A Gunner in Lee's Army: The Civil War Letters of Thomas Henry Carter

Edited by Graham T. Dozier

University of North Carolina Press, 2014, 368 pp., $39.95
        

Review by Gordon Berg

 

Thomas Henry Carter epitomized Southern privilege and pride.  Scion of an old and wealthy Virginia family and related to several others, Carter received a top-flight medical education and then came home to manage the family's 1,200 acre King William County plantation and oversee its 100-plus slaves.  He married well, made the plantation profitable, and enjoyed Tidewater's lively and convivial social life.  Then the war came.  When Virginia seceded, Carter committed his energy and talents to the service of his Commonwealth and the Confederacy.  In May, 1861, he raised an artillery battery, rose from captain to colonel, and became one of the Army of Northern Virginia's senior artillerists.  For four years, he fought along side some of the Confederacy's most prominent soldiers and candidly commented on their personalities in his letters to his wife and partner in all things, Susan.
 

Graham Dozier has meticulously edited and compiled 100 of these poignantly written and highly insightful letters.  Devoid of fire-eater rhetoric and political ideology, they give life to the myriad experiences Carter endured during the war in the Eastern theater.  Through them, Dozier concludes, "Carter reveals himself to be a thoughtful observer of the people around him and of the events which he is a witness or participant." 

Carter's opinionated letters begin with his first posting near Fairfax Station on September  27, 1861.  In quick succession, he concludes that Adjutant General Samuel Cooper "is an imbecile," and commanding General Joseph E. Johnston "is a man of splendid abilities & every inch a soldier but I take it he is lazy if I may judge from the want of system evinced on every side."  Not all of Carter's observations were so critical.  At the Battle of South Mountain on September 14, 1862, he comments on the conduct of Colonel John Brown Gordon.  Carter maintains that Rode's Brigade would have been destroyed "but for the gallantry of Gordon who kept his Regt under perfect control when every other Regt broke & fled, marching it so skillfully under a terrible fire as to cover the retreat."

But as the war dragged on, the pragmatic Carter realized the army and the Confederacy's political leadership were deteriorating.  In October 1864, he described the inglorious aftermath of the Battle of Cedar Creek and the fate of the army's supply train at the hands of Union cavalry.  "Although thousands of infantry marched on each side of the train in a disorganized state," he lamented, "none could be induced to offer resistance to the enemy."  He likened the soldiers to a mob rather than an organized body of men.  By the end of the year, Carter conceded that slaves needed to be conscripted into the army in order to save the Confederate nation.  "The Yankees have used them successfully & so can we if their freedom is given them when conscribed -- or enlisted," he conceded.  War's end found Carter with Lee's battered army at Appomattox Courthouse.  His artillery helped clear the Lynchburg Stage Road on the morning of April 9 and success seemed at hand.  But the arrival of Union infantry ended any hopes of the army escaping west.  On April 12, he broke camp for the last time and headed home to an uncertain future.

Carter struggled to maintain the plantation through the 1860s and 1870s, even starting a school to help defray expenses.  In March 1877, fortune smiled on Tom Carter when the Virginia House of Delegates voted to appoint him the first railroad commissioner for the Commonwealth.  He later relocated to Atlanta and served on the board of arbitration of the Southern Railway and Steamship Association.  In 1897, Carter and his wife moved back to Virginia when he assumed the post of proctor at the University of Virginia.  His life's partner, Susan, died in 1902 and Carter followed her six years later.  Both are buried in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery. 

Carter never published a memoir of his Civil War service.  His letters to his wife, therefore, served as a lasting testament to his service and his beliefs.  With language every bit as eloquent as his subject's, Dozier's informative annotations put Carter's wartime experiences into context.  Essays detailing Carter's early years and post-war activities provide substantive bookends to a life well lived.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

As I Remember: A Civil War Veteran Reflects on the War and Its Aftermath 
through personal reminiscences, diaries, and correspondence.  From a collection of Lewis Cass White, a soldier in the 102nd Pennsylvania Volunteers

Edited by Joseph Scopin, Jr. 
Additional narrative by Dr. Benjamin Franklin Cooling III

