Book Review: 

A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for

Petersburg, Volume 1: From the Crossing of the James to the
Crater by A. Wilson Greene
   

0 C OM MENT S

in  C IV IL W AR B OO KS

This review appeared a day earlier at TOCWOC – A Civil War

Blog.

Greene, A. Wilson. A Campaign

of Giants–The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 1: From the
Crossing of the James to the Crater. (University of North
Carolina Press: June 2018). 728 pages, 34 maps, notes,
bibliography, index.  ISBN: 978-1-4696-3857-7. $45.00 (Cloth)
With A Campaign of Giants–The Battle for Petersburg,
Volume 1: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater,
author and Petersburg expert A. Wilson Greene has started on
his Gordon Rhea-like journey to write the definitive account of
the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, also known as the Siege
of Petersburg.  Volume 1 looks at the first three offensives of
the campaign, from early June 1864 just after Cold Harbor all
the way to the Battle of the Crater on July 30, 1864.  If this
first volume is any indication, Greene’s work will be looked on
as a classic in the field for decades to come.  Deftly discussing
command decisions and their impact on the fighting, Greene
provides readers a nuanced view, never exactly bowing to the
commonly held wisdom on the campaign.  The author deals in
shades of gray rather than black and white, convincingly
painting a picture of what happened, when, why, and how. 
There are certain events which have defied even his ability to
explain clearly due to conflicting accounts, and he clearly states
this the appropriate areas.  Greene ably “fills the niche between
the fine one-volume scholarship of Trudeau and Hess and the
closely focused work of Sommers, Newsome, Rhea, and
others”, creating the first “modern, comprehensive scholarly
study” of the Siege of Petersburg. Future authors will have an
incredible new jumping off point when writing about the events
at Petersburg in June-July 1864.  The wait for Volume 2 will be
difficult.
Author and Petersburg expert Wil Greene is a man ideally
suited to write the definitive account of the Richmond-
Petersburg Campaign.  He has walked the ground in a
professional role for over 25 years, serving at both Petersburg
National Battlefield as well as Pamplin Historical Park and The
National Museum of the Civil War Soldier.  Greene authored a
volume on Grant’s Ninth Offensive against Petersburg
entitled The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign:
Breaking the Backbone of the Rebellion.  It provides
coverage of the battles in 1865 at Petersburg with a main focus
on the fighting at the Breakthrough on April 2, 1865, the last
day of the Siege.  He has also written about the city of
Petersburg itself during the Civil War, in Civil War
Petersburg: Confederate City in the Crucible of War, a
complete war history of the second largest Confederate city. 
Taking all of this together, it seems the task and the man are
paired exceptionally well.
The University of North Carolina Press is one of the foremost
publishers of Civil War books in operation today.  Check out
the UNC Press Blog for updates on upcoming and recently
released books. Wil Greene has made several appearances
recently with ties to his new series, including an answer to the
question of whether or not Petersburg was a true Siege and a
look at how the study of the Petersburg Campaign has grown
since he first arrived at Petersburg National Battlefield in 1973.
The Richmond-Petersburg Campaign was a lengthy one, in fact
the longest of the entire Civil War.  Add to this what author Wil
Greene calls its “complexity” and you have the recipe for a
fascinating story, one which until relatively recently was very
sparsely told or even understood.  This first volume of A
Campaign of Giants covers the first three of nine offensives
which Ulysses S. Grant waged against the Cockade City and the
Confederate capital.  The book begins with a sort of
introductory explanation of Butler’s Offensive against
Petersburg on June 9, 1864, then shifts to Grant’s Crossing of
the James (June 12-16, 1864), continues through the
early Second Battle of Petersburg (June 15-18,
1864) and Battle of Jerusalem Plank Road (June 21-14, 1864),
covers the Wilson-Kautz cavalry raid of late June 1864, looks at
the relative lull from late June to late July as everyone settled
in to the realities of a partial siege, moves on to the First Battle
of Deep Bottom north of the James River (July 27-29,
1864) and ends with the Battle of the Crater on July 30, 1864,
arguably the most famous event of the entire campaign.
When all is said and done, a notable aspect of this book and
presumably the following volumes will be Greene’s ability to
provide a nuanced view of events.  After the Army of the
Potomac left the trenches around Cold Harbor on June 13,
1864, they marched for the James River, looking to cross to
the southern side.  As this was going on, Grant immediately
sent Baldy Smith’s Eighteenth Corps, Army of the James by
boat to Bermuda Hundred, and then on foot to make the first
attempts against Petersburg on June 15, 1864.  Grant had the
four corps of the Army of the Potomac moving in Petersbrg’s
direction after they each crossed the James River in turn,
coming from the northeast to slowly reinforce Smith over the
four days from June 15-18, 1864.  Baldy Smith is often made
the scapegoat for the failure to capture Petersburg on June 15,
1864, when he and he alone could have tried and failed or tried
and succeeded.  Rather than blaming the failure to capture
Petersburg on June 15, 1864 on one person, however, Greene
assesses what went wrong, when, where, and why.  His
handling of the sources and knowledge of the material leads
him to parcel out the blame and ultimately also to attribute
some of it to dumb luck.  Grant and Lee are not represented as
perfect, either.  Lee was “overly conservative” in reacting to
the Crossing of the James, but Grant fumbled as he reached
the goal line of Petersburg.  Meade was “totally absent” from
the decision making on June 14-15, 1864, Butler was
conservative, and Grant was relying on Butler, writes Greene. 
Take these together with rations arriving late, the exhaustion
of Second Corps, Army of the Potomac, the hot and dusty
conditions, and Smith’s Artillery Brigade commander deciding
to water the horses at an exceptionally bad time, and you have
a recipe for disaster.

