A Fire In The Wilderness: The First Battle Between Ulysses S. Grant And Robert E. Lee, by John Reeves

This is the second time I have read a book by the author, and the second time that this author has shown himself to be a particularly maladroit and heavy-handed historian whose craft lacks something of the integrity that one expects from a professional historian. In this particular book, we find a few notable lapses from sound historical judgment. For one, the author enters into the head of Private William Reeves of the 76th New York Infantry quite often during the course of his brief and spectacularly unsuccessful time as a soldier in the Army of the Potomac as well as his time dealing with the incompetent medical staff of that same army which was at about the same level of competence in medicine as the author is as a historian, which is all the more striking as the author does not cite a great deal of actual research as to what this replacement soldier said or thought, though the author presumes to speak on his behalf in terms of how he fights and how he deals with the various medical interventions that terminate in his untimely demise. This man appears to be a relative of some kind to the author, though the author does not make the precise relation very clear. Besides the biased attention that the author shows to Private Reeves and his particular regiment, there is a related and serious bias for the somewhat pokey General Warren, whose cause the author takes up with a marked bias against Generals Grant and Sheridan, whose glory the author appears to envy on behalf of the cashiered Warren, whose slow advance at Five Forks led to his removal from the army only days before its final victory against Lee. These sorts of biases make this book less a work of history than a simulacrum of a history and mere reportage of mediocre quality.

This book is a bit more than 200 pages and it is divided into sixteen generally short chapters. The author begins by framing the fight in the Wilderness in the context of the previous year’s Battle of Chancellorsville on nearly the same ground (1). This is followed by a detailed discussion of private William Reeves (2) as well as the advance of the Confederates to counter the Union advance through the Wilderness (3) and the shock of the contact between Union and Confederate forces that leads to Reeves’ injury (4). A discussion of the fighting at Saunders Field (5) and Orange Plank Road (6) on the first day of the Wilderness follows, as well as a discussion of the harrowing first night of the battle (7). The noted incident where Texan troops urged Lee to the rear (8) forms the core of the next chapter with Longstreet’s belated arrival at the battle, along with a discussion of the second days’ fighting on the Orange Plank Road (9) and Lee’s missed opportunity for a chance to defeat Grant spoiled by the disorganization following Longstreet being wounded by friendly fire (10). At this point the proper narrative of the battle of the Wilderness has ended, and the book continues with a discussion of Grant’s night march to Spotsylvania Court House (11), the wounded of the battle (12), the fighting at the Bloody Angle of Spotsylvania (13), the burial of the dead at Arlington (14), a chapter on the death and recovery for the Union of General Wadsworth’s body (15), and a closing discussion of the legacy of the battle in the Reeves family (16). The book then ends with acknowledgements, selected bibliography, endnotes, and an index.

Ultimately, this book has a lot of padding that demonstrates that the Wilderness as a battle really lacks the material to make it a suitable subject for the sort of battle study that the author wants to create for it. Indeed, it is only by including information from later battles as well as the author’s rather unseemly personal focus on the obscure private Reeves and his equally unseemly animus against Generals Grant and Sheridan that give enough material for this book to reach even barely the length of a standard nonfiction book at around 200 pages, and had the book stuck to what was historically significant, it would have been even shorter. Though there is certainly enough material here for a short book if it was written by someone of more skill and subtlety than the author possesses, the author’s clunky prose often falls flat, and the author’s tendency to enter unbidden into the consciousness of his relative as he moves about from one hospital to another with the likes of Walt Whitman and his taking the paranoid conspiratorial thinking of General Warren for historical fact demonstrate that he lacks the sound judgment to be a worthwhile military historian, despite his obvious ambitions to be one. At its best, this book is acceptable as historical fiction or an effort in contemporary journalism about the past, but that is the highest achievement it can claim for itself.