Scopin Design, 2014, 184 pp., $39.95        

Review by Gordon Berg

Just when you think everything that can be said has been said, along comes a previously unknown batch of historical materials that puts a new light on everything.  Joseph Scopin, Jr. experienced such a moment in 2011 when he was cleaning out the basement of an elderly relative.  Hidden among a lifetime of moldy, water-logged debris, Mr. Scopin unearthed a bag of handwritten reminiscences, daily notes from diaries, correspondence, speeches, newspaper clippings and photos, and other odds-and-ends belonging to Lewis Cass White, a Civil War veteran of the 102nd Pennsylvania Infantry.  No one seemed to know how the material came to be in a Bethesda, Maryland basement and Mr.Scopin wasn't sure just what he had found. Fortunately, he reached out to Civil War scholar Benjamin Franklin Cooling, who did.

What sets the White collection apart from the papers of hundreds of other Civil War veterans dutifully annotated and edited by scholars almost from the time the Blue and Gray guns went silent?  White's brief obituary in the Butler County Record of Aug. 31, 1916, gives no hint of the rich life lived by this young western Pennsylvania school teacher who, like tens of thousands of other young men of his time, volunteered to participate in this nation's defining event.  The richly illustrated, carefully crafted volume produced by Mr. Scopin, an experienced art director, coupled with the extensive contextual narrative supplied by Cooling, explains why a bag of 19th century ephemera, much of it reproduced in stunning clarity, deserves the attention of serious students of the Civil War. 

It turns out that the school master was a pretty good writer, too.  The transcriptions of his yearly diaries and most of the daily entries from which they were taken show White to be a cool and careful observer of what it was like to be a common soldier in the Army of the Potomac.  Many of the daily entries began "Got up and cooked," or "Stood guard as usual," or "We attended the usual duties of the day," the mind-numbing routines that filled most soldiers' days.  Even his Salem Church entry for May 4, 1863, about the retreat of the Union Army after the disaster at Chancellorsville, describes events in a very matter-of-fact way, typical of a battle-tested veteran. 

                 We laid in line near all day.  In Eve we marched round to 
                 the front, then to the left, where we were left in line and
                 the rest of the army fell back over the river.  Regt came
                 near being taken prisoners. We had to run for our lives. 
                 Some of Co. and Regt were taken. 

White lost his right hand at Cedar Creek and he spent the last months of the war recovering in a hospital.  In Philadelphia's Christian Street Hospital, he recorded the news of Lincoln's assassination on April 15, 1865.  "We were surprised and filled with sorrow and sadness by the news of of the death of President Lincoln," White wrote, "by the vile hand of a villain, a fiend in human shape."

After the war, White bought property on the old Fort Stevens battlefield and lived near where his regiment stood picket. Life after the war for the one-handed veteran was better than for many disfigured soldiers. He married and soon secured a position as a clerk in the Pension Bureau in Washington DC. There he lived for the last 50 years of his life. But his connection to old army comrades through the Grand Army of the Republic and other fraternal organizations led White to revisit one of the war's seminal moments: the Battle of Fort Stevens on July 11-12, 1864.  That battle was the only time a sitting president ever came under enemy fire, and some of the documents Mr. Scopin found shed new light on that oft told tale.

White's regiment, the 102nd Pennsylvania, was one of the Sixth Corps units sent from Petersburg, VA to bolster the undermanned defenses north of Washington when Confederate General Jubal Early's Army of the Valley paid an unexpected visit.  In a history of the regiment White wrote just after the war, he recalled Lincoln's visit to the fort as well as the wounding of Surgeon Cornelius Crawford who was standing near the president.  More importantly, correspondence to White from old comrades disputes what historians have long written about where Lincoln was standing when fired upon.

