In 1994, he published The Battle of the Wilderness (May 5-6, 1864); in 1997, he published The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern (May 7-12, 1864); in 2000, he published To the North Anna River (May 13-25, 1864); in 2002, he published Cold Harbor (May 26-June 3, 1864); and, finally, in 2017, he published On to Petersburg (June 4-15, 1864).
I read them in a slightly different order; the first in 1998, the next in 2003, then 2007, 2010, and, finally, now in 2018. With all but the last the books were published, purchased, and waiting on my shelf for me to read them. It was only with the last volume that I found myself waiting for its publication. And although that was only an eight-year wait when measured by the reading schedule, it was evidently a fifteen-year wait for anyone who was thirstily reading them as they were published.
I can’t say why there was such a gap in the publication of volumes four and five. What I can say is that there are few books that I found myself waiting for with more anticipation.
A Sickening, Harrowing Spectacle
Rhea, in my opinion, does three things really well.
First, he grounds his narrative in the experiences of individual soldiers, often capturing the true horror of their experiences in ways not otherwise felt.
Along Gibbon’s front, Confederate fire swept the ground, preventing soldiers caught between the lines from going back for food or water. Several troops survived by constructing a small fort. Ranald Mackenzie, heading the 2nd Corps’s engineering effort, decided to visit the outpost and invited fellow engineer Wesley Brainerd to join him in a two-hundred-foot dash to the isolated citadel. “Good bye, Brainerd!” Mackenzie shouted as he sprinted into the clearing. Bullets spit up puffs of dust, but the engineer made it to the fort, weaving around corpses that covered the ground.
Cursing, Brainerd followed his friend into the field -- “the wicked whistling of the wind about me forced home to my consciousness the fact that hundreds of unseen bullets, meant for me, were searching for their victim,” he later wrote -- and soon lay gasping for breath next to Mackenzie. Looking around, he saw thick dirt walls with holes for muskets a few feet from the top. Two ragged yellow scars of dirt, one in front of him and one in his rear -- the main Confederate and Union entrenchments -- stretched north and south into the distance. Smoke billowed from the earthworks, musketry rattled without interruption, but not a living soul was visible. “Groups of bodies lay scattered along to the far distance,” Brainerd remembered. “Silent and motionless they lay in all conceivable shapes and positions.” Nearby was a form that he identified as Colonel Peter A. Porter of the 8th New York Heavy Artillery, shot down during the charge on June 3. “I knew him by his uniform and stout person, bloated and disfigured though he was, his arms uplifted, his legs stretched out, his blackened face with white foam oozing from his mouth, turned upward toward the blazing, scorching June sun,” Brainerd wrote. “Around him in different stages of decomposition lay the bodies of the brave men who had died in the vain effort to recover his dead body. It was indeed a sickening, harrowing spectacle.” Darting back, Brainerd and Mackenzie were greeted with cheers from their friends behind the main Union line.
Stories like these abound in Rhea’s narrative -- and not just in this latest and last volume. They provide an honest and often visceral lens on the reality of these situations. It is history, yes, but history experienced by real people, people not wholly unlike the people now reading about it.
And the people in question often did extraordinary things. Battlefield heroism is commonplace, but so are feats of unrivaled engineering and expertise.
The floating bridge was completed by midnight, seven hours after work on it had commenced. It was two thousand feet long, ten feet wide, and rested on 101 wooden pontoons spaced twenty feet apart, from center to center, and anchored in place. “The flooring system provided a wearing surface of chess, wooden planks 12 inches wide by 1 1/2 inches thick, laid on 5 ‘balks’ (stringers) 5 inches square,” an engineer reported. A newsman estimated that the bridge’s floor floated two feet above the water and was sufficiently wide for twelve men or five horses to cross abreast. It was the longest bridge of its type built to date. Assistant War Secretary Dana considered the bridge “unprecedented in military annals, except, perhaps, by that of Xerxes, being nearly seven hundred yards long.” Lyman surmised that “in civil life, if a bridge of this length were to be built over a river with a swift current and having a maximum depth of eighty-five feet, they would allow two or three months for the making of plans and collecting of material. Then not less than a year to build it.”
