Meade

G. Selby John

Description

George Gordon Meade has not been treated kindly by history. Victorious at Gettysburg, the biggest battle ofthe American Civil War, Meade was the longest-serving commander of the Army of the Potomac, leading his army through the brutal Overland Campaign and on to the surrender of Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. Serving alongside his new superior, Ulysses S. Grant, in the last year of the war, his role has been overshadowed by the popular Grant. This first full-length study of Meade's two-year tenure as commander of the Army of the Potomac brings him out of Grant's shadow and into focus as one of the top three Union generals of the war.John G. Selby portrays a general bestride a large army he could manage well and a treacherous political environment he neither fully understood nor cared to engage. Meade's time as commander began on a high note withthe victory at Gettysburg, but when he failed to fight Lee's retreating army that July and into the fall of 1863, the political knives came out. Meade spent the winter of 1863-64 struggling to retain his job while the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War sought to have him dismissed. Meade offered to resign, but Grant told him to keep his job. Together, they managed the Overland Campaign and the initial attacks on Petersburg and Richmond in 1864.By basing his study on the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, original Meade letters, and the letters, diaries, journals, and reminiscences of contemporaries, Selby demonstrates that Meade was a much more active, thoughtful, and enterprising commander than has been assumed. This sensitive and reflective man accepted a position that was as political as it was military, despite knowing that the political dimensions of the job might ultimately destroy what he valued the most, his reputation.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• United States of America
• Diaries
• History of the Americas
• American Civil War
• États-Unis
• Guerre de Sécession

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 16 octobre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781631013287
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

MEADE
CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS AND STRATEGIES
Brian S. Wills, Series Editor
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HAMPTON NEWSOME
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THOMAS E. PARSON
“My Greatest Quarrel with Fortune”: Major General Lew Wallace in the West, 1861–1862
CHARLES G. BEEMER
Phantoms of the South Fork: Captain McNeill and His Rangers
STEVE FRENCH
At the Forefront of Lee’s Invasion: Retribution, Plunder, and Clashing Cultures on Richard S. Ewell’s Road to Gettysburg
ROBERT J. WYNSTRA
Meade: The Price of Command, 1863–1865
JOHN G. SELBY
MEADE
The Price of Command, 1863-1865

