Description
Book SynopsisWhen Robert E. Lee marched his Army of Northern Virginia into Maryland in early September 1862, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan moved his reorganised and revitalised Army of the Potomac to meet him. The campaign included some of the bloodiest and influential combat of the entire Civil War. Combined with Southern failures in the Western Theatre, the fighting dashed the Confederacy’s best hope for independence, convinced President Abraham Lincoln to announce the Emancipation Proclamation, and left America with its bloodiest day in history.
One of the campaign’s participants was Ezra A. Carman, the colonel of the 13th New Jersey Infantry. After the horrific fighting of September 17, 1862, he recorded in his diary that he was preparing “a good map of the Antietam battle and a full account of the action.” Unbeknownst to the young officer, the project would become the most significant work of his life. Appointed as the “Historical Expert” to the Antietam Battlefield Board in 1894, Carman and the other members solicited accounts from hundreds of veterans and scoured through thousands of letters and maps. Carman also wrote an 1,800-page manuscript on the campaign. Although it remained unpublished for more than a century, many historians of the war consider it to be the best overall treatment of the campaign ever written. Jammed with firsthand accounts, maps, photos, a biographical dictionary, and a database of veterans’ accounts of the fighting, this long-awaited study will be appreciated as battle history at its finest.
About the Author
Dr. Thomas G. Clemens (ed.), recognized internationally as one of the foremost historians of the Maryland Campaign, has spent more than two decades studying Antietam editing and richly annotating Carman’s exhaustively written manuscript. The result is The Maryland Campaign.
