Review: "A Grand Opening Squandered: The Battle for Petersburg, June 15-18, 1864" by Sean Michael Chick

[A Grand Opening Squandered: The Battle for Petersburg, June 15-18, 1864 by Sean Michael Chick (Savas Beatie, 2025). Softcover, 7 maps, photos, illustrations, appendix section, orders of battle, reading list. Pages:xxiii,167. ISBN:978-1-61121-721-6. $16.95]

Much has been made of the Army of the Potomac's skillfully staged and practically unopposed mid-June 1864 crossing of the James River, a smoothly run operational movement that constituted a stolen march on an opponent (Army of Northern Virginia commander Robert E. Lee) who had up to that point proved consistently adept at meeting marches around his eastern flank. In truth, however, that newly seized freedom of movement and the advantages it conferred mattered little if its immediate goal, the rapid capture of Petersburg, proved unattainable. Indeed, the inability of Union forces to sweep aside the Cockade City's small garrison and capture the town represents one of the war's most momentous lost opportunities. Instead of isolating Richmond and forcing its evacuation in June 1864, Union failure before Petersburg consigned the war in the East to a quasi-siege that stretched over ten months. That key four-day interval that altered the course of the war in the theater is explored in Sean Michael Chick's A Grand Opening Squandered: The Battle for Petersburg, June 15-18, 1864.

Prior to the crossing of the James by the Union army led by U.S. Grant and George Gordon Meade, Petersburg's stark vulnerability was exposed on June 9 during an operation best described in William Glenn Robertson's The First Battle for Petersburg: The Attack and Defense of the Cockade City, June 9, 1864 (2015)¹. Even though that smaller-scale action drew needed attention on the part of Confederate authorities to the perilous state of Petersburg's defenses, the protective works surrounding the vital logistics hub were still sparsely defended when the main Union forces arrived six days later.

Four chapters, one for each day of the June 15-18 stretch of fighting, finely summarize the action². Supported by an abundance of visual aids (including maps, contemporary artwork, and photographs), those chapters describe both the mad scramble by the Confederates to defend their undermanned positions and the Union high command's struggle to effectively harness its massive numerical superiority into a coordinated offensive. Unable to convince General Lee of the enormity of the danger imposed by the attacking Union host, which captured the eastern end of the Dimmock Line but could not progress from there to fatally pierce the defenders' improvised inner line of earthwork fortifications, commanding general P.G.T. Beauregard was primarily left to his own devices prior to the 18th. In the end, the city was held by the slimmest of margins. Of course, the amount of tactical-scale detail made available in a concise work such as this one (the main narrative runs just under 100 pages in length) cannot match that found in the author's own full-length history of the same subject, but the text nevertheless offers a suitably detailed and insightful higher-level description of the fighting. The text also offers convincing conclusions in regard to what factors contributed most to Confederate success and federal failure.

Much like Thomas Howe maintained decades earlier in The Petersburg Campaign: Wasted Valor, June 15-18, 1864, Chick finds that Union high command bungling proved comprehensively self-defeating (none of the top actors on the Union side—Grant, Meade, Butler, Hancock, and Smith—come across well in this volume). Chick, however, also stresses that the extremely run-down condition of many Union formations deployed against Petersburg, those forces having been horrifically reduced in numbers and leadership over the continuous stretch of fighting between the Wilderness and Cold Harbor, also bears a great deal of responsibility for the failed offensive. That being said, as the saying goes, the other side also had something to do with it. In the author's estimation, Beauregard was the man of the hour, doing all that could have been done against the long odds he faced. At this point Chick has become a leading voice among those rating Beauregard as the Confederacy's second-best general capable of leading armies, a lofty ranking that Beauregard himself (if he were alive today) would almost surely dispute as being off by one.³

Like those at the top of the Union high command, the Confederacy's top general also does not escape censure. With his army backed up to the Richmond suburbs, Lee could not easily risk the safety of the Confederacy's capital by prematurely reinforcing Petersburg with the bulk of his forces, but Chick joins many others in determining that the general, considering the information available to him at the time, was still dangerously tardy in bolstering the Petersburg defenses. Heavy detachments from the Army of Northern Virginia did not make their presence felt until the fighting on the 18th. Their contributions meant than the final Union attacks had little chance of success, but the previous three days were close-run affairs, with Beauregard having the benefit of only scant reinforcement.

A 13-stop driving tour is included in the volume as an appendix, that section also including a number of other interesting side topic discussions. The final appendix delves into some worthwhile debates and arguments related to campaign remembrance and some of its most consequential leadership accomplishments and failures. Though not available at the time of this writing, it is intended that the volume's footnotes can be downloaded from the ECW archive here³.

Sean Chick's A Grand Opening Squandered: The Battle for Petersburg, June 15-18, 1864 represents a promising start to a planned series of ECW volumes covering the entire length of the 1864-65 Petersburg Campaign.

Additional Notes:
1 - Robertson's study commemorating the fight's 130th anniversary is a revised and expanded version of the author's 1989 contribution to the H.E. Howard Virginia Civil War Battles and Leaders series titled The Petersburg Campaign: The Battle of Old Men and Young Boys, June 9, 1864.
2 - Published the same year as Robertson's expanded anniversary edition, Chick's The Battle of Petersburg, June 15-18, 1864 (2015) was the first major study of this part of the Petersburg Campaign since Thomas Howe's The Petersburg Campaign: Wasted Valor, June 15-18, 1864 (1988), another Howard series volume. This ECW series title fixes some errors from the earlier text, improves upon map coverage, and, in the author's own words, allowed him to "reassess things after more thought and research" (pg. 166).
3 - If you're interested in reading more about the author's thoughts and opinions in regard to Beauregard's place in the pantheon of Confederate generals, see his 2022 biography Dreams of Victory: General P.G.T. Beauregard in the Civil War.
4 - It is not made explicit in the text which views were those that had evolved most between the author's 2015 study and this one, and I was hoping that perhaps the notes would provide some guidance.