And the Union Army built it in seven hours.
A Desperate Undertaking
The second thing that Rhea does really well is reveal the slow game of cat and mouse that was infantry tactics in the American Civil War. As much as this series of books are focused on the battles, they are just as much focused on the time between the battles, the constant and relentless jockeying for position that both armies endured as they danced with one another over the Virginia countryside.
Nowhere is the dependence on hour-by-hour reconnaissance and decision-making more apparent than in Grant’s final sweep across the James River and to the south of Richmond.
Near noon Lee received copies of the various dispatches Beauregard had sent to Bragg. The appearance of Federal troops in front of Petersburg was disturbing, although the source of the invaders was still not evident from these communications. Since Beauregard’s reports neglected to identify the units missing in front of the Dimmock Line, Lee had no way of knowing whether they belonged to the Army of the Potomac or if Butler was simply reprising his failed offensive of June 9. In any event, Lee informed Bragg, he had directed Hoke that morning to report to Beauregard and recommended that Ransom be sent forward as well.
Lots of names and references in that short excerpt, but know that the situation it briefly describes is a dangerous one. Numerically inferior Confederate forces are scattered over a large area, trying to keep at least three larger Union armies at bay -- Grant’s Army of the Potomac, which has just quietly disengaged itself from its trenches at Cold Harbor, Butler’s Army of the James, which was more or less bottlenecked in the Bermuda Hundred just south of Richmond, and Hunter’s Army of the Shenandoah, which was trying to rip up that Valley and keep it from serving as a breadbasket for Lee’s Confederates. In the midst of this danger and uncertainty, Lee has to make a decision.
Lacking definitive information, Lee saw no choice but to stay put and bar Grant’s access to Richmond. The disparity between Grant’s and Lee’s numbers was daunting. Reduced now to two corps -- Anderson’s and Hill’s -- and one cavalry division, the Army of Northern Virginia could marshal at most 30,000 soldiers. If the offensive against Petersburg involved Butler and Smith alone, Grant retained the capacity to hurl four army corps, numbering at least 100,000 troops, against Richmond. For Lee to hold them at bay, he had to remain firmly entrenched in his present line from White Oak Swamp to Malvern Hill. Indeed, even if Grant sent an army corps across the James to assist Butler, Lee’s calculus could not change.
They way Rhea tells it, there was nothing else Lee could do. And that, in of itself, is fascinating. So often us moderns look a piece of history and wonder why things had to be the way they were. Couldn’t the figure in question have done something different? Why didn’t they simply do this? Or that? The truth, of course, is often that things happened one way because they had to happen that way. Any of us, placed in the same place at the same time, would have done exactly the same thing.
But not always. Because while Lee is making this choice in his trenches outside of Richmond, Grant is trying to concentrate his forces against Petersburg. And here, it seems very much like nothing was foreordained.
Let’s look first at the Union reconnaissance of the scanty Confederate forces around Petersburg.
But the personal reconnaissance also revealed a fatal weakness in the enemy lines. While Confederate artillery appeared formidable, the entrenchments were thinly manned. The threat to an attacking force came from cannon fire, not from musketry. A densely packed body of assaulting troops would take severe losses, but troops loosely arrayed in a skirmish line stood a fair chance of success. Artillery would pass harmlessly through their formation, and the scant rebel defenders would be unable to generate sheets of musketry that were so destructive of an attacking force. So [Union General William F.] Smith decided to concentrate his artillery near [Union General William T. H.] Brooks’s center, open a heavy bombardment to suppress rebel fire, and attack with a double line of skirmishers. Once these men had overrun the works, the rest of his troops were to follow and consolidate the gains. As Smith later articulated his reasoning, “my best chance of success was to trust to a very heavy skirmish line which would not of itself attract much artillery fire and which yet would be sufficient to do the work if the enemy was not very strong in infantry.”
