Recently Read

These are not new books, and in fact, only one of them was new to me. The others were revisited with great pleasure. But if you want to wallow in the Civil War, you can't do better than Stephen W. Sears.

• To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign, Stephen W. Sears. If you want to know why George McClellan was the political George W. Bush and the military Benito Mussolini of his day, this is the book to read.
  
• Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam, Stephen W. Sears. Horrifying and probably treasonous behavior on the part of the Federal command, astonishing courage and sacrifice from the rank and file, and the ouster, for the first time, of Lee from a northern invasion.
  
• Chancellorsville, Stephen W. Sears. After Lincoln booted McClellan and installed "Fighting Joe" Hooker in command of the Army of the Potomac, Hooker invaded Northern Virginia, stumbled into the area called the Wilderness, and got his butt kicked right back across the Rapidan by Lee and Jackson.
  
• Gettysburg, Stephen W. Sears. And of course, after Chancellorsville, Lee moved north again, up through Maryland and into Pennsylvania. Then, his brain quit working, and he allowed himself to be pulled into a meeting engagement with the Union army, this time under George Meade, who was essentially the first of the Federal generals to understand offensive movement, defensive action. Lee lost.
  

The thing I like about Sears is that he's a careful and well-educated historian who can also write. Unlike the popularizers like Shaara and his ilk, Sears has no axe to grind, he just explains and does it brilliantly. I haven't done an actual count, but these four books together probably comprise 2500 pages, and you'll be hard pressed to find a better introduction to the war in the East. I don't know what Sears may be working on now, but I hope it's more of the same. If he'd just take on first and second Manassas and Fredricksburg, virtually the whole pre-Grant eastern theater would be covered, and we could remainder a lot of lesser books on the subject.