LEE'S LAST CAMPAIGN

by Clifford Dowdey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 31, 1960

Subtitled ""The story of Lee and his men against Grant"" this latest book by the Richmond author of Death of a Nation, etc. is a detailed account of the final military operations of the Army of Northern Virginia, and as such to a large extent is the Confederate counterpart of Catton's A Stillness at Appomatox. The story begins on May 2, 1864, with Lee and his generals waiting for Grant, moving on Richmond, to cross the Rapidan and plunge into the Wilderness; it ends with the disintegration of the Confederacy on the Richmond-Petersburg front and the forced retreat of the Army to Appomatox, where on April 9, 1865, it was officially dissolved. With admirable lack of bias but without Catton's fluid clarity of description, the author, a novelist as well as an historian, writes of confusion in the Wilderness, bloodshed at Cold Harbor, and back-and-forth struggles before Petersburg, but the best of the book lies not in its battle-scenes but in its characterizations. Longstreet, Ewell, A.P. Hill, Stuart and many others ride through its pages, and with them rides Lee, the Field General, here no sacrosanct hero but a man capable of human error. Behind Lee lurk the villains of the piece: exhaustion, lack of supplies, the ineffable Braxton Bragg, and above all Jefferson Davis, Commander-in-Chief of the Confederate Armies, who by running his war on departmental lines and denying needed help to Lee lost both war and country. Never fictionized but written with the smoothness of good fiction, this book is perhaps the author's best to date.

Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1960

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1960

Categories: NONFICTION