A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg. Volume 1, From the Crossing of the James to the Crater by A. Wilson Greene (review)

A. Wilson Greene’s greatest potential contribution to the field is as profound as it is straightforward; a comprehensive and well-researched campaign study of the military operations that culminated in the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia simply does not exist at the moment. In this first of three projected volumes, Greene ably covers the Petersburg campaign from the crossing of the James to the Battle of the Crater. For scholars interested in a wide variety of topics, there is much useful information in Greene’s volume. For those interested in race and emancipation, Greene ably covers the effect that racism had on military operations, especially in the charnel pit of the Crater, where Confederate troops mercilessly gave Federal African Americans no quarter. Greene also ably covers the effects of military operations on Petersburg’s civilians, but as the title forthrightly attests, this volume is first and foremost a campaign study, and it will unavoidably be of greatest interest to military historians.

The relative lacuna in the literature on the Petersburg campaign (at least compared to the literature on other campaigns of comparable significance) produces few places where Greene can intervene in points of great historiographical controversy. He does, however, flag in his own preface a distinctive assessment of Grant’s leadership, which Greene describes as “in many respects . . . disappointing. Readers may be as surprised as I was to discover the many shortcomings in Grant’s leadership once his troops crossed the James” (xiv).

In a field where Grant’s military reputation remains ascendant—perhaps too much so—Greene offers a somewhat subdued voice of dissent. In Greene’s volume, Grant appears distant and even disengaged, allowing his senior subordinates such as George Meade and Benjamin Butler great discretion in their generally poor management of operational details. Greene is too careful and judicious a historian to come even close to returning to the Grant-as-butcher canard, but he does aver when discussing the Union armies’ missed opportunities to take a lightly defended Petersburg in mid-June 1864 that “it is curious that Grant showed such scant interest in overseeing the culmination of his brilliant maneuver from Cold Harbor” (216). This tone is echoed throughout the volume; Greene modulates that criticism, however, by acknowledging that most of Grant’s biographers have seen this behavior as consistent with Grant’s command style and his responsibilities as general in chief of all the Union armies.

On this point, Greene may underrate the importance of Grant’s responsibilities beyond the Virginia theater. One must remember the sheer complexity of the larger Union war effort Grant had to supervise, with far-flung military forces in disparate theaters operating across a continent. Moreover, focusing on individual command personalities such as Grant seems to be an increasingly arid avenue of inquiry in the first place and reveals a gap in the bifurcated approach that still dominates much military history of the Civil War.

On the one hand, Greene’s analytical focus on the problem of assessing Grant’s performance—even his volume’s title—stands in the battles-and-leaders tradition of Civil War history. On the other hand, the volume also benefits from the obvious influence of social history in the ample space it gives to the perspective of the common soldier, backed by prodigious research in a wide variety of sources. In sum, Greene’s opus is very much of a piece with what I have in other places described as scholarship that focuses on brave men and brave deeds. In its capacious approach, it rebuts charges of romanticization—it is hard to come away from Greene’s treatment of the grisly combat in the Crater as someone overly fond of war—but at its most fundamental level, Greene analyzes the campaign’s...