Review: Priest, Before Antietam (1992)

Before Antietam: The Battle for South Mountain by John Michael Priest

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is an incredibly detailed account, using a host of primary sources (letters and diaries and memoirs and basically anything any of the people who were there ever wrote or said about it), of the ten days leading up to the battle of Antietam. Priest gives roughly equal time to both sides and as much attention to the enlisted men as to the officers. We see much less of the upper echelons (except J.E.B. Stuart being J.E.B. Stuart)---certainly much less than you would get in a more conventional historiography of South Mountain---so this is very much the worm's eye view. It is so detailed it's actually a little hard to follow what's going on, which is a very dim reflection of what it was like to be there.

The maps are equally detailed; I honestly found them all but impossible to read.



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