Product Description

The Petersburg campaign began June 15, 1864, with Union attempts to break an improvised line of Confederate field fortifications. By the time the campaign ended on April 2, 1865, two opposing lines of sophisticated and complex earthworks stretched for thirty-five miles, covering not only Petersburg but also the southeastern approaches to Richmond. This book, the third volume in Earl Hess's trilogy on the war in the eastern theater, recounts the strategic and tactical operations in Virginia during the last ten months of the Civil War, when field fortifications dominated military planning and the landscape of battle.

Hess extracts evidence from maps and earthworks systems, historic photographs of the entrenchments, extensive research in published and archival accounts by men engaged in the campaign, official engineering reports, modern sound imaging to detect mine galleries, and firsthand examination of the remnants of fortifications on the Petersburg battlefield today. The book covers all aspects of the campaign, especially military engineering, including mining and countermining, the fashioning of wire entanglements, the laying of torpedo fields, and the construction of underground shelters to protect the men who manned the works. It also humanizes the experience of the soldiers working in the fortifications, revealing their attitudes toward attacking and defending earthworks and the human cost of trench warfare in the waning days of the war.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #203024 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-15
• Released on: 2009-06-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780807832820
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Review
"Takes an in-depth look at the war's final evolution of field fortifications and countermeasures, and explores the central role they played in the various Union offensives conducted during the ten-month Petersburg campaign. . . . Impressive."
— Civil War Books and Authors Blog

"[Hess's three-volume] set unquestionably deserves recognition as groundbreaking work on an important topic. It will be the standard for years."
— Robert Krick, America's Civil War

"Humanizes the experience of the soldiers working in the fortifications."
— McCormick Messenger

"The [book is the] result of Hess's indefatigable research in a wide range of sources and his imaginative field study of extant battlefields. . . . This volume and its companions, even more innovative and important than his previous outstanding studies, should give Earl J. Hess his rightful place among the best Civil War historians of our time."
— Civil War History

"Wonderfully written, well researched and easy to read. . . . Highly recommend[ed] to any serious student of the American Civil War. . . . Entertaining and enlightening."
— The Mighty Scourge

About the Author
Earl J. Hess is associate professor and chair in the Department of History at Lincoln Memorial University. Previous books in his series on field fortifications are Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War: The Eastern Campaigns, 1861-1864and Trench Warfare under Grant and Lee: Field Fortifications in the Overland Campaign.

Customer Reviews

Absolutely Required for Petersburg
I agree whole-heartedly with the other three reviewers in giving this work five stars. It is scholarly and breaks new ground on the battles around Petersburg or siege if you prefer. The author takes a rather unorthodox approach to the siege -- one stressing the fortifications and engineering on both sides during the siege. This approach explains a great deal as to why the siege progressed the way it did, and that after Meade's initial failure to seize Petersburg in Grant's surprise move from north of the James River, Lee's army was only going to be beaten by attrition and stretching them beyond their ability to defend their works.

Grant always possessed a superiority in numbers, but overall did not reach that point whereby the Confederates could not effectively man all their fortifications until April 2nd, immediately after the battle of Five Forks. At that point the Sixth Corps carried the Confederate works from West to East, effectively forcing Lee to abandon Petersburg.

One of the most interesting points made in this work is that the Federals were forced to extend their fortifications to the West with protection facing South as well as facing North against the Confederate lines defending Petersburg. The Union Army was constantly threatened by raids from the South and West, and each time Grant sent forces to the West to extend his lines, a battle ensued -- one that generally cost the Federals more casualties than the Confederates, but also forced the Confederates to progressively weaken their lines to meet the extended Federal threat of turning their western (right) flank.

The importance of fortifications came into being due to the armies remaining in close contact with each other. That was a new feature in the Virginia: after Grant attacked South in the Wilderness, from that point forward Grant remained in contact with Lee's army and forced Lee to react to his moves. Attacks were seldom successful against well-developed fortifications, and both sides attempted such attacks although Meade's attacks were larger and more costly. Towards the end, the soldiers on both sides refused to attack fortifications they felt were too strong, and even in his movements to lengthen his lines, Meade could not always depend on his soldiers. This contrasted markedly with the army's performance during Lee's retreat to Appomattox when both armies were in the open. Casualties were incurred and accepted without question by Federal soldiers while chasing Lee and attempting to bring the war to a close.

The only negative I have for this book concerns the maps. The work lacks a good overall map, and in spite of good efforts by the author to dovetail maps with his narrative, I found myself wanting more, and in some cases, more detailed maps showing troop movements in addition to just fortifications. For example, I was not able to see exactly how Mahone approached Warren in his counterattack during the 4th offensive.

I believe this work is destined to become a military classic, and it certainly belongs on the shelf of everyone interested in the military history of the Civil War. It presents information and action analysis not contained in the Official Record, and as such is a very great contribution to understanding how the Petersburg campaign went the way it did.

