Product Description

On September 13, 1862, in a field near Frederick, Maryland, four Union soldiers hit the jack-pot. There they found, wrapped carelessly around three cigars, a copy of General Robert E. Lee's most recent orders detailing Southern objectives and letting Union officers know that Lee had split his Army into four vulnerable groups. General George B. McClellan realized his opportunity to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia one piece at a time. "If I cannot whip Bobbie Lee," exulted McClellan, "I will be willing to go home." But the notoriously prudent Union general allowed precious hours to pass, and, by the time he moved, Lee's army had begun to regroup and prepare for battle near Antietam Creek. The ensuing fight would prove to be not only the bloodiest single day of the entire Civil War, but the bloodiest in the history of the U.S. Army. Countless historians have analysed Antietam (known as Sharpsburg in the South) and its aftermath, some concluding that McClellan's failure to vanquish Lee constituted a Southern victory, others that the Confederate retreat into Virginia was a strategic win for the North. But in Antietam: The Soldiers' Battle, historian John Michael Priest tells this brutal tale of slaughter from an entirely new point of view: that of the common enlisted man. Concentrating on the days of actual battle--September 16, 17, and 18, 1862--Priest vividly brings to life the fear, the horror, and the profound courage that soldiers displayed, from the first Federal cavalry probe of the Confederate lines to the last skirmish on the streets of Sharpsburg. Antietam is not a book about generals and their grand strategies, but rather concerns men such as the Pennsylvanian corporal who lied to receive the Medal of Honor; the Virginian who lay unattended on the battlefield through most of the second day of fighting, his arm shattered from a Union artillery shell; the Confederate surgeon who wrote to the sweetheart he left behind enemy lines in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that he had seen so much death and suffering that his "head had whitened and my very soul turned to stone." Besides being a gripping tale charged with the immediacy of firsthand accounts of the fighting, Antietam also dispels many misconceptions long held by historians and Civil War buffs alike. Seventy-two detailed maps--which describe the battle in the hourly and quarter-hourly formats established by the Cope Maps of 1904--together with rarely-seen photographs and his own intimate knowledge of the Antietam terrain, allow Priest to offer a substantially new interpretation of what actually happened. When the last cannon fell silent and the Antietam Creek no longer ran red with Union and Confederate blood, twice as many Americans had been killed in just one day as lost their lives in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American war combined. This is a book about battle, but more particularly, about the human dimension in battle. It asks "What was it like?" and while the answers to this simple question by turns horrify and fascinate, they more importantly add a whole new dimension to the study of the American Civil War.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #896368 in Books
• Published on: 1994-04-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 424 pages

About the Author
Teacher at South Hagarstown High School.

Customer Reviews

Well written account of this terrible battle
I enjoyed this author's other book 'Before Antietam: The Battle of South Mountain' so much that I had to read this book as well and I was not disappointed. I found it hard to compare this book with Stephen Sear's book 'Landscape turned Red' as I enjoyed that book just as much if not more. The two authors present this battle in their own way and I would not say one book was better than the other, I'd leave that to the individual to decide. This is a still a well researched and well written book, the narrative flowed along gracefully with numerous maps to assist the reader in locating each action and the flow of the battle. The only criticism which I found in this book as well as his other was the standard of his maps, I think they could have been better. Other than that this is a great book of a terrible battle, buy it and enjoy!

Fantastic Book!
This book is a "must read" for the serious Civil War buff interested in Antietam. Priest gives you the battle from the perspective of those who fought it, in the actual chronology of the battle. The many maps are some of the most detailed I have ever seen of the battlefield - you can locate within a few feet where a particular company stood at a particular time. In addition, Priest simply tells what happened - again, in great detail. He thankfully does not editorialize or moralize (unlike Sears in "Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam"). This book ranks up there with "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War" by Johnson and Buel as one of the truly great, unbiased works about Antietam. ... Priest has also written a book on the few days preceeding Antietam, called, "Before Antietam: The Battle for South Mountain" - another gem!

The BEST book from the "Soliders View" I have ever read!
Wether you are a student of the battle or just a "weekend warrior" this book is a must if the reader wishes to grasp the scope of the battle and a feeling of "being there". Mr. Priest uses a combination of first hand accounts and excellent maps to relate a minute by minute story of the battle. This is the only book I have read that gave me a true understanding of the sequence of different actions that made up the entire battle. Mr. Priest demonstrates a "second to none" knowledge of this conflict.