Review: The Long Road to Antietam

A review of The Long Road to Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution, by Richard Slotkin. Found at the Lawyers, Gun$ and Money blog. 

The story may be familiar, but Slotkin adds much to it. He convincingly demonstrates that the Union was in a precarious position in 1862. Not only had the war gone badly in the face of superior military leadership in the Confederacy, but the North was disunited. Slotkin puts the lie to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s idea of a Team of Rivals, noting that disagreements in the Cabinet severely hurt the prosecution of the war in its first year. Meanwhile, despite the commonly held belief that Jefferson Davis had a strained relationship with his generals, Slotkin shows that, in 1862 at least, Davis and Lee were quite close and agreed on both short and long-term strategy, providing a much more unified front than the Union. 

Read the full review here.