38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best book out there on America's bloodiest day, April 10, 2004
This review is from: Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (Paperback)
Having just toured the Antietam battlefield, I once again appreciate how good of a book this is. The story of Antietam is one not so much of what did happen but what might have been. Lee had his back to the river and was heavily outnumbered. McClellan once again had another chance to deal a crushing blow to Lee and once again due to his inability to press the fight let's him off the hook.
As much as anything this book is about the generals and how they approach the battle as it is about who shot who where and when. On the one side you have Lee moving his troops from one end of the field to another in perhaps his greatest achievement of the war. On the other side you have McClellan who is frozen by indecisiveness.
As for the writing style, Sears again shows why he's one of the more talented writers in the Civil War genre today. The book reads like a good novel thanks to Sears's writing talents. This book is easly the best book out there on the battle of Antietam and I highly recommend it to anyone.
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32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A vivid and clear analysis of America's bloodiest battle!, September 17, 2003
This review is from: Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (Paperback)
This is a splendid analysis of a pivotal battle of the early Civil War, in which two great and relatively green armies have at one another in a battle which contains the bloodiest single day in American military history. Sears does a fine job of explaining to the reader why this battle had vast strategic as well as military significance. Britain and France were on the verge of intervening on the Confederate side, because their textile industries were screaming for cotton (Southern cotton was blockaded by the Union Navy) and accordingly their textile workers were screaming for jobs. (This is language that politicians understood well, then as now.) President Lincoln thoroughly understood the dynamics of this risk, realized that once these foreign powers intervened that the Union cause was almost certainly lost. He prepared the Emancipation Proclamation, which Sears shows to have been a political masterstroke. It made it politically impossible for any Great Power to support the South and slavery against the Union and abolition.
But there was a problem before the battle occurred, and Lincoln knew this too: the Union Army in the east had suffered a continuous series of defeats. To announce the proclamation abolishing slavery without a victory to herald it would be a terrible sign of weakness; one that might only encourage intervention. Lincoln needed a victory in the east first. When Lee's army crossed into Maryland, the President knew he had his chance for the victory he needed. And therein lies a fascinating story which Sears presents crisply and with unusual clarity.
Sears has a gift for explaining a lot of details of a battle without completely losing the reader, as so often happens in this type of book. He wonderfully and colorfully describes the Southern march into Maryland and its skeptical reception by the Marylanders, who find their towns and hamlets occupied by a foreign army which is nevertheless comprised of fellow Americans. It is hard to imagine such a thing today, as indeed it was hard for people to imagine back then. But these people lived through it, and Sears makes the reader almost feel a part of it.
Sears paints one of the most negative pictures of General McClellan I can ever remember reading, but he is persuasive. I at least felt that Sears was no harsher on McClellan than the facts warrant. He also explains why Lincoln, who by then saw McClellan for what he was, nevertheless put up with him.
One aside: the book contains an excellent appendix concerning the lost order. (McClellan found himself in possession of Lee's precise written battle plans on the eve of battle through an inexplicable stroke of incredible luck. In fact, only McClellan could have lost the battle after having such luck, and McClellan more or less admitted the same prior to the battle.) I had always wanted to know more about this odd event, and Sears more or less tells what is known about it.
This is a very fine book. Four and a half stars. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is that I thought Sears' "Gettysburg" was even better!
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22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Danse Macabre, June 2, 2005
This review is from: Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (Paperback)
Say "Gettysburg" to most Americans and recognition dawns in their eyes. But many Americans have trouble even pronouncing "Antietam." The Confederate name for this battle, "Sharpsburg" is easier to say but less well known.
Despite its relative anonymity, this hideous Civil War battle claimed more casualties in one day than America lost in its Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War and World War One combined.
It's difficult even to gauge the number of battle deaths, since the low velocity and large caliber of Civil War-era weapons inflicted terrible wounds which were untreatable by the medicine of the day (no anaesthetics, no antibiotics, and no idea of antiseptics). Scores of men died of their wounds months or years after the battle. Hundreds of unknown soldiers were buried in mass graves, blue and gray together.
As Stephen Sears shows us, tactically, Antietam was at best a draw. Strategically it put the Confederacy into a slow downward spiral from which it never recovered. It ennobled the Union cause by resulting in the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Sears does a masterful job of exploring the battle, its causes, its results, and most of all, its moment-to-moment details. While LANDSCAPE TURNED RED (the title is taken from a Union soldier's report that he literally saw red in the midst of the battle) is never as vivid as a novel, it does place the reader squarely in the thickest mists of the fog of war. Sears never loses the thread, and he is able to make sense of the chaos on the field in relation to the whole, a challenging task in regard to this bedlam of a battle.
LANDSCAPE TURNED RED is also an indictment of the waste of war. Sears admires neither battle commander. Robert E. Lee clearly believed that he could force the Union to a showdown with 25,000 underfed and ill-equipped men on Maryland soil. George B. McClellan, as was his wont, saw at least three times that many Confederates in his mind, all armed to the teeth and howling for blood.
Although McClellan flinched at Antietam, his troops (who he claimed were "dispirited") did not, despite fearsome losses.
Antietam was a charnel house. In part, this was due to the awful and primitive state of battlefield communications (via semaphore and courier) with a resulting lack of coordination even among the best commanders, but it was also due to McClellan's fear of losing. In McClellan's mind, a draw was as good as a win, and he maddeningly refused to shatter the rebel lines when he could have. A lifelong winner never tempered by discouragement, "the Young Napoleon" failed to realize that the key to victory is to risk defeat.
Despite a gift for organization, and certain personal messianic pretentions, McClellan's battlefield leadership was halting, plodding and uncertain even after he serendipitously acquired a set of Lee's battle orders. By failing to press his enemy on this bloodstained day, McClellan probably prolonged the war and added immeasurably to the total death toll.
Lee, for his part, understood that McClellan had no heart for bloodletting, and exploited this weakness to the utmost by pressing in turn. Although Lee did not flinch, he could not carry the day simply because the Yankees outnumbered and outgunned him.
More importantly, on this particular September day in 1862, Billy Yank had discovered his own sense of esprit d'corps and did not flee as at Manassas. Neither did Johnny Reb, and this fight on the pastoral fields of central Maryland became an atavistic man-to-man slaughter which had less to do with the larger war than with motivations personal to each combatant.
In the end, the personal element is what makes Antietam so crucial in the annals of war. After all, what drove men to fight frenziedly against each other, rifle barrel to rifle barrel and bayonet point to bayonet point? The raison d'etre of LANDSCAPE TURNED RED is the answer to this riddle.
Sears shows us that the answers to these questions lift this battle above itself, and its participants beyond bravery.
LANDSCAPE TURNED RED is a well-written book from every perspective, and well worth your time and attention.
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