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.

Review - "Stonewall Jackson’s Winter Operations: The Raids Against the C&O Canal and the Bath-Romney Campaign, December 1861 to February 1862" by Timothy Snyder

[Stonewall Jackson’s Winter Operations: The Raids Against the C&O Canal and the Bath-Romney Campaign, December 1861 to February 1862 by Timothy R. Snyder (Savas Beatie, 2026). Hardcover, 6 maps, photos, illustrations, footnotes, appendix section, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xxii,253/315. ISBN:978-1-61121-771-1. $32.95]

While he had justly earned his immortalizing nickname months earlier for his stalwart actions on Henry House Hill during the First Manassas battle, the Thomas J. Jackson of the winter of 1861-62 was not yet the "Stonewall" Jackson of legend. Though his lackluster performance during the Seven Days, a far more significant episode wedged between his Shenandoah Valley Campaign masterpiece and his daring drive into the Union rear that set up the smashing Confederate victory at Second Manassas, has inspired heaps of modern criticism, Jackson's operations along the Virginia-Maryland border from December 1861 to February 1862 clearly represent another Civil War career low point. Analysis of Jackson's flaws in personality, judgment, and command style that were exposed during that early phase of his Civil War career is central to the narrative presented in Timothy Snyder's Stonewall Jackson’s Winter Operations: The Raids Against the C&O Canal and the Bath-Romney Campaign, December 1861 to February 1862.

The reader will not progress very far into the book's introduction before realizing that the author does not rank among Jackson's modern devotees. While it is true that previous generations of writers too often downplayed the worst moments of Stonewall Jackson's Civil War career (of which this campaign was one), with some arguably blind to Jackson's faults, the more recent literature probably deserves more credit from the author for being reasonably well balanced in nature, with admirers, detractors, and those in between together presenting a suitably nuanced overall assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Jackson's Civil War generalship.

Detailed in the book are Jackson's December raids along the Upper Potomac and his follow-on military operations against the Union-occupied towns of Bath and Romney. The goal was to inflict lasting damage to two strategically significant regional transportation networks, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal linking Washington, D.C. and Cumberland, Maryland. In addition to supporting the movement of troops and supplies, much of the region's coal was transported along those routes for military and civilian purposes. By sweeping Union forces from those parts of Virginia that effectively shielded the railroad and canal (hopefully destroying them in the process), Jackson intended to establish long-term disruption to both routes. For Union forces, in addition to protecting those vital logistical arteries, occupation of Romney and Bath threatened Confederate-held Winchester and the rest of the Lower Shenandoah Valley, the defense of which were key parts of Jackson's Valley District command responsibilities.

The author of the 2011 study Trembling in the Balance: The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal during the Civil War, Snyder's established expertise on that subject serves him well in this volume. In addition to explaining why the C&O was such an important means of bulk transportation (especially for coal), the book details a series of Confederate winter raids—one against Dam Number 4 and three against Dam Number 5—none of which were able to inflict any lasting damage. As the author explains, the Confederate raids, which involved both infantry and cavalry forces, were ineffectual for a number of reasons. The Confederate raiders lacked blasting powder for breaching the dams and artillery fire was not used after it was determined that ammunition stockpiles were insufficient for that purpose. Instead, the dismantling process was to be achieved through hand-wielded tools, an iffy proposition under the best conditions let alone in icy winter waters against armed opposition. If that weren't bad enough, the well-positioned Union defenders across the water were both hypervigilant and highly mobile, able to quickly concentrate against as well as outrange their Confederate opponents with disruptive field artillery and rifle fire. Without the unrestricted freedom necessary to complete the laborious process of destroying the dams by hand, the Confederates were rather easily rebuffed at every turn. Description and analysis of these events, along with a properly framed appreciation of the canal's economic and military significance to the Union war effort, form one of the book's most important contributions.

Frustrated by the lack of success against the C&O but substantially reinforced by General W.W. Loring's small Army of the Northwest, Jackson was determined to clear Union forces from his district's western flank (hopefully eliminating the Union garrisons at Bath and Romney in the process) and destroy vital B&O infrastructure in the area. The problem was that achieving this would involve an arduous winter campaign in the Allegheny Mountains. As Snyder describes in the book, Jackson advanced on Bath from multiple directions, but the alert Union defenders were able to break contact and outrace his advance forces to the Potomac crossings. Finding further progress blocked at and around Hancock, Jackson bombarded the town, but the defenders there on the other side of river under fiery and aggressive Union commander Frederick Lander refused to surrender. Jackson next turned to Romney, but the defenders there retreated before his combined forces arrived, again denying the Confederates the possibility of capturing or destroying significant Union forces in the area. As was the case with the C&O, no long-term damage was inflicted upon B&O bridges and tracks during the brief Confederate occupation, and the campaign basically ended with Loring's men left behind to garrison Romney while Jackson's men returned to Winchester. The Confederates then fell into demoralizing internal squabbling that almost resulted in Jackson leaving the army altogether. In the end, Loring's isolated command was ordered to Winchester and Union forces rushed back into the ensuing void, reasserting control that would effectively last throughout the rest of the war.

At best, the benefits reaped from occupying Bath and Romney and in sweeping Union forces across the Potomac were minimal and temporary. Though it is difficult to fault Jackson too much for not being able to capture or destroy Union forces in the area given that they ran away at the Confederate approach, management of the campaign still left much to be desired. As the author explains, some of Jackson's missteps could be attributed to his high command inexperience, both in mountain operations during wintertime and in leading far more troops (approximately 8,500 officers and men, though fewer effectives) than he ever had before. Snyder also gives Jackson, who was without the services of his chief quartermaster John Harman, poor marks in logistical management of the campaign as evidenced by the extreme non-combat losses incurred during the campaign. By some estimates, these reductions in force numbered anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of the army's total strength, filling the military hospitals with sick and otherwise temporarily incapacitated soldiers. In analyzing those claims, Snyder justifiably contends that Jackson pushed too many of the men under his command beyond their physical limits, though one might also argue that other Confederate leaders during this time, notably those in charge of the concurrent Fort Donelson campaign over in Tennessee, contributed to military disaster by not being willing enough to test the limits of their men's endurance. At this stage of the war, Jackson also tended to overestimate the offensive capabilities of militia forces under his command. In relation to his militia and regular officers alike, he then compounded the situation by equating a lack of success (regardless of the cause or causes) with willful failure to perform their military duties. He also demanded blind obedience to the letter of his orders, rarely condoning independent initiative in reaction to changing circumstances. What couldn't be chalked up to inexperience were Jackson's extreme level of operational planning secrecy and his willingness to bypass the chain of command, both of which frustrated and infuriated principal subordinates such as Loring. These would be common complaints from those who served under Jackson (even the general's own staff members) throughout his remaining Civil War career.

Arguably Jackson's biggest mistake after securing Romney was in widely dividing his forces while in such close proximity to the enemy, who could easily rush in forces by rail to position superior forces against Confederate communications. By leaving Loring's command isolated in Romney and marching the rest to Winchester, Jackson was seemingly repeating Confederate president Jefferson Davis's disastrous national cordon defense strategy at the district level. Though the administration held on to that strategy for too long, leading to major military disasters in the West, the danger was immediately recognized on the Virginia frontier, with Jackson being directed through War Secretary Benjamin to withdraw Loring. Jackson considered (very wrongly, in Snyder's view) those orders to be improper "interference" in his own sphere of responsibility, that clash with his superiors prompting the general to submit his resignation. Snyder provides a detailed account of General Lander's ensuing offensive operation, one that would take advantage of the enemy dispersal and attempt to trap the Romney garrison. The fortunes of war would intervene, however, as Loring was already on the move. That and another of Lander's bouts with chronic illness (on top of the festering leg wound that would eventually kill him with sepsis) together allowed Loring to escape unmolested. Nevertheless, Union forces could take pride in how they performed during the winter operations covered in the book. Success or lack of success in any military campaign results from a combination of controllable and uncontrollable factors. One might argue that Snyder's narrative, by focusing so closely on the former, primarily in the context of Jackson's alleged failures and missteps, deflects reader attention from a full appreciation of the remarkably well-managed Union response to the Confederate canal raids and the Bath-Romney Campaign that followed them.

