Alfred C. Young III. Lee's Army during the Overland Campaign

Lee's Army during the Overland Campaign: A Numerical Study is an exceptionally narrow monograph, preoccupied with a single question: What was the strength of the Army of Northern Virginia during and after a series of battles that took place in Virginia in the late spring of 1864? The justification for devoting a 428-page book to this quandary, according to the author, is the absence of a reliable answer. The campaign is one of the least-studied episodes in the Civil War, and the records for the Confederate side are so fragmentary that those historians who have written about it have been forced to use dated and inaccurate assessments. Alfred C. Young III's study, therefore, is an attempt to fill this void and provide some conclusive numbers. The research Young has performed is admirable. He has thoroughly and meticulously reconstructed the manpower figures for each brigade in Robert E. Lee's army, combining data culled from the individual service records of Confederate soldiers, regimental histories, diaries, newspapers, and calculations made by other historians, including officers on Lee's staff. Young concludes that the army's strength in the beginning of the campaign was 66,000 men, an increase of 4,000 over what historians have previously believed; with reinforcements, the Confederate's total force amounted to 96,000 men, rather than 78,000 men, the figure provided by one of Lee's subordinates. The number of casualties is also higher than previously thought, reaching a total of 33,500. This, according to Young, makes the Overland Campaign the bloodiest chapter in the history of the Army of Northern Virginia, overshadowing even the gory Seven Days' Battles in 1862 and the Gettysburg Campaign.

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