JOHN G. SELBY

The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio
© 2018 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Number 2018008752
ISBN 978-1-60635-348-6
Manufactured in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Selby, John Gregory, 1955-
Title: Meade : the price of command, 1863–1865 / John G. Selby.
Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, 2018. | Series: Civil war soldiers and strategies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018008752 | ISBN 9781606353486 (hardcover: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Meade, George Gordon, 1815-1872. | Generals--United States--Biography. | United States. Army--Biography. | United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Campaigns.
Classification: LCC E467.1.M38 S45 2018 | DDC 355.0092 [B] --dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008752
22 21 20 19 18      5 4 3 2 1
To Hampton Newsome—friend, collaborator, and a true scholar
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
  1 From Cadiz to Gettysburg: Meade’s Life and Career up to the Battle of Gettysburg
  2 Gettysburg: Test of Command
  3 The Pursuit of Lee: July 5–14, 1863
  4 Fall Frustration: Meade and Lee Spar in Virginia, July–November 1863
  5 Winter’s Worries: Meade Fights for His Job, December 1863–April 1864
  6 New Commander, Same Foe: The Battle of the Wilderness, May 1864
  7 Grant Takes Command: The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House, May 1864
  8 The “Hammering” Continues: From Spotsylvania to Cold Harbor
  9 South to Petersburg: The Army Moves South and Begins the Siege of Petersburg-Richmond
10 Extending the Line: Richmond-Petersburg Operations, August 1864–March 1865
11 The Defeat of Lee and the End of the Army of the Potomac
12 A Major-General in Peacetime, 1865–1872
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Much help has been received in this six-year journey to understand the leadership of George G. Meade. Librarians and archivists at the following institutions greatly facilitated my primary source materials research: the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the New York State Library Manuscripts and Special Collections, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Heritage Center of the Union League of Philadelphia, the U. S. Army Military History Institute, and the Gettysburg National Military Park Archival Collection. The interlibrary loan coordinator at Roanoke College, Jeffrey Martin, promptly and efficiently procured dozens of books for me, often on short demand. The department secretary, Karen Harris, helped me with Word and Dropbox at some crucial moments in the creation of this book. Departmental student assistants Emma Clemente, Sydney Brennert, Mady Palmer, and Taylor Thompson helped with typing and cataloguing at various stages of the project. Special thanks goes out to former student assistant John Stang, who copied hundreds of pages from the Meade collection on microfilm and prepared extensive lists of the letters found in those pages; and to another former student departmental assistant, Kassie Wines, who took a brief “postgraduation” post as a chief typist for me for two drafts.
Colleagues and friends provided support and encouragement throughout the process. Holding the John R. Turbyfill Chair in History at Roanoke College for six years gave me considerable time and some financial support to work on the project. The college dean, Richard Smith, has shown interest in the work from the day I first described it to him. My colleagues in the History Department have provided steady encouragement over the years, and my former department chair, Mark Miller, has been a champion of the “Meade manuscript” from start to finish. About halfway through my work I discovered the George G. Meade Society of Pennsylvania, and the enthusiasm of the society’s chair, Dr. Andy Waskie, has lifted me every time I felt like the project would never be finished. I especially thank Andy for squiring me around the historic Union League of Philadelphia. My long-time friend John Bierlein has never ceased asking how the work was going, and my former student Andy Blair has been a cheerleader for the project from the day it began.
Special thanks goes out to several people. Laura Dewey took on the daunting job of preparing an index for this long manuscript, and did an outstanding job. The well-known Civil War cartographer, Dr. Bradley Gottfried, took time out from his own busy research schedule to prepare thirteen maps for me; I only wish we could have doubled that number. The team at Kent State University Press shepherded this manuscript into a book: Mary Young, managing editor; Chris Brooks, design and production; and Susan Cash, marketing. Will Underwood, acquisitions editor, has been a steadying influence throughout the long process. Laura Dewey, copy editor, brought consistency, clarity, and prose variety to a lengthy manuscript. The two readers for the press offered numerous recommendations that improved the work; any shortcomings are now solely my responsibility. My good friend and fellow collaborator on an earlier work of Civil War history, Hampton Newsome, read every word of a sprawling draft of this book and made many suggestions for strengthening the book.
Family members bolstered me throughout the long period of reading and writing. Cousins, siblings, and in-laws asked what I was working on, and my family—Deb, Meg, and Jack—patiently bore with my long hours in the office cranking away on the manuscript. They even tolerated some “vacations” to places like Philadelphia and Albany so I could dig into archival materials while they toured the cities. Though they heard more about the Civil War and George G. Meade than they ever wanted, I hope that they see in this book the story of a professional struggling to do the best he could under his circumstances.
Introduction
George Gordon Meade has not been treated kindly by history. Victor of the Battle of Gettysburg, longest-serving commander of the Army of the Potomac, and the fourth highest-ranked general at the end of the Civil War, Meade is largely known today for his crucial role at Gettysburg. After that battle his eight-month stint as commander of the largest army in the Civil War is glossed over as the war narrative speeds to the appointment of Ulysses S. Grant as general-in-chief in March 1864. From that moment until the end of the war, Meade is sometimes mentioned as the commander of the Army of the Potomac, but convenient shorthand usually summarizes the fighting in the East for the last thirteen months of the war as Grant versus Lee.
Meade has always had his defenders, though their names and influence pale compared to that of his critics. His nephew, Richard Bache, wrote a long and flattering biography of him published in 1897. Isaac R. Pennypacker added support for Meade in the short biography of him written for the Great Commanders series. The strongest contemporary case made for Meade came from the labor of love produced by his son, George Meade, and brought to publication by his grandson, George Gordon Meade. The two-volume Life and Letters of George Meade is the standard primary source on Meade, encompassing hundreds of private letters, official documents, newspaper articles, maps, and a narrative of his life and accomplishments. Given its authorship, and the knowledge that the private letters were edited by both Meades, the source has always been used cautiously. The last important source from a contemporary was the publication of some of the letters his aide and friend, Theodore Lyman, sent home while on Meade’s staff from 1863 to 1865. Lyman was a first-rate writer with unusual powers of observation and expression, and his letters home—although not in their original form due to thorough editing—have been a useful source frequently consulted by students of the last two years of the war in the East. 1
Meade has found a few new defenders in the modern era of Civil War scholarship. Edward Coddington began the reappraisal with an essay on Meade’s reputation published in The Historian in 1962 and continued his balanced assessment of Meade in his now classic The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command . Meade’s most ardent champion in the 1960s was the amateur historian Freeman Cleaves, who wrote a laudatory biography entitled Meade of Gettysburg . Archer Jones aided in the rehabilitation of Meade’s military reputation in his award-winning book, Civil War Command and Strategy . More recently, Richard A. Sauers has written two books and an article dealing with Meade, striving to land somewhere between the unremitting hostility of his critics and the glossy sheen of his admirers. Ethan Rafuse analyzes the factors that restricted Meade’s decisions in George Gordon Meade and the War in the East , and in an essay on the Grant-Meade relationship in Grant’s Lieutenants: From Chattanooga to Appomattox . Christopher Stowe has written extensively on Meade’s prewar life in his 200