Few wartime cities in Virginia held more importance than Petersburg.
Wilson Greene, Executive Director of Pamplin Historical Park and the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier, is the author of Breaking the Backbone of.
About the Author: A.
Employing scores of unpublished sources, the book weaves a uniquely personal story of thousands of citizens--free blacks, slaves and their holders, factory owners, merchants--all of whom shared a singular experience in Civil War Virginia.
Greene\'s book tracks both Petersburg\'s civilian experience and the city\'s place in Confederate military strategy and administration. (The fall of Richmond and collapse of the Confederate war effort in Virginia followed close on Grant\'s ultimate success in Petersburg.) At war\'s end, Petersburg\'s antebellum prosperity evaporated under pressures from inflation, chronic shortages, and the extensive damage done by Union artillery shells.
Over the next four years, Petersburg\'s citizens watched their once-beautiful City become first a conduit for transient soldiers from the Deep South, then an armed camp, and finally the focus of one of the Civil War\'s most protracted and damaging campaigns.
Little more than a month before Virginia\'s secession did Petersburg finally express pro-Confederate sentiments, at which point the City threw itself wholeheartedly into the effort, with large numbers of both white and black men serving.
On the eve of the Civil War, the City elected a conservative, pro-Union approach to the sectional crisis.
Industrial, commercial, and extremely prosperous, Petersburg was also home to a large African American community, including the state\'s highest percentage of free blacks.
Wilson Greene now provides an expertly researched, eloquently written study of the City that was second only to Richmond in size and strategic significance.
The noted Civil War historian A.
Nonetheless, the City has, until now, lacked an adequate military history, let alone a history of the civilian home front.
Few wartime cities in Virginia held more importance than Petersburg