Not all of the results at the Second Battle of Petersburg were

disheartening, however.  Greene covers the first fights of the
USCT regiments at Baylor’s Farm and in carrying the outer line
of Confederate trenches east of Petersburg.  In these fights,
Hinks’ African-American Division had been “in a sense
transformed” by the fighting, and proved Black men could fight
and fight well.  Ultimately, Greene assigns blame to Grant and
Butler for allowing Lee to reach Petersburg without any real
concerted effort to interpose between Richmond and the former
city.  Without Lee’s veteran divisions serving as reinforcements
directly from the direction of Richmond, Petersburg almost
certainly would have fallen on June 15-18.  Throughout the
Second Battle of Petersburg the behavior of the Union
commanders was mostly passive.  Per Greene, Meade struggled
to coordinate the assaults, Butler “lacked will,” and Grant never
bothered to come up in person.  As others have done, the
author gives P. G. T. Beauregard much credit for his multi-day
defense of the Cockade City before Lee made up his mind
about where the main Union effort would take place.  He
believes Lee performed well, if a little cautiously, during these
events.  Taken all together, Greene’s assessment of Grant’s
First Offensive differs in some respects from other analyses of
the campaign, and his assessment is backed by an array of
accounts.

Grant’s Second Offensive against Petersburg came mere days

after the first, resulting in the June 21-24 Battle of Jerusalem
Plank Road or First Battle of the Weldon Railroad.  Grant’s
absurdly ambitious (Greene uses the term “geographically
ludicrous”) goal was to sidle around the Confederate Dimmock
Line until the Federals reached the Appomattox River west of
Petersburg, thus completely encircling the town from the east,
south, and west.  This would trap the Confederates against the
Appomattox and cutting the number of railroads running into
Richmond down to just one.  As it happened, this would be the
first of many slow, painful efforts to accomplish that goal, and
it didn’t get far.  Grant’s men had been digging in east of
Petersburg, and the works allowed two Corps, the Union
Second and Union Sixth, to move south down the Jerusalem
Plank Road, and then attempt to move northwest in a
coordinated effort to extend Grant’s siege lines and cut the
vital Weldon Railroad, one of Lee’s supply lines into
Petersburg.  In the first of many bright performances during
this campaign, Confederate division commander William
Mahone, a man who knew the ground in this area by heart due
to his pre-war occupation as the Chief Engineer on the Norfolk
& Petersburg Railroad, found a crease between the advancing
Second Corps and Sixth Corps.  In the ensuing combat, three
small Confederate brigades routed the entire Union Second
Corps, driving its men pell mell back to the Jerusalem Plank
Road, cannon and many prisoners of war.  On the following
day, Mahone captured the picket line of the sixth Corps,
manned by men in Grant’s Vermont Brigade, many of whom
would die in captivity at the dreaded Confederate POW Camp
Andersonville. Greene assigns blame all around.  Birney, in
temporary command of Second Corps, did not order his
divisions to keep touch with Sixth Corps, but instead to act
independently.  Sixth Corps commander Wright was extremely
timid throughout the whole affair, his inactivity leading in part
to the twin disasters of June 22 and 23, 1864.  Despite the
massive success, controversy existed on the Confederate side
as well.  Division commander Mahone blamed Division
commander Cadmus Wilcox, the next division to his right, for
not marching to the sound of the guns and making the victory
even more complete.  Greene writes that Lee and Third Corps
commander A. P. Hill realized Mahone’s victory did nothing to
alter the overall picture, but at least it temporarily boosted
Confederate morale.  Greene is higher on Meade in the Second
Offensive, appreciating his aggressive nature, but the timidity
of Birney and Wright combined with the brilliant performance
by Mahone led to a disaster, and Greene calls this the low point
of Federal morale for the entire campaign.  These battles led to
essentially two brigades of Federals being led off to
Confederate prison camps.  Grant finally admitted active
campaigning was no longer in order, and gave the necessary
orders to turn this campaign into a partial siege of Petersburg.

