Review - "A Summer of Battles - The Final Weeks of the Civil War's 1864 Atlanta Campaign, Volume 1: The Siege of Atlanta, Utoy Creek and The Grand Movement" by David Allison

[A Summer of Battles - The Final Weeks of the Civil War's 1864 Atlanta Campaign, Volume 1: The Siege of Atlanta, Utoy Creek and The Grand Movement by David Allison (Author, 2025). Softcover, maps, photos, illustrations, appendix section, endnotes, index. Pages main/total:xxx,300/455. ISBN:9798272419958. $25]

The collective output of 1864 Atlanta Campaign publishing over the past fifteen years or so has managed to achieve, in a remarkably short period of time, a stunning reversal of the rather profound neglect that persisted across preceding decades (the one shining light being Albert Castel's classic 1992 campaign history). Remarkably, just for the July fighting around Atlanta alone, six major studies—two each for the Peach Tree Creek, July 22, and Ezra Church battles—have been produced since 2010. Credited to Gary Ecelbarger, Earl Hess, and Robert Jenkins, all are excellent. What still remains the most overlooked phase of the long campaign, however, is its conclusion. Those events are finally addressed at length for the first time in a two-volume set (available in both hardcover and paperback) from David Allison titled A Summer of Battles - The Final Weeks of the Civil War's 1864 Atlanta Campaign. Encompassing the first thirty days of August 1864, Volume 1 begins with the pressing of Union siege lines forward against Atlanta's inner ring of defenses and ends with General William T. Sherman's army group seizing a bridgehead across Flint River and closing in on the critical Macon & Western Railroad town of Jonesboro.

Allison's detailed descriptive account of the week-long series of events leading up to and including the Battle of Utoy Creek solidly suggests an author possessing intimate knowledge of the ground and strong familiarity with the source material. The ways in which the battlefield terrain and road network west of Atlanta shaped the course and conduct of the fighting between the Union Fourteenth and Twenty-Third Corps and S.D. Lee's Confederate corps are clearly and meaningfully laid out. Variously presented at brigade and regimental scales, the tactical narrative incorporates a vast array of firsthand accounts that really bring to the fore the experiences of the common soldiers and lower-ranking officers that led them. At the higher command level of the discussion, the author also offers a lengthy assessment of the controversy that emerged over Fourteenth Corps commander John Palmer's rank dispute that did much to derail the entire operation. The effect Palmer's obstinate refusal to take orders from Army of the Ohio commander John Schofield (after being directed to do so by Sherman) had on Union opportunities for breakthrough success west of Atlanta remains open for debate, but Allison's analysis supports the view that Palmer's intransigence likely led to hundreds of unnecessary Union casualties. While his actions may have satisfied his sense of personal honor, Palmer's resignation in the middle of an active operation constitutes a major black mark against his otherwise sterling record as one of the Union Army's best-regarded citizen-generals. In the end, Allison's account of the Utoy Creek battle shows that John Bell Hood's Army of the Tennessee, though severely battered by the failed offensive actions of the previous month, remained well capable of defensively thwarting Sherman's methodical extension of the fighting front.

There are some notable flaws. In common with many other self-publishing projects of this scale, text and presentation have some rough edges that an outside editor might have helped smooth over, but the end result is not overly distracting.  A dearth of map coverage marred Allison's otherwise fine 2018 study of the rear area battle at Decatur [site review here]. With inclusion of a pair of good brigade-scale maps of the fighting at Utoy Creek, there is improvement in this volume. At a larger scale, Sherman's initial progress west of Atlanta is traced using maps borrowed from the atlas to the O.R., but they're usefulness is limited. Unfortunately, map coverage ends entirely with Utoy Creek, leaving the reader with only textual means of tracking the course of the Grand Movement and its final approach to Jonesboro.

