Noah Andre Trudeau

Summary: A day by day account of the final trip Abraham Lincoln took for sixteen days at City Point, Virginia, the headquarters of Ulysses S. Grant, and how this transformed Lincoln.

It was Lincoln’s longest stay away from the White House during his presidency.. It didn’t start out that way. Lincoln, accompanied by his wife Mary, had planned a two day visit to Grant’s headquarters, beginning on March 24, 1865. Lee’s forces defending Richmond were slowly weakening as Grant extended his show more lines. The hope was that the decisive breakthrough ending the war was near. Phil Sheridan was rejoining Grant from the Shenandoah valley. Sherman, further off, was marching from the south.

Lincoln arrived as a war-weary president wanting to encourage Grant to finish the job. He described himself saying, “I am very unwell” and he looked it to observers who knew him. He ended up extending his stay for sixteen days and left a different man both physically and in outlook. Noah Andre Trudeau traces Lincoln’s day by day itinerary against the backdrop of the final days of the Civil War, filling in gaps in the somewhat sketchy outlines of Lincoln’s stay at City Point.

Perhaps the event that changed Lincoln’s plans was Grants repulse of the surprise attack on Fort Stedman on the second day. Grant realized that Lee was fatally weakened and further extended his own lines to the southwest and called on Sheridan to attack on Lee’s right flank. Lincoln attended the command summit a few days later that included Sherman as they readied the attack, encouraging them that “Your success is my success.”

As Grant moved west to be at the crucial point of attack, Lincoln was left with little to do but ride and walk, receive visits and visit field hospitals. Unwittingly, he became a war correspondent, passing news from Grant along to Washington, where his reports were disseminated to the public. In so doing, Lincoln broke new ground in media communications, changing the expectations of a president as public communicator to the nation.

Meanwhile, Trudeau also introduces us to the instabilty and vanity of Mary Lincoln and her dustups with Julia Grant. In the end, she returned early while Lincoln stayed on. The portrait of the First Lady is unflattering, suggesting what Lincoln and others who were around her suffered.

Trudeau covers Lincoln’s visits to Peterburg and Richmond, including the scant provisions for security on the first of these trips. A sniper could easily have ended his presidency right there. Instead, we see a president deeply moved both by war’s devastation and the joyful reception he received from emancipated former slaves.

Lincoln finally departs on April 8. One of the most moving descriptions in the book is Lincoln’s visit to the hospitals for each division, literally speaking to every wounded soldier, some who would die within days while others would carry memories of Lincolns attention and encouragement. Throughout the narrative, we hear of Lincoln’s concern to end the bloodshed. His visit reflected his awareness of the precious sacrifice these and many others had made. This included Confederate soldiers who Lincoln would welcome back to the Union without retribution.

And here we glimpse the transformation that Trudeau so skillfully traces. Lincoln came a weary commander-in-chief. He left anticipating the end of hostilities which came the next day. He returned to Washington committed to the task of reunifying a nation and embarking on a new era in the treatment of former slaves. He was physically restored, filled with a sense of fulfilled purpose, and ready for the new challenge of restoring the Union as a peace president. But first an evening’s entertainment at Ford’s Theater…

Trudeau offers us a well-rounded account of the sixteen days at City Point and how they changed Lincoln. Trudeau also reveals to us the depth of character of Lincoln, battered but resilient, firm in resolve, enthusiastic in support for Grant, and tender with the wounded. We see a man capable of growth as he meets former slaves. And we see a man with a far-reaching, magnanimous vision, one that would die with him. show less

Yet another military book. I have a preference for obscure wars and obscure battles, so I’ve generally resisted detailed studies of Gettysburg, but this one was part of a “Buy Two, Get One Free” deal at Barnes & Noble, so I couldn’t resist. I’m glad I didn’t; Noah Andre Trudeau’s Gettysburg is very good indeed. Back cover blurbs compare Trudeau to Catton and Foote as a civil war history, and I have to concur. Trudeau’s style combines memoirs of individual soldiers and show more civilians from both sides with detailed but easy-to-follow descriptions of the battle.


