On this, the 150th anniversary of the battle of Antietam, which, thank God, has not yet been replaced as the bloodiest day in American history, please allow me to recommend a new history of the battle, Richard Slotkin‘s The Long Road to Antietam. As the title suggests, the book is about much more than the battle, but about how the war changed in 1862, after both sides woke up to the fact that this would not be a short rumble but a prolonged and challenging struggle. In the south, this meant evolving a victory strategy of invasion; in the north, more dramatically, it involved a prolonged struggle between Lincoln and his generals, principally George McClellan, as well as the lengthy decision to win the war by emancipating the slaves. Slotkin does a wonderful job of showing how emancipation grew not from a moral conviction, but from a growing understanding of Lincoln’s presidential power as commander-in-chief. Where Slotkin really shines, however, is in his portrayal of McClellan, a man as opposed to abolition as he is to secession, and who conducted a mild war designed to promote a stalemate that would see his elevation as a Julius Caesar-type dictator who would save the nation. It’s hard enough, in writing history, to capture what really happened, but it’s sheer brilliant to be able to bring out what people were really thinking while it happened. We forget what a young country America was in 1862; we forget that the Constitution was untested and that everything was up for grabs. Many previous civil wars had ended up with the country entrusted to a military dictator–Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon. That was always the shadow play behind his relationship with Lincoln, and Slotkin does an amazing job of showing all these threads came together and ultimately reached their bloody resolution in western Maryland 150 years ago today.
