Compare and contrast

Tomorrow night, I will compare and contrast different treatments of McClellan's commissioning in order to portray "degrees of merit" in Civil War history.

In other words, to give flesh to my endless complaining about how incompetent Centennial history has been.

We'll baseline off of Bruce Catton's absurdly compressed acccount of events, then his protege Stephen Sears' erroneous and misleading version of the affair, followed by Ethan Rafuse's decent but incomplete treatment, capped by Russel Beatie's rich, full, but not quite right version.

I'll place the cherry on Beatie's sundae, the key fact/document, hidden once again in plain view, that no one had built into any account of McClellan's commissioning. If you are a deep reader of Civil War history, the surprise should equal that of Pope being ordered into the field against Lee during the Maryland Campaign.

Blogging has been light due to days like today: newly broken tooth, bad case of poison ivy, crisis at work, and emergency gardening after dark.

Got irritability?

See you later; thanks for visiting.