![]() The leadership in both Washington and Richmond understood that the South didn't need to destroy Union armies or occupy Northern territory. Public opinion was the biggest thing that pivoted. The South could have won, and on at least three occasions during the war nearly did, Antietam being the first and most crucial of these "pivotal moments." Crossroads of Freedom is the third volume in a new series that highlights "historical contingency" - the idea that nothing in history is "determined," that chance, accident and human agency really do affect the way big events turn out.ĭid the North's enormous advantage in men and materiel make its victory "inevitable"? To that perennial question, McPherson says no. This in turn is part of a larger conceptual project. ![]() Rather, McPherson wants us to see Antietam in its military and political context, as a moment when momentum shifted from one side to the other. The battle itself occupies only about 30 pages of this 203-page volume. McPherson, the most important living academic historian of the Civil War (his 1988 Battle Cry of Freedom is considered the best one-volume account of the war period).īut Crossroads of Freedom isn't simply about "the bloodiest single day in American history," to use McPherson's phrase. That's the thesis of this crisply argued little book by James M. By the time he withdrew his battered troops into Virginia less than two weeks later, the tide of Southern victory had passed, never to rise so high again, although the war dragged on for another 2 1/2 years. ![]() Lee marched his Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac River that autumn, the South seemed poised to win its independence. Asked to name the turning point in the war, most Americans would probably say Gettysburg, fought almost a year later. Nevertheless, that's less than half the number who perished on another September day in America, in the cornfields and along the fence lines and in a sunken lane outside the Maryland town of Sharpsburg, in the second year of our Civil War.īetween 6,300 and 6,500 Union and Confederate soldiers died or were mortally wounded Sept. This authoritative volume makes sense of that vast and confusing "second American Revolution" we call the Civil War, a war that transformed a nation and expanded our heritage of liberty.NEARLY 3,000 people - an appalling figure - died in the Sept. This "new birth of freedom," as Lincoln called it, constitutes the proudest legacy of America's bloodiest conflict. Eventually, the North had to grapple with the underlying cause of the war-slavery-and adopt a policy of emancipation as a second war aim. The book's title refers to the sentiments that informed both the Northern and Southern views of the conflict: the South seceded in the name of that freedom of self-determination and self-government for which their fathers had fought in 1776, while the North stood fast in defense of the Union founded by those fathers as the bulwark of American liberty. Particularly notable are McPherson's new views on such matters as the slavery expansion issue in the 1850s, the origins of the Republican Party, the causes of secession, internal dissent and anti-war opposition in the North and the South, and the reasons for the Union's victory. Packed with drama and analytical insight, the book vividly recounts the momentous episodes that preceded the Civil War-the Dred Scott decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry-and then moves into a masterful chronicle of the war itself-the battles, the strategic maneuvering on both sides, the politics, and the personalities. James McPherson's fast-paced narrative fully integrates the political, social, and military events that crowded the two decades from the outbreak of one war in Mexico to the ending of another at Appomattox. Filled with fresh interpretations and information, puncturing old myths and challenging new ones, Battle Cry of Freedom will unquestionably become the standard one-volume history of the Civil War.
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