Stephen Sears – författare

General George B. McClellan, the self-styled American Napoleon, is one of the most controversial figures of the American Civil War. General-in-chief of the entire Union army at one point, he led the Army of the Potomac through the disaster at Antietam Creek, was subsequently dismissed by Lincoln, and then ran against him in the 1864 presidential campaign. This collection of McClellan's candid letters about himself, his motivations, and his intentions reveals much fresh information on the military operations and political machinations he was involved with, and sheds new light on his complex personality. Stephen Sears, a Civil War expert, Prize-winning author, and biographer of McClellan, here lets this once-removed and now notorious commander speak of himself, providing us with an important first-hand view of what went on behind the scenes of America's greatest and most awful war.

By age 35, General George B. McClellan (1826-1885), designated the "Young Napoleon," was the commander of all the Northern armies. He forged the Army of the Potomac into a formidable battlefield foe, and fought the longest and largest campaign of the time as well as the single bloodiest battle in the nation's history. Yet, he also wasted two supreme opportunities to bring the Civil War to a decisive conclusion. In 1864 he challenged Abraham Lincoln as the Democratic candidate for the presidency. Neither an indictment nor an apologia, this biography draws entirely on primary sources to create a splendidly incisive portrait of this charismatic, controversial general who, for the first eighteen months of the conflict, held the fate of the union in his unsteady hands.

Mr. Dunn Browne's Experiences in the Army, edited by noted Civil War writer Stephen Sears, provides a candid, often witty, behind-the-scenes look at the Civil War. A collection of battlefront letters composed by Browne (pseudonym of Captain Samuel Wheelock Fiske of the 14th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry), this book is unique in the literature of the Civil War. Fiske was at once a fighting infantryman and an experienced newspaper correspondent, and no one in this war, on either side, wrote better accounts of a soldier's experiences in battle and in camp. From Antietam to the Wilderness, readers of the Springfield Republican had Dunn Browne to explain to them just how it was in the Army of the Potomac. In addition, he was an investigative reporter (before that term was invented) who delved into the follies of the army bureaucracy, the sophistries of the Copperheads, and the abuses of conscription. He delved, too, into the complexities of why men fight.