Tarnished Victory
Finishing Lincoln's War
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A "full and insightful" account of the Civil War's final year from the award-winning author of Lee's Last Retreat (Publishers Weekly).
Beginning with the Virginia and Atlanta campaigns of May 1864 and closing with the final surrender of Confederate forces in June 1865, Tarnished Victory follows the course of the Civil War's final year. As the death toll rises with each bloody battle, the home front is devastated and the nation suffers incredible losses on both sides of the political divide.
Victory in the North required great sacrifice, and here, "first-rate scholar," William Marvel considers what that sacrifice was worth in the aftermath of 1865, as Abraham Lincoln's political heirs failed to carry through on the occupation of the South, resulting in a tarnished victory (Booklist).
Just as he did in Mr. Lincoln Goes to War, Lincoln's Darkest Year, and The Great Task Remaining, the prize-winning historian has drawn on personal letters, newspaper articles of the time, and official documents and records to create an illuminating work of revisionist history that ultimately considers the true cost of Lincoln's war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pointless bloodshed and moral squalor suffuse this somber, cynical climax to the author's multivolume revisionist history of the Civil War. Marvel (The Great Task Remaining), a Lincoln Prize winner, depicts the last year of the Union war effort as a quagmire of war-weariness, shirking and bumbling generalship that wasted lives on a massive scale. Amid a fluent narrative of campaigns and political developments, the author focuses on darker corners: Northern draft evasion and mercenary recruits; Republican suppression of antiwar sentiment; the horrors at the Confederate Andersonville prison camp, which he blames as much on Union callousness in refusing prisoner exchanges as on Confederate misconduct. And Marvel dwells on the ordeal of the Army of the Potomac: bled white during Grant's assaults against Lee's Army of Northern Virginia Marvel's portrait of Grant and his army is unremittingly negative it degenerates into a mob of gun-shy recruits officered by cowardly drunks. Marvel's account of the year's smaller engagements is unusually full and insightful, and his emphasis on the war's seamier side is an important corrective. But his book's limited perspective we see little of the South's moral breakdown and conclusion that Lincoln's war was a futile and misguided crusade that did not even meaningfully emancipate Southern blacks seems one-sided and ill-judged. 32 b&w illus.; 6 maps.