Inadequate map coverage was a clear drawback of the winter campaign's only other book-length account, Thomas Rankin's Stonewall Jackson's Romney Campaign, January 1-February 20, 1862 (1994). There is improvement on that score with Snyder's commissioned set, with its finely detailed maps of the Upper Potomac region and mountainous area of operations west of the Shenandoah, but, save for the skirmishing at Bath and the Confederate pursuit toward Hancock, troop movements associated with the canal raids and Bath-Romney campaign are not superimposed on any of the pictured road networks. It is also the case that map coverage ends completely just beyond the volume's midpoint, before the Confederate expedition to Romney begins.

Overall, this volume is a very fine raid and campaign history that measures up strongly as the most comprehensive account of Jackson's winter operations of 1861-62. At the same time, while the author provides a noteworthy service in shining a spotlight on the earliest manifestations of the generalship flaws that would most significantly color the remainder of Jackson's Civil War career, there does come a point when the volume and tone of the criticisms pass the threshold into becoming immoderate. In interpreting matters great and small in relation to Jackson's personality, command style, and decision-making during this period of the war, Jackson's behavior and actions are at nearly every turn presented in the least favorable light. But, as they say, opinions vary, and other readers and reviewers might see it differently. It is really only near the end of the book, with the final chapter having the tonally fitting title of "Stonewall Jackson Rebuked," that the author references the likelihood of positive benefits from Jackson's highly demanding leadership and command style. Most notable is the possibility, as suggested by veteran accounts, that Jackson's insistence that subordinates strictly follow his orders to the letter (regardless of intervening circumstances) and his pushing his men to the limits of endurance had the combined effect of steeling discipline in both the officer and enlisted ranks in ways that strongly prepared those volunteers, many of whom were still relatively green citizen-soldiers, for the rigors of hard marching and hard fighting necessary to achieving victory in the upcoming Valley Campaign and beyond. In the end, though, regardless of one's feelings about where the author's analysis of Jackson himself registers on the balance meter, it is undeniable that the book is a major contribution to the history of early-war military operations along the hotly contested Virginia-Maryland border.

Review - "Opening Manassas: The Iron Brigade, Stonewall Jackson, and the Battle on Brawner’s Farm, August 28, 1862" by Herdegen & Backus

[Opening Manassas: The Iron Brigade, Stonewall Jackson, and the Battle on Brawner’s Farm, August 28, 1862 by Lance J. Herdegen and Bill Backus (Savas Beatie, 2025). Hardcover, 8 maps, photos, footnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:x,264/286. ISBN:978-1-61121-761-2. $32.95]

While no one has yet attempted to surpass John Hennessy's 1993 masterpiece Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas, smaller pieces of the campaign and battle have received quality standalone treatment. Noteworthy works of that type include Robert K. Krick's Cedar Mountain battle study, Scott Patchan's examination of James Longstreet's August 30 mass assault that secured Confederate victory at Second Manassas, and a number of book-length accounts of the Fitz John Porter controversy. Another prominent title to add to the list is Lance Herdegen and Bill Backus's Opening Manassas: The Iron Brigade, Stonewall Jackson, and the Battle on Brawner’s Farm, August 28, 1862.

In addition to its fresh description and reappraisal of the much smaller-scale, but nevertheless bitterly contested, fighting that directly preceded (and did much to shape) the following two days of major fighting at Second Manassas, the book also adopts a novel dual-author format, one that is described by the publisher who suggested it as a "fog of war" style of approach. In it, widely acknowledged Iron Brigade expert Lance Herdegen handles the Union side, and Bill Backus unveils the action from the opposing perspective of Stonewall Jackson's wing of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. The chain of events examined in the book unfolds through alternating Union and Confederate chapters. The one-sided viewpoint and focus of each chapter is further shaped by the writer's interpretation of how much was known about the other side's movements and intentions at the time. The transition between chapters is less than smooth at times, with narrative and chronological continuity to some extent sacrificed in service to emphasizing the friction of war.

Understanding what had to happen to place elements of two Confederate divisions of Jackson's wing and a portion of Union general Rufus King's First Division/Third Corps together on Brawner's Farm requires a pretty heavy amount of background and context, and the reader is past the volume's midpoint before the August 28 clash itself begins in earnest. Taking the long view, Herdegen traces the full length of the Iron Brigade's journey from its western origins to the bitter struggle in Brawner's field. The brigade's unusual headgear and uniform, struggles with adapting to army discipline under the leadership of John Gibbon, the physical trials of the summer campaign, and mounting frustration over a lack of battle experience are all matters discussed at some length. Covering the background for the Confederate side of things, Backus ably traces Lee's increasingly desperate attempts to come to grips with, and quickly crush, John Pope's Army of Virginia before it could combine forces with the Army of the Potomac. Ultimately, that involved the high-risk detachment of Stonewall Jackson's wing of the Army of Northern Virginia for a drive deep into the enemy rear to sow chaos and create opportunity for Pope's defeat or destruction. A striking theme that emerges from the fog of war approach is just how much in the dark both sides were as to enemy locations and intentions. Indeed, the extent of mutual confusion that persisted over the period examined in the book is pretty remarkable considering the relative proximity of the opposing forces involved, and misuse of cavalry as a contributing factor is a good point raised by Backus.

Backus's overall assessment of Jackson as a general aligns with those who rate him at his best when conducting sweeping operational maneuvers and weakest when managing affairs at the tactical level. In terms of problematic leadership traits, Backus cites Jackson's legendary operational secrecy and his frequent issuing of orders that bypassed the normal chain of command as key flaws. Both of these, especially the former, are on prime display during the August period examined in the book. Indeed, the author's analysis of Jackson's decision-making at each stage of the operation heavily emphasizes the degree to which Jackson courted disaster through his own unique command style. Though his many points of criticism raise valid concerns about Jackson's leadership style and judgment, their sheer number, especially after factoring in those involving negative repercussions that might have happened but didn't, arguably threatens to overshadow the greater significance of what Jackson and his men actually achieved during these stages of the campaign. In contrast, Backus heaps superlatives upon division commander Richard Ewell, though, unlike how the Jackson critiques are handled, it's made much less clear in the text where the reasoning is coming from. Jackson's gravest mistake, in the author's view, was his abandoning possession of Thoroughfare Gap, though Backus mitigates some of that criticism by conceding that Jackson's prioritization of his wing's concentration over assigning strong units to rear area security had merits of its own and by noting that other mountain passes were available for reestablishing communications had things truly gone south for the Confederates.

During the Civil War, infantry lines of battle arrayed against each other in the open and at short range rarely traded volleys for more than a brief period of time before one side or the other brought the proceedings to a head by either charging the enemy line or ending the exchange through withdrawal. As traditionally understood, Brawner's Farm was different, a face to face firefight lasting upwards of an hour and a half, resulting in horrendous casualties for those involved, and this volume's microhistory of the battle fully explores that atypical reality. As explained in the text, the Confederates struggled that day to harness their superior numbers, a large part of that being attributed to terrain difficulties, key leadership losses, and the battle taking place very late in the day. On the Union side, Gibbon's brigade has always garnered the lion's share of the attention for its determined and costly stand, but Herdegen also duly credits Abner Doubleday's brigade for filling in a dangerous gap in the Union line at a critical moment when the Confederates of Lawton's Brigade were finally able to launch a charge against it (which was repulsed with heavy losses all around). Support for Gibbon from the rest of the division could have been better managed, but that is typically blamed on the temporary leadership void caused by General King's untimely epileptic episode. It was what happened after the battle that caused the most controversy. The decision to march King's division away from the battlefield was, in Herdegen's opinion, a "mistake" that "played a large role in the defeat of Pope's Army of Virginia in the next two days" (pg. 263), but the reasoning behind that damning assessment is left undeveloped. One might argue that falling back was well within military prudence given how exposed King's battered division would have been on the morrow.

As the book recounts at length, officer losses on the 28th were exceptionally high, but the Confederate leadership casualties in particular (two division commanders along with a great multitude of field grade and company officers spread across four brigades) cast a long shadow. In assessing the aftermath of Brawner's Farm, this study persuasively contends that the process of  junior officer attrition in the Army of Northern Virginia was already reaching damaging levels well before the war's midpoint.

