After studying our Civil War and visiting its battlefields since my centennial-era childhood, I’ve spent the better part of a decade attempting to portray the war in the eastern theater, from Gettysburg to Appomattox, with realism, fidelity, and humanity. I sought to free the famous from their prisons of bronze and marble, to let them live again as the complex, imperfect, challenging, and ultimately inspiring individuals they were. The best known demanded a soldier’s appreciation; the half forgotten clamored to be acknowledged; and the common soldier had to be redeemed from cold statistics to be seen again as a being of flesh and blood: heroic, fearful, selfless, selfish, homesick, loyal, murderous, merciful, hot, hungry, bored, terrified, humorous, devout, and profane. Above all, I wanted to be just, to shun today’s pernicious habit of judging the past by our own self-righteous standards. Whether they wore Federal blue or Confederate gray, I tried to understand these men on their terms, to appreciate the values for which they fought so long and hard.
I failed, of course. As a planned three books turned into five, I still could not engage all the men and events wanting resurrection. And no book, or film, or techno-reality can do more than suggest—faintly—what those men experienced. They are beyond our knowing. The best I could do was to rub the facts together and hope to spark the reader’s imagination.
This cycle of books sought to grip the feel of our country as it was then, as an agrarian age passed beyond recall and another era—that of the modern state—rose from the destruction. In a blink, we moved from the rule of the plow to forms filled out in triplicate. I wanted each novel to stand on its own, but if all five are read in order, from Cain at Gettysburg to Judgment at Appomattox, they’re meant to provide a deep immersion, a unified two-thousand-plus-page American epic. As characters wove in and out; as armies moved and the seasons passed (few things are more vivid to soldiers than the weather); and as a sobered country changed irrevocably, I wanted to give the reader a glimpse of the war’s terrible grandeur—a vision not of false romance and sanitized gallantry, but of the haunting reality, the great devouring.
Here and abroad, the 1860s formed a revolutionary decade. These books cover the two years that saw the birth of modern industrial warfare played out on battlefields an army commander could no longer survey from a well-chosen hilltop. From Gettysburg, the last Napoleonic battle, to the final months on the Petersburg front (a war of telegraph stations, steam power, rapid-fire weapons, and vast trench lines—and, for the North, a stunning logistics performance), warfare changed more profoundly than it had in the century and a half from the Duke of Marlborough’s victories to that fateful morning when Harry Heth’s soldiers encountered dismounted cavalry outside a country town in Pennsylvania.
It remains our greatest and most tragic war, the central event of our history. It forged the nation we know and echoes today. If we do not understand it, we won’t understand ourselves.
* * *
Abundant thanks to all the readers who joined me on this journey. I’ll invite you on a briefer trip to Chancellorsville in a few years, through a “prequel.” My editor challenged me to take on Stonewall Jackson, the only other general in that war as unique and ineffable as Grant. I also fancy writing about Reconstruction, an era reduced to clichés in the popular memory, but whether that will come to pass I cannot say with confidence. Often, authors are kidnapped by marauding subjects that descend unexpectedly, demanding a ransom of several hundred pages. And a publisher must be convinced of a book’s appeal.
As for this book, my repeated thanks to the wonderful team at Forge (and Macmillan); to George Skoch, whose maps are superb and vital; to Sona Vogel, who, despite my obsession with accuracy, always discovers a factual error that’s just plain embarrassing; and to Jack Mountcastle, retired U.S. Army brigadier general and stalwart mentor.
Not least, my gratitude goes to Ricarda Huch, an early and courageous opponent of Adolf Hitler whose unique books taught me how to dramatize history.
* * *
As always in these books, I must acknowledge key historical works that proved of particular value as I researched and wrote. I also continue the practice of not listing books cited in the previous author’s notes in this series, simply because the list would grow too long. So you won’t see many of the best-known sources for the Richmond-Petersburg front or the Overland Campaign listed here—they’ve already been credited in the author’s note to The Damned of Petersburg or elsewhere.
Of course, the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion are fundamental, followed closely by the letters home, diaries, private papers, and memoirs. But on these concluding pages I need to concentrate on the debt I owe to contemporary and earlier historians. Reputations ebb and flow: revisiting Bruce Catton after decades of neglect, I was startled by how well he wrote and how wisely. He was the model of a popular historian. Douglas Southall Freeman, by contrast, seems the last of the Lost Cause propagandists, his marvelous research and fluid prose undercut by blithe adulation of his gray-clad subjects. He diminished great men by perfecting them.
Setting those giants aside, many Civil War historians, whether professionals or dedicated amateurs, deserve far more attention than they receive—book sales are Darwinian in the worst way—so please consider the works cited below (fellow authors, forgive me if your books are not listed here—a lifetime is literally insufficient to read everything that’s been published on our Civil War).
The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign, by A. Wilson Greene, is simply first-rate: finely detailed and clearly presented. Briefer takes on aspects of those fights can be found in The Battle of Fort Stedman, by William Henry Hodgkins, who served on Hartranft’s staff; and in the well-illustrated and succinct Dawn of Victory: Breakthrough at Petersburg, March 25–April 2, 1865, by Edward S. Alexander. The Confederate Alamo: Bloodbath at Petersburg’s Fort Gregg on April 2, 1865, by John J. Fox III, is a vivid, peerless account of the horrid fight that let Lee’s army survive that fateful day.
