The Long Road To Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution

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The Long Road To Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution by Richard Slotkin.

Finished this a couple weeks ago, and for those with an interest in the American Civil War it's probably worth a read. From the synopsis at Amazon:

In the summer of 1862, after a year of protracted fighting, Abraham Lincoln decided on a radical change of strategy—one that abandoned hope for a compromise peace and committed the nation to all-out war. The centerpiece of that new strategy was the Emancipation Proclamation: an unprecedented use of federal power that would revolutionize Southern society. In The Long Road to Antietam, Richard Slotkin, a renowned cultural historian, reexamines the challenges that Lincoln encountered during that anguished summer 150 years ago. In an original and incisive study of character, Slotkin re-creates the showdown between Lincoln and General George McClellan, the “Young Napoleon” whose opposition to Lincoln included obsessive fantasies of dictatorship and a military coup. He brings to three-dimensional life their ruinous conflict, demonstrating how their political struggle provided Confederate General Robert E. Lee with his best opportunity to win the war, in the grand offensive that ended in September of 1862 at the bloody Battle of Antietam.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Long-Road-Antietam-Revolution/dp/0871404117

I enjoyed the book for its treatment of the relationship between Lincoln, McClellan, Halleck, and Stanton, and the role of those interpersonal relationships in shaping events during the first year-and-a-half of the war. He compares and contrasts this with the relationship between Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, and how the dynamics of those two sets of relationships affected the success (or failure) of Federal and Confederate forces on the battlefield. He also gives us a look at the degree of loyalty McClellan had among the officers around him in the Army of the Potomac, the role of the division in Northern attitudes toward blacks (both enslaved and free) in determining what the war would ultimately be about, and the role of those attitudes among McClellan's staff in driving their loyalty to him to a degree bordering on sedition.

Slotkin is a very good wordsmith, and he held my interest throughout what could easily have been a boring slog; however, he could have lightened up on the restatement of his thesis, which occurred a bit too frequently. He did provide a very good account of the nation's "bloodiest day," at Sharpsburg in September, 1862. Not as good as Steven Sear's Landscape Turned Red but Slotkin's work is shorter, and his scope broader.

Some reviewers criticized Slotkin for choosing his evidence to support a pre-determined thesis conclusion while ignoring contradictory evidence, primarily in the relationship between Lincoln and McClellan. I'm not enough of an expert on the Civil War to be able to weigh the merits of their arguments, so I'll leave it to others to judge.