Booknotes: Decisions at Chancellorsville

New Arrival:

• Decisions at Chancellorsville: The Sixteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Battle by Sarah Kay Bierle (U Tenn Press, 2025).

Given how much the Command Decisions in America’s Civil War series is talked about, and its many titles reviewed, on this site, regular readers won't need an introduction. For new visitors: Decisions at Chancellorsville "explores the critical decisions made by Confederate and Federal commanders during the campaign and how these decisions shaped its outcome. Rather than offering a history of the operation, Sarah Bierle hones in on a sequence of decisions made by commanders on both sides of the contest to provide a blueprint of the campaign at its tactical core. Identifying and exploring the critical decisions in this way allows students of the battles to progress from a knowledge of what happened to a mature grasp of why events happened."

The time period addressed in the volume is January 1863 to May 6, 1863, and the sixteen critical decisions under consideration are organized into six chapters. There are 17 maps, a 12-stop driving tour, an appendix exploring Chancellorsville Campaign memory (that might be a series first), and orders of battle for both sides.