The great historian and battlefield preservationist Chris M. Calkins authored The Appomattox Campaign: March 29–April 9, 1865, which provides the best and most readable overview of the subject. It’s the key book battlefield visitors should read before they retrace the campaign in person (presumably in greater comfort than “Lee’s miserables” did).
For the chaotic “black day of the Confederacy,” Colonel Greg Eanes’ Sailor’s Creek is indispensable. As I wrote the chapters on that multilayered battle, I turned to Eanes again and again for corroboration—and his historical writing uses much the same technique as my dramatization does, switching back and forth between opposing viewpoints. To a remarkable extent, Eanes tells the story in the recovered words of the participants.
Whenever the eyewitness accounts and history texts conflicted (eyewitnesses didn’t always get everything right; they saw only their sliver of the field), I did what I always do and relied on my own military experience filtered through common sense: “What would Private Snuffy do?”
This time around, the unit histories I found most useful were Red Clay to Richmond: Trail of the 35th Georgia Infantry Regiment, C.S.A., also by John J. Fox III, and Irish Rebels, Confederate Tigers: A History of the 6th Louisiana Volunteers, 1861–1865, a wonderful book and a labor of love by retired journalist and defender of the printed word James P. Gannon (please note that Mr. Gannon bears no blame for my interpretation of Private Daniel Riordan).
Another evident labor of love is Major-General John Frederick Hartranft: Citizen Soldier and Pennsylvania Statesman, by A. M. Gambone. Thank the Lord for dedicated historians such as Mr. Gambone who do the grinding research and produce books that honor the lesser-known heroes of the war—knowing that the audience for such books will be painfully limited. Such works contribute far more to our understanding of the Civil War than yet another academic bundle of naïve misjudgments about Gettysburg.
“Happiness Is Not My Companion”: The Life of General G. K. Warren, by David M. Jordan, is a handsomely written testament to the complexity and qualities of a fine soldier who is remembered by most—if at all—only as a savior of the Union left on July 2, 1863. Jordan brings an earnest, talented man back to center stage, an officer who, to his misfortune, fits the cliché of being his own worst enemy (having Phil Sheridan out for his scalp didn’t help, either).
Fighting for General Lee: Confederate General Rufus Barringer and the North Carolina Cavalry Brigade, by Sheridan R. Barringer, and From Blue to Gray: The Life of Confederate General Cadmus M. Wilcox, by Gerard A. Patterson, are both valuable not only for filling in the lives of two gifted leaders and hard-luck souls, but for the way they fill in our sense of command relationships in the Army of Northern Virginia.
Inevitably, I turned to the magnificent and definitive biography Richard S. Ewell: A Soldier’s Life, by the irreproachable historian Donald C. Pfanz. Read it if you want the military backstory of the Confederacy.
Among the memoirs and original sources I haven’t mentioned previously, All for the Union: The Civil War Diary and Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes, edited by Robert Hunt Rhodes, is just plain wonderful as an account of a young man’s unexpected rise through the ranks. Rhodes’ depictions of his regiment’s participation in the Petersburg Breakthrough and at Sailor’s Creek decisively shaped my portrayal of those fights.
Henry Kyd Douglas’ classic I Rode with Stonewall didn’t end when Stonewall was no longer riding. His account of the closing years of the war—and his basic decency—makes this a must-read for students of the war. As for insight into Robert E. Lee and the staff work of the Army of Northern Virginia, two valuable works are Lee’s Adjutant: The Wartime Letters of Colonel Walter Herron Taylor, 1862–1865, edited by R. Lockwood Tower, and Taylor’s memoir, Four Years with General Lee. One only wishes that, at some point, Taylor had really let himself go and given full vent to his feelings. Of course, his careful temperament made him well suited to work closely with Lee.
I will forever be grateful to the U.S. Army on many counts, but in this case for exposing me to every American dialect and giving me the voices from the vastness. And I owe a debt to the 1st Battalion of the 46th Infantry for teaching me that, indeed, soldiers do not rust. I can still feel the German winter rain and recall the bleak landscape as Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Hagler, a true soldier’s soldier, grinned and dismissed our discomfort with a favorite quip: “I’ve never seen a rusty soldier.” Plenty of wet ones, though.
My compliments to the Commonwealth of Virginia (and to Chris Calkins again) for the redemption and preservation of the Sailor’s Creek battlefield as a state park. Some of the key terrain remains to be recaptured and the park deserves unstinting public support.
Finally, my thanks to the National Park Service for all the splendid work its rangers and historians do. I’ve been on many “staff rides” and battlefield explorations in my life, but the three-day “walk” historian Pat Schroeder put together for the Appomattox Campaign ranked with the finest. I shut my mouth and did my best to learn from Pat and his colleagues.
My thanks to all.
Ralph Peters
November 17, 2016