It was an opportunity to shatter the Confederate line around Petersburg and take the city itself, which would have dramatically changed Lee’s calculus up near Richmond. To be successful, it would be necessary for Smith to receive immediate support from one of the Union Army’s other infantry corps. General Winfield S. Hancock’s II Corps had, in the mind of the army’s commanding general, been given that very task, but, through miscommunication and battlefield confusion, that order never actually reached Hancock. While Smith was laying his plans, Hancock was, in fact, moving his corps in the wrong direction.
[Hancock] still had no inkling that he was expected to move into position to support Smith’s assault on the Dimmock Line [protecting Petersburg]. Indeed, the 2nd Corps, now divided into two segments, was veering northwestward, heading more toward City Point than toward Petersburg. “Sent wrong [by his initial orders],” Hancock’s aide Francis Walker later observed, “his line of march increased by several miles, after his time of starting had been delayed several hours, Hancock led forward the corps without an intimation that his presence was to be imperatively required at Petersburg. So far as he had any reason to think, it would be sufficient if he brought up his corps, in good condition, in season to go fairly into camp by nightfall.”
And to complicate matters even further, Grant himself, viewing the field of operations around Petersburg from the bluffs around City Point, attempted to send fresh orders to Hancock’s lead division commander, General John Gibbon, urging him and the rest of Hancock’s corps forward to support Smith’s assault. These orders were intercepted by Smith himself, who added his encouragement for the opportunity that presented itself and then, believing that Hancock’s corps was nearby, decided to delay his assault until Hancock could move into position.
Smith was anxious to attack, but Grant’s letter alerting him to Hancock’s proximity induced him to wait. His troops had been deployed in front of the Dimmock Line for six hours now, pelted by continuous artillery fire. Waiting another hour or two would be excruciating, but the gain could be enormous. If the 2nd Corps joined him in time for the assault, victory would be certain. And so Smith decided to bide his time.
But, of course, Hancock was not an hour or two away. Although Hancock, upon finally receiving Grant’s order to support Smith, did everything he could do to comply, the fact was that this was the first he had heard of this need, and his divisions were scattered and very nearly lost, armed with faulty maps of the unfamiliar Virginia countryside.
At this juncture, [General Francis C.] Barlow [, commander of Hancock’s first division,] was entirely in the dark, relying on oral instructions that [Captain Charles] Bird had received from [Lt. Colonel Charles H.] Morgan. His troops were exhausted -- they had “pushed on as rapidly as possible, making only one short halt” -- and he was lost. “I had no means, whatsoever, of knowing where were the ‘outer works,’ which Gen. Smith had captured, or where Smith’s lines were,’ he later wrote.
Eventually, with nightfall approaching, Smith would launch his assault on the Dimmock Line without knowing where Hancock’s corps was or if it would be in a position to support him.
Soon after 7:00 P.M. Smith’s division and brigade heads sprang into action. “Don’t be afraid,” [Brigadier General Gilman] Marston assured his troops. “We are ten to one of the enemy.” [Brigadier General Hiram] Burnham gathered his regimental commanders behind the skirmish line and gave directions for the impending assault. During the conference, a cannonball ricocheted into Major Charles E. Pruyn of the 118th New York, tearing a hole through his chest and killing him instantly. Bringing the conference to an abrupt close, the officers returned to their units. The division’s skirmish line was to spearhead the attack, each man five paces from his closest companion, while the remainder of the brigades followed close behind. “It was a dare-devil piece of work at best,” an officer recalled. “It seemed like a desperate undertaking,” admitted another.
Desperate it might have been, but two hours later the Union forces had overrun and taken possession of more than a mile and a half of the fortified Confederate line. At least some of the Confederates in question were not even regular soldiers, they were civilians desperately pulled out of nearby Petersburg to man the line. Although Smith received reports that Confederate regulars were hastily being sent down from Richmond, at that moment there were no Confederate forces or even fortifications between him and Petersburg. Still, it was now full dark, Hancock still had not appeared, and he was unfamiliar with the ground in front of him. Rather than move into Petersburg, Smith decided to entrench on the line his troops had just taken from the Confederates.
