Defeating Lee

Lawrence A. Kreiser

Description

The battles and legacy of a hard-fighting Civil War unit

Fair Oaks, the Seven Days, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, Petersburg—the list of significant battles fought by the Second Corps, Army of the Potomac, is a long and distinguished one. This absorbing history of the Second Corps follows the unit's creation and rise to prominence, the battles that earned it a reputation for hard fighting, and the legacy its veterans sought to maintain in the years after the Civil War. More than an account of battles, Defeating Lee gets to the heart of what motivated these men, why they fought so hard, and how they sustained a spirited defense of cause and country long after the guns had fallen silent.

Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1. Beginnings: The Organization of the Second Corps
2. Apprenticeship: The Peninsula and Maryland Campaigns
3. Defeat: The Fredericksburg Campaign
4. Pinnacle: The Winter Encampment of 1863 through the Gettysburg Campaign
5. Rebuilding: Bristoe Station to Stevensburg
6. Carnage: The Overland Campaign
7. Victory: The Petersburg and Appomattox Campaigns
8. Memories: The Postwar Era
Appendices
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Civil War Period
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Cold Harbor, Virginia
• Pickett's Charge
• Fair Oaks
• Battle of Antietam
• Robert E. Lee
• History of the Americas
• Battle of Gettysburg
• American Civil War
• Petersburg
• Winfield Scott Hancock
• United States
• Robert Lee
• Guerre de Sécession

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 19 avril 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253001702
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

