Taking on the Maryland Campaign with a New Book by Alexander Rossino

Alexander B. Rossino Their Maryland: The Army of Northern Virginia from the Potomac Crossing to Sharpsburg in September 1862 (Savas Beatie, 2021).  

Y’all will remember that I had Alex Rossino on the Rogue Historian Podcast, back when there was such a thing. We discussed his most excellent book, Six Days in September: A Novel of Lee’s Army in Maryland, 1862. I thought he really captured the spirit of the Army of Northern Virginia, simultaneously depicting the events as they unfolded for the upper echelon of command, a number staff and field grade officers, and a handful enlisted soldiers as they maneuvered from South Mountain to Sharpsburg to slug it out (spoiler alert: unsuccessfully) with George B. McClellan and the Union Army of the Potomac.

Rossino is an expert on the Maryland campaign and he knows his stuff, and while he excels at mixing history with fiction as a novelist, he is equally good at taking on some of the conventional thinking concerning this campaign from the perspective of a historian. I really dig this new book. And here’s why. 

To begin, I think Rossino handles existing literature on the campaign very well, especially Ezra Carmen’s iconic Maryland Campaign volumes but also such notable contributions to the campaign scholarship as D. Scott Hartwig’s To Antietam Creek and Stephen W. Sears’s Landscape Turned Red. 

He rethinks and evaluates a lot of well-established points such as whether or not Marylanders would support or even embrace invading (or liberating) Confederates. The book takes on more particular things as well – for instance, where certain units camped, or the date associated with a famous photograph, or even the question of who lost “the order” outlining Lee’s invasion plans…what would eventually end up the hands of none other than Little Mac himself. You might ask, does picking such nits matter all that much? I’m going to argue that yeah, it really does.  

Let me promise you that this book is well worth reading, and Rossino’s approach to the material is not only valuable, but essential to the discipline. Civil War history (and Civil War minutiae, for that matter) is not necessarily carved in stone (okay, insert monument joke here…) Maybe you agree maybe not – but there’s more to understanding the broader context of this campaign and the broader sweep of the war than that. This discipline is about discourse and the evaluation of evidence. If Rossino has evidence that supports or challenges some well-worn conclusions about the Maryland campaign, then we need to talk about it. 

I’ve enjoyed hammering things out with Rossino before – and we don’t always agree. But I guarantee that we both approach history in good faith. There’s one thing for sure with which he and I most certainly agree. Engaging ideas, following evidence, and discourse is the hallmark of intellectual honesty. I tell my students this and do my best to set that standard by example.   

And by the way – historians disagree on stuff all the time. It’s fine. 

With compliments, 

Keith 

P.S. For those of you who miss the podcast - I am very much reconsidering resurrecting it this summer. So stay tuned.