A Campaign of Giants--The Battle for Petersburg

Approx. 696 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 34 maps, notes, bibl., index

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-8481-9
Published: April 2025

Civil War America

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Grinding, bloody, and ultimately decisive, the Petersburg Campaign was the Civil War's longest and among its most complex. A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg offers a gripping, comprehensive history of the decisive campaign in the eastern theater. In this second of three volumes, A. Wilson Greene narrates the critical months from August through October 1864, during which Ulysses S. Grant’s army group launched three major offensives against Robert E. Lee’s defenses around Petersburg and the Confederate capital in Richmond. The Confederates counterpunched after each Union advance and conducted a spectacular cavalry raid that netted almost 2,500 cattle from Federal grazing grounds. But as winter approached, Grant had captured one of Lee’s primary supply routes and extended the lines around Petersburg and Richmond to some thirty-five miles.

Supported by thirty-four detailed maps, Greene's narrative chronicles these bloody engagements using many previously unpublished primary accounts from common soldiers and ranking officers alike. The struggle for Petersburg is often characterized as a siege, but Greene’s narrative demonstrates that it was dynamic, involving maneuver and combat equal in intensity to that of any major Civil War operation.

About the Author

Prizewinning author A. Wilson Greene spent a forty-four-year career in public history, twenty-four of them working on the Petersburg battlefields. His first volume in this trilogy, From the Crossing of the James to the Crater, was published in 2018. He lives in Walden, Tennessee.
For more information about A. Wilson Greene, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"With the second volume of A Campaign of Giants, one of the field’s finest military historians returns to the subject he knows best. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, this book is a must-read for serious students of the war."—Susannah J. Ural, Mississippi State University

"Many historians have written on the complex operations comprising the ten-month struggle for Petersburg, Virginia. No previous work can compare, however, to this masterful account by A. Wilson Greene. Drawing on impeccable research, Greene offers astute observations and a wealth of detail in a compelling narrative. This second volume of planned trilogy makes clear that Greene is writing the definitive history of the Petersburg campaign."--Jeffry D. Wert, author of The Heart of Hell: The Soldiers' Struggle for Spotsylvania's Bloody Angle

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Military History

Volume 2: From the Crater's Aftermath to the Battle of Burgess Mill

By A. Wilson Greene