White was a founding member of the Fort Stevens/Lincoln Memorial Association dedicated to preserving the remnants of the rapidly deteriorating fort.  Materials from that organization are reproduced in the book.  In 1900, he decided to write a history of the battle and called on fellow veterans to supply details of their experiences during those fateful days. One of those contacted was Surgeon Crawford who replied with a detailed letter and a diagram of where the principles stood when he was wounded.  According to Dr. Crawford, he was on the parapet and was shot about 5:30 p.m. on July 12.  Lincoln, however, was not on the fort's parapet (where most historians have placed him), but within the fort, standing behind Sixth Corps commander, General Horatio Wright, who was prone on the parapet, observing the enemy.  Dr. Crawford remembers the close proximity of the shot "impelled the President to involuntarily diminish the height of his personage, which he did by suddenly crooking his knees."

This scenario was confirmed in a series of letters White received, beginning in 1911, from George E. Jewitt, a member of the 13th Michigan Battery,  He remembers that "Mr. Lincoln was standing inside the fort behind these officers, the top of the parapet coming up to about his breast."  After the shot that wounded Dr. Crawford, Jewitt claims Lincoln "picked up an ammunition box and sat down on it, the top of the parapet just about covering the top of his tall silk hat."  Veteran James W. Latta opines that the story of Lincoln on the parapet originated in the multi-volume Life of Lincoln written by John Nicolay, one of his personal secretaries.

Which story is true is asking the wrong question.  History is an ever unfolding kaleidoscope of incidents probably imperfectly recalled from the depths of fading memories.  For historians, the quest is not in finding the answer; it's in the gathering of previously unexamined materials or taking a different look at what's already been found.  The Lewis Cass White collection demands that we do both.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

Stonewall's Prussian Mapmaker: 
The Journals of Captain Oscar Hinrichs

Edited by Richard B. Williams

University of North Carolina Press, 2014, 392 pp., $45.00
        

Review by Gordon Berg

      Jedediah Hotchkiss is justly famous as "Stonewall" Jackson's principal mapmaker.  But almost no one has ever heard of Oscar Hinrichs  That's all changed now, thanks to the historical sleuthing of Richard B. Williams.  Historians, archivists, and researchers all dream of stumbling across a relatively obscure, previously unpublished, primary source that offers new perspectives on important people and events.  Williams' eureka moment came in 2000 when a Civil War memorabilia dealer tipped him off to the existence of the unpublished diaries of Captain Oscar Hinrichs, a Prussian born engineer officer who served the Confederacy with distinction throughout the war.  An experienced researcher and manuscript editor, Williams developed a plan-of-action to verify the journal and validate its content.  It proved to be a long and complicated process but Williams and a host of dedicated helpers stuck to their guns. The end-product is a treasure trove of detailed observation and candid insight that Robert Krik's forward rightly characterizes as "an enormously important primary source."

        Williams worked with Hinrichs' wartime memories in two forms; a wartime transcript covering November 1860 to September 1863 and a verbatim English journal and translation of his German journal spanning September 1863 to April 1865.  From this material, Williams has brought to life an opinionated man of considerable intelligence, excellent education, discerning insight, and a not inconsiderable amount of wit. 

       

        Hinrichs was an infant when his parents brought him to New York from Germany.  His comfortable childhood was interrupted by the death of his mother when he was only four.  His loving North Carolina-born stepmother, however, immersed him in the culture of her successful Southern family and his frequent visits probably sowed the seeds of the divided loyalties he experienced later in life.  Classically educated in Europe, Hinrichs returned to the United States in 1853 as a confident, idealistic, and ambitious young man steeped in the skills needed for a career as an engineer.  Williams' illuminating introduction concludes that "the close relationship Oscar had with his stepmother influenced his decision to join the Confederacy."  In a postwar essay not included in the monograph, Hinrich wrote "My sympathies were with the people of the South, among whom I had lived so long, and where I had many warm friends." 

         He joined the U.S. Costal Survey in December 1856 and his first assignment was to map the coast from Virginia to Georgia would be the first of many professional Southern sojourns.  When the war broke out, however, he found himself surveying the coast of Maine.  His clandestine journey south to join the Confederacy had enough nocturnal rendezvous, narrow escapes, and secret signs and safe houses to fill a Hollywood screenplay.  Shadowed by a government detective after he left New York, Hinrichs and a few colleagues headed to Baltimore.  With the help of Confederate sympathizers in southern Maryland, they crossed the Potomac River in a skiff on New Year's Eve and entered the camp of Colonel Wade Hampton on the first day of 1862.  John Wilkes Booth would follow nearly the same route in 1865.  Hampton quickly sent Hinrichs on to General Joseph Johnston's army camped near Centerville, Virginia.  

