The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-6, 1864 by Gordon C. Rhea Esq.

Strongly recommended for academic and public collections. As written by Rhea, the Battle of the Wilderness underscores how the Confederacy won many battles but lost the war. Powerfully written, mingling official histories with diaries and letters, this study is filled with dramatic tension. Personalities aside, the battle of attrition that would win the war had begun. The author questions Lee's reputation as a brilliant strategist while praising Grant for a well-conceived battle plan. Historian Rhea's revisionist history considers the Wilderness a Union victory. Two days of close-quarters fighting ignited the woods and trebled the casualty list with no advantage to either side Lee stalemated Grant's superior force. Source: Publishers Weeklyįought in a dense woods, the Battle of the Wilderness was the first clash between Grant and Lee. Rhea also critizes Lee for consistently taking the offensive with an army that could not afford the major losses it sustained in attacking. Grant relied too heavily on the Army of the Potomac's commander, George Gordon Meade, who failed to coordinate the movements of subordinates disoriented by the broken ground they fought over. Rhea, wrote that For the rest of the morning, the Ninth Corps remained lost to the Federal war effort. wrote The Battle of the Wilderness, comprising 520 pages back in 1994. Instead, Rhea notes, the Wilderness became a 'soldiers' battle,' with raw courage compensating for inadequate generalship on both sides. The Battle of the Wilderness May 5-6, 1864 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 48. Grant's original plan was to maneuver Lee out of his defensive position along the Rapidan River, then crush his troops with superior numbers. The author's reconstruction of the fighting highlights the difficulties of controlling troops once they had been committed to action.

Rhea, a Virginia attorney, offers what will likely become the definitive account of one of the Civil War's most confusing engagements: the Battle of the Wilderness, the first encounter between Ulysses S.

The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-6, 1864 by Gordon C. Rhea Esq.