by Ron Chernow
The heat was brutal, the troops were exhausted, and a pall of dust and smoke hung everywhere. The landscape at Spotsylvania Court House presented complex challenges to Grant. It had pockets of forests thick with dwarf pine and scrub oak, punctuated by clearings, swamps, and gently rolling hills that benefited an army on the defensive. Lee ordered his men to build elaborate fortifications unprecedented in their breadth and sophistication. Once mocked as “King of Spades” for his predilection for digging trenches, Lee had now refined the art of defensive warfare, which had progressed more quickly than offensive methods. Intricately hewn from earth, rails, and logs, thrown up with dazzling speed, Confederate defenses at Spotsylvania featured loopholes that allowed marksmen to fire safely at Grant’s troops. In the opinion of one Union officer, Lee’s line was constructed “in a manner unknown to European warfare, and, indeed, in a manner new to warfare in this country.”63 (These deep entrenchments anticipated the western front in World War I.) It would be the bane of Grant’s campaign against Lee that he usually had to attack him in fortified positions, whereas Lee could shift troops nimbly employing short, interior lines.
That Lee beat Grant to Spotsylvania partly stemmed from botched communications between Meade and Sheridan, two men with especially hot tempers. Meade complained that Sheridan and his cavalry had interfered with his infantry advance, ignoring orders to get out of the way. The splenetic Sheridan shot back that he never received Meade’s message and expressed outrage that Meade bossed around his cavalry. As Porter related, “Sheridan declared with great warmth that . . . if he could have matters his own way he would . . . move out in force against [J. E. B.] Stuart’s command, and whip it.”64 In a huff, Meade marched off to Grant and repeated his conversation with Sheridan, including the latter’s boastful comment about whipping Stuart. Meade was taken aback by Grant’s response. “Did Sheridan say that?” he asked, struck by Sheridan’s gumption. “Well, he generally knows what he is talking about. Let him start right out and do it.”65
Meade wrote orders for Sheridan and his ten thousand horsemen to ride past the rear of Lee’s army, drive toward Richmond, and harass the enemy. Union cavalry had never attempted anything so ambitious. As Sheridan wrote, before this “the boldest mounted expeditions had been confined to a hurried ride through the enemy’s country, without purpose of fighting more than enough to escape in case of molestation.”66 Now Sheridan issued a full-scale challenge to Stuart’s cavalry. For the next sixteen days, detached from the Army of the Potomac, Sheridan, with matchless gusto, played havoc with Lee’s army, even penetrating Richmond’s outer defenses. Grant summed up Sheridan’s storied achievements: he had “encountered [Lee’s] cavalry in four engagements, and defeated them in all; recaptured four hundred Union prisoners and killed and captured many of the enemy; destroyed and used many supplies and munitions of war; destroyed miles of railroad and telegraph, and freed us from annoyance by the cavalry of the enemy for more than two weeks.”67 On May 11, at Yellow Tavern near Richmond, Sheridan’s men routed Confederate cavalry under Stuart, who was mortally wounded, robbing Lee of a premier lieutenant. A flamboyant figure partial to ostrich-plumed hats and scarlet-lined capes in battle, James E. B. Stuart was an inspired warrior whom the South couldn’t afford to lose. Upon hearing of his death, Lee fought off tears. “I can scarcely think of him without weeping,” he said and took refuge in his tent.68 Earlier in the war, the Confederate cavalry had been preeminent but now, thanks to Sheridan’s slash-and-burn style, the Union cavalry matched and overtook it.