A great strength behind Allison's narrative account of these operations is the sheer number of firsthand accounts the author managed to compile through his research. They are extensively integrated into every aspect of the study. Indeed, that class of source material deeply colors and enhances Allison's detailed renderings of the opposing siege lines, the mass bombardment of Atlanta, the large-scale maneuvering west and south of the city, and the battlefield events of the thirty-day period (August 1 to August 30) examined in the book. When the contending armies were on pause during the month, the earthworks constructed by both sides, as well as the sharpshooting and skirmish line raids and sweeps that each side participated in, strongly resembled what was going on far to the east around Petersburg. Personal interactions between Union and Confederate soldiers facing each other across no man's land, including widespread fraternization, is also covered extensively. The scale and intensity of the bombardment of Atlanta, and what it was like to experience it on both ends of the barrel, are also informatively revealed in the text. Many Union rifled batteries fired so many rounds that they wore out their tubes, necessitating replacement guns be sent down from northern factories. Confederate soldiers in the trenches around Atlanta and civilians remaining in the city itself undoubtedly suffered from the physical and psychological effects of the bombardment, but the rain of shells at the same time did not lessen their resolve. Bombardment alone could not break Confederate resistance, and there was no patience for regular siege approaches. That reality, along with the check at Utoy Creek and the failure of Judson Kilpatrick's cavalry raid to do much damage to enemy rail communications, finally convinced Sherman that a more radical approach was needed in order to lever Hood's army out of Atlanta. His answer was the "Grand Movement," a far more ambitious flanking strategy that ultimately proved successful.

For his Grand Movement, Sherman pulled Twentieth Corps back to a series of fortified Chattahoochee River bridgeheads and slid the rest of the army group west and south along a wide-arcing left wheel movement that would position it against, and eventually across, Hood's last remaining rail link below the city. Not displaying his usual brand of aggressiveness, Hood did not directly oppose the five-day march of Sherman's flanking forces, and the question naturally arises as to why he didn't attack while Sherman's army group was in motion. The normal explanation is that Hood, lacking full and timely intelligence (Wheeler's cavalry was off on a long-distance raid against Sherman's own communications), mistakenly assumed that the enemy movement was either the beginnings of a general retreat or, at worst, another raid against Atlanta's rail links. By the time Hood realized that the threat beyond his left was being conducted by Sherman's main body (six full corps), it was too late to intervene. Hood himself cited the many offensive hindrances stemming from the broken nature of the ground west of Atlanta and the enemy's ability (consistently demonstrated at all points prior) to instantly fortify as reasons for not attacking. The possibility that Hood's Army of Tennessee, after the failed attacks on July 20 at Peach Tree Creek, the July 22 Battle of Atlanta, and at Ezra Church on July 28 together produced frightening losses in officers and men, might have simply been spent as an offensive force is curiously not part of the discussion, which is a bit surprising given that both Ecelbarger and Hess make that argument in their excellent Ezra Church books. As Allison describes it, Sherman's movement was planned and executed so skillfully (with the Union corps pressing forward cautiously, refusing flanks and fortifying at every stop along the way) that openings for Hood to counterattack and derail it were hard to come by. However, as August 30 approached, Twenty-Third Corps, the original hub of the wheeling movement and then its entrenched rear guard, found itself separated from the other corps by three miles of ground. In the author's view, this moment, as fleeting as it may have been, was Hood's only real opportunity to strike back. Hood's inability or failure to contest the Grand Movement is addressed in the main text and at even more depth in an appendix, and further critical assessment of Hood's reaction to finding the enemy in force and across his communications will undoubtedly be furnished in Volume 2.

In presenting a wealth of descriptive military and human interest detail on some of the most neglected aspects of one of the war's most momentous campaigns, David Allison's A Summer of Battles - The Final Weeks of the Civil War's 1864 Atlanta Campaign, Volume 1 is well worthy of recommendation, certainly sparking more than enough interest to proceed onward to the second volume's coverage of the Battle of Jonesboro, Lovejoy's Station, and the fall of Atlanta.