And keep moving on : the Virginia campaign, May-June 1864 / Mark Grimsley.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [241]-270) and index.

Campaign plans and politics -- The Wilderness -- "Grant is beating his head against a wall" -- The collapse of Grant's peripheral strategy -- "Lee's army is really whipped" -- "The hardest campaign" -- "It seemed like murder" -- The campaign's significance.

"And Keep Moving On is the first book to see the Virginia campaign of spring 1864 as Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee saw it: a single, massive operation stretching hundreds of miles. The story of the campaign is also the story of the demise of two great armies. Lee's army lost a third of its senior leadership, about 33,000 of its best troops, and most of its offensive capability. Of Grant's army, 55,000 Federals were killed, wounded, or captured in the forty days of the campaign.

The scale of casualties and human suffering that the campaign inflicted makes it unique in U. S. history.".

"This is not just another battle book. Mark Grimsley places the campaign in the political context of the 1864 presidential election; appraises the motivation of soldiers; appreciates the impact of the North's sea power advantage; questions conventional interpretations; and examines the interconnections among the major battles, subsidiary offensives, and raids.

In an especially powerful chapter he discusses the extent and causes of the physical misery sustained in what one soldier called "the hardest campaign" and draws out the campaign's importance as a touchstone of the "Lost Cause" mythology."--BOOK JACKET.