Robert “Bobby” E.L. Krick’s The Battle of Gaines’s Mill — the culmination of a legendary career’s worth of studying the sources and walking the ground — not only stands as the definitive work about one of the Seven Days’ most astounding battles, it is a masterclass in historical inquiry, examination, and evaluation by one of our finest military historians. Please note: This listing is only for Volume One of the two-volume work.
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The Second Summer of the Civil War in Virginia found the contending armies outside Richmond. George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac lay poised to capture the capital city of the Confederacy until Robert E. Lee launched a preemptive offensive with his army to save the city. The ensuing week of action became known to history as the Seven Days Campaign.
Gaines’s Mill, fought on June 27, 1862, surpassed in size all of the week’s other encounters. After seizing the initiative the day before, Lee assembled a strong force with which he hoped to hammer an isolated part of the Federal army into the swampy morass known as the Chickahominy River. McClellan’s protege Fitz John Porter commanded the vulnerable defenders.
Nearly 90,000 men confronted combat as the battle waxed and waned. Some of the most famous soldiers of that era led troops at Gaines’s Mill, including George G. Meade, John F. Reynolds, and Gouverneur K. Warren on the Northern side and Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, and John B. Hood on the Southern side. The battle ended in Confederate victory — Lee’s first as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia — but without the destruction of his foe.
Dawn on June 28 inaugurated a dark and gray day, prompting a South Carolinian to write in his diary that perhaps the sun “did not want to look upon such a field of carnage.” Gaines’s Mill produced more than 14,000 casualties in less than six hours of fighting.
The Battle of Gaines’s Mill explores at a tactical level what happened on June 27, with a special emphasis on the experiences of the soldiers who fought the battle and on the rural landscape where it took place, a two-mile-wide swath of countryside made forever memorable by the events of long ago.
Volume One (To the Banks of the Chickahominy) carries readers through the first two-thirds of the battle, including the early evening moment when Texans and Georgians opened the first permanent breach in the Federal line of defense along Boatswain’s Creek.
Volume Two (Race against the Setting Sun) addresses the denouement of the great battle, from the fighting in the yards of the McGhee House and the Watt House to the dramatic Union cavalry charge and the hand-to-hand fight among the cannon on the Adams House ridge. This portion of the definite account of the battle is NOT included; please find Volume Two here.
- Includes Volume 1: ISBN TBD
- Hardcover, 450+ pages
- Published by Knox Press