The Gettysburg Campaign

When Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia marched into Pennsylvania in June 1863, five counties in the south-central region of the Keystone State became the first significant area of free soil to experience the destruction that accompanied the passage of rival armies. Despite Lee’s General Order No. 72 that prohibited unauthorized confiscation of civilian property, residents of the Chambersburg area experienced nearly a week of depredations and saw local freeborn African Americans rounded up and sent south into slavery. The major battle around Gettysburg on July 1–3 inflicted massive destruction on the landscape and residents’ livelihoods, in some cases forcing the sale of damaged properties that became the foundation of today’s National Military Park.

The Battle of Fredericksburg

The December 13, 1862, Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, marked the defeat of Union Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s Army of the Potomac by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, an important setback for the Union cause and military effort to seize the Confederate capital city of Richmond, Virginia. The battle and military campaign preceding it, which occurred primarily along the Rappahannock River at the city of Fredericksburg and in adjacent Stafford and Spotsylvania counties, was the most lopsided victory the Army of Northern Virginia achieved during the American Civil War, with the Union Army sustaining combat casualties equivalent to more than double those suffered by Confederates. The campaign also saw the use of urban combat, military occupation, and the direct role of civilians at the center of the November and December military maneuvers around the city, which was positioned approximately equidistant between Washington, D.C., and Richmond. Principal battle locations included the Confederate position of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s corps on Marye’s Heights behind the city, the Union artillery position on Stafford Heights, the position of Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s Confederate corps at Prospect Hill south of the city of Fredericksburg, and the Rappahannock River itself, which was crossed only after Union engineers built a pontoon bridge under fire. The campaign is noted for Union Army shelling of the city itself as a military position, the failed, multiwave Union infantry assaults against fortified positions, and the destruction of property on December 12 as the town itself was sacked.

The Fall of Petersburg and Appomattox

Americans experienced the last months of the Civil War as uncertain and full of dramatic events that together finally spelled the Confederacy’s doom. The Union capitalized on its advantages in manpower and materiel, on the command harmony of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his team, and on the political momentum of President Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation policy to seize the prizes of Richmond and Petersburg and send the Confederate government and Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia into flight. Confederates, confronting shortages of manpower and materiel, debated how to prolong the fight and clung to the hope that Lee’s army would win victories that breathed new life into the Confederate project. President Lincoln framed this last season of war as a moral reckoning with slavery and the moment to advance the work of reunion. The final campaigns were a watershed in the process of emancipation, as Lee’s surrender brought many slaves their de facto freedom.

The Overland Campaign

This chapter recasts the military history of the Overland Campaign in ways that reveal the blurred boundaries between homefront and battlefront. The campaign, which took place in Virginia during spring 1864, began in the Wilderness and ended with Cold Harbor. Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant directed major elements of the U.S. Army in operations against Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The contours of the fighting and its importance were shaped by the constant interaction of free Whites and enslaved African American civilians, men and women, as well as by the national political context in which Lincoln ran for and ultimately won reelection. As part of the campaign’s design, U.S. soldiers invaded homesteads, destroyed the landscapes of towns and farms, looted and foraged what they needed while they destroyed any surplus, and otherwise terrorized civilians by their presence. When the campaign ended, Grant’s forces had pinned Lee against Richmond and Petersburg, eventually leading to the capture of the Confederate capital the following April.

Petersburg Besieged and the Shenandoah Valley

This chapter describes two crucial campaigns in Virginia between September and December 1864. The second Shenandoah Valley Campaign witnessed the destruction of Lt. Gen. Jubal Early’s small army by Union forces led by Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan, while the Fifth and Sixth Offensives of the Petersburg Campaign trapped Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in its thinning lines around Petersburg. The essay also explores the political implications of the campaigns, as both sides waged war in the fall of 1864 with one eye on the congressional and presidential elections in the North. It furthermore examines the destruction of crops and other supplies in portions of the valley as an example of Northern “hard war” strategy, the use of African American troops, and the conditions faced by troops in the trenches. These campaigns marked the beginning of the end of the Confederacy’s capacity to wage war.

