And Keep Moving On: The Virginia Campaign, May-June 1864 (Great Campaigns of the Civil War)

Not only the election, but appraises the motivation of soldiers, appreciates the impact of the North's sea power advantage and questions convential interpretations; andexamines the interconnections among the major battles, subsidiary offenives, and raids.

The Contents of the book is as follows:

Campaign Plans and Politics
The Wilderness
"Grant Is Beating His Head aganist a Wall"
The Collapse of Grant's Peripheral Strategy
"Lee's Army Is Really Whipped"
"The Hardest Campaign"
"It Seemed Like Murder"
The Campaign's Significance

"The art of war," maintained Lt. Gen. Ulyses S. Grant, "is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on." Grant the bludgeoner, Lee the master of maneuver were, in reality, the two commanders were almost identical in style.

Grant took over the hard luck Army of the Potomac and Lee had his Army of Northern Virginia and that ensured that the spring campaign of 1864 would pit the Civil War's two most successful generals against one another in a duel that became legendary.

The fighting was not restricted to a duel between Grant and Lee, either. In order to maximize his chance of success, Grant put into motion virtually every Union soldier in hte eastern theater. As a result, the struggle between the main armies... eventually dubbed the Overland campaign... was only part of a larger offensive that included major expeditions in western and southeastern Virginia as well as numrous impromptu raids aimed at the Confederate transportation infrastructure. Grant and Lee not only had to take these maneuvers into account, they often supervisedthem as well. It is therefore better to think, as they did themselves, in terms of a single, massive Virginia campaign of spring 1864.

Grant confronted Lee with four subsidiary offensives in addition to the Army of the Potomac's main advance: two in southwestern Virginia against Confederate salworks, lead mines, and railroads; a third in the Shenandoah Valley under Major General Franz Sigel; and a fourth in the James River estuary under Major General Benjamin F. Butler. Grant intended these lesser offensives to divert strength from Lee's army and, if possible, to achieve significant results on their own. He had particularly high expectations of Butler, believing that Butler could threaten Richmond, interdict Confederate communications with the Deep South, and help place Lee at a ruinous disadvantage. But by shifting their outnumbered forces adroitly, the Confederates thwarted Grant's offensive at every turn, defeating Sigel and Butler and administrating sharp checks to the Army of the Potomac in the battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, the North Anna and Cold Harbor.

You really get a feel for how the Virginia Campaign was fought in this book making it a definate addintion to you American History library. The narrative is easy going and the insights are engrossing, making for an informative and educational read.


A compelling, persuasive history of a deadly campaign   October 15, 2002
Bruce Trinque (Amston, CT United States)
12 out of 14 found this review helpful

Mark Grimsley does not seek to break new ground in "And Keep Moving On: The Virginia Campaign, May - June 1864". Up front he states: "This is primarily a work of synthesis. As such, my foremost thanks are due to the authors of the specialized studies on which it is based." These specialized studies are, either through their daunting size or their limited availability, unfamiliar to most persons interested in the Civil War. Mark Grimsley has performed a valuable service for such readers by drawing upon those narrow analyses to craft a comprehensive and lucid narrative about the Overland Campaign and its associated operations. In less than 250 pages of narrative text, Grimsley covers the fundamentals of not only such grand battles as the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor, but also Butler's fumbled thrust towards Richmond, cavalry raids in West Virginia, and fighting in the Shenandoah Valley. Moreover, he relates the pace of military matters to the political background (1864 was a Presidential election year in the North) and to state of civilian morale.

In discussing combat, Grimsley includes sufficient first-hand detail so the reader does not lose sight of the ultimate reality that the contending armies were made up of living, breathing, dying individual soldiers. Nonetheless, the book's primary focus is on the senior commanders. Grimsley states in the preface that he "evaluated the principal leaders as sympathetically as possible, always bearing in mind that they were intelligent men who operated under extraordinary conditions and pressure ... I have encountered few historical actors - even such perennial goats as Ben Butler - for whom I could not muster at least some respect." It seems that Franz Sigel, justifiably in my opinion, fell outside the author's range of sympathy. In writing of the battle of New Market, Grimsley quotes William C. Davis with favor about that hapless officer: "Franz Sigel was not just an incompetent; he was a fool."

The results of these several weeks of combat in the early summer of 1864 are presented by Grimsley as a mixture of limited success and deeper failure for both sides. Grant sought to destroy Lee's army, but he only succeeded in depriving Lee of the initiative while both armies battled each other into stumbling weariness. Lee tired to drive his enemies back from their invasion, but only managed to resist destruction while being driven back to the static defense of Richmond. In an absorbing extension of his analysis of the results of the campaign, Grimsley discusses the historical memory of these battles as filtered through the Lost Cause mythology of the post-war South, which portrays Lee as the flawless soldier of genius and Grant as the merciless butcher who wins by numbers alone. Grimsley rightly exposes such thinking as shallow and inadequate.

In his acknowledgements section, Grimsley pays special tribute to Gordon Rhea who has, thus far, published five excellent volumes on the Overland Campaign. The influence of Rhea's work is clearly evident on Mark Grimsley's book (Rhea's most recent book, "Cold Harbor", was unfortunately published too late to influence "And Keep Moving On"; if it had been available, I believe Grimsley would have rejected tired conventional wisdom about Union casualty rates during that battle and instead would have followed Rhea's illuminating evaluation of the subject), but even an enthusiastic reader of Rhea's histories can find much of value in "And Keep Moving On." The narrative is delivered in an engaging, persuasive manner, moving briskly towards its conclusion without a feeling of being rushed. This volume has found a permanent spot on my crowded Civil War bookshelves, and I can only hope that Mark Grimsley some day may write a similar volume about the Petersburg campaign that followed.