All day on May 8, Lee had fended off Grant’s attacks and felt sufficiently confident to wire encouragement to Jefferson Davis in the early hours of the night. “With the blessing of God, I trust we shall be able to prevent General Grant from reaching Richmond.”69 The next day, Grant could only guess at Lee’s next move and lamented to Halleck that his own movements were encumbered “by our immense wagon trains.”70 That morning he mounted a black pony named Jeff Davis that had been captured on a Mississippi plantation owned by the Confederate president’s brother. He went to scan Lee’s fortifications, came upon General John Sedgwick, and conferred briefly with him. According to Porter, Sedgwick “seemed particularly cheerful and hopeful that morning, and looked the picture of buoyant life and vigorous health.”71 Shortly after Grant rode off, Sedgwick, a smart, good-natured, and much beloved bachelor, affectionately nicknamed “Uncle John,” mocked his men for being afraid of Confederate snipers taking potshots at them. They didn’t have to worry, he insisted, because the rebels “couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”72 These were his last words as he toppled over dead on his horse, struck by a marksman’s bullet to the head. At first, Grant could hardly take in the horrendous news. “Is he really dead?” he asked twice. Although he named the popular Horatio Wright to lead the Sixth Corps, he considered Sedgwick’s loss irreparable. “His loss to this army is greater than the loss of a whole division of troops,” he believed.73
At 9:30 a.m. on May 10, Grant prepared for a furious onslaught. He dashed off a telegram to Halleck with a vintage statement: “I shall take no backward step.” He ordered another fifty rounds of ammunition for each of his one hundred thousand men. Still, he sounded less cocky than before and certainly more modest about thrashing Lee: “We can maintain ourselves at least and in the end beat Lee’s Army I believe.”74 Grant probed for a chink in Lee’s extended line and assailed his center, only to be thrown back with heavy losses. During this long day of bloody mayhem, he moved his headquarters tent to the margin of a wood. One adjutant remembered standing twenty feet from Grant when a shell “passed 3 inches from his ear.” Without missing a beat, Grant told his new aide, Captain Peter Hudson, “Hudson, get that shell. Let’s see what kind of ammunition they are using.”75 With his odd composure, Grant smoked and wrote dispatches, seemingly unaware of having barely escaped death. One wounded Wisconsin soldier, borne on a stretcher past Grant, observed approvingly, “Ulysses don’t scare worth a damn.”76
It was Grant’s eternal assumption that when his adversary strengthened one part of his line, he weakened another. So upon learning that Lee had buttressed his left, Grant ordered an afternoon attack at the enemy’s center under Hancock’s direction. The fighting focused on an elevated spot called the Mule Shoe, named after its shape and the way it projected forward from Confederate breastworks. It was well guarded by artillery. Grant had long been frustrated by standard tactical manuals, translated from the French and poorly suited to wooded terrain. Now Colonel Emory Upton of New York, a West Point graduate and iconoclastic student of military lore, devised an ingenious solution. He took twelve regiments, arranged them into four lines, and had them race across open ground toward the Mule Shoe, howling like men possessed. The novelty of his method was this: when the first line reached the Confederate defenses, it split left and right, opening a path for the second line to rush in and take up the assault; this line, in turn, splayed left and right, creating an opening for the third and fourth in succession. To speed up the charge, soldiers were told to withhold fire until they reached the Confederate defenders. Badeau recalled this tour de force of tactical innovation: “Allowing nothing to stop them, creeping on hands and knees over all obstacles, even under fire, they climbed the hill and completely broke the lines in their front, capturing an entire brigade of infantry and a battery of artillery.”77 A thousand startled rebel prisoners fell into Union hands.
