On August 1, 1864, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant sat down at his headquarters at City Point, Virginia, to pen a note to the army’s chief of staff, Major General Henry Halleck. His subject was the demoralizing defeat suffered by Union forces two days earlier at the Battle of the Crater—a poorly executed and costly attempt to pierce the Army of Northern Virginia’s defenses east of Petersburg, Virginia. The “disaster of Saturday,” as Grant called it, “was the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war. Such opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have.”

Grant’s effort to take Petersburg would eventually prove successful. Eight months after the defeat at the Crater, Union forces compelled the city’s evacuation—an event that marked the beginning of the end of the Civil War. The Union’s ultimate victory, however, largely obscured the fact that the first six weeks of the Petersburg Campaign were marked by frustration, setbacks, and missed opportunities. In this issue’s cover story (“Grant’s Cruel Summer,” p. 32), A. Wilson Greene makes the case that the Union army’s slow start at Petersburg didn’t have to be—and that while there was blame for it to go around, the lion’s share fell upon the shoulders of none other than Grant himself.

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