Book Review: A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg, Volume Two: From the Crater’s Aftermath to Burgess Mill

A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg, Volume Two: From the Crater’s Aftermath to Burgess Mill. By A. Wilson Greene. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025. Hardcover, 693 pages. $45.00.

Reviewed by Peter Vermilyea

In the pantheon of Civil War battles, Petersburg too often appears as a singular engagement, alongside Antietam, Gettysburg, or Chickamauga. It was, of course, far more complicated than this, a nine-month campaign that reshaped both the course of the war and the military infrastructure of the armies. A. Wilson Greene’s A Campaign of Giants: The Battles for Petersburg, Volume 2: From the Crater’s Aftermath to the Battle of Burgess Mill is a masterful continuation of his comprehensive history of the Petersburg Campaign.

This volume covers the critical months from August through October 1864, a period that witnessed Union Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Fourth through Sixth Offensives against the Confederate railroad hub. Greene’s book, while focused on the strategic and tactical developments of this time period, also places notable events such as the Confederate sabotage that resulted in the massive City Point explosion in August and the audacious Beefsteak Raid in September within the broader context of the campaign.

Greene challenges the traditional depiction of the Petersburg Campaign as a siege, seeing it instead as a dynamic series of maneuvers, offensives, and counteroffensives. In this volume he effectively argues that while Grant suffered heavy losses in his repeated attempts to break the Confederate lines, by the culmination of the Sixth Offensive in October 1864, it was the Army of Northern Virginia that was in a “dire situation.” (495). Simply put, Grant could replace his casualties while Lee could not.

But Grant, Greene argues, was not a butcher, “engaged in some grim game of human arithmetic.” (xii) The Union commander adapted his strategies, replacing frontal assaults against powerful defenses with attempts to cut Confederate supply lines west of Petersburg while forcing the rebels to stretch their defensive line, which swelled to thirty-five miles in length. Confederate General Robert E. Lee recognized this, writing to Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon during the Fourth Offensive that it was “evident that the enemy has abandoned the effort to drive us from our present position by force, and that his purpose now is to compel us to evacuate it by cutting off our supplies.” (163)

While the focus of the book is on the continuous maneuvering and fighting of this stage of the Petersburg Campaign, Greene also analyzes the impact of these experiences on the common soldier. This is especially effective, as he relies on the soldiers’ own words to convey the physical and mental toll brought about by non-stop campaigning. In one particularly telling example, Pvt. William E. Fielding of the 9th Alabama wrote, “We are all completely broken down. I feel as if I was 100 years old.” (65)

Additionally, Greene provides an important analysis of the role of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) in the campaign. While the fighting at the battle of the Crater is the best-known aspect of the USCT’s involvement in the campaign, Greene offers readers a comprehensive understanding of their expanding role in operations of the Union armies.

A Campaign of Giants: Volume Two is a towering achievement of research. The archival and manuscript collections mined in researching the book take up seventeen pages of the bibliography. Yet this is not a dry book. Greene’s writing is sharp, pithy, and occasionally humorous, such as when he describes Confederate Lt. Gen. A. P. Hill’s performance at the Second Battle of Reams Station on August 25, 1864: “No one could accuse A.P. Hill that morning of enhancing his reputation for impetuosity.” (187) Importantly, thirty-four maps help the reader visualize the battles of these three offensives, many of which are unknown to all but the most die-hard of Civil War enthusiasts.

A. Wilson Greene restores this period of intense combat and strategic maneuvering to a central position in our understanding of why the United States forces triumphed in the Civil War. For as Greene concludes, despite the failure of the Union armies to seize either Richmond or Petersburg, “likelihood of Confederate independence diminished substantially between the first of August and the end of October 1864.” (xi)

Peter Vermilyea teaches history in Falls Village, Connecticut, and for the University of Connecticut. The co-director of the Gettysburg College Civil War Institute teacher program, his most recent book, Litchfield County and the Civil War, was published in 2024.