Book Review: The Last Full Measure by Jeff Shaara

The conclusion to the father-son trilogy that starts with Jeff Shaara’s Gods and Generals and continues with Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece The Last Full Measure, concludes the story of some of the American Civil War’s most important combatants: Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and Joshua Chamberlain amongst them.

Picking up as the Confederate army returns south after the Battle of Gettysburg stalls the invasion that General Lee believed could end in Washington, thus giving the Confederacy total victory and their own nation. Instead, of course, it is General Meade’s Union army that triumphs in Pennsylvania, and the war continues. The Last Full Measure charts the battles and marches beginning after Gettysburg and ending with the surrender of Confederate forces in the east, at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.

Shaara has done a wonderful job of painting Lee as the sort of mythical, legendary general that so many believed him to be. It’s not a stretch, I don’t think, to say that is the most beloved general in American history, and certainly his affection for his own men, the Army of Northern Virginia, is very apparent in Shaara’s treatment. You can feel the love Lee had flor his men, for his state, and the pages where he is agonising over whether or not to surrender his forces are some of the best in the entire book.

The interaction between President Lincoln and Grant, who had not appeared in the earlier two books in the trilogy, was also particularly well done. I found myself looking forward to the handful of times where the two men met at City Point during and after the Siege of Petersburg to discuss the continuing conflict.

For the most part, Chamberlain goes missing – he is wounded multiple times, and is away from the Army and recuperating for long periods of time, so Shaara has no choice but to focus his narrative elsewhere – but he returns at the end to accept the arms of the surrendered rebels, a scene etched into history, and calls for his men to salute their defeated enemy. The important moment is enhanced by Shaara.

Given the main viewpoints are those of senior officers, there are less battle scenes than in other, more recent Shaara novels, in which he focuses on those who serve on the front lines, but the tactical cat and mouse game between Lee and Grant is illustrated well. It’s a triumphant end to a gripping trilogy.