         Hinrichs' makes the purpose of his journals clear from the beginning.  He describes them "as notes public and private of my own personal feelings and experiences during the war"  which include "my opinion at the time of measures and affairs as they occurred to me."  In the future, Hinrichs hopes "they may become useful references and also records which have mostly been verified by subsequent events."  After early duty in Tidewater Virginia, Hinrichs was ordered to join Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley in May 1862, just in time for the battles of Cross Keys and Port Republic.  He would remain with Jackson's vaunted Second Corps throughout the war.  With a true engineer's eye for topographical detail, Hinrichs brought the same skill to his observations of men and events.  From his transcript, Hinrichs opines that the Gettysburg campaign failed "first in not getting possession when it was practicable of the ground commanding the Baltimore pike and the hill contested by [Edward] Johnson.  Second the want of unity of action on the part of the attacking columns; third, the not supporting of those columns which had effected lodgments in the enemy's lines in a manner adequate to the occasion." 

        He was equally as candid when assessing the qualities of his fellow officers.  Hinrichs believed General D.H. Hill  "uncouth and ungentlemanly in his manner" with "a mind narrow and shallow, he possesses no genius for command."  Jackson, on the other hand, was "In person, quiet, modest, diffident and unassuming, [Jackson] bears upon him his honors lightly and meekly."  Hinrichs observed Jackson on battlefields from Malvern Hill to Chancellorsville and found him "Brave to insensibility, insensible to rashness and obstinacy, he stands firm and cool among a shower of shot and shell which makes him stand aghast at the apparent tempting of God's mercy and kindness."  A man with a facility for the English language like that deserves to be published.

        Williams has done an excellent job of annotating Hinrichs' journals and provides insightful footnotes.  Appropriately, more than a dozen maps, drawn by George Skoch, help give geographical context to Hinrichs' rich narrative.  This journal should rank among the best contemporary surveys of the war in the East from the Confederate point-of-view.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

Our One Common Country: 
Abraham Lincoln and
the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865

James B. Conroy

Lyons Press, 2014 390 pp. $27.95
        

Review by Gordon Berg

      On Jan. 29, 1865, Captain Thomas Parker of Pennsylvania walked out into no-man's land along the Petersburg, siege lines.  There, he met Lieutenant Colonel William Hatch of Kentucky.  Both men were unarmed and under flags of truce.  Hatch informed the dumbfounded Parker that three emissaries had just arrived from Richmond and wished to meet with President Abraham Lincoln to discuss terms for ending the war.  Four days later, Lincoln, traveling alone, slipped into a carriage in front of the White House, bound for a fast steamer destined for Hampton Roads, at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.  Only Secretary of State William Seward knew the purpose of Lincoln's clandestine sojourn.  Thus began one of the most star-crossed secret missions of the Civil War, an audacious tale James B. Conroy tells with energy and eloquence.

        Conroy, a lawyer and former DC publicist and speechwriter, gives lie to the shibboleth that a thoroughly researched, abundantly footnoted, monograph can only be written in parched, overly academic jargon, by denizens of collegiate ivory towers.  Our One Common Country swings out at a quick step pace with a narrative strategy that manages to incorporate a myriad of detail and analysis into a universe of uncommon suspense.   It resonates with illustrative anecdotes, pithy turns-of-phrase, occasional hints of irony, and bon mons enough to fill a gossip column.  It's a Civil War story that experts and novices will find riveting and revelatory. 

        Rumors of a negotiated peace had been in the air at least since the summer of 1864 when influential Northern publisher Horace Greeley advised Lincoln to meet with Confederate agents on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.  The President declined.  Re-elected in November 1864 and with the tide of battle turning in favor of the Union on every front, Lincoln was finally ready to do something no sitting President had ever done before or since: engage with the enemy in peace talks in the midst of a shooting war.  That makes the meeting aboard the steamer River Queen on Feb. 3, 1865, a unique event in American history; an event that has, until now, escaped an in-depth investigation.

