Over the River

Two of the most brilliant campaigns of maneuver in the American Civil War - perhaps of any war - were conducted almost simultaneously during the spring of 1863. Two Union commanders, U. S. Grant in the West and Joseph Hooker in the East, faced similar problems that spring: Each had to find a way to cross a major river to get at his opponent for something other than a sure-to-be-disastrous head-on frontal attack. Hooker had to cross the Rappahannock, and Grant the Mississippi. Both generals conceived and executed extensive turning movements to come at their enemies from unexpected directions. The results, however, were vastly different. This is a study of those two campaigns and how they related to each other, as well as to other operations in other theaters of the war going on at the time, told in a chronological day-by-day narrative.