I assume most here know about Gettysburg – for the benefit of our non-USA friends, here’s a rough summary.


Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia defeat the Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville, leaving Union General Joe Hooker to pull back and refit. Lee is pressured by Richmond to send some of his army west to help out at the siege of Vicksburg, but demurs and decides to invade the North instead. The ANV steals a march on Hooker and heads into Pennsylvania. Hooker eventually follows, but like many Union generals feels he is outnumbered and demands reinforcements. Hooker is relieved and replaced by George Meade. In the mean time, Lee’s army is wandering around central Pennsylvania scooping up supplies and generally making mischief; unfortunately for him his cavalry under J.E.B. Stuart has managed to get itself on the wrong side of the Army of the Potomac and is unavailable to perform reconnaissance. Even though neither side wants a general engagement, a Union cavalry screen under General John Buford encounters a Confederate force under Henry Heth on July 1, 1863. Both sides throw in reinforcements – the Union First Corps arrives and things are temporarily going the Union’s way when another confederate force under Richard Ewell arrives on the north. After fierce fighting, the Federals break and retreat to positions on Cemetary Hill and Seminary Ridge. First day to the Army of Northern Virginia.


On July 2nd Lee tries to outflank the Union left with Longstreet’s corps. The Federals are generally in a fairly strong position, except they have neglected to put troops on Little Round Top, a commanding hill on their extreme left; and eccentric General Daniel Sickles either fails to understand Meade’s orders or ignores them and positions his Third Corps in front of Seminary Ridge instead of on top of it. This is where many of the famous places on the battlefield are – The Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den, The Wheatfield, and, of course, Little Round Top, where the 20th Maine under Joshua Chamberlain holds off the 15th Alabama under Warren Oates until out of ammunition, then breaks the exhausted Confederates with a bayonet charge (Trudeau points out that this wasn’t quite as dramatic as depicted in the movie, but he’s still full of praise for Chamberlain). In the meantime, Sickles is pushed out of his position and back to Seminary Ridge, losing a leg in the process. (Well, he didn’t actually lose it; it just wasn't attached to him any more. It ended up in an army medical museum, where Sickles would frequently visit it after war.) Second day slightly in favor of the Army of Northern Virginia.


Having attacked the Union right and left, on July 3rd Lee goes after the Union center, a decision forever controversial. Pickett’s Division goes after the Union Second Corps in the infamous Pickett’s Charge. Unfortunately for them, Union artillery commander Henry Hunt has anticipated this move and positioned all his reserve artillery in this sector. Further, Hunt orders units to stop firing and conserve their ammunition, to make the Confederates think their own preparatory counterbattery fire has been successful. Pickett’s Division goes down to bloody ruin in the face of massed Union artillery and musket fire; a little copse of trees (still there) at the crest of Seminary Ridge is the “high water mark” of the Confederacy. Although Lee is able to retreat the battered Army of Northern Virginia back to friendly soil, he’s never able to take the offensive again. Day Three, battle, and war to the Union.


Up to now, my understanding of the battle was strongly influenced by the movie Gettysburg and my own visits to the site, which mostly focused on the more accessible sites of the second and third days of fighting. I hadn’t realized that the first days fighting was that extensive, or the degree of action at Cemetery and Culp’s Hills on the Union right, or the location of the cavalry battle between Stuart and Custer on the third day. The actions of the Eleventh Corps on the Union right were especially interesting; this unit had a strong contingent of immigrants. If you asked somebody “In what war did officers Leopold Von Gilsa, Detleo von Einsiedal, Gotthilf Bourry, Alexander Schimmelfennig, Georg von Amsberg, Adolphus Dobke, Adolph von Hartung, Alexander von Mitzel, Gustav Schleiter, August Otto, Emil Koenig, and Wlodzimierz Kryzanowski lead units of regiment size or greater?” they probably wouldn’t guess the American Civil War. I wonder if there’s some chauvinism acting there, with Union and Confederate historians both reluctant to admit the participation of non-anglosaxons?


