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  • Revolutionary Antietam:Lincoln’s Emancipation of McClellan
  • Michael P. Gray (bio)
Richard Slotkin. The Long Road To Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2012. xxxii + 478 pp. Maps, chronology, Antietam Order of Battle listing, notes, selected bibliography, and index. $32.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

Richard Slotkin, emeritus professor at Wesleyan University, taught American Studies and English throughout a distinguished career that includes numerous awards for both teaching and writing. An accomplished writer, even dabbling in fiction, perhaps Slotkin is best known for his highly praised trilogy dealing with Frontier and Western history. These works include Regeneration Through Violence (1973), The Fatal Environment (1985), and Gunfighter Nation (1992). In addition, Professor Slotkin’s writing scope also includes ventures into King Philip’s War, the Civil War, and World War I.

Slotkin now contributes to Civil War historiography with The Long Road To Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution, a timely evaluation that will leave readers intrigued but also asking questions. With the Sesquicentennial in full force, other excellent and important studies have recently appeared dealing with the battle, as well as its prelude and aftermath. John Michael Priest’s Before Antietam: The Battle for South Mountain investigates its origins, while D. Scot Hartwig’s more recent To Antietam Creek: The Maryland Campaign of September 1862 is the first volume of a comprehensive investigation of the campaign’s entirety. Ezra Carman’s firsthand account of the battle, enhanced by the editing of Thomas Clemens, also offered an extremely detailed look, particularly in mapping the field with The Maryland Campaign of 1862. James McPherson’s earlier Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam is not as detailed, but no less significant for its integration of the military, political, and diplomatic implications that focused on the “pivotal” consequences that took place. Perhaps another work, not as voluminous as more recent studies but extremely consequential—and hopefully not overlooked, since it contains fresh and insightful prose by some leading scholars in the field—was brought together by Gary Gallagher in his edited 2007 The Antietam Campaign. Prior to this, a [End Page 84] benchmark to the battle had been set by Stephen Sear’s 1983 seminal narrative Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam.

Slotkin contends in The Long Road To Antietam that a combination of political and military maneuvers drove leaders on each side to adopt increasingly radical and even revolutionary military policies that remained in place long after the conflict. The author believes his work “differs from previous studies of the campaign in that it offers a narrative that integrates military and political developments and shows how each played with and against the other as events unfolded.” Slotkin meets this goal, but it must be noted that “narrative”—at least through a good portion of his evaluation—is stressed. More interpretation, however, is eventually offered to readers, particularly toward the book’s conclusions, where his thesis is finally accentuated. Slotkin writes that his “book also differs from its predecessors in seeing the Civil War as a genuinely revolutionary crisis in American history” (p. xv). He suggests that Abraham Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation “was the culmination of this movement: to defeat the Confederacy’s political revolution he would inaugurate a social revolution, with class and race consequences far more like those of, say, the French or Russian revolutions than the Napoleonic Wars” (p. xvi). Lincoln’s determination that led to Emancipation afforded

an unprecedented assertion of presidential and Federal powers, which altered forever the constitutional balance of powers. . . . It would revolutionize the economy, social order, and politics of one-half of the country; and the transformation would be nationalized in the longer term, as freed slaves left the South and racial issues became a critical factor in the social, cultural, and political life of the entire nation.

[p. xvi]

Slotkin concludes: “The Civil War may have ended as (in Eric Foner’s phrase) an ‘unfinished revolution’—but revolution it certainly was” (p. xvi). Slotkin builds up these and other vociferously argued points with mention of Foner, among other historians, and one might even think how Slotkin’s contentions might add or detract from the “life...

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