Review - "Forward to Richmond: The Virginia Campaign of 1862" by Brian Burton

[Forward to Richmond: The Virginia Campaign of 1862 by Brian K. Burton (University of Nebraska Press, 2026). Hardcover, 17 maps, illustrations, endnotes, bibliographic essay, index. Pages main/total:xiv,259/335. ISBN:978-1-4962-2971-7. $39.95]

Brian Burton's Forward to Richmond: The Virginia Campaign of 1862 is the twelfth installment in University of Nebraska Press's Great Campaigns of the Civil War series, which is now just over a quarter-century old. The purpose of each volume is not to revisit a major Civil War campaign in exhaustive operational and tactical detail but rather to offer new and experienced readers alike a relatively concise synthesis of the modern scholarly treatment of the campaign in its military, political, social, and international contexts. Burton's contribution to the series fulfills all those requirements in robust fashion.

Existing single-volume histories of the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, of which Stephen Sears's To the Gates of Richmond (1992) remains the standard, typically treat decisions and events outside the coastal plain as ancillary. That rather insular perspective of the campaign has been considerably altered (for the better) of late. To be fair, every good examination of the campaign has acknowledged important ties with concurrent operations in the Shenandoah Valley, but it is only recently that historians have stressed to this degree a portrait of the fighting in Virginia during that time as a single integrated, theater-wide campaign. This broader understanding is exemplified in Ethan Rafuse's excellent recent book From the Mountains to the Bay: The War in Virginia, January-May 1862 (2023), the follow-up volume of which is currently scheduled for release later this year. Strongly influenced by that earlier work, Burton's interpretation of the Virginia campaign for this series is very much in that vein. His narrative discusses relevant military operations across the breadth of the state: from the Shenandoah Valley (bordered by the Alleghenies to the west and the Blue Ridge mountains to the east) to the central corridor between Washington and Richmond (the Piedmont) to the fingers of coastal plain flanked by navigable rivers and jutting into Chesapeake Bay (the Tidewater). These geographically separated operations are presented as linked events with intertwining military and political impacts that the author lucidly explains.

After President Abraham Lincoln stripped George B. McClellan of his general-in-chief duties in March 1862, assuming them himself with the assistance of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, management of the Union war effort in Virginia was left entirely in the hands of civilian novices. Burton joins many other writers and historians in judging the level of micromanagement that came out of the White House and War Department during this time as often inefficient and frequently detrimental. Burton would probably agree with Donald Stoker, who greatly admires Lincoln's strategic vision in the broadest sense but sees Lincoln's hands-on management of the events covered in this book (situated between McClellan's demotion and the appointment of Henry Halleck as general-in-chief) as a low point. Confronted with a steep learning curve, the president also failed to appreciate how much conditions and logistical constraints limited the speed and range of operations. On the other side, the Confederates had the opportunity for creating unity of command under a military man after President Jefferson Davis brought in Robert E. Lee as his chief military advisor, but the top-level advisory position was not seamlessly integrated into the formal chain of command. This led to avoidable situations such as when a bewildered Richard Ewell and his wandering division received directions from three different superior officers (Joe Johnston, Stonewall Jackson, and Lee).

Most historians deem Lincoln's decision in May 1862 to launch a large-scale Valley offensive aimed at trapping Jackson's seemingly exposed command as a serious mistake that diverted forces poised to tip the balance in the fight over Richmond, the theater's primary strategic point. Burton acknowledges the strengths behind that argument, but he also is highly sympathetic toward the wisdom of a Valley offensive. As that argument goes, a reasonable opportunity to trap and destroy an enemy force of 17,000, which would have been a major event at any point in the war, was hard to pass up, and, if successful, would have only cost the Union forces time that they could have afforded. In the end, the degree to which one might be persuaded depends on how much one believes a Valley offensive capable of strategic results against Jackson and to what degree its timing was critical in denying reinforcements to McClellan's forces on the Peninsula.

Burton's examination of the modern literature's current understanding of the campaign includes critical engagement with its analyses and conclusions. Upon his narrative's arrival at key moments of contingency, Burton does a fine job of identifying and exploring the options available to each side along with the advantages and challenges that factored into each (inserting his own informed commentary in a non-heavy handed manner). Much like the process central to University of Tennessee Press's Campaign Decisions in America's Civil War series, Burton's emphasis is primarily placed on understanding why particular decisions were made instead of judging them in the end as wholly good or bad.

Generally speaking, Burton sees the Confederate forces as developing two main advantages over their Union foes during this time: operational speed and secrecy. Most recent scholarship has treated Stonewall Jackson's legendary command secrecy even more harshly than before. Burton acknowledges the faults inherent in that command trait, but he also sees a not inconsiderable associated benefit to Jackson keeping even his own principal subordinates in the dark and Johnston keeping his army strategy close to the vest. In going to those extremes, it significantly lessened the chance that Confederate plans and movements could be leaked to the enemy either intentionally or unintentionally. In terms of speed, everyone is aware of Jackson's effective exploitation of unencumbered mobility in the Valley, and Lee achieved two great moments of potentially decisive concentration (first at Gaines's Mill and second at Glendale) during the Seven Days. Burton ranks among those who believe Glendale to have been a great missed opportunity to significantly cripple, if not destroy, McClellan's retreating army. In the author's view, the failure to achieve greater results from Lee's massing of forces against vulnerable parts of McClellan's army was less about employing overly complicated plans and more about astoundingly poor staff work (for which Lee bears much responsibility) and bad performances from inexperienced and/or incompetent subordinate commanders.

What the Confederates couldn't match, in the opinion of many (including Burton), were clear Union superiorities in artillery firepower and military engineering. Most sources praise Union logistical capabilities during the campaign, but the author finds room for criticism in how both sides handled logistics during this still learning stage of the war. Burton is largely impressed with how most Union corps and division leaders performed during their first big tests in a major campaign. The defects he sees in McClellan's conduct are of the traditionally cited sort, among them major flaws in the gathering and interpretation of military intelligence (especially when it came to enemy numbers), general underappreciation of the political impact of military decisions, and absenting himself from the fighting front during key battles.

While the primary focus of the study is on the campaign's military aspects, considerable attention is paid to social, political, and diplomatic consequences. Widespread and sustained soldier-civilian interactions across the theater during the period examined in the text hastened hardening attitudes all around, and there was mutual recognition that both sides were in clear earnest. Unlike some observers, Burton does not see Union military failure across the board as necessarily signaling the failure of conciliation policy, but radical factions were nevertheless able to win a war of perception, successfully linking personal military failure (McClellan was the army's chief proponent of conciliation) with policy failure in ways that paved the way for hard war and emancipation. More briefly explored are the ways in which the campaign shaped foreign relations between the North American combatants and the forces of public opinion and political leaders in Britain and France. Burton also makes it a point to discuss the impact of environmental conditions on both the health of the combatants and on operations. Of course, bad weather affects both sides, but, given that timing is everything when it comes to their effects, the author argues that, on balance, weather events tended to favor the Confederates most often during this period.

In a comprehensive narrative synthesis that begins with initial campaign planning debates and ends with Confederate victory in the Seven Days offensive, Brian Burton's Forward to Richmond: The Virginia Campaign of 1862 deserves to be regarded as a strong candidate for consideration as the best single-volume treatment of the expansive military contest in the eastern theater over the first half of that year, one that further recognizes the campaign's status as one of the war's most significant social and political inflection points.