Two other important events occurred during the Second

Offensive.  First, Grant ordered Army of the James commander
Benjamin Butler to establish a bridgehead across the James
River at Deep Bottom, so called because of the depth of the
river at that point.  This bridgehead served as a constant thorn
in Lee’s side for the remainder of the Siege, and was in fact
expanded in September-October 1864, because at any time
Grant could launch an offensive directly against Richmond from
this spot.  The end result was that Lee’s lines would be spread
thinner. The second event involved a cavalry raid popularly
referred to as the Wilson-Kautz Raid.  Wilsons’s Cavalry
Division of the Army of the Potomac, accompanied by the sole
cavalry division of the Army of the James, were ordered to
make a raid on the Confederate railroads coming into
Petersburg from the west.  From June 23-29, Wilson and Kautz
destroyed track and fought running skirmishes with their
Confederate counterparts, nearly facing complete destruction
at the First Battle of Ream’s Station on June 29, 1864. 
Ultimately, though much equipment and some cannon were
lost, most of the cavalrymen made it back to Union lines in
early July.  This raid and its aftermath had a polarizing effect
on the Union high command, per Greene.  Grant and a minority
of others thought the losses worth the cost, while Meade and a
majority referred to it as a disaster.  The Confederates were
overjoyed at the result, another morale boosting victory.  An
interesting point Greene makes concerns part of the reason
why Meade thought it a disaster.  He and Cavalry Corps
commander Phil Sheridan despised each other, and Meade
blamed Sheridan for not properly supporting Wilson and Kautz
with his other two divisions as it became clear they needed
help.  Ultimately, Greene writes, all of the Union command
played a role in the result.  Grant allowed his cavalry to be
divided and defeated in detail.  Meade found out just how
serious Wilson’s predicament was too late to help in a timely
fashion.  Sheridan moved his other two cavalry divisions too
slowly to be of service on June 29.  A major point after the raid
was Confederate accounts of Yankee depredations on civilians. 
Wilson, after being questioned by Grant, of course denied the
charges, but there appears to be some merit to them.  Slaves
also tried to escape with Wilson, but most were abandoned to
their fates and recaptured by Confederates.

Where Greene truly shines is in highlighting the smaller affairs,

especially the fighting from late June to mid-July 1864 in
between the Second and Third Offensives.  The author notes
that Lee’s actions suggested he was NOT resigned to the
ultimate capture of the city, despite the well-known tale about
Grant reaching the James dooming Richmond and Petersburg
to capture.  The fighting at Hare’s Hill on June 24, often lumped
in with the Second Offensive, was actually a Confederate “mini
counteroffensive” if we are being technically correct.  Greene
writes of the another attack near Hare’s Hill, this time by the
Union Eighteenth Corps against Bushrod Johnson’s Confederate
division, on June 30.  He also covers a planned Confederate
attack on July 17-18 which was called off due to deserters
giving up the secret.  These are actions and maneuvers which
rarely make any books about specific battles or offensives, yet
here the author covers them and sets them in the context of
the overall campaign.  It truly makes this book and the
succeeding volumes unique among the literature of the
campaign.  Greene also uses these late middle chapters to
discuss how the Siege impacted civilians, how the drought
occurring at the time made things miserable for soldiers and
civilians alike, and how the Union bombardments of the city
destroyed property and lives on an ongoing, sudden basis with
little to no warning.