DEFEATING LEE

DEFEATING LEE
A HISTORY OF THE SECOND CORPS ARMY OF THE POTOMAC
LAWRENCE A. KREISER, JR.
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
www.iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
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Orders by e-mail [e-mail]
2011 by Lawrence A. Kreiser
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kreiser, Lawrence A., [date]
Defeating Lee : a history of the Second Corps, Army of the Potomac / Lawrence
A. Kreiser, Jr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35616-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. United States. Army of the Potomac. Corps, 2nd. 2. United States-History-Civil War, 1861-1865-Campaigns. 3. Virginia-History-Civil War, 1861-1865-Campaigns. I. Title.
E493.12nd .K74 2011
973.7 3-dc22
2010037579
1 2 3 4 5 16 15 14 13 12 11
To my grandparents, William and Vera Eichenberg and Lawrence and Ann Kreiser
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1 BEGINNINGS The Organization of the Second Corps
2 APPRENTICESHIP The Peninsula and Maryland Campaigns
3 DEFEAT The Fredericksburg Campaign
4 PINNACLE The Winter Encampment of 1863 through the Gettysburg Campaign
5 REBUILDING Bristoe Station to Stevensburg
6 CARNAGE The Overland Campaign
7 VICTORY The Petersburg and Appomattox Campaigns
8 MEMORIES The Postwar Era
Appendices
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
The study of the Union war effort is increasingly filled by unit histories. Books on armies, brigades, and regiments abound, many of them well written and researched. 1 Missing, however, are histories of army corps. No study of an army corps has been published since six written by Union veterans well over one century ago. 2 The oversight is all the more surprising given that many modern-day scholars consider corps as the building blocks of Civil War armies. Corps consisted of two to four divisions and numbered, at any given time, between 10,000 and 30,000 men. Forming the largest organizational divisions within individual Union armies, corps served as the primary means for field commanders to maneuver and fight their forces.
The Union had created nearly forty-five corps by the end of the Civil War, but none achieved the distinction of the Second Corps. 3 Only soldiers in the Second Corps served throughout the war in the Army of the Potomac, the premier Union military force in the eastern theater. The men always seemed to be where the action was the hottest, from storming the Bloody Lane at Antietam on September 17, 1862, to repulsing Pickett s Charge at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863; from capturing the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania on May 12, 1864, to cutting off the Confederate retreat at Appomattox on April 7, 1865. The Second Corps was also larger than any other Union corps, and by the last year of the war comprised one-quarter of the manpower in the Army of the Potomac.
The illustrious record of the Second Corps came at a high cost. Of the 100,000 men who served during the war, 40,000 were killed, wounded, or captured. These were the highest numerical losses of any Federal corps. The Second Corps was prominent by reason of its longer and continuous service, larger organization, hardest fighting, and greatest number of casualties, William Fox, a nineteenth-century authority on the fighting quality of Civil War units, noted. Within its ranks was the regiment which sustained the greatest numerical loss during its term of service; while of the one hundred regiments in the Union army which lost the most men in battle, thirty-five of them belonged to the Second Corps. The reputation of the soldiers of the Second Corps as hard and skilled fighters endures, with historians ranking the Second Corps as one of the elite fighting units of the Union army. 4
Despite an illustrious record, the Second Corps has found recounting only by Francis Walker. A staff officer throughout much of the war, Walker relied upon his memory and the recollections of his fellow veterans to construct a narrative history, published in 1887. Walker sometimes gave way to his personal involvement with the Second Corps, and bogged down in minute details when defending his former command against some perceived battlefield slight. Walker also assumes his readers are interested only in the war years, and so ends his story in 1865. Yet, simply by writing the history of the Second Corps, Walker offers distinct insight into the Union war effort.
Corps histories are so rare for several reasons. Army corps were large groupings of men, and the level of detail regarding their daily existence is nearly overwhelming. Even Walker was at times driven to distraction by the minutiae. He pleaded that among so many thousands of separate statements regarding names, numbers, dates, order of events, juxtaposition of troops, direction of movements, etc., he was certain that he had made some mistakes. He offered that, if so, he had tried his best. Besides the daunting level of detail, corps histories are almost unheard-of because they too easily become tied up in the story of the Union army. Where the army ends and the corps begins becomes almost indistinguishable in describing the outcome of a particular battle or campaign. Even William Fox blurred the lines in summarizing the career of the Second Corps. The history of the Second Corps, he declared, was identical with that of the Army of the Potomac. 5
Rather than simply update Walker, or write a history of the Army of the Potomac by another name, my book takes an analytical approach to the Second Corps. That soldiers of the Second Corps fought from ideological commitment to the Union is the first argument made. These men were not the most likely to become among the most redoubtable fighters in the Union army. Many soldiers of the Second Corps came from Democratic homes and ethnic communities, and they gave little support to the expansion of Federal war aims to include emancipation. Combined with suffering the highest casualty rates in the Union army, soldiers of the Second Corps might quickly have become skittish about seeing the war through. Yet the men reenlisted in large numbers during the winter of 1863-64. That fall, they voted for Abraham Lincoln and the continuation of the war in overwhelming numbers. The commitment displayed by soldiers of the Second Corps adds depth to arguments made by James McPherson and Earl Hess, among others, on the morale of Civil War soldiers. McPherson and Hess have convincingly put to rest earlier arguments that soldiers fought only for their comrades in the ranks, or from misplaced ideals. Rather, soldiers sacrificed much to preserve the ideals and liberties of the American Union for themselves and their families. 6
The next argument made is that the Second Corps reflected well on the creation of military force by the Union. High-ranking commanders of the Second Corps showed a deft touch in balancing unit cohesion and manpower demands. The Second Corps did not always triumph on the battlefield. But the men fought ferociously far more often than not, allowing the Union to ultimately win the war. This is in contrast to the poor marks that historians often assign to the mobilization of the Union army, when they broach the topic at all. Fred Shannon s work on the organization and administration of the Union army, published in 1928, is still a standard reference in the field, speaking volumes to the lack of scholarly notice. 7
That soldiers developed a strong sense of pride in the Second Corps is the last argument made. Identity came through hard fighting. Soldiers even came to claim that the vaunted Confederate Army of Northern Virginia feared facing the Second Corps on the battlefield. The men attempted to maintain their hard-won legacy as the war progressed. They often fell into squabbling, sometimes stridently, over battlefield laurels with other members of the Army of the Potomac, and even other members of the Second Corps. Many of these arguments raged well into the postwar era. Corps identity developed more slowly throughout the rest of the Army of the Potomac. The reasons are several, but mainly centered around poor battlefield reputation and political intrigue among high-ranking officers.
My study quickly had to grapple with whether the Second Corps is a sample providing insight into the rest of the Union army or a subject with its own distinct history. The Second Corps is in many ways a sample because, like much of the rest of the Federal army, its soldiers were white, and they were overwhelmingly volunteers. Soldiers also came from every major region of the Union and from nearly every state. In more ways, however, the Second Corps is a subject. Soldiers were cognizant that they were part of an elite group, as expressed by their battle cry, Clubs are Trump! A reference by soldiers to the trefoil-shaped badge that they wore, the cry also expressed pride in their battlefield prowess; they were the trumps, or the best cards, in