Yankees in the Hill City
Yankees in the Hill City

Author: Clifton W. Potter, Jr.

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2024-08-30

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1476653895

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With three railroads and a canal passing through the city, Lynchburg, Virginia, was a major hospital center during the Civil War, far from the remote battlefields. A transit camp where Union soldiers remained before being paroled or transferred to another prison opened in June 1862 at the Fair Ground, just outside the city limits. Upon arrival, the sick and wounded were assigned to one of the 32 hospitals regardless of the uniform they wore. Union POWs who died were buried in the City Cemetery by the local funeral service, which also carefully recorded their personal data. Local ministers daily performed burial services for all soldiers, regardless of their race or the color of their uniforms, and all their expenses were paid by the Confederate government. This book presents the complete history of this Union POW camp in Lynchburg: the context of its founding, its operations, and its fate after the war. Two appendices present burial records for the POWs and Lynchburg Campaign casualties.

On to Petersburg
On to Petersburg

Author: Gordon C. Rhea

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2017-09-06

Total Pages: 607

ISBN-13: 0807167495

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With On to Petersburg, Gordon C. Rhea completes his much-lauded history of the Overland Campaign, a series of Civil War battles fought between Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee in southeastern Virginia in the spring of 1864. Having previously covered the campaign in his magisterial volumes on The Battle of the Wilderness, The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, To the North Anna River, and Cold Harbor, Rhea ends this series with a comprehensive account of the last twelve days of the campaign, which concluded with the beginning of the siege of Petersburg. On to Petersburg follows the Union army’s movement to the James River, the military response from the Confederates, and the initial assault on Petersburg, which Rhea suggests marked the true end of the Overland Campaign. Beginning his account in the immediate aftermath of Grant’s three-day attack on Confederate troops at Cold Harbor, Rhea argues that the Union general’s primary goal was not—as often supposed—to take Richmond, but rather to destroy Lee’s army by closing off its retreat routes and disrupting its supply chains. While Grant struggled at times to communicate strategic objectives to his subordinates and to adapt his army to a faster-paced, more flexible style of warfare, Rhea suggests that the general successfully shifted the military landscape in the Union’s favor. On the rebel side, Lee and his staff predicted rightly that Grant would attempt to cross the James River and lay siege to the Army of Northern Virginia while simultaneously targeting Confederate supply lines. Rhea examines how Lee, facing a better-provisioned army whose troops outnumbered Lee’s two to one, consistently fought the Union army to an impasse, employing risky, innovative field tactics to counter Grant’s forces. Like the four volumes that preceded it, On to Petersburg represents decades of research and scholarship and will stand as the most authoritative history of the final battles in the campaign.

The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, May 7--12, 1864
The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, May 7--12, 1864

Author: Gordon C. Rhea

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2005-03

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 0807158143

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The second volume in Gordon C. Rhea's peerless five-book series on the Civil War's 1864 Overland Campaign abounds with Rhea's signature detail, innovative analysis, and riveting prose. Here Rhea examines the maneuvers and battles from May 7, 1864, when Grant left the Wilderness, through May 12, when his attempt to break Lee's line by frontal assault reached a chilling climax at what is now called the Bloody Angle. Drawing exhaustively upon previously untapped materials, Rhea challenges conventional wisdom about this violent clash of titans to construct the ultimate account of Grant and Lee at Spotsylvania.

Nowhere to Run
Nowhere to Run

Author: John Michael Priest

Publisher: Savas Publishing

Published: 2014-06-20

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 1940669537

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At 12:00 a.m. on May 4, 1864, Ulysses s. Grant and George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac began crossing the Rapidan River in an effort to turn the strategic right flank of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Confederate reaction was swift. Richard E. Ewell’s Second Corps and Ambrose P. Hill’s Third Corps moved to meet the advancing Union infantry, artillery, and cavalry in the heavy terrain known simply as “The Wilderness,” a sprawling area of second growth scrub oak, brush, and gullies, interspersed with meandering creeks. Inside this difficult terrain one of the largest and bloodiest battles would consume two days and thousands of men. Nowhere to Run is the story of the men and their officers who fought and died in the horrific fighting. With John Michael Priest’s customary thoroughness, specially drawn maps, and extensive documentation, the reader will experience the battles just as the men themselves saw it, and wrote about it, from their own eyes and their own pens. “Farther to the rear, and closer to Germanna Ford, [Ambrose Burnside’s Federal] IX Corps band serenaded the troops whit patriotic airs while the soldiers waited for their coffee to boil. The veterans did not want to hear the selections the musicians had chosen. They insisted on ‘Home Sweet Home.’ The sight of so many playing cards strewn along the roadside led many of the men in the 45th Pennsylvania (Potter’s division) to think of their souls. Private William A. Roberts (Company K) listened to the melancholy strains of the John H. Payne favorite and solemnly observed veterans, like himself, crying unashamedly.”