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  • The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign: Breaking the Backbone of the Rebellion
  • Timothy J. Orr
The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign: Breaking the Backbone of the Rebellion. Second edition. By A. Wilson Greene. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008. Pp. 573. Cloth $49.95.)

A. Wilson Greene's The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign details the little-known climactic assault delivered by the Army of the Potomac against the Confederate entrenchments surrounding Petersburg, Virginia, on April 2, 1865. Originally published in 2000, this latest edition delivers a blow-by-blow account of the harrowing morning attack where Union soldiers from the Sixth and Ninth Corps surged over the breastworks built and defended by Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, obstructions that had held them at bay for nearly ten months. Greene focuses much of his attention on the vicious fighting that occurred at the Sixth Corps's "Breakthrough," [End Page 87] an engagement that began at 4:40 A.M., lasted one hour, and involved some fourteen thousand Union soldiers and twenty-eight hundred Confederate defenders, resulting in almost twenty-two hundred casualties. (Greene uses the capitalized word "Breakthrough" to refer to this otherwise unnamed battle.) Greene also analyzes the ensuing action that resulted in the capture of Fort Gregg, a small bastion defended by about 350 Confederates—mostly Mississippians—attacked by the men of the Union Twenty-Fourth Corps. Brutal combat on the slippery walls of Fort Gregg's parapet delivered the coup de grâce to the Army of Northern Virginia's "last ditch," and it unhinged the Confederacy's tight hold on the Cockade City and ultimately on Richmond as well, forcing Lee to make a weeklong retreat to Appomattox Court House, thereby terminating the war in the eastern theater.

Greene's spellbinding account of the Breakthrough and its consequences enforces a larger point: the final collapse of Lee's army in April 1865 was never a foregone conclusion. Greene writes, "Historians have viewed the final battles at Petersburg, from March 25 to April 2, through the lens of an inevitability that has robbed this bitter combat of its drama and significance." Hindsight has led historians to conclude erroneously "that by the spring of 1865, the outcome of the Civil War had been determined. All that remained was to 'play out the string'" (365). Greene is exactly right. The prevalence of the Lost Cause during the postwar years stressed the disparity in numbers between Union and Confederate armies in the East during the war's final months. It underscored the certainty of Union victory in 1865 to the point that the significance of the final assault on the Petersburg entrenchments became virtually forgotten. To most twentieth-century scholars of the war, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's legions won their final victory over Lee's diehards, not through generalship or élan, but by simply outlasting them. Greene, however, shows that Grant's final assault on Petersburg—that which "broke the backbone of the rebellion," to paraphrase Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs—achieved success thanks to solid planning and celeritous execution. Previous frontal attacks delivered by the Army of the Potomac had stalled or failed outright due to the absence of either, but finally, on a cold, April morning, the soldiers of the Sixth and Ninth Corps proved that discipline, leadership, and courage could win the day. Greene concludes, "The men . . . who executed the Breakthrough did not consider themselves robotic pawns in the achievement of a foregone conclusion. The determined Confederates who defended Lee's works at the Breakthrough, Fort Gregg, and astride the Jerusalem Plank Road had not abandoned hope or forsaken [End Page 88] their desire to live" (365). Thus, even up to the moment of contact, the path to victory or defeat in the East still swung in the balance.

Greene's book is more than just a tactical narrative of the April 2 assaults. He also weaves together a social history of the events leading up to the Breakthrough. He profiles the soldiers of the Union Sixth Corps during their return from the Shenandoah Valley to Petersburg's western breastworks, highlighting their life in winter quarters...

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