Booknotes: The Battle of Fort Stedman

New Arrival:

• The Battle of Fort Stedman: Lee's Forlorn Hope, March 25, 1865 by Edward B. McCaul, Jr. (McFarland, 2026).

Given the advanced nature of the Union siege lines on the Petersburg front in 1864-65, it often seemed like Grant and Meade were overcautious in retaining so many men in the trenches during their series of offensives south and west of the city. Clearly, they feared a Confederate breakthrough counterstroke against a siege ring too thinly occupied, but that understandable defensiveness often robbed their assaulting columns of overwhelming numerical superiority over already overstretched Confederate positions. In the spring of 1865, a desperate Lee finally did try to directly test the Union death grip on his army, but the resulting Battle of Fort Stedman failed with predictable results. Historian Edward McCaul revisits that late-campaign event with his new book The Battle of Fort Stedman: Lee's Forlorn Hope, March 25, 1865.

From the description: "The Confederate attack on Fort Stedman, near Petersburg, Virginia, was a desperate gambit that nearly succeeded in the final weeks of the Civil War. Shedding light on a battle that, despite being well known to historians, has received less attention than it deserves, this book examines the reasons for the battle, the Confederate preparations, the Federal defenses, the Confederate attack, the Federal counterattack, and the impact of the engagement in the overall war."

Hindsight suggests that the attack's goals were impossible to achieve given the state and position of Lee's army along with the disparity in numbers between the two sides, but at the time "both Generals Robert E. Lee and John Gordon had great hopes of success. "The plan was well conceived and the execution of it very well done indeed," wrote Ulysses S. Grant, but confusion, misorientation, and daylight, along with a stubborn Federal defense, doomed it to failure."

The Battle of Fort Stedman "analyzes the Confederate plan in depth, finding it prescient of much modern day military strategy. A breakthrough was to be followed by expansion of the breach and the entry of fast moving mobile units whose mission was to destroy the enemy's logistical base." McCaul's analysis is supported by maps and numerous period and modern photographs of the battlefield. Appendices explore the life of the fort's namesake (BG Griffin A. Stedman, Jr.), medal of honor awards associated with the battle, the Confederate force dispositions prior to the battle, Petersburg Campaign mining operations, and controversies. Discussion of the last seems to center around the signal for the attack and the time of the attack's launch.

In the author's view, Fort Stedman lacks detailed coverage in the literature due to it being quickly overshadowed by the flurry of dramatic events that followed it from Five Forks onward. McCaul also argues that the battle's brevity, the overall dearth of Confederate reports, and comparatively small losses in killed and wounded when weighed against major Civil War battles, were other factors that heavily contributed to Fort Stedman being a well recognized but underscrutinized battle. This book aims to fill in those details.