Campaign For Petersburg

The Petersburg Campaign was the war's true turning point, a grinding ten-month siege that broke the Confederacy's back. While Gettysburg claims the glory, it was these muddy trenches outside a small Virginia rail hub that suffocated Lee's army and forced surrender. Richard Wayne Lykes tells this pivotal campaign through the eyes of the men who fought it: Union soldiers burrowing toward Confederate lines in tunnels packed with explosives, Confederate defenders clinging to shrinking territory, both sides enduring a winter of extraordinary suffering. This National Park Service historical account focuses less on troop movements and more on what the campaign meant to those who lived it. Lykes examines the meaning behind the fighting and the shared experience of soldiers in blue and gray, the exhaustion, the terror, the grim resolve that sustained them through ten months of attrition warfare. The campaign directly precipitated the Confederacy's collapse, with Lee surrendering just two weeks after the fall of Petersburg. For readers who want to understand how the Civil War actually ended, this account reveals the grinding human cost behind the Union's final victory.