In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Cold Harbor to the Crater: The End of the Overland Campaign ed. by Gary W. Gallagher, Caroline E. Janney
  • Christopher S. Stowe
Cold Harbor to the Crater: The End of the Overland Campaign. Ed. Gary W. Gallagher and Caroline E. Janney. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. ISBN 978-1-4696-2533-1. 360pp., cloth, $35.00.

For a decade, Gary W. Gallagher’s Military Campaigns of the Civil War series provided the era’s scholars and enthusiasts with a treasure of original research devoted to the eastern theater’s operational course. Since its 1994 beginning, Gallagher’s editorship—enlisting noted academic and public historians to craft wide-ranging essays dedicated to a single campaign under one cover—had spawned nine volumes spanning events from the 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign through the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House. A telling indicator of the series’ value is that each of its works remains important in an expansive Civil War historiography. As initially conceived, books in the series provided penetrating analyses of tactical actions; operational decision-making; and strategic contexts; as well as organizational, political, and leadership variables, adding scholarly gravitas to a historical genre justly criticized for its reliance on hoary, narrative approaches. Yet, over time the series evolved, expanding its aperture to include home-front considerations, examinations of sectional and national memory, and essays discussing the use of battle sites as training grounds for later generations of military professionals.

After a nine-year break in publication, the series makes a triumphant return with Cold Harbor to the Crater. Caroline E. Janney, a rising leader in Civil War–era studies, joins Gallagher here as series coeditor; together with their contributors they have crafted an outstanding volume detailing the conduct, effects, and memory of a two-month period of sustained and bloody conflict in central and Southside Virginia between the armies of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee.

Though space limitations prevent full contemplation of the ten essays contained within, specific themes of perception, performance, and posterity emerge among its selections to engage the reader. Gallagher’s opening piece places Grant and Lee within the context of American (and world) public opinion. By the summer of 1864, each general had emerged as his section’s [End Page 326] principal instrument of political victory; events before Richmond and Petersburg tested the degree of faith held by citizens north and south in their capacity to command. Lee’s reputation within and outside the Confederacy, Gallagher contends, remained robust in spite of his army’s retreat toward its Richmond base, while the Union’s costly Overland advance shone far less luster upon Grant, who, in a two-party system, often became the vessel for the Democratic press in its effort to affix blame on the Lincoln administration for the conduct of the war. M. Keith Harris and Janney explore the intricacies of morale among Confederate soldiers and Petersburg civilians in their respective essays, with the former affirming the seemingly unwavering confidence in ultimate southern victory asserted in Gallagher’s chapter, while Janney largely stresses the flagging optimism and lasting enmity of the Cockade City’s white population after its nine-month ordeal of hard war.

Additional chapters are notable for their depth and perspective. Robert E. L. Krick chronicles the often overlooked effort by C.S.A. authorities to provide the Army of Northern Virginia with thousands of reinforcements as the Overland campaign approached the gates of Richmond. “The new men,” Krick writes, “proved to be valuable ingredients in Lee’s successful defense,” noting that “by June 3 . . . the competing armies stood in virtually the same relative balance as they had on May 4, 1864, prior to the Battle of the Wilderness” (62). In fashioning a thorough examination of the Battle of Cold Harbor’s effects on the Union and Confederate rank and file Kathryn Shively Meier builds on her earlier groundbreaking work detailing soldier survival techniques. Her contention that “we must give Cold Harbor participants credit for actively, and for the most part successfully, surviving the mental strains associated with the battle” adds to a growing literature extolling the resiliency of those who endured one of the war’s most...

pdf

Share