A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg: Volume 2: From the Crater's Aftermath to the Battle of Burgess Mill (Civil War America)
“. . . exhaustively researched and meticulously written history . . .”
The lengthy Civil War Battle of Petersburg is often described as a siege, but in this exhaustively researched and meticulously written history of the battle, A. Wilson Greene more accurately describes it as “a series of separate Union offensives resulting in major engagements, a handful of Confederate initiatives, and several prominent cavalry raids, all combining to form the longest sustained military operation of the Civil War.”
Greene spent 44 years as a battlefield preservationist, National Park Service historian, and museum director. He appears to know every inch of the Petersburg battlefield. His writing is crisp, clear, and highly detailed. He includes numerous, helpful maps of the myriad engagements that make-up the Battle of Petersburg. There are 100 pages of footnotes and a bibliography that spans 50 pages and includes manuscripts, archival sources, and secondary works.
A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg, Greene’s second volume on the battle, focuses on events during August, September, and October of 1864, in the geographical area south of the Appomattox River, north of the James River, with consequences that affected fighting in the Shenandoah Valley. Petersburg’s importance derived from its location near the Confederate capital of Richmond and its use as a logistics hub for Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
The ”giants” in this campaign were Lee and Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, whose armies had fought one another in brutal, relentless combat in the Overland Campaign between May and June of 1864, with battles in the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, near the North Anna River, and at Cold Harbor. Grant was the pursuer and Lee the outnumbered defender. Those battles produced horrendous casualties that the Union could replace and the Confederacy could not. Petersburg was the last Confederate citadel before Richmond. If Petersburg fell, Richmond would fall, too.
Grant’s key subordinates in the battle included Generals Meade, Hancock, Warren, Butler, and Gregg, while Lee had with him Generals Beauregard, Longstreet, Heth, A.P. Hill, and Wade Hampton. Meanwhile, Union Gen. Phil Sheridan and Confederate Gen. Richard Ewell battled in the Shenandoah Valley and Gen. William T. Sherman seized Atlanta and began his march to the sea.
Greene begins this volume by revisiting the scenes described at the end of his first volume, when the Union’s failed effort to use mining and explosives to destroy the Confederate battle lines created a “crater” that inexperienced Union troops waded into with disastrous results. The fear of more underground explosions would continue to concern both sides at Petersburg.
The engagements that Greene describes in such vivid detail in volume 2, often using letters and remembrances of the soldiers on both sides who fought there, include Deep Bottom (a boat landing on the James River near Richmond), Fussell’s Mill, Weldon Railroad (which connected to the Cape Fear River and the crucial port of Wilmington, North Carolina), Reams’ Station (situated along the Weldon Railroad), Ebenezer Church, Forts Harrison, Johnson and Gilmer, New Market Heights, Pegram’s Farm, Squirrel Level Road, Hatcher’s Run, and Boydton Plank Road. The Union won some and the Confederates won some, and while the Union edged closer to Richmond and seized the Weldon Railroad, by the end of October the outcome was still in doubt.
Both sides at Petersburg made extensive use of trenches and abatis, which made frontal assaults more hazardous than usual. Petersburg’s trenches and underground explosions foreshadowed the fighting along the Western front in the First World War. Total casualties (dead, wounded, missing, captured) in the 292-day battle were about 48,000 Union and 22,000 Confederate.
Greene’s second volume ends with the forthcoming presidential election, which Greene writes, “might determine the outcome not only of the campaign for Petersburg but of the war itself.”