        Conroy sets up his drama by giving readers incisive character portraits of the drama's leading players.  His description of Greeley is as priceless as it is accurate: eccentric, fickle, and powerful all at the same time.  Conroy conveys the essence of Ulysses S. Grant in two clear, concise, unpretentious paragraphs, a fitting tribute to the man himself.   Conroy lets Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens' own Shakespearian rhetoric eloquently invoke his startling image:  "Weak and sickly I was sent into the world with a constitution barely able to sustain the vital functions…But all these are slight when compared with the pangs of an offended and wounded spirit."  Conroy needs only seven choice words to bring Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens to life: "Richard III in a Prince Albert suit."

        The Hampton Roads conference was spawned in the quixotic imagination of the Francis Preston Blair Sr., the senior Democratic senator from Maryland with influential friends throughout the North and South.  With Lincoln's permission, the old man traveled to Richmond with a fantastic proposal the wily politician had concocted but Lincoln had never backed. Nevertheless, Confederate government officials were interested, although President Jefferson Davis set conditions that insured its failure.  So the peace conference process, possibly the worst kept secret of the war, staggered forward.  Conroy describes it with melodrama worthy of a Stephen Spielberg film noir.

        The three Confederate peace commissioners, Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell, Senator Robert M. Hunter, and Vice President Alexander Stephens, expected to be received by General Grant and escorted to Washington.  But Lincoln, a wily politician himself, had a different agenda.  Congress was ready to consider the 13th Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting slavery and even a whiff of a negotiated peace might induce wavering Democrats to vote against it in hopes of ending the war without abolishing the "peculiar institution".  While Congress debated, Lincoln connived to keep the peace emissaries far from The Capital.  While they waited aboard the steamer Mary Martin, unaware of the machinations their visit had spawned, the Southern commissioners were treated like visiting royalty, replete with good food, cigars, and congenial conversations reminiscent of happier times.

        While the commissioners cooled their heels, the diplomatic game played by various Union participants turned downright byzantine.  Lincoln sent a carefully worded letter to the commissioners with conditions for a meeting.  The commissioners responded with a letter of their own.  Each side chose its words carefully, sensitive to nuance and innuendo.  The telegraph lines between City Point and Washington sizzled with rumors and hopes.  The parties began to founder on Lincoln's insistence of "our one common country" and Davis' commitment to "two nations" as a basis for any discussion.  The talks seemed doomed before they had begun.  Finally Grant, so far frozen out of this campaign, entered the fray.  He sent an impassioned telegram to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, confident that Lincoln would read it, too.  Lincoln was moved by Grant's sense of the commissioners' sincerity and agreed to a meeting and so informed Seward, already at Fort Monroe.  

        No one kept a transcript of the four hour meeting but Conroy has clearly digested the recollections of all the participants.  This allows him to recreate the diplomatic dance performed by the five old friends in dramatic tones befitting the grave issues discussed in the saloon of the River Queen. Through it all, Conroy contends, Lincoln's towering presence dominated the room.  Ironically, it was on the issue of slavery that he held out the possibility for some measure of negotiation.  Conroy reports Alexander Stephens recalling that Seward seconded the proposition that "A gradual end to slavery would be palatable if the war ended now and the South rejoined the Union freely.  If not, the Thirteenth Amendment would end it abruptly, with the Southern states excluded from the process."  But the commissioners, hide-bound by Jefferson Davis' delusions, had nothing to offer except a truce and possible renewal of trade.  "It was far from good enough," Conroy concludes.  

        Back in Washington, the cat was now out of the bag.  Many Democrats praised Lincoln's efforts for peace and reunion; many Radical Republicans chided him for showing magnanimity to the enemy when on the verge of victory.  But Lincoln could not let go of the possibility of ending the war.  Conroy relates the extraordinarily generous but little known "Fellow Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives" message written on February 5 that could have formed the basis of Lincoln's reconstruction policy had he lived.  In it, he asked Congress to appropriate $400 million to compensate slaveholders and offered other lenient terms.  Lincoln read it to the Cabinet.  No one supported it.  Saddened, Lincoln put it in his pocket, leaving his proposal to the judgment of history. 

