Review - "The Vermont Brigade in the Seven Days: The Battles and Their Personal Aftermath" by Paul Zeller

[THE VERMONT BRIGADE IN THE SEVEN DAYS: The Battles and Their Personal Aftermath by Paul G. Zeller (McFarland, 2019). Softcover, 8 maps, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:viii,165/201. ISBN:978-1-4766-7661-6. $39.95]

Through their respective bodies of work, a number of prolific Civil War authors have become nearly synonymous with their native states. Just to name two examples among writers working today, we have Michael Hardy's prodigious Civil War North Carolina output and Rhode Island certainly has Robert Grandchamp to thank for many excellent monographs related to that state's military history. With now four Vermont titles under his belt (three Civil War unit studies and a town history), Paul Zeller is well on his way to achieving similar status through his Green Mountain State scholarship. His latest work is The Vermont Brigade in the Seven Days: The Battles and Their Personal Aftermath.

One of many distinguished infantry brigades that served in the Army of the Potomac, the First Vermont Brigade (most commonly called simply the "Vermont Brigade") was organized in the fall of 1861, saw its first heavy action during the 1862 campaign on the Virginia Peninsula, and remained in the field throughout the remainder of the conflict. Initially composed of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th Vermont infantry regiments, all under the command of Brig. Gen. W.H.T. Brooks, the brigade was attached to William F. Smith's division of Erasmus Keyes's Fourth Corps. Smith's division later transferred mid-campaign to William B. Franklin's new Sixth Corps. During the early stages of the Seven Days, Smith's troops occupied the stretch of Union front directly abutting the south bank of the Chickahominy River.

The Seven Days focus of the study is framed by officer introductions, a brigade organizational history, and fine contextual summaries of 1862 Peninsula Campaign events before and after the week-long series of battles. In fact, one of the highlights of the book is its detailed recounting of the Vermonters's baptism of fire at Dam No. 1 on the Warwick River. Throughout the book, Zeller effectively weaves numerous, and often extensive, firsthand accounts into the narrative. Many of these were uncovered through the author's research efforts in Vermont archives.

Of course, the Seven Days battles are the heart of the book, and lengthy chapters cover the Vermont Brigade's involvement in the fighting at Garnett's Hill (June 27) and Gouldin's Farm (June 28), the Battle of Savage's Station (June 29), and White Oak Swamp (June 30). Though the "battle" at Garnett's Hill was fairly small in terms of total numbers engaged, casualties were nevertheless significant and the position occupied by the Vermont Brigade a vital one to hold. The brigade and other units in the area shielded the Chickahominy bridges that served as the only direct connection between the two wings of the Union army. On the 27th, when Confederate forces south of the Chickahominy pushed forward within range of these essential links to Porter's isolated command (which was then fighting for its life at the Battle of Gaines's Mill), the Vermont Brigade provided skirmishers and two regiments to bolster the Garnett's Hill line at important stages of the fighting. With their assistance, the Confederate attackers were repulsed.

With the battered Army of the Potomac's change of base underway, the Gouldin's Farm skirmish on June 28 was essentially a rear guard/holding action. Of historiographical note is the book's "Gouldin" alternate spelling. It's safe to say that even the most dedicated students of the campaign will be far more familiar with the apparently incorrect "Golding" spelling, which appeared on Union maps created after the battle and was then perpetuated over time. According to the author, the park service has since 2011 updated the spelling on its own maps and materials.

At Savage's Station, all of the Vermont Brigade regiments were on the battle line together for the first time in the war. There was much high command confusion during the battle, but the brigade stalwartly held the Union left and the resulting casualties (358 in number) were commensurate to the effort. This section is noteworthy for the author's decision to discuss the actions of each regiment in turn, densely populating each isolated account with lengthy individual stories of heroism and horrific battle injury. While documenting for posterity the harrowing experiences of those fighting men at such detail is commendable, the clarity of the chapter's narrative of the overall course of the battle (and the brigade's place in it) gets disrupted in the process.

On the 30th, Brooks's brigade assumed an elevated defensive position above the south boundary of White Oak Swamp facing the advance elements of Stonewall Jackson's enemy command. Though a minor Confederate probe near the burned bridge was easily turned away, most action on this front consisted of the Vermonters dodging projectiles fired from Jackson's large collection of artillery positioned across the swamp. On the following day, the Vermont Brigade was held in reserve at Malvern Hill and joined the rest of the army in the general retreat to Harrison's Landing.

As the reader can see, the Vermont Brigade wasn't exactly in the thick of the fighting during the Seven Days. However, they played a significant role in some of the period's lesser known and documented actions, particularly the fighting on the 27th and 28th. Though Garnett's Hill and Gouldin's Farm (particularly the former) are covered sufficiently well in Brian Burton's standard history of the Seven Days¹, Zeller's study adds significantly to our knowledge of those events, both overall and in the particular attention paid to Vermont's participation in them.

Chapter Six ("The Aftermath") adds even more personal material. The section is comprised of a collection of well-researched mini-biographies of over two dozen Vermont Brigade soldiers, each placing special emphasis on the physical and psychological cost of war. The pieces highlight the many ways veterans and their families suffered the war's consequences for the rest of their lives.

In addition to assembling an impressive photo gallery of Vermont officers and men along with evocative images of them in camp and in the field, Zeller also commissioned a fine set of maps from well-known cartographer George Skoch. Skoch's full-page creations offer rich topographical detail and show the opposing forces at appropriate small-unit scales. However, while some license is always necessary when depicting in a single map the ebb and flow of extensive battlefield maneuvering, there's some rather glaring disagreement between maps and text in the Garnett's Hill and Gouldin's Farm chapter.² These oversights to some degree mar accounts that otherwise rank among the best (perhaps even the best) available for those two actions. Other readily noticeable mistakes were missed during final editing as well. Thankfully, factual errors like the author's compound gaffe on page 5 referring to "President Buchannan's (sic) decision to invade Mexico" in 1846 do not appear to be routine, but typos of various kinds remain too numerous to escape criticism.

Those interjections aside, Zeller's book constitutes a valuable record of a prominent Union infantry brigade's trial by fire on the Virginia Peninsula in 1862. Certainly anyone with a deep interest in Vermont's role in the war will greatly benefit from reading this study, but long-suffering Peninsula Campaign students in general will also find much to learn from and appreciate. Zeller's full accounts of the Vermont Brigade's participation in Peninsula skirmishes and battles from Dam No. 1 through White Oak Swamp are well contextualized within the wider campaign narrative, and his detailed coverage of those events offers readers some fresh insights into several of the most understudied military aspects of the campaign. Recommended.


Notes:
¹ - Extraordinary Circumstances: The Seven Days Battles by Brian K. Burton (Indiana Univ. Press, 2001) is by far the best military treatment of the Seven Days, with excellent narrative accounts of each battle, sound analysis throughout, and a fine set of maps.
² - For those interested in the details, on page 70 the Garnett's Hill text states that the 15th Georgia formed on the left of the 2nd Georgia, but the map places the 15th to the right of the 2nd. The map in Burton's book agrees with Skoch's, so perhaps it was a simple left vs. right mistake of the type so  commonly found in battle studies. For Gouldin's Farm, the error is more clearly cartographic in nature. The arrangement of the Confederate battle line is delineated in the text on page 76, with the 8th and 7th Georgia (in that order) anchoring the right, but Skoch's corresponding labels are of the 7th and 6th Georgia (the last is an impossibility, as the 6th was across the river with D.H. Hill's division at the time of this fight).