Brawner's Farm was far more than an outpost battle or mere prelude to the main event, and, like David Powell and others have recently done in altering our conception of which events should be considered integral parts of the Battle of Chickamauga, books like this one clearly demonstrate that Second Manassas should be viewed as a three-day, rather than the traditionally understood two-day, battle. In addition to providing a thorough history of the fighting at Brawner's Farm, Opening Manassas offers Civil War readers compelling historiographical points of interest in regard to ongoing debates surrounding Stonewall Jackson's generalship and the early development of the Iron Brigade's distinguished combat reputation.

Review - "Decisions at Chancellorsville: The Sixteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Battle" by Sarah Bierle

[Decisions at Chancellorsville: The Sixteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Battle by Sarah Kay Bierle (Command Decisions in America’s Civil War series - University of Tennessee Press, 2025). Paperback, 17 maps, photographs, battlefield touring guide, orders of battle, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xx,142,277. ISBN:978-1-62190-956-9. $24.95]

Decisions at Chancellorsville is the latest installment of University of Tennessee Press's Command Decisions in America’s Civil War series, which has published multiple titles each year since 2018. In addition to the prolific release schedule that the series continues to maintain, fresh blood is infused into its stable of authors on a fairly regular basis, too, and this is Sarah Kay Bierle's first contribution. And a fine one it is.

Now for the obligatory background summary for those unfamiliar with the series and its structure. First, it should be noted that these books do not examine Civil War campaigns and battles through the traditional narrative perspective and format. Instead, the main content is presented through a chronological sequence of "critical decision" analyses. In the hierarchy of decision-making, critical decisions are defined as being those command choices that produce profound consequences in their immediate aftermath and that meaningfully shape the course of ensuing events.

As outlined in previous reviews, analysis of each critical decision follows a standardized format to which every volume strictly adheres. Discussion progresses through five linked stages—Situation, Options, Decision, Result(s)/Impact, and Alternate Decision/Scenario. The first and typically lengthiest section, Situation describes the state of affairs at a crossroads moment in the campaign or battle. It provides readers with the background information necessary to recognize and evaluate the range of reasonable Options (most frequently two or three in number) available for addressing the situation. The historical Decision is then outlined before the Result(s)/Impact section recounts what happened and how those results shaped subsequent events. A degree of emphasis is placed on tracing lasting effects of critical decisions made earlier. Finally, an optional Alternate Decision/Scenario section delves into alternative history conjecture based on choices not made. In this case, Bierle elected not to engage with the optional alternate history component, which is perfectly fine.

In the series, critical decisions are categorized as being either strategic, operational, tactical, organizational, logistical, or personnel-related. Bierle organizes the sixteen decisions of her study into six groupings: the pre-battle January-April 1863 interval and the May 1, May 2, May 3 (in two parts), and May 4-6. Those six sub-sections contain three critical decisions each, the exception being the last, which includes a single one involving Army of the Potomac commander Joseph Hooker's retreat decision. There are a preponderance of tactical-level critical decisions. In the author's view, the total numbers disparity (nine for the Union side and six for the Confederates) represents Hooker's persistent struggle to reassert control of events after the strong start to his campaign quickly fizzled. Although he had many opportunities during those first days in May to impose (or reimpose) his will upon Robert E. Lee's vastly outnumbered army, Hooker's choices instead led him to "give up his military advantages and initiative, handing opportunity to Lee to react" (pg. xvi), with decisive reaction on the part of Lee forming several of the Confederate side's half-dozen critical decisions. Supporting the volume's decision analysis are 17 maps, a 12-stop driving tour, an appendix examining the campaign's historical memory (that is not a regular series feature), and orders of battle for both sides.

Beirle's selection of critical decisions and their available option formulations together exhibit a very strong grasp of both big picture and more nuanced elements of the military history literature associated with the Chancellorsville Campaign. Each option is effectively framed for the reader through thoughtful weighing of the benefits and risks attached to it (some of which have a fresh ring to them).

For the series as a whole, nearly all critical decisions are made by individuals, mostly high-ranking military officers and top government officials. Collective critical decisions are thus highly unusual, but Bierle has two of them. In her assessment, the final Union assault on Marye's Heights was a group decision among frontline small-unit commanders. Another decision involving multiple parties was the possibility of medical and military officers deciding as a group that Hooker was too incapacitated (presumably by concussion) to remain in command after the pillar he was leaning against was struck by cannon fire. Another interesting matter related to the Fredericksburg sector of the battlefield is Bierle's willingness to take up the truce flag controversy, a matter recently addressed at some length in Erik Nelson's 2024 study of the eastern half of the expansive Chancellorsville battlefield, as a critical decision impacting the final Fredericksburg assaults. Though not related to any particular critical decision (and thus not explored further), the author's criticism of Jeb Stuart's infantry tactics (characterizing them as overly wasteful frontal assaults) on May 3 after the cavalryman took over leadership of wounded Stonewall Jackson's Second Corps forms a dissenting opinion perhaps worthy of mention. Most modern writers, including the general's most recent biographer, have not adopted that same view, instead arguing that Stuart performed well after being abruptly thrust into infantry corps command in the middle of a major battle.

In terms of arguable 'misses,' Bierle's set lacks a standalone decision related to how George Stoneman's cavalry corps would be used during the campaign. Incorporating it into the discussion as just a part of Hooker's overall planning options lends an element of inevitability to how Stoneman's role in the campaign would unfold that is perhaps not warranted. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that Hooker, even if he had eschewed the deep raid option in favor of keeping his cavalry nearby, would have deployed his cavalry as close tactical support in ways that might have kept him better informed as to Lee's movements and protected the open right of his army from getting crushed by Jackson's massive flank attack.

As mentioned before, one of the conceptual qualities of the critical decision is that its impact extends beyond the immediate period in ways that meaningfully shape downstream campaign and battlefield events. Interestingly, Bierle goes beyond that, showing how critical decisions during the Chancellorsville Campaign affected the Gettysburg Campaign that followed it. For example, Bierle suggests that Third Corps commander Dan Sickles's dismay at Hooker's critical decision ordering him to abandon the Hazel Grove high ground (leaving it to the Confederates for use as a devastating artillery platform that transformed the fighting around the Chancellorsville crossroads) might very well have been a bitter learning experience that directly informed his determination, misguided or not, to press forward to occupy the higher ground fronting his assigned position as the left flank of the Union army at Gettysburg. As another example, contemporary observers and present day writers alike have praised Hooker's winter reforms that restored Army of the Potomac morale after Fredericksburg and placed it on a strong footing for the spring, but Chancellorsville exposed the flaws in Hooker's artillery arm reorganization. Hooker's belated, mid-battle decision cited by Bierle that restored Hunt's authority over the army's artillery had a positive short-term impact (albeit limited by circumstances), and it led to Hunt being given authority to reorganize the artillery after the battle in ways that improved its performance at Gettysburg. Bierle also suggests that Fifth Corps commander George Meade's experience with Hooker's mismanaged Chancellorsville council of war, which resulted in the commanding general going against majority opinion of his principal subordinates and ordering a retreat, shaped how Meade would conduct his own critical decision during a similarly key moment at Gettysburg on the night of July 2-3.

Consistency is a hallmark of the Command Decisions in America’s Civil War series, which is pretty remarkable given the hectic release schedule and multitude of contributors involved, and Sarah Bierle's Decisions at Chancellorsville strongly upholds that reputation while also adding some unique elements of its own. Hopefully, we'll see more of her quality input in the future.

