A DAY IN SEPTEMBER

The September 1862 battle recounted through the lives of nine participants.

Historian/biographer Budiansky reminds readers that Robert E. Lee did not assume command until a year after hostilities began. During that time Confederate President Jefferson Davis, aware that the North possessed far more resources, had adopted a defensive policy, certain that to win the South had only to emulate Washington’s successful strategy during the Revolution: avoid outright losses and make the war unacceptably expensive for the enemy. By the time Lee took over, this strategy was working, according to Budiansky and most contemporary observers. No deep thinker, Lee assumed that generals attack, a disastrous policy for a weaker adversary, though spectacularly successful at first because he faced incompetent opposition epitomized by Union general George McClellan. Disorganized and vainglorious, McClellan showed a maddening reluctance to attack and vastly exaggerated the size of Lee’s army. He could have annihilated Lee at Antietam but bungled it. No scholar has yet explained why, when a copy of Lee's plans fell into McClellan’s hands, he did nothing for days while Lee frantically recalled his units and then, still outnumbered, fended off McClellan’s confused, piecemeal attack, which produced equal slaughter on both sides. Budiansky chooses equally compelling supporting figures. Physician Jonathan Letterman worked to reform the shameful Union medical care system. Wounded repeatedly, Oliver Wendell Holmes barely survived three years as a junior officer and recorded his painful descent from dreams of glory to squalor and death. Alexander Gardner shocked the public with photographs of the dead, though few showed corpses decapitated, disemboweled, missing limbs, or partially devoured by marauding pigs. Also, Budiansky notes, Gardner staged some photos, moving around corpses “to conform to some idealized representation of death.” Buttressed by four additional, equally cogent portraits, these masterful mini-biographies give the famous battle a compelling human face.

A masterful addition to the crowded shelf of books about Antietam.