Peninsula

by Alexander Stewart Webb

Alexander Stewart Webb (February 15, 1835 â February 12, 1911) was a career United States Army officer and a Union general in the American Civil War who received the Medal of Honor for gallantry at the Battle of Gettysburg. After the war, he was president of the City College of New York for thirty-three years.

So much has been written on this subject that it would not at first appear to be a difficult matter to condense the various accounts ; but to the writer's task has been added the special work required in comparing and collating for careful investigation the new material gathered by the War Department, and now for the first time made the basis of a history of that period. The results of that labor he resents in these pages.

A note from the We are very proud to present this third part of the series "Campaigns of the Civil War" to all Kindle readers. It has taken some time to review and optimize this 1881 book for the needs of the 21st century. What you hve here is not a scanned or photgraphed version of the orginal text, but the original text reworked and put into a real ebook. The original maps are included!

This book is one of the basics you need to have when diving into American history and the Civil War period especially. It covers the following

PREFACE.
CHAPTER 1 - GENERAL McCLELLAN AND THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC.
CHAPTER 2 - CAMPAIGN PLANS.
CHAPTER 3 - ACTIVE OPERATIONS.â SIEGE OF YORKTOWN.
CHAPTER 4 - FORWARD FROM YORKTOWN-BATTLE OF WILLIAMSBURG.
CHAPTER 5 - TO THE CHICKAHOMINY â McDOWELL â JACKSON IN THE SHENANDOAH VALLEYâ AFFAIR OF HANOVER COURT HOUSE.
CHAPTER 6 - BATTLE OF FAIR OAKS.
CHAPTER 7 - WITHDRAWAL TO THE JAMES.â THE "SEVEN DAYSâ BATTLE."
BATTLE OF GAINES' MILL
BATTLE OF ALLEN'S FARM.
BATTLE OF SAVAGE'S STATION.
BATTLE OF GLENDALE, OR NELSON'S FARM.
CHAPTER 8 - BATTLE OF MALVERN HILL.
CHAPTER 9 â TERMNATION OF THE CAMPAIGN

Genres: Civil War, History

238 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1881

Reviews

[Mark Harden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holds up very well for a book published in 1881. Webb offers the standard narrative of the campaign in the middle chapters. It is the opening and concluding chapters where his analysis is of interest. He offers a convincing discussion of the factors that impaired McClellan in the campaign. Web includes a fair amount of criticism of McClellan for his own contributions to those impediments, in particular his failure to offer proper respect to Lincoln’s desires (thus losing Lincoln’s confidence) and his failure to obtain the essential coordination with the navy.

[Mark Saha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vol.3 The Peninsula - MeClellan's Campaign of 1862
The Scribners History of the Civil War (1883)

Following the Battle of Bull Run [Vol. 1], the newly formed Union Army of the Potomac sailed from the Potomac and down the Atlantic coast to land on the Yorktown Peninsula. The Confederate capitol Richmond lay at its base, and they hoped a swift advance on it would end the war. McClellan suffered a series of defeats in the Seven Days battles and Lincoln, fearful for Washington's safety, ordered him to evacuate.

* * *

This book is part of the Scribners's series of 16 volumes on the Civil War on land and at sea, published in 1882-3. It took congress twenty years to finally allocate funds to have all official documents and battlefield communications assembled and sorted through. Americans could at last have an inside look at who actually said or did what, and when.

While that massive project was still underway, Scribners persuaded highly qualified people - most of them participants -- to write the individual volumes of this history in light of the new information. There is an immediacy to these brisk and readable accounts, making them a very good starting point for someone who wishes to study the conflict. After reading these, you can pick up any modern volume on any aspect of the war with good contextual grasp of how it fits into the overall picture.

Where these volumes fall short is maps, which are essential but inadequate because the publisher wanted to keep the price of each volume to one dollar – within reach of the ordinary person. The publisher advised readers to keep an atlas handy. Fortunately, today you can google “images” for good maps of almost anything under discussion. For the three naval volumes, you can also google images of the specific ships, or types of ships, under discussion.