It would prove to be a fateful decision, as during the night the Confederates would entrench themselves, along a new line a half mile or so in from of the Federals. And those two sets of trenches, apparently, would become part of the massive entrenchments that would practically surround Petersburg, and which would be occupied by the two armies for the next nine months.
Smith’s men were relieved that their ordeal was over. “The moon, nearly at its full, cast a mellow light over the scene,” a Massachusetts soldier recalled, “while the early evening dews and the cooler night air was refreshing to men who had been prostrated all day under the burning rays of a hot June sun.” A warrior in the 118th New York later remembered the “lovely moonlight night. The roofs and spires of Petersburg could be plainly seen a couple of miles away, and to our right and rear the lights of the Bermuda Hundred camps were visible.” Another New Yorker recalled how on the “evening of the 15th of June, we stood on the heights, and, by the light of a brilliant moon, contemplated the silent valley, and beheld the nearly defenceless city. Why we did not then go down and possess them, is the question which occurred and recurred times innumerable, during the months of carnage which followed on that line.”
On such decisions the fate of nations turn. Sometimes the poor hand is dealt to you. Sometimes luck, good or bad, affects the outcome. And other times, the winning cards are in your hand, and still you cannot take all the tricks.
His Most Significant Lapse
The third thing that Rhea does really well is put all of this detail into context. Following the meticulous descriptions of the cat and mouse dancing with each other, swapping roles from time to time, and waltzing together down the Virginia countryside, Rhea switches his rhetorical position and becomes the not just the military historian but the military instructor, assessing the strengths of weaknesses of these particular movements.
In doing so, he bases his assessment on Grant’s stated objective or turning Lee out of his Cold Harbor entrenchments, seizing the Confederate capital at Richmond, and confronting Lee on an open field of battle. And from that perspective, he says the the feint towards Petersburg -- whatever its particulate successes and failures -- was unnecessary. The same objective could have been better and more easily achieved by sending Smith and Hancock not across the James and south to Petersburg, but as reinforcements to Butler on the Bermuda Hundred in order to smash through Beauregard's thinly-held entrenchments and sever the single railroad line connecting Petersburg and Richmond and providing Lee all of his supplies.
Within the context of the plan against Petersburg, however, Rhea’s strongest condemnation is levelled against Grant.
Grant’s apparent lack of concern about developments on the ground is difficult to fathom. June 15 represented the culmination of his grand maneuver from Cold Harbor and offered an excellent opportunity to strike a blow calculated to bring the war to a speedy conclusion. The Union general in chief, however, spent much of the morning watching wagon trains cross the pontoon bridge over the James, then hitchhiked a steamboat ride to City Point, where he settled in. He had relegated oversight of Smith to Butler, though not until the afternoon did he attempt to learn what progress he was making. Butler, however, had no idea where things stood, as Smith had not yet communicated with him, and the James commander had sent no one to find out. Coordination from the top -- once again, Grant’s responsibility -- was nonexistent.
Clearly the most important Union command role on June 15 was ensuring that Smith had at his disposal the resources necessary to achieve his objective and that the disparate elements of the offensive were meshing as planned. Astoundingly Grant neither assumed that role himself -- he was, after all, only a few miles from the front -- nor assigned anyone else to coordinate Smith and Hancock. In hindsight his detachment on June 15, compounded by his failure to designate someone to oversee the offensive on the ground, stands as his most significant lapse during the entire campaign from the Rapidan to Petersburg. And it was a lapse that came at the campaign’s culmination, literally denying Union arms the objective they had fought so mightily to achieve during the previous forty-five days.
Read those last two sentences again. His most significant lapse during the entire campaign. This from an author who is wrapping up more than 2,400 pages of historical description and analysis. If someone is to blame for the ten additional months of Civil War conflict and carnage that followed June 15, 1864, it has to be none other than Ulysses S. Grant.