Not many know this, but the Third Offensive against

Petersburg, which ultimately resulted in the memorable Battle
of the Crater, was originally conceived by Grant to be a grand
raid similar to what ultimately happened during Warren’s
“Applejack Raid” of December 1864.  Grant then decided he
wanted a massive four corps assault on the Confederate lines
in mid-July.  He shifted back to a massive cavalry raid on July
14, looking for Sheridan to take his cavalry and tear up the
Weldon Railroad for 50 miles, all the way to Weldon, NC.  Both
Meade and Sheridan didn’t like this idea, and Meade wanted to
send along Second Corps if the attempt were to be made at
all.  All of this was discarded for the time being, but it showed
that Grant’s mind was always working, always looking for a
way to solve the various problems with which he was presented
in order to end the siege.  He was the Grant of Vicksburg,
working tenaciously to finish an enemy.  Only here he faced a
tougher foe than Pemberton.  In late July, his mind still
churning, Grant conceived what would ultimately become the
First Deep Bottom Campaign, and it came only two days prior
to the actual campaign itself.  On July 25, Grant designed a
joint infantry-cavalry raid northwest from Deep Bottom to the
south Anna River.  The goal was to destroy portions of the
Virginia Central Railroad north of Richmond.  Ultimately, the
plans made were what Greene says could be charitably called a
“fluid” command environment, were turned into the first Deep
Bottom Campaign.  Hancock’s Second Corps and two divisions
of Sheridan’s Cavalry Corps were to use the Deep Bottom
bridgehead to move north of the James and threaten
Richmond.  Ultimately, after some inconclusive fighting from
July 27-29, Hancock was pulled back across the James in time
for the Crater explosion and battle.

Despite postwar writing, Greene maintains Grant’s first priority

was this campaign, rather than what turned into the Battle of
the Crater.  When Hancock and Sheridan were stopped,
however, Grant kept them in place to draw Confederate units
north of the James.  He had an ace up his sleeve.  Union
Colonel Henry Pleasants, commander of the 48th Pennsylvania,
had used his regiment and others to build a tunnel underneath
Pegram’s Salient, a key feature of the Confederate lines east of
Petersburg. Grant now acceded to a plan to blow up Pegram’s
Salient and attempt an assault immediately thereafter.  The
story of the crater has been told many times, so this will be a
brief recap.  The Union Ninth Corps, consisting of four divisions,
was tabbed to make the assault on Pegram’s Salient after the
explosion.  One of these divisions, the Ferrero’s Fourth, was
composed entirely of African-American men led by White
officers.  Postwar controversy sprung up about this division
being trained to lead the assault, with Meade pointing out and
Grant agreeing that sending these men in first would make it
look like the Union didn’t care about them.  Ultimately, the
three white division commanders drew straws, and the
alcoholic and incompetent one was chosen to lead the assault. 
Greene writes in detail about all of this, ultimately concluding
with some skepticism about the amount of training done by the
USCT regiments in Ferrero’s Division prior to July 30.

Early on the morning of July 30, 1864, the mine was sprung,
completely destroying Pegram’s Salient and resulting in a
massive Crater where it once had stood.  The Union assault,
made in such crazy conditions, in a small area, and with a large
number of men, was uncoordinated from the start.  Once men
began seeking the shelter of the Crater things went from bad
to worse.  Eventually, the Black Division of Ninth Corps was
added to the mix as well, and while they did advance a short
distance beyond the Crater, seem to have added to the
confusion.  Mahone’s Division, as it had done before and would
do again, came to the rescue.  Three brigades assaulted in
several waves, eventually killing and capturing a good many
men who were trapped in the Crater.  Allegations of no quarter
and atrocities were made by both sides, and it does appear
some Black men were killed rather than taken prisoner as they
should have been.  Despite the disaster, Grant was ready to try
again the next day, a fact very few have written about in the
past.  Greene picks up the slack and then some.  Ultimately,
though the flank movement involving two infantry and one
cavalry corps was called off, it shows Grant stayed positive
even in the worst of circumstances.