This major success was squandered when Upton didn’t receive timely aid, the division assigned to support him having faced heavy artillery fire. Reluctant to subdue their fighting spirit, Grant was heartbroken to order a retreat by Upton’s regiments, which had sacrificed a quarter of their men, with Upton himself severely wounded. As in the Wilderness, the forest burst into flames, frying to death many soldiers disabled on the battlefield. Before leaving Washington, Grant had been authorized to promote officers in the field for special acts of gallantry. On the spot, he made Upton a brevet brigadier genera
l and in later years paid tribute to his sterling achievement at Spotsylvania. “He gave us the first really American system of tactics, a want our Army had long felt . . . his system of tactics adopted by the War Department made intelligent operations possible on any kind of ground.”78
Of the late-afternoon attack against the Confederate line, Congressman Washburne wrote in his diary: “Genls. Grant and Meade . . . rode on to a ridge in front of the timber where the battle was raging. It was at its height just as the sun was going down. The roar of musketry and cannon and the cheers of our men as they rushed to the charge made an impression never to be effaced. It has been a day of continuous fighting and our losses have been heavy, but we have gained decided advantages.”79 In the waning daylight, other forays against Confederate positions miscarried. Despite the bright spot of Upton’s tactics, it had been a rough day for Grant, marred by faulty coordination among commanders. He had insisted that Meade would lead the Army of the Potomac, but it was hard for him not to interfere and the awkward arrangement impaired operations. Nevertheless, Grant asserted that Meade had met his “most sanguine expectations” and a few days later recommended his promotion to major general in the regular army, even though it turned out no vacancies currently existed.80
That night, briefing a reporter on the day’s action, Grant struck a rueful tone. “We have had hard fighting to-day, and I am sorry to say we have not accomplished much. We have lost a good many men, and I suppose that I shall be blamed for it.” He struggled to augment public confidence without raising unrealistic expectations. “I do not know any way to put down this rebellion and restore the authority of the Government except by fighting, and fighting means that men must be killed. If the people of this country expect that the war can be conducted to a successful issue in any other way than fighting, they must get somebody other than myself to command the army.”81 Once again Grant showed well-tuned political instincts and found the right voice, honest and forthright, for addressing the northern public. By now, Rawlins had become a second Grant who internalized his tenacity and relentless sense of forward motion. “Our progress towards Richmond is slow,” he wrote to his wife, “but we are on the way, and do not propose, unless some disaster overtakes us, ever taking a step backwards.”82
The next morning, May 11, cold and rainy after two weeks of broiling weather, Grant enjoyed a spartan breakfast: a tiny piece of beef, cooked well enough to drain any juice from it, and black coffee. Around 8:30 a.m. he stood before his tent, smoking a cigar, and bid farewell to Washburne, who was returning to Washington. Washburne requested a message to take back to the capital—something to allay the anxiety of Lincoln and Stanton. Afraid of stirring false hopes, Grant hesitated. Then he disappeared into his tent and penned a letter to Halleck. Ely Parker said Grant wrote it on a tree stump, his head wreathed in cigar smoke that he swatted away with his hand. After Washburne left, Grant’s staff examined a copy of the letter and found nothing exceptional. Grant referred to eleven generals and twenty thousand soldiers killed, wounded, or missing since crossing the Rapidan, while he had taken more than four thousand prisoners. Then came an immortal line that would be emblazoned in the press and trail him forever: “[I] propose to fight it out on this line if it takes me all summer.”83 In an artful piece of editing, Grant struck out the word “me,” which might have sounded vain; that deletion turned him into an impersonal force of nature. Grant didn’t realize the force of his line until it shouted from newspaper headlines several days later. Nothing since the “unconditional surrender” line at Fort Donelson had gripped the public imagination quite so powerfully.
Grant’s words created a sensation in Washington. As Noah Brooks wrote, “Washington had broken loose with a tremendous demonstration of joy . . . There was something like delirium in the air. Everybody seemed to think that the war was coming to an end right away.”84 When crowds gathered at the White House, Lincoln uttered the famous line that had now become a watchword, a battle cry. A month later at a Philadelphia fair, he dilated upon Grant’s theme: “Speaking of the present campaign, General Grant is reported to have said, ‘I am going through on this line if it takes all summer.’ I say we are going through on this line if it takes three years more.”85 Still, if the words delivered a needed fillip to northern spirits, they also risked fostering euphoric expectations. “The people are too sanguine,” Lincoln lamented to a reporter. “They expect too much at once.”86
Amid steady rain on May 11, Grant meditated his next step against Lee. The timing and place of his subsequent assault may have been dictated by a lapse in the seeming clairvoyance of Lee, who received intelligence that made him suspect Grant would suddenly pull out and march toward Richmond. To prepare for such a move, he withdrew twenty-two cannon from the Mule Shoe. When a rebel deserter alerted Grant to this news, he decided to attack the spot around daylight the next morning.