Review- "A Campaign of Giants - The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 2: From the Crater's Aftermath to the Battle of Burgess Mill" by A. Wilson Greene

[A Campaign of Giants - The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 2: From the Crater's Aftermath to the Battle of Burgess Mill by A. Wilson Greene (University of North Carolina Press, 2025). Hardcover, 34 maps, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xiii,495/706. ISBN:978-1-4696-8481-9. $45]

Generations of avid followers of the Civil War campaigns fought in the eastern theater between the Union Army of the Potomac and Confederate Army of Northern Virginia have been enthralled by streams of books detailing the sweeping maneuvers, crushing flank attacks, and grand assaults that generated signature moments of enduring distinction among so many of the great field contests of 1862-63. However, when considering the campaigns fought in the theater from the spring of 1864 onward, a different popular impression of the style of warfare fought between those mighty foes emerged. For a long time, reader perception of the 1864 Overland Campaign was primarily that of a continuous series of brutal frontal slugging matches remarkable mostly for the unprecedented attritional bloodletting they produced amid extensive tactical reliance on fieldworks, and the 1864-65 Richmond-Petersburg Campaign was widely seen as a static "siege" operation. Over recent decades, though, those simplistic characterizations have been significantly overthrown by way of fresh scholarship and reassessment. Starting with Gordon Rhea's classic series of books, the Overland Campaign has come to be seen and appreciated with far more operational and tactical nuance than ever before. For the 1864-65 Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, a flood of new books has revealed that that long campaign, far from being anything truly siege-like, rather consisted of a series of mobile offensives that produced numerous battles with a great many features of interest to inquisitive military history students. A major contributor to that profound altering of perception is A. Wilson Greene, his latest project being a monumental three-volume history that began in 2018 with the release of A Campaign of Giants - The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 1: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater. Published earlier this year, the middle tome, A Campaign of Giants - The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 2: From the Crater's Aftermath to the Battle of Burgess Mill, is the subject of this review. It comprehensively addresses events on the Richmond and Petersburg fronts from the beginning of August 1864 through the end of October, months that encompassed the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth of the campaign's nine distinct offensives.

The Fourth Offensive (August 12-25) marked further development of Union Army general in chief U.S. Grant's overall theater strategy of launching coordinated offensive movements against either end of the Richmond-Petersburg line. With the Confederates not knowing which of the two was the main effort, the hope was that good timing and local superiority in numbers would combine to score a major breakthrough. If outright capture of those cities could not be achieved, at the very least gains would be made in isolating them further. While the Battle of Second Deep Bottom, on the face of it, was poorly conducted and failed to either threaten Richmond or cut the Virginia Central Railroad, it did practically ensure that the Confederates couldn't provide further aid to Jubal Early's Shenandoah Valley operation. Regardless of how much that affected Lee's real plans, the resources that went into stopping the Union attack north of the James weakened Confederate forces south of the river and eased Union Fifth Corps' task of seizing the Weldon Railroad (a major lifeline into Petersburg). During the fighting on August 18-19, G.K. Warren's Fifth Corps successfully cut across the railroad, but the gap between its advance and the rest of the army was negligently spanned (the blame for which could be spread around). That hole in the front was exploited in devastating fashion by William Mahone's Confederate division, which launched a breakthrough attack that hauled in a massive load of prisoners before being halted by arriving Union Ninth Corps elements. The Confederates didn't have the numbers to fully exploit their initial breakthrough and were rather easily turned back with heavy losses of their own during the subsequent August 21 fighting against Fifth Corps's firmly entrenched position across the railroad. In the author's view, Mahone, as he had earlier in the campaign, "played the starring role" in the Fourth Offensive. Warren's grade, on the other hand, was decidedly mixed. The controversial Fifth Corps commander displayed little in the way of offensive-minded drive and initiative, and he shared responsibility for the open space in the front line that Mahone exploited. On a more positive note, Warren partially redeemed himself on the 21st (although, as Greene maintains, achieving that defensive victory did not require any great display of generalship, and Warren made no effort to take advantage of the enemy's newly vulnerable condition). The action did not end there, though, as Grant and Meade sought to expand their gains. By any measure, the resulting Battle of Second Reams Station (August 25) was poorly fought affair on the Union side. As Greene outlines, Second Corps lines were badly placed, cavalry reconnaissance completely missed the Confederate build-up nearby, and Meade inadequately supported Hancock. In addition to severely damaging Second Corps, adding 2,000 prisoners to the larger haul accumulated only days earlier, Lee's men halted further destruction of the Weldon Railroad, which kept at a manageable distance the logistical bypass that Warren's continued presence astride the railroad still forced upon them.

Upon concluding his meticulous description and analysis of the Fourth Offensive, Greene detours into an informative look into the ongoing development of federal siegecraft, especially in the context of how it was applied to consolidating the gains produced by the latest offensive. The author also explores side topics such as fraternization between the armies and the reactions of both sides to the fall of Atlanta. During this operational pause, Union forces also grasped the opportunity to reorganize their order of battle. The main military event of the period bridging the Fourth and Fifth offensives was the "Beefsteak Raid." While Greene's fine account of that celebrated Confederate cavalry operation concludes that success was primarily due to neglect and complacency among the Union leadership, it also offers strong accolades for the man who conceived and conducted it, Wade Hampton. Throughout Greene's narrative it is revealed that Hampton was a more than capable replacement for the late Jeb Stuart, the tactical skill displayed during his command's close cooperation with the infantry on multiple occasions playing an important part in limiting Union gains below Petersburg. Indeed, while the story of the final breakthrough at Petersburg and complete success of the Appomattox Campaign in 1865 is commonly attributed to the advanced development of Union combined arms deployment of infantry and cavalry, a strong argument could be made that the Confederates held the upper hand in that regard (though theirs was more defensive in nature) on the Petersburg front in 1864. A major theme developed early on and throughout the rest of the book is the profound effects Shenandoah Valley-related events and strategic considerations had on operational planning for both sides on the Richmond and Petersburg fronts. Involved with all of that was a mixture of opportunity and fear of enemy intentions (real and imagined).

In his assessment of Grant's Fifth Offensive (September 29-October 2), Greene gives Army of the James commander Benjamin Butler mixed marks. Though Butler's command seized New Market Heights and captured Fort Harrison, further attacks ultimately fell short against the Intermediate Line of Richmond's three-ringed system of defensive fortifications. The initial plan of operations was well-received and Grant approved it without revision, but the author feels that Butler accorded more weight than was needed against the thinly held heights, not leaving enough strength to push beyond Fort Harrison, breach the Intermediate Line, and push into Richmond. Greene is certainly persuasive in arguing that leadership failures (and inopportune high command casualties), played a major part in stalling what was, even by early morning, a very promising offensive. On the Confederate side, Lee balanced his forces on both sides of the James in judicious fashion yet again, and the Richmond front's collection of front-line, second-line, and reserve troops held on better than could reasonably be expected against long odds and did not widely panic after initial disaster. Forced to wait until the next day to respond, Lee, determined to recover the lost ground, launched a counterattack against Fort Harrison that failed in the face of poor coordination from his subordinates and a consolidated defense. Meanwhile, on the other end of the line below Petersburg, four divisions of Warren's Fifth and John Parke's Ninth Corps set out west to test the sector held by A.P. Hill's Confederates and make sure no more enemy reinforcements left for the Richmond or Shenandoah fronts. Their limited action was authorized to shift over into a major offensive if circumstances permitted. While Warren and Parke seized the lightly held Squirrel Level Line on September 30, only cautious advances followed, and Hill seized the initiative, smashing the federal advance at Pegram's Farm (taking in another large haul of prisoners). The following day, the Confederates, eager to reprise their devastating counterattack of August 19, instead bungled the assault against a better prepared enemy, leading to hundreds of ill-afforded casualties. Resumption of offensive action was urged by Grant and Meade, but Warren and Parke only inched forward with their innate caution, and the Fifth Offensive ended up petering out on both sides of the James after some ineffectual probing attacks.

As Greene convincingly demonstrates, both sides had reason to be alternatively pleased and disappointed with aspects of the Fifth Offensive. The Confederates lost Fort Harrison on the Richmond front and their Squirrel Level Line buffer southwest of Petersburg, but they inflicted better than two to one losses on their foes and maintained every critical point, sealing off the breakthrough at Fort Harrison and maintaining possession of the primary positions covering the Boydton Plank Road and South Side Railroad. Union forces, by seizing the Squirrel Level Line were able to use that new position to anchor yet another westward push across Petersburg's southern front. Butler's command captured Fort Harrison (though the long-term significance of that achievement proved minimal), and his USCT forces were able to earn valuable combat prestige and experience at New Market Heights. Throughout Greene's Fifth Offensive coverage, one gains an appreciation for how adeptly the Confederate defenders employed interior lines and tactical flexibility to counter Meade and Butler's more plodding subordinates and superior numbers.

