Booknotes: Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville

New Arrival:

• Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville: A Battlefield Guide by Brian K. Burton (Univ of Neb Press, 2026).

University of Nebraska Press's This Hallowed Ground series of Civil War campaign and battlefield guidebooks debuted in 1999. Over the next decade and a half, a total of seven volumes sampling battles from all three major theaters of operation were published. Time between releases widened significantly after 2008, with gaps of six and twelve years between the two most recent publications, but it is great to see that the series is still going. I've always found the books to be useful and interesting alternatives to those following the well-established U.S. Army War College guide format.

The newest installment, eighth in the series, is Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville: A Battlefield Guide. Its author, Brian Burton, is the contributor of another series volume, 2007's The Peninsula & Seven Days. Since both campaigns shared significant physical space, it is natural for a guide to combine Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville into a single volume. That way, visitors, especially those from afar who might have only one chance to drive the routes and walk the ground, can take in all or most of the sites during a one-day outing.

From the description: "Through the winter of 1862 and spring of 1863, the U.S. Army and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia clashed along the Rappahannock River in two major battles. Both demonstrated the height of power for the Confederacy in the Eastern Theater. The Battle of Fredericksburg was a tactically defensive triumph for Lee over the Army of the Potomac. The Battle of Chancellorsville, often described as Lee’s masterpiece, was a surprisingly aggressive response to Joseph Hooker’s operational flanking maneuver, as Lee sent Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson on a flanking maneuver of his own, dividing an army that already was substantially smaller than its Union counterpart to deliver a crushing blow at a decisive spot. It was in the latter stages of that blow that Jackson was mortally wounded by his own men. The battles, failed campaigns with high casualty rates for the Union, were a lead-up to the armies’ meeting at Gettysburg in July 1863."

One of the strongest features of the series as a whole is how well the reader/user is oriented to the key visual cues at each stop (with solid maps to assist in that). In this volume, there are eleven stops for the Fredericksburg tour and thirteen for Chancellorsville, and if users follow only the most basic elements (with minimal walking) perhaps only eight hours are required to complete them.