Stephen W. 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.

The definitive account of Robert E. Lee's Chancellorsville, one of the most dramatic battles of the Civil War.Stephen W. Sears describes the series of controversial events that define this crucial battle, including General Lee's radical decision to divide his small army––a violation of basic military rules––sending Stonewall Jackson on his famous twelve-mile march around the Union army flank. Charging out of the Wilderness with Rebel yells, Jackson's troops destroyed one entire corps of the Union army. Lee's great victory came at great cost, however: Jackson was accidentally shot by his own troops and died eight days later. And ironically, the momentum of Lee's greatest triumph pushed him to launch an aggressive campaign that led to his greatest defeat, at Gettysburg. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, including personal accounts by soldiers on both sides, Sears has written the authoritative book on Chancellorsville.

A multilayered group biography of the Civil War commanders who led the Army of the Potomac: "a staggering work . . . by a masterly historian" (Kirkus, starred review).The high command of the Army of the Potomac was a changeable, often dysfunctional band of brothers, going through the fires of war under seven commanding generals in three years, until Grant came east in 1864. The men in charge all too frequently appeared to be fighting against the administration in Washington instead of for it, increasingly cast as political pawns facing down a vindictive congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War.President Lincoln oversaw, argued with, and finally tamed his unruly team of lieutenants as the eastern army was stabilized by an unsung supporting cast of corps, division, and brigade generals. With characteristic style and insight, Stephen Sears brings these courageous, determined officers, who rose through the ranks and led from the front, to life and legend. "A masterful synthesis . . . A narrative about amazing courage and astonishing gutlessness . . . It explains why Union movements worked and, more often, didn''t work in clear-eyed explanatory prose that''s vivid and direct." —Chicago Tribune

Stephen W. Sears has delivered a masterwork in Gettysburg, his single-volume history of the Civil War''s greatest campaign. Drawing on original source material, from soldiers'' letters to the Official Records of the war, Sears offers dramatic and informed accounts of every aspect of the campaign, from well-hewn portraits of the battle''s leaders to detailed analyses of their strategies and tactics. Sears depicts General Meade''s remarkable performance in his first week of army command and pinpoints General Lee''s responsibility in the agonizing failure of the Confederate army. With characteristic style and insight, Sears brings the epic tale of the battle in Pennsylvania vividly to life.

In Lincoln’s Generals , Gabor S. Boritt and a team of distinguished historians examine the interaction between Abraham Lincoln and his five key Civil War generals: McClellan, Hooker, Meade, Sherman, and Grant, providing fresh insight into this mixed bag of officers and the president’s tireless efforts to work with them. The president’s relationship with his generals was never easy. Stephen W. Sears underscores McClellan’s perverse obstinacy as Lincoln tried to drive him ahead. Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark E. Neely Jr. sheds new light on the president’s relationship with Hooker, arguing that he was wrong to push the general to attack at Chancellorsville. Boritt writes about Lincoln’s prickly relationship with the victor of Gettysburg, “old snapping turtle” George Meade. Michael Fellman reveals the political stress between the White House and Sherman, a staunch conservative who did not want blacks in his army but who was crucial to the war effort. And John Y. Simon looks past the legendary camaraderie between Lincoln and Grant to reveal the tensions in their relationship. These authors take us inside the personalities and relationships that shaped the course of the nation’s most costly war.

After 150 years the Civil War is still our greatest national drama, at once heroic, tragic, and epic-our Iliad, but also our Bible, a story of sin and judgment, suffering and despair, death and resurrection in a "new birth of freedom." Drawn from letters, diaries, speeches, articles, poems, songs, military reports, legal opinions, and memoirs, The Civil War: The First Year gathers over 120 pieces by more than sixty participants to create a unique firsthand narrative of this great historical crisis. Beginning on the eve of Lincoln''s election in November 1860 and ending in January 1862 with the appointment of Edwin M. Stanton as secretary of war, this volume presents writing by figures well-known-Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Mary Chesnut, Frederick Douglass, and Lincoln himself among them-and less familiar, like proslavery advocate J.D.B. DeBow, Lieutenants Charles B. Haydon of the 2nd Michigan Infantry and Henry Livermore Abbott of the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, and plantation mistresses Catherine Edmondston of North Carolina and Kate Stone of Mississippi. Together, the selections provide a powerful sense of the immediacy, uncertainty, and urgency of events as the nation was torn asunder. Includes headnotes, a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory endnotes, full-color hand-drawn endpaper maps, and an index. Companion volumes will gather writings from the second, third, and final years of the conflict.

The Library of America''s ambitious four-volume series continues with this volume that traces events from January 1862 to January 1863, an unforgettable portrait of the crucial year that turned a secessionist rebellion into a war of emancipation. Including eleven never-before- published pieces, here are more than 140 messages, proclamations, newspaper stories, letters, diary entries, memoir excerpts, and poems by more than eighty participants and observers, among them Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, George B. McClellan, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Clara Barton, Harriet Jacobs, and George Templeton Strong, as well as soldiers Charles B. Haydon and Henry Livermore Abbott; diarists Kate Stone and Judith McGuire; and war correspondents George E. Stephens and George Smalley. The selections include vivid and haunting narratives of battles-Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, the gunboat war on the Western rivers, Shiloh, the Seven Days, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Iuka, Corinth, Perryville, Fredericksburg, Stones River-as well as firsthand accounts of life and death in the military hospitals in Richmond and Georgetown; of the impact of war on Massachusetts towns and Louisiana plantations; of the struggles of runaway slaves and the mounting fears of slaveholders; and of the deliberations of the cabinet in Washington, as Lincoln moved toward what he would call "the central act of my administration and the great event of the nineteenth century": the revolutionary proclamation of emancipation.

Theodore Ayrault Dodge (1842-1909) was the nineteenth century's greatest military historian and the author of biographies of Hannibal, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, and Napoleon. In 1862, he arrived on the Virginia Peninsula as a company officer in the 101st New York, a regiment reinforcing George B. McClellan's campaign against Richmond. Here is the war as seen from the company-officer perspective, recorded by a young man of superior intellect who would become a leading historian of the Civil War generation. Although only some thirteen months of the war are detailed here, from the Peninsula through Gettysburg, where he lost a leg, they were critical months for the Union cause.