Death Of President Kennedy (1964) - A 144 page joint work of the American Heritage Magazine and United Press International on the death of the 35th U.S. President.
Waiting for the Morning Train (1972) — Catton's account of Michigan in his boyhood.
Michigan: A Bicentennial History (1976)
The Bold & Magnificent Dream: America's Founding Years, 1492–1815 (1978)

Other honors
Catton received an award for "meritorious service in the field of Civil War history" in 1959, presented by Harry S. Truman. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 from Gerald R. Ford.

Catton received 26 honorary degrees in his career from colleges and universities across the United States, including one in 1956 from Oberlin College.