The significance of the Confederate attack down Darbytown Road on October 7, which brushed aside Butler's right flank cavalry before being stopped cold by the refused line of fortifications held by David Birney's Tenth Corps, is recognized as marking the final attempt by Lee to eliminate the Union threat to Richmond north of the James (or at least limit it to a small bridgehead at Deep Bottom). Greene also conjectures that the failure led Lee to finally accept that his army could no longer risk heavy casualties through large-scale counterattacks. But that realization did not mean the end of activity on the Richmond front. The period between the end of the Fifth Offensive and the beginning of the Sixth Offensive witnessed both a major extension of Confederate entrenchments east of Richmond (the "Alexander Line") and a major testing of those new positions by Butler's command, which was repulsed with significant loss in the Second Battle of Darbytown Road. On the other end of the line, near Squirrel Level Road, more clashes erupted across no man's land.

For his Sixth Offensive (October 27-28), Grant continued to hit upon his promising strategy of employing simultaneous attacks on both ends of the long Richmond-Petersburg line. North of the James, Butler's two corps (Tenth and Eighteenth) sought to outflank the newly extended Confederate front before Richmond but instead engaged the Confederate defenders, who used lateral flexibility to meet them head on, through a series of poorly conducted attacks that produced no results noteworthy enough to justify the casualties incurred. Meanwhile, strong elements of Second, Fifth, and Ninth corps plus Gregg's cavalry swung around the far Confederate right below Petersburg and attempted to seize the grail objectives of Boydton Plank Road and the South Side Railroad. Neither of those lofty goals would be met, as Parke and Warren became immediately bogged down, leaving Hancock to fight off a fierce counterattack at Burgess Mill. Their rebuff left the Confederate spearheads, especially Mahone's men, isolated and vulnerable, and it was with great difficulty that they were able to disengage and withdraw without disaster. In the end, both sides suffered roughly equal casualties overall and Second Corps fell back rather than risk staying in an isolated position. With that fizzle went any hope of achieving a signal success on the Richmond and Petersburg fronts that might have helped clinch Lincoln's prospects for reelection. For the eastern theater at least, that honor would go to Philip Sheridan's series of victories in the Shenandoah Valley.

In conveying to readers an understanding as to why this series of Union offensives, like those that preceded them, failed to achieve greater results, Greene focuses mostly closely on controllable factors. At a number of places in the narrative, Grant's frustration is felt deeply, as his innate aggressiveness could not be fully transmitted to the tip of the spear on either side of the James. If Grant was a jolt of electricity from the top, and Meade duly carried out his superior's wishes while also offering sage advisement, the charge steadily diminished as it moved down the Union order of battle, which acted like a poorly insulated conducting wire. Even the usually reliable cavalry division commander David Gregg significantly underperformed during this period. In ways that attempted to cover up their own shortcomings, Union leaders frequently blamed their own men for defeats. At numerous points in the book, the author reveals damning quotes, originating from high-ranking Union generals and lesser lights alike, that routinely blamed the new men in the army for the most lopsided mishaps suffered at the hands of Lee's veterans. Directly confronting those claims might be beyond the scope of Greene's investigation, but one hopes that the third volume can reserve some space for addressing the most recent scholarship on the topic. Completed around the same time as Greene's Volume 2 are major works from Edwin Rutan and Alexandre Caillot that strongly challenge the most persistently hidebound negative assessments of the fighting capabilities of the Army of the Potomac's late-war enlistees and regiments.

As revealed in the book, the Confederates were not without their own accumulation of operational misjudgments and tactical mistakes. Lee is reasonably second-guessed on occasion, one example being his determination to go forward with a delayed counterattack to try to recover Fort Harrison, but the record remains clear that the Confederate leadership overall performed commendably in limiting federal gains to manageable losses in the near term. Of Lee's subordinates, hard-hitting William Mahone emerges as his commander's chief fireman on many battlefields described in both volumes, and Greene's narrative also offers renewed appreciation for Henry Heth, who is typically regarded as a fairly middling major general. With the ailing A.P. Hill leaving a bit of a higher leadership void along his overstretched and highly vulnerable Third Corps front, Heth stepped up effectively in some key moments.

Though Greene prominently pays homage to those who have covered this material before, singling out for special recognition Hampton Newsome, John Horn, and the late Richard Sommers, and refers his readers to the relevant works from that trio to find even more micro-level detail, his own narrative offers impressive levels of tactical depth and sage analysis. Indeed, Greene ranks high in his ability to transform a vast amount of primary and secondary source research into a complex yet readily comprehensible campaign and battlefield narrative. Supplementing Green's text is a set of very fine operational and tactical-scale maps (34 in total) from Edward Alexander that cover the action without leaving any notable gaps.

Judging from the content and tone of this review, one might correctly surmise that this volume receives the site's highest possible recommendation. If V3 meets the same standards set by V1-2, and there is no reason to suppose otherwise, then the finished trilogy will unquestionably become a lasting standard on the same order as other top-flight book series such as David Powell's Chickamauga, Timothy Smith's Vicksburg, and Gordon Rhea's aforementioned Overland Campaign work.

Review - "The Johnson-Gilmor Cavalry Raid Around Baltimore, July 10-13, 1864" by Eric Wittenberg

[The Johnson-Gilmor Cavalry Raid Around Baltimore, July 10-13, 1864 by Eric J. Wittenberg (Savas Beatie, 2025). Hardcover, 5 maps, photos, illustrations, appendix section, footnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:ix,127/173. ISBN:978-1-61121-619-6. $29.95]

After the Dix-Hill exchange cartel dissolved amid mutual recriminations and irresolvable differences, the prisoner of war camps of both sides, which were unprepared for that eventuality, rapidly filled to overcrowding. Some of the worst conditions on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line were found at Point Lookout, Maryland, which held captive roughly 15,000 Confederates by the summer of 1864. If there was a chance that those prisoners could somehow be freed and reintroduced into the depleted ranks of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, any risks involved in the process would be well worth it. Timed to coincide with, and branch off from, Confederate general Jubal Early's raid on Washington by way of the lower Shenandoah Valley, just such a daring scheme was put into play by Confederate authorities. Its history is recounted in Eric Wittenberg's The Johnson-Gilmor Cavalry Raid Around Baltimore, July 10-13, 1864.

With Point Lookout's military prison and hospital complex separated from Confederate lines by a wide body of water, the camp was to be liberated through the tandem efforts of cavalry raiders moving down the peninsula from above and an amphibious force landing directly at the point from below. Unfortunately for its Confederate planners, all-important operational secrecy was lost right off the bat. With public discussion of the naval raid (which would have been led by one of the Confederate Navy's most competent and highly respected officers, John Taylor Wood) overheard on city streets, the waterborne component was abruptly cancelled. Though doing so basically wrecked the entire plan, cancellation was necessary given U.S. naval supremacy in the Chesapeake and all along the coastal approaches to the bay.

The ground component of the operation, however, went ahead as planned. On July 9, Confederate Brigadier General, and Marylander himself, Bradley Johnson left the main body of Early's army at Frederick and initiated his part of the Point Lookout operation. Ranging in a wide arc across central Maryland and zig-zagging down toward Washington (and, along the way, burning the country home of Maryland Governor Augustus Bradford in retaliation for Union general David Hunter's firing of Virginia Governor John Letcher's Lexington house), Johnson slipped past Washington to the northeast and continued on toward his goal. The expedition was operating under a very tight timetable (made even more unyielding by a two-day delay in receipt of orders for its launch), however, and Johnson was forced to turn back one-hundred miles from the POW camp. How much closer he might have gotten had all extraneous activities been ruthlessly excised is difficult to assess.

On the other hand, while Johnson was ordered back well before reaching his destination, Major Harry Gilmor's side raid (July 10-14), aimed toward threatening Baltimore, disrupting its rail and telegraph communications with the North, and destroying key bridges, achieved quite a bit for its size (only 150 troopers were assigned to it). Fanning out north of Baltimore, Gilmor applied the torch to what infrastructure he could and caused the enemy general consternation. A particularly interesting episode involved his capture of William B. Franklin, one of the Union Army's highest ranking generals. The book's account of that event, along with the hobbled officer's escape and trek to restored freedom, is an engrossing tale told well. While the damage inflicted by Gilmor's men was restored quickly, the raid went about as well as could be expected, and the author offers high praise for what was accomplished by so few and at comparative negligible loss.