        Lincoln's offer would have probably fallen on deaf ears because, in Richmond, Jefferson Davis quickly demanded that his commissioners write a public report, leaving out anything positive that emerged from the meeting and to include absolute fabrications that vilified the Lincoln Administration.  Davis hoped to use the "doctored" report to steel the resolve of the South to endure even greater sacrifices.  He seemed determined to lead Southern citizenry into his own private "Gotterdammerung."  Senator William Graham of North Carolina would conclude "there has been a very great duplicity towards a large portion of the Southern people displayed in this little drama."  The war continued in all its ferocity.

        Conroy succinctly wraps up the final months of the war up to the assassination of Lincoln on April 14.  As a final, dramatic, epilogue, he provides thumbnail sketches of the postwar fate of the drama's leading players.  In the war's aftermath, Conroy poignantly quotes Confederate General Josiah Gorgas' May 4 diary entry.  "I am as one walking in a dream, expecting to awake.  I cannot see its consequences, nor shape my own course, but am just moving along until I can see my way at some future day." 

       Because of the failure of the Hampton Roads Peace Conference, thousands of young men in blue and gray never had a chance to see their way at some future day.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

Bloody Spring: 
Forty Days That Sealed the Confederacy's Fate

Joseph Wheelan

Da Capo Press, 2014, 448 pp., $27.50

        

Review by Gordon Berg

        On a bright Virginia spring morning, twelve men in pewter gray solemnly rode to the top of Clark's Mountain.  From there, they gazed down on a virtual city sprawling below them for miles.  They saw streets, huts, tents, wagons, horses, mountains of supplies, and thousands of men with gleaming bayonets.  Confederate General Robert E. Lee turned to his loyal lieutenants and presciently announced "I think those people over there are going to make a move soon."  Two days later, on May 4, 1864, that city of Union blue began to surge across the Rapidan River.  For the next 40 days, it would relentlessly pummel Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in an unprecedented campaign of bloodshed and maneuver. 

        Numerous books have covered the Overland Campaign, masterminded by newly appointed Union general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant.  Those who have read them may not find much new in Joseph Wheelan's account.  But for those who haven't, this excellent one-volume account hits all the high points.  In clear, concise, journalistic prose, filled with energetic verbs and colorful adjectives, Wheelan vividly recreates those critical days that permanently turned the tide of the war in the East.  In addition, his rock-solid research and instructive anecdotes puts events and personalities into a context that brings clarity to the bloodiest spring of the war.

        Lee had fought in the 80 square miles of woods, thickets, and underbrush known as the Wilderness before.  It was there that he achieved possibly his greatest victory, Chancellorsville.  But Lee had never faced the relentless, unassuming, warrior from the West.  James Longstreet had, however.  Lee's most reliable lieutenant knew Grant personally and predicted "that man will fight us every day and every hour till the end of the war."  Part of Grant's master plan would require the Army of the Potomac, still under the titular command of Major General George G. Meade, to do just that.  Lee, ingenious and audacious himself, understood that the Confederacy was hanging on by a thread; he would have to oblige his bellicose foe or lose the war. 

        Grant never intended to fight in the Wilderness.  But by stopping early on the first day, Wheelan contends, Grant had "handed Lee a glittering opportunity to strike at the massive Union army while it was still inside the claustrophobic Wilderness, a place that nullified Meade's overwhelming advantages in numbers and artillery."  The two armies stumbled upon each other on the Orange Plank Road, the Orange Turnpike, and forest waste in between.  After three days of almost continuous carnage, the names of obscure country places like Parker's Store, the Wilderness Tavern, widow Tapp's house, Saunders Field, and the Chewning Farm would saturate newspapers stories, north and south, and Private Charles H. Wilson of the 18th Massachusetts would become the first name on dishearteningly long casualty lists.

