This is the second volume in the trilogy, "The Army of the Potomac," written by historian Bruce Catton. The work begins, as others, with vignettes. The most telling, perhaps, is of the convalescing General Joe Hooker. He holds forth, berating other generals, touting himself as a future commander of the Army of the Potomac, and currying favor.
The line of this book, though, at its center, is the progression from Ambrose Burnside's unhappy tenure as commanding general of this army, culminating in a disastrous and highly avoidable defeat at Fredericksburg to the melancholy Mud March and concluding with Abraham Lincoln about to deliver his Gettysburg Address.
As with all three volumes, the star of the Army is its soldiers. They were ill used during much of the Army's existence by general officers who were incapable of using the men to the best of their potential. There were glimpses of the potential of the fighting machine in the Seven Days (Lee took the worst of most of the battles as McClellan withdrew) and at Antietam. But there were the failures of generals at Fredericksburg (Burnside) and after a most promising start under Hooker, that intriguer's star fell with his inability to exercise moral courage at Chancellorsville. An eminently winnable battle (two of his best corps were not even put into the fray) was lost.
The volume rises to a crescendo as the Confederate forces under General Robert E. Lee headed north. Hooker, after a slow start, got his Union forces in pursuit. After a falling out with Washington D. C., he was relieved after threatening to resign and General George Meade took over. The battle of Gettysburg followed, and the Union forces held on, albeit with the issue in doubt at a number of times over the three days of this struggle.
Some of the real pluses of this work (and the other two in the trilogy) is the character sketches developed by Catton. One gets a sense of Burnside and Hooker and Meade in a relatively short space. They become human, with their unique strengths and weaknesses.
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