Book Review: Lee Besieged: Grant’s Second Petersburg Offensive, June 18-July 1, 1864

Lee Besieged: Grant’s Second Petersburg Offensive, June 18-July 1, 1864. By John Horn. El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2025. Hardcover, 448 pp., $34.95.

Reviewed by Tim Talbott

The Petersburg Campaign has experienced a wealth of scholarship over the last four decades or so. However, the last twenty years have produced an explosion of book-length studies compared to the preceding two decades.

Books like A. Wilson Greene’s Civil War Petersburg: Confederate City in the Crucible of the Civil War (University of Virginia Press, 2006), Kevin Levin’s Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Earl Hess’s In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications & Confederate Defeat (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), Noah Andre Trudeau’s Lincoln’s Greatest Journey: Sixteen Days that Changed a Presidency, March 24-April 8, 1865 (Savas Beatie, 2016), and Steven E. Sodergren’s The Army of the Potomac in the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns: Union Soldiers and Trench Warfare, 1864-1865 (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), among several others, have all explored previously ignored or under examined topics. These studies help provide a much more complete picture of the campaign’s people and events.

Plenty of excellent traditional military histories have also recently appeared in both multi-volume editions covering the campaign as whole or as single volumes closely examining the nine individual Union offensives during the 292-day campaign. In fact, only one of Grant’s Petersburg offensives still remains without its own informed study now that John Horn’s much anticipated Lee Besieged: Grant’s Second Petersburg Offensive, June 18-July 1, 1864, came to press earlier this year.

As the subtitle for Lee Besieged indicates, Horn spotlights Grant’s Second Offensive. This move, which followed closely on the heels of the First Offensive, witnessed a flurry of action involving efforts by the Army of the Potomac’s II and VI corps to cut the nearby vital Weldon Railroad that ran south out of Petersburg, and if all went well, also hopefully the further Southside Railroad that ran west from Petersburg to Lynchburg.

Known sometimes as the battle of Jerusalem Plank Road (present-day Crater Road), and the First Battle of Weldon Railroad (another would follow from August 18-21, 1864), this action saw its fair share of Federal missteps. Much like at the battle of the Wilderness a month and a half before, both the area’s densely wooded landscape and determined Confederate counterattacks played parts in the lack of Union success. Instead of maintaining contact, the two corps ended up separated in the thick undergrowth. On June 22, Brig. Gen. William Mahone’s division smashed into the II Corps, led at the time by Maj. Gen. David Bell Birney, rolling it up and capturing about 1,700 prisoners. The following day, Mahone attacked the VI Corps, capturing almost 500 more Union soldiers.

One of the things that makes the Second Offensive so intriguing is that the infantry movement toward the Weldon Railroad was paired with a separate cavalry raid led by Maj. Gen. James H. Wilson and Brig. Gen. August Kautz that ranged south and west attempting to wreck the Southside Railroad and the Richmond & Danville Railroad. Both rail lines served as vital communication links in supplying Lee’s troops at Petersburg and the capital at Richmond. While Wilson and Kautz succeeded in inflicting significant damage to the railroads, Confederate cavalry harassed them almost from the beginning of the raid. Aided by local defense organizations, the Confederates successfully defended the bridge over the Staunton River on the Richmond & Danville Railroad.

Along the raid’s route enslaved men, women, and children seeking freedom within Union lines followed the weary troopers. The raid largely came apart as the cavalrymen and the accompanying Black civilians neared their return. At Reams Station additional Confederate cavalry and some infantry routed Wilson’s and Kautz’s horsemen, capturing hundreds of Federals, as well as re-enslaving those fugitives they caught.

Never an easy task, Horn deftly blends the telling of the separate infantry and cavalry actions into a well synthesized account of the Second Offensive. While his primary concern is covering the various tactical actions involved, he never loses touch with the individual officers, enlisted men, and civilians—both free and enslaved—who were caught up in these events. Horn uses their primary source accounts to great effect, and in doing so, helps humanize the story.

Deeply researched, the book contains paged footnotes that add significant information to the study’s main text. Forty maps by noted battle cartographer Hal Jespersen, and like number of photographs and images help readers better understand the events and people discussed. Two appendices, one showing troop strength, casualty, and effective numbers, and the other offering Union and Confederate orders of battle, are both appreciated supplements.

Lee Besieged: Grant’s Second Petersburg Offensive, June 18-July 1, 1864 is truly a worthy addition to the growing body of scholarship on the Petersburg Campaign and will certainly serve as the go to book for this offensive for years to come.