There are extensive maps, both of strategic and tactical situations; the maps for Hooker and Mead’s pursuit of Lee show the position of each Union corps at the start and end of each day. The one salient drawback to the maps is Trudeau uses black rectangles to indicate Confederate units and dark gray rectangles to indicate Union ones; in this edition they are practically indistinguishable. I wonder if the hardcover version had them in different colors, or perhaps on coated paper? Fortunately, units also have the commanding officer’s name alongside, so as long as you are reasonably familiar with Civil War generals things usually make sense, although it may take some perusal of the organization tables for both armies in the appendix to figure out the complicated fighting on the second day. Although I very seldom write in books, I’m tempted to go over all the maps with a highlighter to distinguish the units.


Highly recommended; Trudeau isn’t quite as readable a historian as Bruce Catton or quite the narrator as Shelby Foote, but he comes close enough in both areas. I’m hyped for another visit to Gettysburg with this book in hand. show less

I previously reviewed Noah Andre Trudeau’s Gettysburg so I picked up Southern Storm when it turned up in the remainder bin. I think I liked Gettysburg a little better, but Southern Storm isn’t half bad.


In the unlikely case that you are unfamiliar with the American Civil War: After the Union victory at Chattanooga, Ulysses S. Grant is summoned to Washington to run things there while Sherman is left behind to run things in Georgia. Confederate General Joseph Johnston conducts an extremely show more skillful retreat toward Atlanta, but the Confederate government is not interested in retreating generals but in attacking generals, and Johnston is replaced by John Bell Hood. Hood attacks, alright, but loses all the battles and is forced to abandon Atlanta and retreat to the southwest.


Up until now, most large Union armies in the West have been supported by river. Sherman in Atlanta has a single track railway for support, and Hood’s cavalry, particular Nathan Bedford Forrest, tear the line up on almost a daily basis. Sherman is a veteran of the Vicksburg campaign, where the Union Army did quite well living off the Southern countryside until it invested Vicksburg and linked up with the river, and thus suggests to Grant (by telegraph) that he simply abandon his supply line and strike out across Georgia to somewhere on the coast. Grant is initially reluctant but on Sherman’s promise that he will send sufficient troops back into Tennessee to defend Nashville, Grant acquiesces (in an interesting contrast to Confederate practice, Lincoln goes along with his generals’ advice). Hood falls in with Sherman’s plans by marching into Tennessee rather than remaining as a covering force in Georgia. And while Hood is marching through Tennessee, Sherman marches through Georgia.


Trudeau makes some interesting comments on conventional wisdom about the March to the Sea. My previous belief is that Sherman planned from the first to “live off the country”; while, in fact, he did plan on foraging as much as possible he actually had sufficient rations in his wagon train to supply his army for a month (including a herd of over 5000 cattle). Thus even if Sherman hadn’t touched a bit of Confederate foodstuff, he still would have been able to get the army to Savannah. (They probably would be pretty tired of hardtack by the time they got there, but they wouldn’t have starved). In order to defeat Sherman, opposing Confederate forces would have had to both prevent him from foraging and capture or destroy his supply train; they didn’t even come remotely close to accomplishing either. Increasingly strident proclamations from Richmond kept advising Georgians in Sherman’s path to destroy supplies before Sherman got to them; the problem with that was nobody in the South (and, in fact, nobody in Sherman’s army, including Sherman) knew where Sherman’s “path” was going to go. This is not to say that Sherman was wandering around at random, but rather that at any point in the campaign he had multiple strategic options: Atlanta to Macon and thence to Mobile or Pensacola; Atlanta to Augusta and thence to Charleston or Savannah; Atlanta direct to Savannah.


