Rindis.com

This is a decent book with good high concept. However, it did not entirely grab me.

The major problem is that Sears is trying to keep track of nearly everyone in the Army of the Potomac from brigadier general on up. While that’s not a large population, it is still a decent number of men, and most of them don’t leave a strong impression. Worse, there are places (mainly after large battles) where we get paragraphs that are very dense with names, attempting to describe who was dead, who was wounded, who was shifted around; it’s very hard to get through these lists, and not, in isolation, nearly informative enough.

But, that is in service to a better goal. In a way, this is a history of the eastern theater of the ACW; it is a history of the Army of the Potomac, which touches just about every other Union army that campaigned in the east. There’s no real attempts to get the soldier’s eye view, instead, this is looking at the upper echelons, as commanders order men into the fray, or—often—are ordered to, and don’t.

And that is valuable; the interplay of the men at top determines a lot of what happens. There is a lot of men leading from the front, and often getting wounded or killed. There’s just as many occasions of commanders not being present at all; sometimes drunk, and always not providing needed direction. A look at some of the staff work to go along with this would be good, but outside of the scope Sears decided upon.

Another valuable thing is that Sears does pay attention to the evolving organization and leadership of the artillery and cavalry, especially just how little attention was paid to both at first, and how long that persisted with the cavalry. He also points up the breakdown of logistics under Burnside after Fredricksburg, and its recovery under Hooker. Sadly, this is not a consistent theme, and it probably should have been.

So, this reads as an overview, but it’s trying to concentrate on a particular subject. Doing that at the level of a single campaign isn’t hard, but that wouldn’t get at the changes over time that he’s trying to show. The book ends up with too many separate threads of different personalities, and other than the top command, it’s hard to keep track of them, and that’s with some of them being familiar to me.