Counter-Thrust

<p> </p><p>During the summer of 1862 a Confederate resurgence threatened to turn the tide of the Civil War. When the Union’s earlier multitheater thrust into the South proved to be a strategic overreach the Confederacy saw its chance to reverse the loss of the Upper South through counteroffensives from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi. Benjamin Franklin Cooling tells this story in <em>Counter-Thrust</em> recounting in riveting detail Robert E. Lee’s flouting of his antagonist George B. McClellan’s drive to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond and describing the Confederate hero’s long-dreamt-of offensive to reclaim central and northern Virginia before crossing the Potomac.</p><p><em>Counter-Thrust</em> also provides a window into the Union’s internal conflict which hampered building a successful military leadership team during this defining period. Cooling shows us Lincoln’s administration in disarray with relations between the president and field commander McClellan strained to the breaking point. He also shows how the fortunes of war shifted abruptly in the Union’s favor climaxing at Antietam with the bloodiest single day in American history—and in Lincoln’s decision to announce a preliminary emancipation proclamation. Here in all its gritty detail and considerable depth is a critical moment in the unfolding of the Civil War and American history.</p><p>Benjamin Franklin Cooling is a professor of national security studies at Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy at National Defense University in Washington DC. He is the author of more than a dozen books on the Civil War including most recently <em>The Day Lincoln Was Almost Shot: The Fort Stevens Story</em>.</p><p> </p>