Saturday, December 8, 2012

Download PDF A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 1: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater

Download PDF A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 1: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater

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A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 1: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater

A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 1: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater


A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 1: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater


Download PDF A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 1: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater

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A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 1: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater

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Audible Audiobook

Listening Length: 25 hours and 9 minutes

Program Type: Audiobook

Version: Unabridged

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Audible.com Release Date: March 19, 2019

Whispersync for Voice: Ready

Language: English, English

ASIN: B07PDJ886D

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

Author Will Greene's Volume I of the 9 month Petersburg Richmond campaign is an excellent study of command not just between the primaries Lee and Grant but Beauteguard, Mahone, Hill and Union Meade, Smith, Burnside, Warren, Sheridan and Ord. Due to the campaign's length and numerous Union offensives the Petersburg campaign is often seen as a challenging study but through articulate writing, great research with first hand accounts and numerous well designed battle maps, Greene explains the complexities of the campaign fluidly. Volume 1 features Beaufreguard's finest days and the Union's numerous lost opportunities although affected by war weary soldiers. Volume I ends with the infamous Battle of the Crater that coincides with an offensive on the Richmond side. The intricate relationship between Grant in Meade is fascinating through the early part of the campaign. I look forward to Volume II to see if that relationship changed in the management of the Army of the Potomac.

The Civil War is enigmatic for many reasons. One is that it is a story of lost opportunities. Each side came close to decisive victories that might have decided the war at an earlier date, but were bungled such that the war dragged on longer, and killed far more soldiers, than a reasonable fate should have allowed.The story told by A. Wilson Greene of the siege of Petersburg fits this template of a bungled campaign that might have won the war for the Union in 1864, but instead came close to losing it. This is his first volume covering the Crossing of the James to the Battle of the Crater.Why did the battles for Petersburg and Richmond last so long, and cost the Union so many casualties that Lincoln feared he would not be re-elected in 1864?The Union commanded overwhelming resources. The two states of New York and Pennsylvania, close to the seat of the rebellion in Northern Virginia, alone had more white men eligible for service, and more economic power than the entire Confederacy. New York City was an urban area of 1.5 million people. Philadelphia had 600,000. Boston and Baltimore had nearly 200,000 each. Richmond and Petersburg together had 65,000. The manpower the urbanized North could theoretically bring against the Rebels in Virginia should have crushed them.The Union had already driven the Confederacy back hundreds of miles from Arizona and New Mexico; had opened the Mississippi Valley down to New Orleans and driven through Kentucky and Tennessee to lay siege to Atlanta. But they were balked in front of Petersburg, barely more than 130 miles from their capital at Washington. What was it about the Confederates at Petersburg that made them so hard to defeat in 1864 when they were supposedly beaten down by three years of attrition?Greene tells the unvarnished truth, without PC revisionism. It boils down to:1. Confederate faith in Robert E. Lee.===The soldiers showed Lee their unmistakable devotion when the army commander attended an April review of Longstreet’s corps. “You never saw such cheering in your life,” marveled one Rebel. The troops pressed around Lee, seeking to touch his horse or better yet, brush the general’s leg in passing. “A wave of sentiment . . . seemed to sweep over the field,” remembered an artillery officer. “All felt the bond which held them together. There was no speaking, but the effect was as of a military sacrament.” One Confederate stated the matter with perfect clarity: “Every man in that army believed that Robert E. Lee was the greatest man alive.”2. The cohesion of Confederate units who fought together to defend their country and their slave-based way of life.3. The mediocrity of the Union army. Greene shows that many Northern soldiers stood the test of duty and died as readily to save the Union as Southern men to break it. But he also makes clear that the quality of both armies was severely degraded by prior losses. The Federal army of 1864 no longer had the backbone of enthusiastic volunteers of earlier years, but was largely composed of conscripts and bounty-jumpers. That showed in the bungling of assaults on Petersburg, culminating in the Battle of the Crater. The Confederates were hurting from the loss of experienced men too, but defending from trenches gave them a relative advantage.4. The failure of the Federal Army to employ its newly liberated African-American soldiers effectively. African-Americans were in a strange new world of freedom in a country that was still institutionally racist in the South and personally racist in the North. Greene points out that Northern men sometimes shot their African-American comrades in the back when the Confederates were about to capture a unit, so that the Confederates would not shoot the white soldiers they captured too. Of course, African-Americans stood the test of war and racism, but their service for the Union was not as effective as it might have been.Greene succeeds in doing what a popular history book like this is supposed to do, which is to put the reader in the middle of the scene and experience the battles as the participants did. This is the unvarnished story of the campaign that might have lost the war for the Union, had the Northern armies not had concurrent successes at Atlanta, Mobile, and the Shenandoah Valley.

