The Battle Of Antietam: The Turning Point Of The Civil War

The reason that the Battle of Antietam is important is due to the fact that it had a large impact on the nation’s future. While for the Confederacy, it was a disappointment and cause of great frustration because the chance they had had to win the war was lost. The victory that the Union army had achieved provided Lincoln with the opportunity to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and broaden the main concern of the war from the unity of the nation to include the abolishment of slavery. The Battle of Antietam is not just important because of what it did for the Union army, but also for the fact that it was a turning point that is significant to history.
In The Long Road to Antietam, Richard Slotkin pulls the reader into this detailed account of the turn of events that led to and were Antietam. Slotkin argues that the significance of Antietam doesn’t lay in the battle, but in the campaign that it produced. He provides not only a detailed narrative of the battle, but also a complex study of the characters involved. The in-depth look into men such as Abraham Lincoln, …show more content…
Throughout the book McPherson works to provide a persuasive case for why the Robert E. Lee’s campaign into Maryland was important in shaping the outcome of the Civil War. One of the points that McPherson presses is that there wasn’t a single battle that decided the outcome of the war. He argues that there were several turning points that brought setbacks of that pushed toward the inevitable need on either side to be victorious over the other. He doesn’t do this by providing a detailed narrative about the battle, but instead by arguing why the events that played out proved to be of great importance in the war. McPherson provides this argument with various information that provides the reader with both the political actions and motivations of the men involved, but also bits of the battle as