Although most histories of the Civil War skip lightly over events in Virginia between the Battle of Gettysburg and the start of Grant’s Overland Campaign, the second half of 1863 was anything but quiet. After returning to the upper Rappahannock River, the Army of the Potomac paused for six weeks on Lincoln’s orders, while nearly 10,000 of its troops went north to enforce the draft. The Confederacy took advantage of that lull to transfer James Longstreet’s corps from the Army of Northern Virginia to Georgia, where it helped Braxton Bragg win the battle of Chickamauga. In the face of that defeat the North shifted the XI and XII Corps from the Army of the Potomac to Tennessee in hope of redeeming the desperate situation at Chattanooga.
Despite losing one-third of his strength via Longstreet’s departure, Gen. Robert E. Lee took advantage of the Federal countermove by launching a daring offensive against Maj. Gen. George Meade’s Army of the Potomac, located inside a treacherous sideways ‘V’ created by the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers. What followed was a fast based campaign of maneuver as Lee sought to land a crippling blow on his opponent, while Meade strove to avoid the thrust by rapidly withdrawing toward Centreville. For a week the two armies engaged in a race, with violent cavalry actions taking place almost daily as Lee tried to head off Meade’s infantry before it slipped beyond his reach. The campaign climaxed in a bloody rearguard action a place called Bristoe Station.
This campaign, never before studied in depth by Civil War historians, is the subject of the second book in author Jeffrey William Hunt’s Meade and Lee series of books examining the war in Virginia between Lee’s retreat over the Potomac after Gettysburg and the end of active campaigning in December 1863.
Jeffrey William Hunt is Director of the Texas Military Forces Museum, the official museum of the Texas National Guard in Austin, TX and an adjunct professor of History at Austin Community College. He had also served as the Curator of Collections and Director of the Living History Program at the Admiral Nimitz National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, TX, and is the author of The Last Battle of the Civil War: Palmetto Ranch.
Copies of the book can be purchased here:
www.savasbeatie.com/meade-and...