HARD, HOT, GRUELING WAR
REVIEWED BY ETHAN S. RAFUSE
Union forces under the overall direction of Ulysses S. Grant conducted against Richmond and Petersburg in 1864-65 was unquestionably one of the most important of the entire Civil War. When it began, Robert E. Lee’s and P.G.T. Beauregard’s commands, though bearing scars from a campaign that began in May 1864 and carried the war to the banks of the James River, were still capable of giving as good as they got. Ten months later, the Confederate high command had no choice but to abandon its capital and shortly thereafter, after a doomed attempt to escape Grant’s clutches, Lee surrendered his army. The campaign for Richmond and Petersburg was a very complicated affair. As A. Wilson Greene chronicles in the massive first entry in his eagerly anticipated three-volume study of the campaign, the first