Civil War mounted operations and military biography are Wittenberg's forte, and this slim volume exhibits all the best characteristics of the author's previous works. The background and wider context of the raid are fully explained, and the operations themselves revealed to the reader in a blow-by-blow fashion that makes for a reading experience that is both engaging and easy to follow. The steadily mounting tension and fatigue that went hand in hand with long-range cavalry raiding ooze out of every paragraph, as do the many possible dangers that lurked around every crossroads and fence corner. The volume's fine collection of maps further enhance reader knowledge and understanding of the paths of Johnson and Gilmor's raiders.

The author's lucid descriptive account of the Johnson-Gilmor raid is accompanied by his equally typical clear-eyed analysis and sound conclusions. In line with the general consensus (Jack Shairer's 2008 book Lee’s Bold Plan for Point Lookout is likely the only study to insist that the plan should have succeeded), it is Wittenberg's studied viewpoint that the original plan clearly constituted an act of extreme desperation. As Wittenberg explains, the combined land and seaborne operation was already highly unlikely to accomplish its designed goal of freeing the prisoners en masse. Dropping the naval component then rendered the meeting of that goal nearly impossible, with the slashed timetable finally excluding even reaching Point Lookout from the realm of possibility. While the ultimate objective may have been beyond reach from the start, as Wittenberg maintains, the mounted raid as it unfolded was "bold and well-executed" (pg. 126), a credit to the leadership abilities of both Johnson and Gilmor.

Material found in the appendix section includes an order of battle, insights into equine care during raiding operations, brief discussions of Point Lookout POW burials and the state of the site today, and a new look into the "strange case" of Maryland Agricultural College president Henry Onderdonk's actions during the raiders' visit to his campus. Another appendix examines the Point Lookout operation in the context of two other long-range raids aimed toward freeing prisoners, the piece focusing in particular on shared reasons as to why they failed.

With the publication of Eric Wittenberg's The Johnson-Gilmor Cavalry Raid Around Baltimore, July 10-13, 1864, the Savas Beatie Battles & Leaders series now sits at four volumes. Those campaigns, battles, and raids that can be fully addressed through mid-size publications seem to be primary targets for the series, and this volume fits very well within that range. With the quality already displayed, future titles should be regarded with eager anticipation.

************************** Finally, on a more personal note, I am sure I join everyone in wishing Eric the best on his long road to recovery from a recent series of serious health setbacks. According to what I've read, it's been a bumpy road filled with ups and downs, and here's to a future filled with much more of the former and much less of the latter.

Review - "The Second Manassas Campaign" by Janney & Shively, eds.

[The Second Manassas Campaign edited by Caroline E. Janney & Kathryn J. Shively (University of North Carolina Press, 2025). Hardcover, 3 maps, figures, chapter notes, bibliographical essay, index. Pp. 265. ISBN:978-1-4696-8536-6. $34.95]

With this latest release, there are now an even dozen titles in UNC Press's Military Campaigns of the Civil War series. With the earlier volumes reissued in paperback format, it happily appears that all of them remain in print. Alas, all good things must come to an end, and we've now reached the penultimate addition to the series, The Second Manassas Campaign. Though theme and content mix has altered over time, reflective of evolving scholarly trends, each anthology still aims to "reexamine common assumptions about pivotal campaigns, the experiences of major figures and common soldiers involved in the fighting, the connection between strategy and tactics on the ground, and the political and social ramifications of battles on the respective home fronts." The nine contributions to this volume collectively address that mission statement in fine fashion.

Union Army logistics is frequently, and with much evidentiary justification, presented as a marvel of volume and efficiency, but it took some time to get there. Steven Stotelmyer's work has highlighted serious gaps in the post-Antietam supply chain, but this essay shows that the shortfalls experienced during the fall of 1862 were an extension of earlier problems in the theater. Citing near logistical collapse as a major contributing factor to Union defeat at Second Manassas, contributor and volume co-editor Kathryn Shively paints a strong picture of the collective consequences of poor top-down decision-making (from Army of Virginia commander John Pope's almost laughable attempts at logistical micromanagement to his ill-timed dismissal of railroad specialist Herman Haupt), extreme levels of military-civilian traffic congestion along the Washington-Fredericksburg corridor, and lack of system when it came to balancing the Army of Virginia's own prodigious needs in the areas of food, forage, supplies, and medical needs with the sudden influx of reinforcements that needed transportation to the front. Significantly, her own views on some matters run counter to historian John Matsui's thesis, developed in his book The First Republican Army (2017), of the Army of Virginia as a distinctive radicalizing force of "hard war" advocacy within the Union war effort. Shively instead sees the crux of Pope's general orders as being an almost desperate attempt to establish order and discipline in his badly administered army, the harshness directed toward civilians being little different from what he and his military superior, Henry Halleck, had already done in Missouri much earlier. She also cites Pope's personal dismay at his army's interpretation of his orders as giving license to plunder the populace and his apparent ignoring of the growing black refugee problem as additional evidence of the prioritization of practical military matters over ideologically driven ones. What a harried Pope, knee deep in a very fluid military situation, might have done above and beyond what his subordinates had already been doing to alleviate the black refugee situation before his arrival (by either employing them with the army or directing them behind Union lines toward Washington, as outlined in the following essay by John Hennessy) is unaddressed.

Hennessy's chapter detailing how the infantry corps that would eventually comprise the Army of Virginia confronted slavery provides yet another example of the institution being critically disrupted, even destroyed, wherever heavy Union forces made their presence felt. This connection was certainly well known at the time. He agrees with Shively that Pope was less of an instigating force in bringing hard war to the Old Dominion countryside than he was an obliging commander carrying out the wishes and directives of both the President and the Congress. There is even some tantalizing evidence hinting at the possibility that much of the rhetorical bombast that Pope has been ridiculed over, then and now, actually originated from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton's office.

In contrast to Shively's interpretation of Pope's military-political agency as being primarily reactive in nature, Cecily Zander presents the general and his actions in ways that largely hearken back to their more traditional portrayal in the literature, with his failure to achieve a signal military victory in the field destroying any lasting footprint he might have left in the theater. Her article serves as a powerful reminder that the Civil War's political initiatives, especially ones invoking radical transformations, had to be paired with military victory in order to be credibly sustained.

Original series editor Gary Gallagher opens his essay by noting that the Battle of Second Manassas, sandwiched between the Peninsula/Seven Days and Maryland campaigns, has (until quite recently) suffered undue neglect, at least on a standalone basis. He goes on to explain that much of that can be traced back to the war itself, when the battle was viewed by many Confederate supporters as just one part of a sweeping series of events that collectively reshaped the war in the East, and by extension the course of the war itself. Of the modern interpretations of this period, the fullest and arguably best account can be found in B.F. Cooling's Counter-Thrust: From the Peninsula to the Antietam (2007). Gallagher's interpretation of that strategic metamorphosis includes a geographic reorientation of the theater seat of war from the outskirts of one capital to another and a fundamental change in the character of Confederate strategy from passive defense to aggressive offense. Closely tied to both was the emergence of Robert E. Lee, who still lagged behind Stonewall Jackson in terms of popular acclaim but nevertheless gave the Confederacy an army commander that inspired confidence in the future. As Gallagher demonstrates here and in previous writings, the new style of war fought in the East proved enormously popular on both the Confederate military and home fronts, with victory (at least as measured through battlefield success) making the heavy casualties incurred more palatable.

The most interesting element of Peter Luebke's chapter, which explores the sources and nature of Lee's 1861-62 strategizing, is the bundle of lessons the Virginian drew from his frustrating time spent in command of the military department tasked with managing Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida's overextended coastal defenses. As Luebke outlines, the local/regional situation along the Lower Atlantic coast (where Union forces, on land and sea, possessed—whenever they had the will to do so—the capability of quickly concentrating overwhelming numbers and firepower against scattered defenders) mirrored the Confederacy's strategic challenges as a whole. The answer, seizing the initiative by concentrating one's own forces and employing risk-taking aggression utilizing rapid maneuver to put enemy plans in disarray and hopefully destroy significant parts of their forces by gaining local superiority at the point of attack, formed the core of Lee's response to taking command in Virginia with George McClellan's army at the gates of Richmond. That operational and strategic philosophy was also employed against Pope's growing concentration of forces in central Virginia.

