Trench Warfare under Grant and Lee: Field Fortifications in the Overland Campaign (review)

In the spring of 1864, as the Civil War entered what would be its last year, the opposing armies in Virginia clashed in the Wilderness, about halfway between Washington and Richmond. The battle cost the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia more than 28,000 men killed, wounded, or captured. Soldiers in both armies threw up hasty field fortifications during the battle and strengthened them after the fighting ended. This practice had gradually been adopted in the East for the last three years. The campaign just opened, however—often called the Overland campaign for its progression overland from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor—would fundamentally change the ways officers and men viewed and used earthworks and other field works for the rest of the war.

Trench Warfare under Grant and Lee, focusing on this pivotal six-week campaign, is Earl J. Hess’s middle book of three on field fortifications in the eastern theater. Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War (2005) covered the period 1861–1864, and a forthcoming third volume will complete the study from Petersburg to Appomattox. This book, like its predecessor, is the result of Hess’s indefatigable research in a wide range of sources and his imaginative field study of extant battlefields, and it extends the careful analysis of Field Armies and Fortifications. Hess argues persuasively, for example, that it was the “combination of firepower and artificial construction” of the rifled musket and field fortifications—rather than the power of the rifled musket alone—that dramatically increased a unit’s ability to defend its lines against assault (216).

By May 1864 Federals and Confederates saw the wisdom of constructing first hasty, then more substantial, field fortifications as soon as they occupied a semi-permanent position. Some men had spades and picks, but most of them dug with bayonets, cups, canteens, cooking utensils, or even their hands, and placed logs or fence rails for breastworks atop their earthworks. It was far more common for soldiers to do such work instead of engineers, and they did it well. As one veteran later recalled, “The men enjoyed the novelty of fighting behind breastworks immensely” (35). They would soon rely on them as a necessity instead of as a novelty.

Hess describes “a more intense reliance on field defenses by both armies” once Grant chose to pursue continuous contact, though not continuous combat, with Lee after the Wilderness (205). When Federal columns broke through strong but poorly placed Confederate lines at Spotsylvania, their assault at the “Bloody Angle” nearly wrecked Lee’s army and resulted in almost twenty-four hours’ hand-to-hand combat. Once the two armies reached Cold Harbor—only five miles from Richmond—troops began digging in without orders to do so, as long as there were no orders against it. The extensive system of works in Virginia would become longer and more elaborate after the opposing armies settled in around Petersburg in mid-June 1864. Open field fights would become increasingly rare, as would periods in which lines would be any significant distance apart. The conduct and the very landscape of the war in the East would be determined by field fortifications until its end in April 1865.

There are a few Civil War scholars in every generation whose writings are indispensable to specialists and general readers alike. Their painstaking research and deep understanding form the foundation for a combination of narrative and analysis that makes their books accessible, persuasive, and timeless. This volume and its companions, even more innovative and important than his previous outstanding studies, should give Earl J. Hess his rightful place among the best Civil War historians of our time.