Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee—The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged by William C. Davis (review)

Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant—their names are forever linked as the two preeminent generals of the Civil War. Although their generalships have been closely compared, first with scholarly rigor by J. F. C. Fuller in Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship (1933; Bloomington, Ind., 1957), studies of the two men usually proceed along parallel tracks that never intersect. But in this joint biography William C. Davis provides arguably the best, and certainly the most readable, account of how their careers developed in tandem. Impressively researched in primary documents, especially with material drawn from the National Archives and newly discovered sources about the youth of both men, Davis’s book is a superb example of how a critically informed historical narrative can come alive for a general audience.

In a long work that seems short, Davis structures each of his eighteen chapters with side-by-side comparisons of Lee and Grant from their childhoods to their deaths, both at the age of sixty-three. By hewing so closely to this dual biographical approach, Davis succeeds in drawing out commonalities in Lee’s and Grant’s development that are often missed because of the contrasts in their personalities. For example, each man faced many frustrations and personal failures before the war that steeled him to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the outbreak of armed conflict. Breaking with the customary emphasis on how their generalships differed—Grant, the plodder, inured to heavy casualties and Lee, the daring innovator, who kept opponents off balance—Davis persuasively argues that their successes rested on a common set of traits. Their brilliance was a product of “careful planning, quick reaction to setbacks and the unexpected, and unflagging audacity” (p. 313). In their most stunning victories (Grant’s at Vicksburg and Lee’s at Chancellorsville), each proved a master of maneuver, deception, and decisive concentration.

Much of what Davis covers, especially in the war years, will be familiar to Civil War scholars, but he does so with such a sure touch and command of the material that the judgments are fresh and engaging. Twenty-one maps help clarify and focus his discussions of battles and campaigns. The majority of his conclusions are anchored overwhelmingly in original sources. For example, after a thorough combing of compiled service records and surviving general orders, Davis concludes that death sentences were imposed in Lee’s army at double the percentage for the Union army and that the “rate of desertion in Lee’s army was almost ten times greater than in the Union army” (p. 416). Through similarly exhaustive digging, Davis discounts the many accounts of Grant’s heavy drinking.

Readers interested in Davis’s take on the historiographical controversies surrounding the military reputations of the two men will likely be disappointed. Thomas Buell’s book The Warrior Generals: Combat Leadership in the Civil War (New York, 1997), one of the sharpest criticisms of Lee, is not even mentioned in the bibliography. However, without directly engaging in these historiographical debates, Davis makes clear where he stands. For example, Davis believes that Lee’s decision to move north during his Maryland and Pennsylvania raids was correct, and that any attempt to send part of his army west as the Vicksburg debacle loomed in May 1863 would have been a waste of manpower. If the war was going to be won, it would be in the East and with Lee’s army. Additionally, by looking at Grant’s early 1864 plans (which were scuttled by President Abraham Lincoln) to strike indirectly at Lee by cutting off his supply lines with massive raids into North Carolina and to shatter resistance in the West with offensives from bases in Alabama and Tennessee, Davis concludes that Grant’s strategic vision was...