        Both sides took a beating in the Wilderness, Grant worse than Lee.  Wheelan's frequent use of eloquent and descriptive quotes from participants adds a terrible beauty to the almost indescribable chaos.  "It was a wild and disconnected battling of regiment with regiment, of company with company, without plan, or purpose, or knowledge or result," wrote Norton Shepard of the 146th New York.  J.M. Waddell of the 46th North Carolina wrote, "It was a mere slugging match in a dense thicket of small growth,""where men but a few yards apart fired through the brushwood for hours."  Wheelan's own prose often approaches the melodic cadences of the antagonists.  After the fighting on May 6 ended, he describes how "the veil of night fell away in tense silence to reveal a spring morning that might have been delightful but for the fuliginous air, the splintered trees, and the dead and wounded lying everywhere."

        When Grant pulled his forces back from the stalemated battle, his men thought it was to retreat back across the Rapidan to lick their wounds, just as they had done before.  Lee knew better.  He assumed Grant would do what he would have done, strike out for open country around Spotsylvania Court House.  In the dark, Grant sat on his horse and watched as Fifth Corps turned south on the Brock Road, going exactly where Lee had predicted.  Tired, dirty, and grievously bloodied, the men in blue nevertheless cheered wildly for their new commander's decision. 

        But Lee got his exhausted army to Spotsylvania first.  Now, the general whose first inclination was to attack, immediately began to entrench.  Lee realized he faced a different kind of Union commander and different tactics would be needed to defeat him.  "Lee's objective was now to seize the initiative somehow and strike Grant's army a mortal blow," Wheelan contends, "Grant's was to retain the initiative and keep applying pressure to Lee until his army crumbled to pieces."  These character traits guaranteed that the bloody brawl would continue.

         Lee, a fortifications expert, "used the high ground his army occupied between the Po and Ni Rivers to bar the way to Spotsylvania and its web of roads pointing towards Richmond."  According to Wheelan, "the Army of Northern Virginia blocked the Union's path with better fortifications than anything seen in the Wilderness, and its defenses were becoming more impregnable by the hour."  Grant was determined to have at Lee but, with Sheridan and his troopers away running down Jeb Stuart and his horsemen, he was operating with virtually no intelligence.  Wheelan concludes that this led Grant to misread the tactical situation and make several critical errors that dramatically raised the Union body count.  Grant candidly admitted "We have had hard fighting today, and I am sorry to say we have not accomplished much."  Attack and counterattack continued in the Spotsylvania area through May 19, a textbook example of Grant's strategy of attritional industrial warfare. 

         The Overland Campaign was not meant to be conducted in a vacuum.  Wheelan wisely includes complementary operations such as a thrust toward Richmond by the Army of the James under politically astute but militarily impaired General Benjamin Butler and Sheridan's cavalry operation toward Richmond.  Neither action succeeded as planned although the irreplaceable Confederate cavalry "beau sabreur," Jeb Stuart, was killed by Union cavalry at Yellow Tavern on May 11.

        Checked at every turn, Grant finally decided to maneuver again.  On the night of May 20, the army wheeled south and east.  A shift in Union strategy now attempted to entice Lee to attack Grant.  Lee wouldn't bite.  Wheelan's chapter on the often-overlooked May 23-26 confrontation on the North Anna River encapsulates his ability to succinctly summarize a campaign without losing the telling anecdotes that give life to events.  It holds up well against longer accounts of that small, but potentially game-changing, action. 

        The grisliest encounter, however, was still to come.  After successfully withdrawing his army from positions opposite an entrenched enemy, always a risky gambit, Grant again sidled east and south, his movements masked by band music played far into the night.  The next stop would be June 1 at Cold Harbor, a blot on Grant's reputation and henceforth to be likened to murder on the battlefield.  Four and a half days of close-quarter's slaughter ended with a two-hour truce on the night of June 7 to collect the Union dead and wounded, almost 7,000 of them.  In his Memoirs, Grant admitted "At Cold Harbor, no advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained."  But heavy losses never deterred Grant.  After another four days of inconclusive but deadly trench warfare, the Army of the Potomac disappeared again, this time to emerge south of the James River in front of Petersburg.  The Overland Campaign had become a siege operation.  Grant's strategy of exhaustion, he maintained, had "so crippled [the enemy] as to make him ever after of taking the offensive."  Wheelan's comprehensive monograph decisively describes how Grant accomplished his mission.  

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.