Adjutant’s Call - April 2021
Circular Memorandum #525 - April 2021
“Grant vs Lee: The First Petersburg Offensive” Presented by A. Wilson Greene
Meet our Speaker A. Wilson Greene
We welcome back our friend Will Greene to the April meeting. Will recently completed a 44-year career in public history as a park historian, battlefield preservationist, and museum director. Greene holds degrees in history from Florida State University and Louisiana State University, where he did his graduate work under the legendary T. Harry Williams. He worked for the National Park Service for sixteen years, was the first executive director of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites (now the Civil War Trust) and is the founding executive director of Pamplin Historical Park and the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier.
He is the author of six books and more than 20 published articles on Civil War history. Greene's latest publication is A Campaign of Giants: The Petersburg Campaign from the Crossing of the James to the Battle of the Crater. This book has won numerous awards including the 2019 Distinguished Book Award in American History from the Society for Military History, the Daniel M. & Marilyn W. Laney Book Prize, Austin Civil War Roundtable; the 2019 Richard Barksdale Harwell Award, Atlanta Civil War Round Table; and the Emerging Civil War Book Award for 2019. This is the first of a projected three-volume study of the Petersburg Campaign from the University of North Carolina Press. Will is now working on Volume 2 and this is his comment on how that is going, “I've been grinding away on research and organization to start writing volume 2 and will be in a position to do so later this year. The amount of material is almost overwhelming. I have about 6,000 5 x 8 cards for Volume 2 thus far and another 5,000 and counting for Volume 3. But I can see light at the end of the research tunnel!”. Greene lives in Walden, Tennessee with his wife, Maggie, and his cat, Ozzie Guillen. Will was our guide on the Petersburg field trip we took in 1998, the Shenandoah 1864 field trip we took in 2013 and on the 2019 field trip of Jackson’s 1862 Shenandoah campaign.
"We Have Done all that is Possible and Must be Resigned: The First Petersburg Offensive"
In the spring of 1864 the new Union general-in-chief, Ulysses S. Grant, conducted a grueling campaign that took the Army of the Potomac from the Wilderness, through Spotsylvania Court House, the North Anna River, and finally Cold Harbor, just ten miles from the Confederate capital at Richmond. Stymied there by geography and Robert E. Lee's stubborn Army of Northern Virginia, Grant undertook a highly risky movement to leave Lee’s front and cross the mighty James River to target Petersburg, the capital's supply and logistics center. This bold maneuver succeeded brilliantly and by June 15 Grant's overwhelming forces were bearing down on Petersburg's outmanned defenses, commanded by General P.G.T. Beauregard. By all odds, Petersburg should have fallen that day, but it did not. Nor did the Federal attacks the next three days succeed in capturing the Cockade City. Will Greene's talk, based on his most recent book, A Campaign of Giants, explores Grant's remarkable shift to the James and the four bloody days of combat that followed, and in the process evaluates not only the prowess of the fighting men in blue and gray, but the generalship of Lee, Grant, Beauregard, and army commander George G. Meade.