The Chancellorsville Campaign

The Chancellorsville Campaign of early May 1863 was one of the most strategic military operations in any theater of the American Civil War. Union Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker and his powerful Army of the Potomac were miraculously defeated by the outnumbered Confederate Army of Northern Virginia under the leadership of Gen. Robert E. Lee and Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. In a daring flank march and attack, the Rebels crushed the federal Eleventh Corps on May 2 and over the next several days hammered the rest of Hooker’s army back across the Rappahannock River. Northern morale sank, Copperheads gained momentum, and German Americans, feeling the sting of nativism, began to question their role in the Union. The initiative in the East once again passed to the South, creating conditions for what became the Pennsylvania Campaign. But Jackson, wounded accidentally by his own men, died, destroying the fragile command team Lee had carefully built over the previous year. His loss was a turning point in the war.

3. 1862

“1862” covers the conscription of Confederate soldiers and the emergence of Robert E. Lee, who assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee won many significant battles against larger Union armies. Both sides experienced heavy losses, in part due to new, deadlier weapons. Soldiers fought for a variety of reasons, and photographs of the battlefield destroyed the public’s romantic notions about the war. While the war was not going well for the Union, a Republican Congress passed legislation that would have been impossible previously. Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation after the battle of Antietam and, by the end of the year, was poised to deliver it.

Prologue

Died: Confederacy, Southern.—at the late residence of his father, J. Davis, Richmond, Virginia, Southern Confederacy, aged 4 years. Death caused by strangulation. No funeral. —Richmond Whig, evening ed., April 7, 1865 The Confederate death certificate given as this chapter’s epigraph was published shortly after General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. Confederate president Jefferson Davis and members of his cabinet were on the run, attempting to make their way to the Trans-Mississippi theater....

The Fall of Richmond, 1865

This final chapter describes Richmond’s last days as the Confederate capital. Union general Ulysses S. Grant continued extending his lines, forcing Confederate general Robert E. Lee to do the same—but with less men. The Army of Northern Virginia was hemorrhaging as desertions averaged 100 men a day. When Grant broke Lee’s lines in three places, Lee had no choice but to call for the evacuation of the Confederate capital on April 2. Lee had decided months earlier to set fire to the tobacco stored in the city. Following Lee’s orders, Department of Richmond commander General Richard Ewell torched the hogsheads. A breeze turned into a swift wind, and before long the city was in flames. Locals, escaped prisoners, slaves, and free blacks looted stores and pillaged government warehouses, enraged by the bounty they discovered there, hoarded during the famine. Mayor Joseph Mayo surrendered Richmond to Federal forces on April 3. The chapter concludes with President Lincoln’s visit to the burned-out capital.

Military Strategy in the Civil War

Despite the absence of a robust and well-articulated conception of strategy, American military and political leaders during the Civil War had an intuitive sense of how military operations should be coordinated with larger political ends. They also shared a general adherence to the straightforward strategic ideas of Antoine-Henri de Jomini, who emphasized the importance of concentrating one’s own military forces in opposition to dispersed opponents. In the case of the Union, however, victory would require not only a more sophisticated conception of strategy that superseded Jomini and coordinated military operations in geographically disconnected fronts but also the practical implementation of such ideas through well-selected subordinate commanders. It would take Ulysses S. Grant until the end of the war to complete all these tasks. In the case of the Confederacy, secessionist leaders faced the challenge of prioritizing different theaters in the face of their material inferiority to the Union. Robert E. Lee chose the plausible strategy of striking directly at Northern public opinion with aggressive operations waged by his own Army of Northern Virginia, but the final failure of the Confederate war effort raises fair questions about whether the Confederacy should have paid more attention to its western theater.