I was also intrigued to see that Sherman did most of his own staff work. For example, Sherman had a copy of the 1860 US Census and marked his campaign maps with the amount of pork, corn, yams, poultry and other foodstuff produced by each county in Georgia. Once the campaign started, he left things up to his wing commanders, Oliver Howard and Henry Slocum, just giving them a direction to go and turning them loose. Trudeau points out that neither Howard or Slocum had a reputation for being particularly imaginative, which probably made them ideal for this campaign; they weren’t likely to go off on their own.


Sherman’s “secret weapon” was the pontoon train and his Chief of Engineers, Captain Orlando Poe. There were two regiments of “pontoniers”, who also repaired bridges and corduroyed roads as necessary. (Sherman had to cross over 200 creeks or rivers potentially requiring pontoons; in some cases bridges were captured, repaired or built from scratch). Trudeau doesn’t mention a fact that other historians have noted; early in the war the Confederacy had dismissed Northern soldiers as “pasty-faced mechanics” while Southerners were “hardy tillers of the soil”. In fact, Sherman’s army included entire regiments of Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota lumberjacks who turned out to be pretty adept at fabricating bridges out of Georgia pine and who probably would have made some comment on anybody who called them “pasty-face” (On the way to Atlanta, the pasty-face mechanics had started with standing trees and built an 800-foot railroad bridge in three days). Southern soldiers considered any sort of manual labor beneath free men (at least Georgia militia did; the Army of Northern Virginia had learned that digging trenches might be “slave work” but had salient utility).


Trudeau’s main problem with the March to the Sea is that nothing much happened. There was a minor fight between six Union and five Confederate regiments at Griswoldville, on the outskirts of Macon; four Union cavalry regiments (mostly fighting dismounted) took on three Confederate cavalry regiments (also fighting dismounted) at Waynesboro, on the road to Augusta (a feint to persuade the Confederates they were heading that way); and, of course, the siege of Savannah. Even these weren’t as big as they sound; the paper strength of a Union infantry regiment was around 900 but at Griswoldville the largest Union regiment had 366 men (the Union practice was to create new regiments rather than add replacements to old ones; this allowed for more officers and thus more political patronage). The rest of the time the army simply marched, firing the odd shot at distant Confederate cavalry here and there. Union losses were astonishingly small – although records are sparse, Sherman’s army of around 60000 seems to have lost less than 2500 killed, wounded, and missing for the entire campaign from Atlanta to Savannah.


Trudeau also notes that the devastation to Southern infrastructure caused by the March is also exaggerated. Although “Sherman neckties” (railroad rails heated on a fire of ties and wrapped around a tree) and “Sherman sentries” (the brick chimneys remaining from burnt out buildings) are features of Gone With The Wind, the South was able to get railroad and telegraph service between Macon and Augusta restored a little more than a month after Sherman had passed. What the March did do is make it obvious that the Confederacy couldn’t defend anywhere distant from the Army of Northern Virginia.


The Confederate response to the March was a study in disorganization. The basic problem was Richmond had no troops but plenty of generals. Thus at various times Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, Braxton Bragg, William Hardee, John Bell Hood, and Richard Taylor all had commands in the area. While, as noted, Sherman’s destruction of Confederate infrastructure wasn’t permanent the temporary effects were pronounced, as the various Confederate generals disappeared into the fog of war where telegraph and rail communications had been lost, only to pop up somewhere else too late to do anything about Sherman. The Confederacy also made the classic mistake of trying to defend everything; the major cities (Augusta, Macon, and Savannah) all had substantial troop concentrations busy fortifying rather than concentrating to meet Sherman in the field, and as demonstrated by Savannah the fortifications at any one city really wouldn’t have slowed him down much if he had decided to go that way. The available Confederate cavalry under Joseph Wheeler was also parceled out between the commands rather than concentrating for an attack on Sherman’s rear; each commander wanted cavalry reconnaissance support leading to lots of reports on where Sherman was without doing anything about him being there.


