Sommers‘ thesis is that these separate attacks should be considered part of the same offensive, and part of a pattern in which Grant struck simultaneously at Lee’s southwestern supply lines and the defenses around Richmond. Complicating matters, Sommers switches back and forth between the attack against Richmond and the attacks southwest of Petersburg. It is difficult to fully grasp the details of these events without making the larger context perfectly clear. A reader unfamiliar with Grant’s previous offensives around Petersburg is left scratching his or her head. Sommers quickly summarizes these events in the Eastern Theater before diving right into the minutia of Grant’s Fifth Offensive. I wouldn’t recommend trying to read Richmond Redeemed without a general understanding of the Siege of Petersburg or the military situation around Richmond in late 1864. Sommers painstakingly reconstructs these events with unrivaled detail. Yet hard fighting and skillful generalship saved both cities. Lee considered abandoning his Petersburg rail center six months before actually doing so. Meanwhile, fighting outside Petersburg at Poplar Spring Church so threatened Southern supply lines that Confederate General Robert E.

The Union attack north of the James River at Chaffin’s Bluff in the fall of 1864 broke through Richmond’s defenses and gave Federals their greatest opportunity to capture the Confederate capital.

Originally published in 1981, the sesquicentennial edition contains new research, new writing, and new thinking with perspectives and insights gathered from the author’s 33 years of teaching at the Army War College and conversations with fellow Civil War scholars and enthusiasts. Grant’s Fifth Offensive (September 29 – October 2, 1864), primarily the Battles of Chaffin’s Bluff (Fort Harrison) and Poplar Spring Church (Peebles’ Farm), against the Confederate defenses around Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia.

Sommers meticulously recounts Union General Ulysses S. In Richmond Redeemed: The Siege at Petersburg, Richard J.

Richmond redeemed by Richard J. Sommers