Booknotes: Forward to Richmond

New Arrival:

• Forward to Richmond: The Virginia Campaign of 1862 by Brian K. Burton (Univ of Neb Press, 2026).

University of Nebraska Press and imprint Bison Books started the Great Campaigns of the Civil War series back in 1999 with Steven Woodworth's Six Armies in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns. These are not detailed microhistories, the focus being more on broader context, themes, and analysis. As described by the publisher, the series "offers readers concise syntheses of the major campaigns of the war, reflecting the findings of recent scholarship. The series points to new ways of viewing military campaigns by looking beyond the battlefield and the headquarters tent to the wider political and social context within which these campaigns unfolded; it also shows how campaigns and battles left their imprint on many Americans, from presidents and generals down to privates and civilians."

I was informed several years ago that a Peninsula Campaign installment was in the works, so the release of Brian Burton's Forward to Richmond: The Virginia Campaign of 1862 did not come as a surprise. I am certainly glad to have it in my hands as the topic ranks very high among my areas of interest. Preceding it was Perry Jamieson's 2015 contribution Spring 1865: The Closing Campaigns of the Civil War and before that B.F. Cooling's Counter-Thrust: From the Peninsula to the Antietam (2007), so the gaps between the most recent series titles has been pretty substantial. I haven't read them all (there are now ten volumes in total), but so far Cooling's book is my personal favorite of the bunch.

In line with the most recent military history scholarship's coverage of the fighting in Virginia over the first half of 1862, Burton's Forward to Richmond "treats the military actions in the Shenandoah Valley, the Piedmont, and the Peninsula as part of a theatre-wide campaign." Indeed, of the book's seventeen maps, seven specifically depict events from the Shenandoah.

Fully aligned with the series mission statement quoted above, Burton's narrative "goes beyond military events to also examine the political, social, and diplomatic interactions with military events, including the meetings of Union soldiers with Southern civilians and African Americans, ultimately leading to a turn away from conciliation and a beginning of a move toward support of emancipation."