Continuous contact between the two armies is a defining characteristic of the Civil War in Virginia beginning in May 1864. This was a breakthrough innovation by US Grant that eventually decided the war, yet, somewhat inexplicably, goes unrecognized. It presents a problem with respect to the tradition in Civil War battle histories, where the armies were separated before and after, allowing a preparation or buildup phase and the immediate consequences to be developed either side of the battle itself into a relatively neat narrative package, e.g., Chancellorsville or Gettysburg. Continuous contact in the Petersburg campaign means that these distinct phases can’t readily be isolated for its engagements, and that battles of varying scale and significance took place relatively frequently (analogous to the Overland Campaign) so its history needs to cover its total extent. This seemingly tall order is being attempted by in the multivolume “A Campaign of Giants” for which the first installment has been released. Although the outcome of the Petersburg campaign effectively decided the war, histories of it are much less prominent than for the well-known battles of 1862-1863, so the appearance of a comprehensive history should be well received. Although there are shortcomings, judging from Volume 1, it is off to a pretty good start.“A Campaign of Giants” does a good job of describing what happened in June and July at and around Petersburg. The maps appear to be generally good and well matched to the text (however, it should be noted that an Order of Battle is not given). What is not included is thorough coverage is why the operations developed as they did, and what their significance was with respect to the wider Civil War. For this aspect of the campaign, I read Earl Hess’s “In the Trenches at Petersburg” in parallel. Hess provides a number of valuable insights into these operations, especially on the Federal side, for example that Grant and Meade recognized after the failure of the mid-June assaults that defensive entrenchments could be constructed faster than existing works, if taken by assault, could be exploited; hence the absence of further attacks on the Harris-Dimmock line and the skepticism of the prospects for Burnside’s mine attack.The book is not without issues. One is an approach that relies predominantly on primary sources (mainly the Official Records, correspondence, and memoirs). The trouble with participants’ recollections is that generally there are multiple sources with conflicting opinions on the same event, which isn’t overtly helpful in understanding what happened. One judgement that the author does make is that RE Lee maintained an aggressive outlook during this period. No substantial evidence for this is presented, however. Lee would appear to have had several opportunities to attack (and Meade assumed he would), after the fight at the Jerusalem Plank Road and the Battle of the Crater for example, but chose to remain in the entrenchments. It is more likely that Lee by this stage had determined that the offensive capability of the Army of Northern Virginia was spent. (Lee’s reaction to the ‘massacre’ during the Battle of the Crater, a stain on the honor of the Army of Northern Virginia, is not reported, but I suspect it confirmed to him a deterioration in morale and discipline.) Also, an unjustified anti-Meade bias seems to run through the narrative. The main complaint is that Meade did not take a direct role in overseeing on-going operations. However, the same criticism can be, but is not, made of Lee. For example, Ewell, Anderson, and Kershaw fumbled at First Deep Bottom; yet Lee did not intervene or take control.

Knowledge of the battle for Petersburg is critical to understanding how the South eventually lost the War and how Grant matured in his ability to engage Lee in a strategy of movement and geographical restriction that ultimately led to a stalemate that the Army of Northern Virginia could not overcome. This volume is a terrific addition to any Civil War buff's library and is both well--researched and well-written by a master historian. I can't wait for the next volume in this study.

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