Common to every volume in the series are essays recounting the key actions of prominent officers and unit formations. Fitting that mold in The Second Manassas Campaign are a pair of chapters, James Marten's focus on the Sixth Wisconsin at Brawner's Farm and Keith Bohannon's review of the part John Bell Hood played in delivering the resounding Confederate victory at Second Manassas. Marten not only traces the Sixth's part in the bloody fighting between what would become the Iron Brigade and Jackson's men but also integrates historical memory and home front components into his narrative. Bohannon's recounting of Hood's initiation to division command is generally laudatory in nature, and, although Hood committed a serious error in assigning a staff officer to lead the Texas Brigade, the writer deems his subject's overall leadership performance on the plains of Manassas as heralding a bright future in the ANV high command. Revisiting the infamous Fitz John Porter trial and conviction as well as that general's long and bumpy road to official redemption, William Marvel's chapter offers a spirited overview of salient points more fully addressed inside his book-length biographical study Radical Sacrifice: The Rise and Ruin of Fitz John Porter (2021) [site review].

Finally, co-editor Caroline Janney's essay tracks both the placement of the first Second Manassas battlefield monuments (a pair of permanent markers installed at Groveton and Henry Hill, both of which were built by Union soldiers just as the war in the East concluded) and the tortuous path toward securing protection via legislative creation of Manassas National Battlefield Park. This concluding chapter yet again reminds us that, like the friction of war itself, nothing is straightforward where partisan politics is involved.

It's a pretty tired reviewing cliche to say that an essay collection offers 'something for everyone,' but this volume's strong addressing of a wide range of subjects, and this series as a whole, really does achieve that type of impact better than most others. Of added interest are elements of the anthology that amplify, and in some cases even challenge, the conclusions of fellow contributors. Now it's on to First Manassas and the ironic outcome of the first major battle of the war being the last volume in the grand old Military Campaigns of the Civil War series.

Review - "The Forgotten Battles of the Chancellorsville Campaign: Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and Banks’ Ford in Spring 1863" by Erik Nelson

[The Forgotten Battles of the Chancellorsville Campaign: Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and Banks’ Ford in Spring 1863 by Erik F. Nelson (Kent State University Press, 2024). Softcover, 21 maps, appendix section, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xxiii,280/407. ISBN:978-1-60635-480-3. $39.95]

Of the single-volume Chancellorsville histories produced over the more than eleven decades that have passed since the 1910 publication of John Bigelow's groundbreaking study, those from Edward Stackpole, Ernest Furgurson, and Stephen Sears have contributed most to the popular understanding of the campaign and battle, the last being the most detailed in addition to being the most recent. Generally speaking, the fighting between the main bodies of each army, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and Joseph Hooker's far more numerous Army of the Potomac, within the tangled forests and clearings surrounding Chancellorsville has garnered the lion's share of popular and scholarly attention. Presenting the battle primarily through that lens is not unexpected given that the intense combat in that sector produced the great bulk of the campaign's very heavy casualties and witnessed Stonewall Jackson's famous flanking attack and subsequent mortal wounding.

Even so, just over a quarter of the total losses to both armies during the campaign were suffered on the eastern half of the battlefield, an area that comprised an expansive military chessboard in its own right. Within that sector—bounded on its northern side by the Rappahannock River, its southern edge the unfinished railroad running roughly parallel to the Orange Plank Road, and, from west to east, the ridge atop which sat Salem Church all the way to the city of Fredericksburg itself—the possibility to alter the entire character and result of the battle loomed large. In 2013, Savas Beatie published a book-length study of the fighting that occurred at Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and during the Union Sixth's Corps's fighting withdrawal toward its pontoon bridge communications near Banks's Ford. That excellent study, Chris Mackowski and Kristopher White's Chancellorsville's Forgotten Front: The Battles of Second Fredericksburg and Salem Church, May 3, 1863, provided readers with the first comprehensive narrative history of those events. Now, more than a decade later, Erik Nelson's The Forgotten Battles of the Chancellorsville Campaign: Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and Banks’ Ford in Spring 1863 revisits the same ground with noteworthy coverage of a complementary nature as well as new interpretation¹.

Nelson's book possesses all the highlights and components that the most demanding readers of modern Civil War battle studies expect to find. Nelson's research, heavily weighted toward primary source materials of all kinds, feeds a sequence of battle narratives that are noteworthy for their small-unit detail and seamless incorporation of first-hand accounts left behind by the officers and men of both armies. Terrain analysis is exceptionally fine. The author's intimate knowledge of the sector's urban and rural fighting landscapes, from the streets of Fredericksburg to the surrounding hills, ridges, ravines, canals, river crossings, fields, forests, and streams, is used to convey a highly nuanced understanding of the ways in which the environment shaped how each of the engagements examined in the text was fought. The volume's twenty-one maps, all produced by noted cartographer Steven Stanley, thoroughly enhance reader comprehension of events through their tracing of troop movements described in the text atop a finely detailed rendering of underlying elevation contours and terrain features.

The better books of this type never fail to express proper regard for the artillery support arm, but Nelson's narrative is exceptional in the amount and depth of attention directed toward the batteries employed by both sides. Few battle studies, even the very good ones, offer the amount of information that Nelson provides when it comes to denoting the composition of individual batteries and describing their tactical deployment, the type and weight of the gun tubes being critical factors in determining where they were deployed and what effect they had on enemy units at various ranges². While much of the tale of the use of the long arm during the Chancellorsville Campaign is focused on the opposing concentrations of firepower at Fairview and Hazel Grove, it could be argued that artillery produced its most outsized contributions to the campaign on the eastern half of the battlefield. There, the artillery of both sides materially impacted events through effective firing at ranges both close and extreme, the Confederates frequently employing ad-hoc concentrations of rifled sections (though their efforts were often hindered by faulty shell fuzes). Additionally, for front coverage Confederate artillery batteries often had to substitute for infantry, which was stretched thin on the eastern sector before reinforcements from the main body arrived at Salem Church following the Union breakthrough at Fredericksburg.

Specialist troops were another support arm whose efforts came to the fore on the eastern half of the Chancellorsville battleground. Nelson's study offers fresh details about the challenges and struggles involved in getting the Army of the Potomac's pontoon trains to the river and getting set up once they arrived. While inevitable friction spawned by the need to strike a balance between secrecy and speed put the bridging operations hours behind schedule, they were successful. Engineer officer Henry Benham, a Civil War figure often ridiculed for his heavy drinking as well as the disastrous offensive action he directed outside Charleston in 1862, is credited by Nelson for creating well-trained engineer troops for the Army of the Potomac and praised for his efforts in coordinating their use on the Rappahannock in May 1863. US Signal Corps and Military Telegraph Corps specialists also went to work to establish communications between the Union army's widely separated wings. As Nelson explains, ill-timed interruptions caused by certain orders to the Signal Corps detachments and problems with deteriorated wire contributed mightily to the creation of lengthy lapses in communication between Hooker and Sixth Corps commander John Sedgwick at critical moments.

Nelson also highlights how staff work problems affected each side. Lee staff officer Robert Chilton nearly caused disaster by prematurely ordering Jubal Early to withdraw his division from Fredericksburg, that potential catastrophe only narrowly averted by a timely reversal that put Early's command back in the trenches before Sedgwick's main attacks. Though Hooker's own muddled orders to Sedgwick and indecisive leadership at the top led to cascading problems, Nelson is unrelentingly critical of the manner in which Hooker's chief of staff, Daniel Butterfield, handled communications between army headquarters and Sixth Corps headquarters.

After the campaign ended, Hooker attempted to attach blame for the disaster to three high-ranking subordinates: Thirteenth Corps commander O.O. Howard, Cavalry Corps commander George Stoneman, and the man he assigned to lead the eastern sector of the battlefield, John Sedgwick. That self-serving assessment of what went wrong at Chancellorsville is largely dismissed in the text for what it was, a disgraced commander seeking to scapegoat others for his own profound leadership failures. Though the overall result of the Chancellorsville Campaign, which got off to a tremendous start, was a fiasco for Union forces, Nelson sees the performance of Sedgwick's Sixth Corps as the one shining light. "Success" at Fredericksburg was arguably not terribly impressive given how thinly the defenders were distributed in comparison to the previous December, but the breakthrough forced Lee to detach a total of seven brigades (in two stages) to contain Sedgwick's advance and keep it away from the rear of Lee's main forces facing Hooker. In Nelson's view, this was the moment for Hooker's forces to resume the offensive against an even more diminished foe, but instead Hooker refused to risk leaving his fortified bridgehead north of Chancellorsville. Curiously, Nelson is not critical of Sedgwick's failure to adequately cover his southern flank and rear as Sixth Corps pressed westward toward Salem Church, an oversight that allowed Early's Division to return to the scene, reclaim the high ground above Fredericksburg, and threaten the Sixth Corps spearhead's sole remaining line of retreat and communications (the floating bridges below Banks' Ford). Also, to be more convincing, Nelson's claim that Sedgwick's attacking success at Fredericksburg created a larger sense of confidence that carried over to Gettysburg could have used more development.

