Battles, the introduction to Donald Stoker's assessment of Civil War strategy asserts, “dominate Civil War literature” (2). And yet one of the main drivers of this study is the author's recognition that, in some respects, they do not. Indeed, he observes, “some historians equate focus on the military aspects of any war, particularly the Civil War, with avoidance or even ignorance of warfare's greater meaning in the American story.” Worse, this “general academic disinterest in strategic thinking,” he notes, “is occasionally tinged with disdain” (2). It may, of course, be tinged with other emotions too, since academic disdain is more than compensated for by public, and publishers', fascination with blow-by-blow accounts of the Civil War battlefield. And whilst it is true that the academy's preferred narrative of the Civil War too often skirts around its martial aspects, it is equally true that military history is sometimes in danger of failing to see the wood for the trees. The “new military history” of a generation ago, bar a few exceptions, failed to produce any lasting working solution to the analytical divisions between the Civil War's martial, political, economic, diplomatic and social dimensions, which is the basis of Stoker's complaint, and the opportunity for his book.

Frequently confused with tactics, strategy, according to Stoker, is a term more often deployed than fully understood. He quotes Jomini's definition: “Strategy is the art of making war upon the map, and comprehends the whole theater of operations” (3). By and large he follows this definition throughout in his endeavour to enhance our understanding of how the political leaders – Lincoln and Davis – approached the strategic imperatives of the conflict, the nuances of civil–military relations, and the “larger military and political objectives the combatants sought” (11). All of this is geared toward addressing an important but “underevaluated” question: why did Union victory take so long to achieve? To answer this, Stoker has mined the memoirs and papers of the usual suspects – Lincoln, Davis, McClellan, Lee and Sherman – together with the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, but always with an eye to what these reveal about the developing – or stalling – strategic perspective of each side.

The long-familiar distinction drawn between Lincoln and Davis as far as their respective comprehension of strategic goals and operational objectives was concerned provides Stoker with his starting point for a detailed, indeed exhaustive, analysis of the gradual expansion of the Union war, and concomitant contraction of its Confederate opponent and opposite. Yet although detailed, this is no dry account of the respective road maps followed in pursuit of union and independence respectively; the directional decisions are probed in depth, but Stoker never lets the reader lose sight of the individuals making those decisions. His is a fast-paced, engaging and lively book in which personality constitutes not the least of the contributory elements that together comprised the strategic approach adopted by each side in the Civil War, and as such it is a book as much geared toward the general reader as designed to inform those whose interest is primarily in military history.

Oddly, however, the one thing that Stoker does not draw out as fully as a book on strategy might be expected to do is the evolving (and contradictory) nature of contemporary understandings of what kind of conflict the American Civil War actually was. He describes it as a war fought between “two democracies in which both sides mobilized large segments of the population” (6–7). Yet even the Prize Cases (1863) that ruled on the constitutionality of the Union blockade of southern ports and seizure of southern ships prevaricated on whether the Confederacy constituted a separate entity (and with almost 50 percent of its population enslaved, it could hardly ever be termed a democratic one). Indeed, one of the main issues behind the drafting of the Lieber Code (Francis Lieber's Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, 1863) was the question of how to conduct a war on home soil, and it was not until the twentieth century that the conflict was officially designated a “civil war.” The strategic implications of the Union's legal position were not something Lincoln, the lawyer, could ignore, especially when it came to the thorny question of emancipation. If emancipation was just one aspect of strategic escalation, as Stoker suggests, for many historians it represents the crucial element in a grand strategy that linked not just the military with the political, but the martial with the moral map of America's civil war.