I've been threatening for a while (at least in my own mind) to write a general review of the readily available works on Antietam. I'm starting to really understand what a large can of worms this is as I reread
Landscape Turned Red, Stephen Sear's account (most recent single volume account), and contrast it with Harsh (
Taken at the Flood).
Back in August, my dad and I toured the approaches to the battlefield taken by Lee and McClellan; the tour was offered by the
Save Historic Antietam Foundation in association with the publication of Tom Clemen's new edition of Carman,
The Maryland Campaign of 1862 Vol 1: South Mountain. The tour was led by Clemens and by Dennis Frye, the Chief Historian at the Harper's Ferry National Historical Park. The tour was very instructive, and one particular theme was emphasized throughout: that facts needed to be checked, that conventional wisdom is all too often wrong.
And this is why the comprehensive review is going to take a while to write (although I may have some peace and quiet to work on it on the upcoming holiday.) Right from the start of
Landscape Turned Red, in the second chapter, Sears repeats some relatively standard conventional wisdom, hostile to McClellan and putting thoughts in Lee's mind, things that Harsh shows are not at all well supported by the documentary evidence at hand. Now McClellan was a slimeball, make no mistake about that, but Clemens and Frye are right about this -- he is undeservedly blamed for a lot of things, particularly in the Maryland Campaign. Once you decide he's a slimeball, it's convenient to blame him with everything -- but it's not necessarily correct.