But Rhea is not reflexively attacking Grant because that’s the axe he has to grind. One of the things that makes Rhea so interesting to read is the way -- like an umpire -- he is simply calling balls and strikes as he sees them. There have been numerous times over this five-book journey that I have encountered Rhea’s reasoned and well-supported judgment that flies in the face of the majority of Civil War conventional thinking.
The best example in On to Petersburg of this is his treatment of the protocol-ridden stalemate between Lee and Grant after the fighting at Cold Harbor that resulted in wounded and dying men being left for days in the no-man’s land between the fortified positions of the two armies.
In later years writers criticized Grant as heartless and Lee as too formal. Hancock’s aide Charles Morgan recollected that “it was understood at the time that the delay was caused by something akin to points of etiquette, General Grant proposing a flag as a mutual accommodation, and General Lee replying that he had no dead or wounded not attended to, but offering to Grant a truce if General Grant desired it to attend to his own.” Grant’s aide Adam Badeau blamed the holdup on Lee and sarcastically inquired in his Military History of Ulysses S. Grant whether the Confederate commander’s “military reputation gained sufficiently to compensate for the sufferings he deliberately and unnecessarily prolonged.” The debate also rocked the staid halls of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, where historian John C. Ropes chastised Grant for the “horrible neglect of our wounded men,” and Colonel Thomas L. Livermore took up Grant’s defense, maintaining that the general had negotiated in good faith and that delays in transmitting correspondence “must be laid to the inevitable difficulties incident to the passage of hostile lines, the long distances, the movements of the commanders, and the barrier which darkness raises.” Accusations against Grant more recently surfaced in Shelby Foote’s historical novel The Civil War -- A Narrative, in which Foote accused the general of making a “sacrifice of brave men for no apparent purpose except to salve his rankled pride.” Reviewing the novelist’s work, a student of the campaign pronounced it “an example of the limited scholarship and misrepresentation on this subject that has gone unchallenged and should not be allowed to continue.”
So much for the conventional thinking. What say Rhea?
Grant’s modern biographer, Brooks D. Simpson, probably got it right when he concluded that “neither general deliberately sought to prolong the human suffering between the lines, and confusion, misunderstanding, and delays in communication contributed to the tragedy.” There was certainly ample blame to go around. It was the Confederates, after all, who were ruthlessly killing wounded soldiers and anyone who tried to save them, and Lee made no effort to stop the wanton slaughter. Of all the generals involved in the affair, Grant looks best. As soon as Meade alerted him to the problem, he immediately offered Lee a plan and announced his readiness to accept a reasonable counter-proposal. He and Lee consumed June 6 with a flurry of exchanges that were unduly protracted, not because of stubbornness, but because of honest misunderstandings and the difficulties of sending messages across active battle lines. Lee wrote a response that was genuinely ambiguous, and Grant misunderstood the letter as requiring only that a white flag accompany each localized truce. Lee set the Union commander straight, apologized for his imprecise language, and explained more clearly his concern that the ceasefire be army-wide. Grant again readily accepted this proposal, but impediments in transmission cost another day. Most of June 7 was frittered away finding an acceptable time for recovery parties to begin their grisly work.
I imagine it is hard to write Civil War history without being accused of bias for one side or the other. And although Rhea himself makes a special apology in On to Petersburg for its sometimes lopsided analysis of Union vs. Confederate movements (a remnant, Rhea claims, of a differential in surviving sources from the Confederate and Federal sides of the conflict), I’d have to say I’ve found him to be about as level-headed and fair as they can conceivably come.
It is certainly something I will miss. Sadly, there are apparently no more works coming anytime soon from Rhea’s masterful pen. But he does leave this reader with some kind of hope for the future.
The executive director of Pamplin Historical Park, A. Wilson Greene, is the leading historian of the Petersburg Campaign. He has recently completed the first book of a multivolume study that when finished will stand as the authoritative word on the campaign.
It’s already on my "Books to Get" list.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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