Booknotes: Grant & Meade

New Arrival:

• Grant & Meade: An Uneasy Alliance by Bradley M. Gottfried & Linda I. Gottfried (Seminole Pr, 2026).

When U.S. Grant was brought to Washington by President Lincoln to head the entire Union war effort as general-in-chief, Army of the Potomac commander George Meade assumed, as did many others, that Grant would appoint a trusted and familiar western general in his place. When Grant did not do so, Meade was grateful for the support and confidence placed in him, but that gratitude quickly eroded amid the trials and stresses of the 1864 Overland Campaign.

From the description: "The relationship began cordially with Grant initially promising to only provide broad strategic directions to Meade. The latter would then direct his army as he desired. However, as the war churned on and Grant believed Meade's army was underachieving, he took a progressively stronger role in its activities." That caused more than a little strain in the relationship as well as deep frustration on Meade's part. "How these two strong-willed military leaders worked together to achieve a common goal was not easy. The thin-skinned Meade constantly worried about losing his job and railed against any hint of disrespect by the press, politicians, or the general public. Grant worried less about image and concentrated on ending the war." Many historians have also criticized the arrangement, which added an extra layer to the army chain of command, as being unwieldy.

The Grant-Meade relationship has been discussed and analyzed extensively within modern studies of the Overland, Richmond-Petersburg, and Appomattox campaigns of 1864-65, but Bradley and Linda Gottfried's Grant & Meade: An Uneasy Alliance devotes an entire book to the subject, a central goal of which is to "help explain the complex and evolving relationship between the two men."