The first volume of A Campaign of Giants ends just after the

Battle of the Crater.  Ninth Corps commander Ambrose
Burnside’s days were numbered.  And despite some small
successes, Grant was hardly nearer his ultimate goal than six
weeks earlier.  The Confederates had won many tactical
victories, but they had likewise not changed the situation to
their advantage, and they were in mortal danger.
In preparing to write this three volume history, I am certain Wil
Greene ran into a lack of Confederate sources, something every
student of the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign inevitably
encounters.  Where he differentiates himself is through, and I
do not use this word loosely, an exhaustive search through
official archives and private collections to fill the gaps in the
narrative.  The bibliography covers forty-eight pages at the
back of the book.  Some of the fighting was initiated by the
Confederates, an always anxious Lee doing everything he could
to arrest Grant’s initiative.  Greene’s research has better
positioned the author to make sense of why things happened
the way they did.  Regardless of how you feel about the actual
text, the bibliography of this volume and the future volumes
are gold mines for researchers and other serious students of
the campaign.

Greene mentions in his Preface the conscious decision to tread

a middle ground between minute tactical detail and the high
level operational decisions which led to the battles and other
events of the campaign.  While die hard students of the
campaign might always wish for more, this was a logical and
ultimately extremely effective choice.  The thing Greene does
better than anyone else and in some cases for the first time is
to tie together the events of the first three of Grant’s
offensives.  Humans tend to categorize things, and the
Richmond-Petersburg Campaign has been categorized by
battles and offensives.  In this book and the two volumes to
follow, you get the sense Greene will make the transition
seamless, without using hindsight in an artificial way.  I’ve
been struck in studying the events at Petersburg at how often
an offensive very quickly came together, and Greene studies
the planning of the Union high command in just the right
amount of detail to help readers understand WHY certain things
came about as they did.

Veteran students of the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign might

note that this first volume of A Campaign of Giants mirrors
exactly the time frame covered by the Official Records of the
Union and Confederate Armies in the War of the Rebellion,
Volume 40.  Both are interested in events from June 13 until
July 31, 1864.  You get the sense Volume 2 will cover August 1
to December 31, 1864, just like Volume 42 of the  Official
Records, and Volume 3 will cover January 1-April 2, 1865, just
like Volume 46. This is a logical division, though it would mean
Volume 2 would cover Offensives 4-7, with the final volume
looking at Offensives 8 and 9.  Whatever the author decides as
far as divisions into volumes, they will inevitably follow the
excellent standard set in this first volume.
Although the maps do not bear his name, Edward Alexander is
the man responsible for the cartography in Volume 1 of A
Campaign of Giants. Thirty-four maps cover the major
operations of June 13-July 31, 1864.  Key additions to help
readers’ understanding of the campaign vary from the more
obvious like clear maps for the fighting at the Second Battle of
Petersburg to the much more obscure, things like Potter’s
“horseshoes” east of Petersburg or the various Cavalry fights
on the periphery of the trenches.  The maps often go down to
regimental and battery level and contain useful indications of
elevation, a must for the fighting which occurred over this time
period.
Drawing on an exhaustive array of sources, covering the
obscure as well as the well-known, providing a balance
between tactical detail and operational decisions while tying all
together into a cohesive whole, Wil Greene is off to a promising
start with his three volume history of the Richmond-Petersburg
Campaign.  In A Campaign of Giants–The Battle for
Petersburg, Volume 1: From the Crossing of the James
to the Crater, the author gives students of the Richmond-
Petersburg Campaign as close to definitive coverage of the first
six weeks of the Siege of Petersburg as we are likely to ever
get.  Old controversies are studied, but new conclusions are
drawn.  The author doesn’t disappoint in coverage of civilians
as well, providing a thorough look into how civilians caught in
the grasp of this massive campaign suffered as a result. Pairing
the expertly written text with thirty-four maps and other
illustrations, this book is a must have not only for students of
Petersburg, but for anyone remotely interested in the military
campaigns of the American Civil War.