Highly recommended.

Important Work on the Siege of Petersburg that Includes Action in Richmond
This is Hess' third book on the Eastern Theater, all involving analysis of the use and building of trenches, redoubts and forts during various segments of those eastern campaigns. Hess, who provides more detail on the construction of earthworks than anyone in Civil War literature does, provides an in-depth description of the type of forts and trenches for both Confederate and Union in this 9-month campaign. Starting virtually from the Confederate Howlett lines and the early but relatively weak Dimmock lines around Petersburg, Hess describes the development of the immense construction of trenches and redoubts, later numbering roughly 123 miles. He does this while describing each of Grant's campaigns to take Petersburg and Richmond. The obvious known, the battle of the crater and the late attempt by the Confederates to take Fort Steadman that ended in disaster for both sides, are superseded as Hess takes you further into the detailed on construction of all forts, works, and mining and countermining. What I like about the book are the extensive descriptions of construction, some of which will require a quick study of siege terminology. This includes how these complex works were built. He includes details on not only mining but also numerous countermining efforts. He also describes well the harsh conditions of living in these environs, such as bombproofs used for shelters. Another interesting detail is the unique description of the battlefield operations such as how 'covered ways' were provided developed to protect troops and wagons serving entrenchments and redoubts. The appendixes review the state of the earthworks immediately after the war based on testimony from the period. In addition, Hess discusses the construction of several forts, many that survive today as he discusses their construction with diagrams and pictures. The book is replete with historic photographs that demonstrate how complex these defensive works were for both sides. Hess borrows significantly from Wilson Green's very good book, "The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign: Breaking the Backbone of the Rebellion's", particularly maps. One critic notes that the book is more a micro view of Petersburg that does not provide in-depth analysis of what lead to the overall defeat. However, Hess does provide a brief discussion on the effect of Grant's constant stretching of his line west that not only severely tested Lee's manpower resources but also his engineering ability to maintain competent works. However, that detail is brief since the story is about the works, the campaign actions serving as a backdrop. The primary part of the book is 280 pages, the balance are appendices, references and index.

First-rate Military Scholarship
Earl J. Hess's "In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications & Confederate Defeat" completes a trilogy begun with "Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War: The Eastern Campaigns, 1861-1864" and continued with "Trench Warfare under Grant & Lee: Field Fortifications in the Overland Campaign". Together with his "The Rifle-Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth", these books certainly place Hess in the forefront of military scholars who look at the "how" of battle and not just the traditional "what" and "who". The popular view of Civil War battle is more or less that everybody stood in long lines opposite one another and blazed away until there was no one left standing; Hess's work reveals a far more complex activity.

In the preface to his new book, Earl Hess remarks that "Petersburg was less of a siege than it was a traditional field campaign with some limited aspects of siege warfare." And he amply demonstrates thereafter that although field fortifications played a vital role (or multiple vital roles) in the Petersburg fighting, the campaign was much more than static trench warfare. In the past hundred years there have been only two general studies of the Petersburg Campaign published, Noah Andre Trudeau's "The Last Citadel" and John Horn's "The Petersburg Campaign", both works somewhat limited in their depth of scholarship, plus various separate works dealing with specific events during the overall campaign (most notably Richard J. Sommers's "Richmond Redeemed" and A. Wilson Greene's "Breaking the Backbone of the Rebellion"). Therefore, in the present volume Hess has undertaken to provide "a general history of the campaign to set the proper context for understanding fortifications and engineering operations". He has done an admirable job of crafting a one-volume general history of the Petersburg Campaign, although of course special attention is paid to the use of field fortifications within that campaign. Hess contends that such fortifications were not merely of defensive importance, allowing Lee to long hold out against superior numbers, but also that the rapid construction of field works served a vital offensive purpose as well, allowing Union troops to secure newly-won positions against threatened counterattacks. Although Grant's weary army stumbled badly in its initial efforts to seize Petersburg in June, 1864, in large part due to Confederate use of fortifications, within a couple months Union forces had begun to demonstrate a grasp of a strategy (Hess calls it "bite-and-hold") of making short movements to the left to extend the line in short stages, consolidating those advances by means of field fortifications, that would eventually lead to Lee's defeat and the destruction of the South's per-eminent field army. Hess presents a picture of the lengthy Petersburg Campaign as not being so much a long sequence of Confederate successes and Union failures as instead a series of steps that inexorably led to a great victory by the Union forces.

Against this background of describing the overall campaign, Hess presents the details of how both Confederate and Union field fortifications were designed and built and their preservation into the modern era, and describes the practicalities of living and fighting in those entrenchments.

This is a first-rate work of military scholarship, worthy of a place on the bookshelves of almost any Civil War enthusiast, one of those too-rare books that provide a genuinely new understanding of the past.