This leads to classic alternate history questions, and Trudeau speculates a little. The first question is what of Hood had stayed close to Atlanta and Sherman rather than invading Tennessee? Well, the whole premise of the campaign was the assumption that Hood would take himself out of the picture. At the start of the campaign Sherman outnumbered Hood almost four to one. If Hood had stayed in northern Georgia or Alabama, Sherman presumably would have gone and fought him. While the outcome of that is not a forgone conclusion, Hood hadn’t won a battle against Sherman yet.


Richmond’s dream was that the citizens of Georgia would fly to arms en masse and stop Sherman. The problem was just about every white male of military age was already in the army and elsewhere in the Confederacy. The militia units scattered around Georgia were already using freed prison inmates and conscripted factory workers and totaled around 10000; even if a force that size could have been concentrated in Sherman’s path and supplied they scarcely would have annoyed him.


One thing that might have changed history is if Sherman had been killed in action. There was scarcely any action that would have made that a possibility until the siege of Savannah, but assuming a stray bullet or bacillus turned up, it might well have made things a little more interesting. As mentioned, Trudeau notes that Sherman’s subordinates were noted for being steady rather than imaginative; it’s possible they may have decided to retreat to Atlanta rather than carry on the campaign. Even this would only work if the campaign was just under way; once everybody was deep in Georgia the only militarily sensible thing was to keep going and given the disparity of forces even an unimaginative general could handle that.


As mentioned, the pontoon trains were essential to the campaign and Trudeau speculates that a successful cavalry attack on the pontoon train could have changed things. Even that would have been temporary, though; pontoon boats aren’t that complicated and, as noted, the army was full of skilled carpenters. The best to be hoped for would have been a couple of days delay. If there had been a large Confederate army in pursuit or on the flank that might have made a difference – but there wasn’t.


A final game changer would have been bad weather. Trudeau did extensive research on weather, and the maps for every day of the march note the weather conditions. Sherman had fairly good luck; there were only a couple of days of rain, probably unusual for November and December in Georgia. When there was bad weather, it did hamper Sherman considerably; wagons and soldiers bogged down in the mud and rivers rose enough to make crossing problematical. A week of heavy rain might well have been pretty unpleasant.


Very good maps; as mentioned, Trudeau provides a map for every day of the campaign plus detailed maps for what battles there were. Unfortunately, the maps are missing names for the rivers (the rivers themselves are shown but are not labeled, which makes it hard to correlate with the text). The maps also lack scales, an annoying omission; when I took a cartography course the instructor said the first thing you put on a map is a direction arrow and a scale and only then do you start drawing other stuff.


The appendix includes orders of battle for both sides; it would have been nice to add approximate numbers, since as mentioned “regiments” could vary greatly in size. The bibliography is extensive.


I’ve got half a dozen books on the March to the Sea; this is far and away the best. show less

It's hard for any writer to keep a book that's this in-depth and this detailed from becoming tedious. A lot of the narrative has to do with troop movements and other such details, so at times one's eyes may begin to glaze over, especially during the chapters that take place before the battle. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating read overall. Trudeau gives us quite a bit of good information about the motivations, both military and political, of the major players in the battle, especially show more Generals Meade and Lee. In addition, Trudeau dips liberally into letters and diaries to give almost every section of the book a personal dimension.

The descriptions of the battle itself are outstanding, both from a historical and from a narrative point of view. Although this is certainly not the first book about the Civil War I've read, I feel like I gained a whole new insight into the nature and horros of combat during this tragic conflict, and also the intriguing, and often baffling, way decisions got made all along the line.

I may not be doing this book justice here, but I do recommend it highly for anyone interested in an extremely detailed account of this bloody and pivotal battle. show less