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  • The Army of the Potomac in the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns: Union Soldiers and Trench Warfare, 1864–1865 by Steven E. Sodergren
  • John H. Matsui
The Army of the Potomac in the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns: Union Soldiers and Trench Warfare, 1864–1865. Steven E. Sodergren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8071-6556-0, 315 pp., cloth, $47.95.

Steven Sodergren provides an intriguing study of the Union Army of the Potomac during the last year of the war. Studies of the 1864–65 campaigns tend to focus on either the Overland or the Petersburg Campaign but not both, which makes this study especially useful for understanding the way the army led by George Meade and Ulysses S. Grant waged war in Virginia. The central thesis is based on the changing nature of combat, set first by the intense marching and fighting of the Overland Campaign and followed by the prolonged siege or Petersburg. A month of “frequent high-intensity field combat followed by an even longer period of low-intensity trench warfare degraded” the army’s “will to fight” and then restored it by reestablishing “control over their environment” in a siege setting (11).

Sodergren emphasizes the experience of ordinary soldiers and volunteer officers, grounding much of his argument on a source base of 170 Union combatants, mostly from the northeastern and mid-Atlantic states. If one may resort to an elemental analogy, in the spring of 1864 the Army of the Potomac was an alloy, a mixture of veteran soldiers, long-term garrison soldiers, draftees, and men who enlisted with the benefit of monetary bounties or as paid substitutes. For the first time in Virginia, black soldiers accompanied the main Union army, however reluctant white generals were to use them in combat. Not quite as large as the Union armies that Ambrose Burnside and Joseph Hooker led across the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers, this [End Page 101] army was also somewhat alloyed in its leadership, for though Meade remained its technical chief, Grant, the new general in chief, loomed over his shoulder.

“Hope is a vital element to morale,” Sodergren notes, commonsensically, in the eighth chapter (190). Whether individual hope of survival, of the triumph of the Union cause, of belief that Northern generals’ orders could bring about that triumph, all of those hopes had been dashed by the end of the Overland campaign. Unsurprisingly, after suffering more than fifty thousand casualties in a single month, Union soldiers were now convinced “that the defender would always be at the advantage on a Civil War battlefield” (136). Hard digging replaced hard fighting before Petersburg. Unlike yeomen and planters in the antebellum Southern states, white Northerners did not universally denigrate hard physical labor as fit only for slaves. While neglecting the historiography on Northern free labor ideology, Sodergren joins Earl Hess in noting that whether farmers or mechanics in peacetime, Northern soldiers valued physical labor and took to improving their trenches around Petersburg with a vim.

Once the frenetic pace of marching and fighting during the Overland Campaign turned to digging and sniping in the siege of Petersburg, soldiers’ hope in final victory returned. Whether this hope took the form of belief in a just God approving a just (Union) war, reassuring letters from the home front that family and friends believed in what the soldiers were doing, or the protection of deep holes and dirt berms that trenches provided, hope writ large was restored to the army during the war’s last eleven months. This insight may be added to methods of coping with a harsh environment, identified by Kathryn Shively Meier in her book Nature’s Civil War, which argues for straggling as a method of self-care during the 1862 campaigns in Virginia. The evidence, via increasing desertions, that the enemy army was losing its will to continue the contest provided another key source of hope.

The Potomac army’s opponent as viewed by Northern soldiers is the subject of the ninth chapter. Sodergren acknowledges the simultaneous decimation of the Army of Northern Virginia due to battle casualties and desertions in the face of the precipitous fall of Confederate home...

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