In addition to providing arguably the literature's best tactical-level discussion of events east of Chancellorsville, Erik Nelson's study of Second Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and Banks' Ford strongly argues for greater recognition and appreciation of a sector of the battlefield that produced a significant proportion of the combined casualties suffered during the first week of May 1863 and gifted the Union army commander with a golden opportunity to reclaim squandered initiative in a campaign he had no business losing after such a promising start. Highly recommended.

Additional Notes:
1 - The site review of that earlier title can be found here. Both books cover the same series of topics in very fine fashion overall and preferring one or the other might best be judged a matter of taste. If you have a deep interest in the topic there's no reason not to read both. Generally speaking, both works devote a great deal of space to the initial river crossings, both offer excellent tactical discussion of the various engagements, and both emphasize human and technological communication breakdowns and confusion as substantially hindering coordination between Hooker and Sedgwick. Mackowski and White focus more than Nelson does on praising Cadmus Wilcox's noteworthy efforts in organizing and situating a blocking force to stop Sedgwick's advance toward Salem Church, and they are much more critical of Sedgwick's post-breakthrough leadership (which they deemed overcautious in both allowing Early to escape relatively intact and employing an unnecessary delay in organizing the Sixth Corps order of march for its westward advance). Nelson's analysis of the former is not of a reproving nature, and the latter point does not enter into his own discussion as a matter of pointed criticism. Nelson's map coverage is the more thorough of the two.
2 - For future reference purposes, the artillery data presented throughout the main text is also compiled into a helpful appendix. The appendix section also contains orders of battle as well as analytical discussion of the Fredericksburg flag of truce controversy that dogged those involved with it and complicated future historical interpretation of the battle.

Review: "A Grand Opening Squandered: The Battle for Petersburg, June 15-18, 1864" by Sean Michael Chick

[A Grand Opening Squandered: The Battle for Petersburg, June 15-18, 1864 by Sean Michael Chick (Savas Beatie, 2025). Softcover, 7 maps, photos, illustrations, appendix section, orders of battle, reading list. Pages:xxiii,167. ISBN:978-1-61121-721-6. $16.95]

Much has been made of the Army of the Potomac's skillfully staged and practically unopposed mid-June 1864 crossing of the James River, a smoothly run operational movement that constituted a stolen march on an opponent (Army of Northern Virginia commander Robert E. Lee) who had up to that point proved consistently adept at meeting marches around his eastern flank. In truth, however, that newly seized freedom of movement and the advantages it conferred mattered little if its immediate goal, the rapid capture of Petersburg, proved unattainable. Indeed, the inability of Union forces to sweep aside the Cockade City's small garrison and capture the town represents one of the war's most momentous lost opportunities. Instead of isolating Richmond and forcing its evacuation in June 1864, Union failure before Petersburg consigned the war in the East to a quasi-siege that stretched over ten months. That key four-day interval that altered the course of the war in the theater is explored in Sean Michael Chick's A Grand Opening Squandered: The Battle for Petersburg, June 15-18, 1864.

Prior to the crossing of the James by the Union army led by U.S. Grant and George Gordon Meade, Petersburg's stark vulnerability was exposed on June 9 during an operation best described in William Glenn Robertson's The First Battle for Petersburg: The Attack and Defense of the Cockade City, June 9, 1864 (2015)¹. Even though that smaller-scale action drew needed attention on the part of Confederate authorities to the perilous state of Petersburg's defenses, the protective works surrounding the vital logistics hub were still sparsely defended when the main Union forces arrived six days later.

Four chapters, one for each day of the June 15-18 stretch of fighting, finely summarize the action². Supported by an abundance of visual aids (including maps, contemporary artwork, and photographs), those chapters describe both the mad scramble by the Confederates to defend their undermanned positions and the Union high command's struggle to effectively harness its massive numerical superiority into a coordinated offensive. Unable to convince General Lee of the enormity of the danger imposed by the attacking Union host, which captured the eastern end of the Dimmock Line but could not progress from there to fatally pierce the defenders' improvised inner line of earthwork fortifications, commanding general P.G.T. Beauregard was primarily left to his own devices prior to the 18th. In the end, the city was held by the slimmest of margins. Of course, the amount of tactical-scale detail made available in a concise work such as this one (the main narrative runs just under 100 pages in length) cannot match that found in the author's own full-length history of the same subject, but the text nevertheless offers a suitably detailed and insightful higher-level description of the fighting. The text also offers convincing conclusions in regard to what factors contributed most to Confederate success and federal failure.

Much like Thomas Howe maintained decades earlier in The Petersburg Campaign: Wasted Valor, June 15-18, 1864, Chick finds that Union high command bungling proved comprehensively self-defeating (none of the top actors on the Union side—Grant, Meade, Butler, Hancock, and Smith—come across well in this volume). Chick, however, also stresses that the extremely run-down condition of many Union formations deployed against Petersburg, those forces having been horrifically reduced in numbers and leadership over the continuous stretch of fighting between the Wilderness and Cold Harbor, also bears a great deal of responsibility for the failed offensive. That being said, as the saying goes, the other side also had something to do with it. In the author's estimation, Beauregard was the man of the hour, doing all that could have been done against the long odds he faced. At this point Chick has become a leading voice among those rating Beauregard as the Confederacy's second-best general capable of leading armies, a lofty ranking that Beauregard himself (if he were alive today) would almost surely dispute as being off by one.³

Like those at the top of the Union high command, the Confederacy's top general also does not escape censure. With his army backed up to the Richmond suburbs, Lee could not easily risk the safety of the Confederacy's capital by prematurely reinforcing Petersburg with the bulk of his forces, but Chick joins many others in determining that the general, considering the information available to him at the time, was still dangerously tardy in bolstering the Petersburg defenses. Heavy detachments from the Army of Northern Virginia did not make their presence felt until the fighting on the 18th. Their contributions meant than the final Union attacks had little chance of success, but the previous three days were close-run affairs, with Beauregard having the benefit of only scant reinforcement.

A 13-stop driving tour is included in the volume as an appendix, that section also including a number of other interesting side topic discussions. The final appendix delves into some worthwhile debates and arguments related to campaign remembrance and some of its most consequential leadership accomplishments and failures. Though not available at the time of this writing, it is intended that the volume's footnotes can be downloaded from the ECW archive here³.

Sean Chick's A Grand Opening Squandered: The Battle for Petersburg, June 15-18, 1864 represents a promising start to a planned series of ECW volumes covering the entire length of the 1864-65 Petersburg Campaign.

Additional Notes:
1 - Robertson's study commemorating the fight's 130th anniversary is a revised and expanded version of the author's 1989 contribution to the H.E. Howard Virginia Civil War Battles and Leaders series titled The Petersburg Campaign: The Battle of Old Men and Young Boys, June 9, 1864.
2 - Published the same year as Robertson's expanded anniversary edition, Chick's The Battle of Petersburg, June 15-18, 1864 (2015) was the first major study of this part of the Petersburg Campaign since Thomas Howe's The Petersburg Campaign: Wasted Valor, June 15-18, 1864 (1988), another Howard series volume. This ECW series title fixes some errors from the earlier text, improves upon map coverage, and, in the author's own words, allowed him to "reassess things after more thought and research" (pg. 166).
3 - If you're interested in reading more about the author's thoughts and opinions in regard to Beauregard's place in the pantheon of Confederate generals, see his 2022 biography Dreams of Victory: General P.G.T. Beauregard in the Civil War.
4 - It is not made explicit in the text which views were those that had evolved most between the author's 2015 study and this one, and I was hoping that perhaps the notes would provide some guidance.