| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Lee's Endangered Left: The Civil War in Western Virginia, Spring of 1864. By Richard R. Duncan. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. xviii, 346 pp. $29.95, isbn 0-8071-2291-2.)

Starting on April 28, 1864, as Federal general George Crook begins his cavalry raid on Dublin, Virginia, and ending on June 23 as Jubal Early starts his march north toward Washington, Richard R. Duncan's Lee's Endangered Left puts operations in the Valley of Virginia into the context of Ulysses S. Grant's "simultaneous movement all along the line." While Grant and Robert E. Lee bludgeoned each other from the Wilderness to Petersburg, Crook, Franz Sigel, and David Hunter toiled in the west. For victory in the valley was vital to Grant's strategy. The Confederacy's most important sources of salt and lead were there; so was Lee's most reliable supply of foodstuffs. Valley railroads not only linked Richmond to those vital resources but also connected Virginia to the Deep South and allowed outnumbered Confederates to move armies along interior lines from front to front. Grant intended to eliminate all this. Crook was to break the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad; a cavalry raid under William Averell was to destroy the salines and lead mines. Franz Sigel would move south to take Staunton, site of the most direct railroad link between Richmond and the Shenandoah, and then, with Crook, farther south to destroy Virginia's most important transportation nexus outside Richmond itself at Lynchburg. . . .

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