This is another splendid effort by Gordon Rhea, whose string of histories documents the Union army’s advance toward Richmond in 1864. The accuracy in his detail of the daily operations and the usually spot-on descriptions of the campaign’s participants and events equals the author’s typical, outstanding level.
Each of the major actions (e.g., Gillmore’s and Kautz’s abortive assault on Petersburg June 9th; the Army of the Potomac’s well-organized crossings of the Chickahominy and then the James; and the final, flawed movement on Petersburg) is comprehensively analyzed.
The major criticism stems from Rhea’s continually giving General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant the benefit of the doubt during this period, as well as throughout the Overland Campaign as summarized in the book’s last chapter. This is quite evident in the “flag of truce” episode following the June 3rd assault at Cold Harbor. Here, Rhea allows Grant to escape well-deserved opprobrium, ascribing the delay in rescuing the hundreds of wounded soldiers in between the battle lines to the Union commander’s “misunderstanding” of Lee’s requirements. Actually, Grant said that he had “no objection” to Meade’s offering a cease-fire under a flag of truce (with its implication of Union defeat), but Grant repeatedly refused to do so himself, as protocol demanded. Many of his soldiers died needlessly as a result, before he finally got around to it.
Rhea gets it right, however, in the chapter titled “Grant Loses a Sterling Opportunity” in which he concludes that “[r]esponsibility for the Union failure to capture Petersburg on June 15 began at the top.” This contradicts the standard version provided by many Civil War histories where William F. (Baldy) Smith gets the blame for not following up his initial success in breaching the Confederate fortifications. Yet, Grant put the less-than-militarily-proficient Ben Butler in overall charge of the expedition, and he didn’t alert Smith, who had immediate command of the assaulting troops, until the last minute. Worse, Generals George G. Meade and Winfield S. Hancock weren’t even informed at all, and those two could have assured that there were sufficient troops at the front to have taken Petersburg. The author concludes: “Hindsight leaves little doubt that a joint attack by Hancock and Smith during the afternoon or evening of June 15 would have overrun the Dimmock Line and Petersburg as well, achieving the mission’s objective of severing Lee’s supply line.”
And Rhea also provides information about the Confederate reinforcements arriving in Petersburg that same evening, a fact which many other histories ignore or even contradict. Ulysses Grant’s Personal Memoirs claimed that Hoke’s Confederate division appeared a day later than it actually did: “Up to this time Beauregard … had received no reinforcements, except Hoke’s division from Drury’s Bluff, which had arrived on the morning of the 16th.” By doing so, Grant assigned Baldy Smith’s even greater guilt for not continuing his advance into the city that night. At the time these events transpired, however, General Grant felt exactly the opposite. He and his staff had exalted Smith for taking “a line of works there, stronger than anything we have seen this campaign,” and within weeks were trying to push Ben Butler out of command of the Army of the James and to replace him with Smith. For various, unwarranted reasons, the General-in-Chief soon turned against Smith, relieved him of command, and turned him into a scapegoat for Grant’s own failure to capture Petersburg.
The last chapter neatly summarizes the Overland Campaign, describing Lee’s succession of tactical victories, while Grant is credited for ultimately achieving strategic success. A footnote indicates that the Union losses may have been higher than usually calculated, just as the expanded number of Confederate casualties enumerated in Alfred C. Young’s Lee’s Army during the Overland Campaign.