Synopsis
An absorbing story of extraordinary bravery and incompetent leadership based on first-person accounts.
Excerpt
By the summer of 1864, Richmond, Virginia, was a city under siege. As Union General Ulysses S. Grant's powerful Army of the Potomac tightened its grip on the Confederate capital, General Robert E. Lee rushed the battered remnants of his Army of Northern Virginia into the city's outer defenses. Weakened by three years of constant fighting, Lee's army was still dangerous; just weeks earlier it had inflicted horrendous losses on the Federals in the battles of the Wilderness and Spottsylvania. On June 3, east of Richmond near, a tavern known as Cold Harbor, Grant's troops suffered 7,000 casualties in a matter of minutes while assaulting the Rebel lines. Still, Grant's resources seemed endless while Lee's were reduced to a trickle along a tenuous lifeline to his south.
Nestled on the bank of the Appomattox River twenty-three miles south of Richmond, Petersburg was the key to the Confederate capital's survival. Nine wagon roads and five rail-