To lead the massive onslaught he selected Winfield Scott Hancock, the very image of a romantic, dashing officer, so high-spirited in battle that the press, taking a hint from McClellan, anointed him “Hancock the Superb.”87 In the view of one California soldier, Hancock was “the beau ideal of a soldier, blue-eyed, fair-haired Saxon, strong, well-proportioned and manly, broad-chested, full and compact.”88 Sheridan praised “his quick apprehension, his physical courage,” and “soldierly personality.”89 Grant and Hancock had attended West Point together and served as Mexican War comrades. Grant admired the noble, aggressive way he dove into the thick of fighting, rallying his men by personal example. Hancock’s renown had been enhanced by beating back Pickett’s Charge from behind Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. By the end of the year, Grant would come to believe that Hancock, a Democrat, had been corrupted by political ambitions. “I have known [Hancock] for forty years,” he said late in life. “He is a weak, vain man. He is the most selfish man I know. He could never endure to have anyone else receive any credit.”90
Such cynicism was still far in the future on the foggy dawn of May 12 when Grant ordered Hancock and Burnside at 4 a.m. to lead “a prompt and vigorous attack.”91 Sitting around a campfire in a dell, pelted by sheets of rain and wrapped in an overcoat, Grant awaited the telltale musketry rattle that heralded the start of offensive operations. Porter portrayed Grant as “in excellent spirits” and even “jocose” that morning.92 The charge came around 4:30 a.m., an uphill climb for Hancock and his men, who had to negotiate a marsh and wend their way through thickly wooded territory. They pressed toward the bulging Mule Shoe in constant rain, in early gray light, as morning mist helped to screen their movements. When they emerged into a clearing before the breastworks, fifteen thousand strong, they let loose a tremendous cheer and surged forward without firing a shot. One Union soldier recalled how “the great mass of men, with a rush like a cyclone, sprang upon the entrenchments and swarmed over.”93 Here, in a scene of wild turmoil, the two armies collided at such close quarters that they bashed each other to death with rifle butts and bayonets. In an hour of frenetic fighting, Hancock captured four thousand prisoners plus thirty cannon. Back in the dell, enthusiastic riders galloped up with news, eliciting cheers from Grant’s staff, while Grant “sat unmoved upon his camp-chair, giving his constant thoughts to devising methods for making the victory complete.”94
The captured division belonged to Major General Edward Johnson, soon hauled into Grant’s presence as a prisoner. Tarnished with mud, prongs of hair jutting from a torn felt hat, Johnson must have been startled by the cordial greeting from Grant, who remembered him from the Mexican War. “How do you do?” said Grant, shaking his hand. “It is a long time since we last met.” Continuing in this courteous manner, Grant offered Johnson a cigar and placed a camp chair for him by the fire. “Be seated, and we will do all in our power to make you as comfortable as possible.”95 The two men chatted, made no mention of the overwhelming conflict in progress, and confined their talk to reminiscences.
After Hancock’s men plowed through the first line of C
onfederate entrenchments, they chased their opponents down woodland paths to a second. Over early morning breakfast, Lee heard the ominous clatter of guns from the Mule Shoe, realized he had misread Grant’s intentions, and rode Traveller hastily toward the fighting. He encountered terrified soldiers, streaking back in chaotic flight. “Hold on!” Lee shouted, seeking to stem the rout. “Your comrades need your services.” The terrified men refused to heed his admonition. “Shame on you men; shame on you!” he cried in desperation.96 Lee was every bit as stubborn as Grant. Repeating his Wilderness performance, he hurried to organize a counterattack that would expose him to danger until his men shouted, “General Lee to the rear!” and he grudgingly obeyed.97 The large force he assembled drove Union troops back to the front line they’d breached. Here Hancock, having seized Confederate defenses, turned them around to stop advancing rebel forces. The fight degenerated into a vicious stalemate that persisted for at least eighteen hours. With extraordinary zeal, Lee made five attempts to regain the front line he had lost and each time was flung back by Hancock’s gallant determination.
Periodically Grant mounted little Jeff Davis and rode to observation posts to survey the bloodbath at the Mule Shoe. Nearby was a secluded clearing where zigzagging trenches formed a sharp angle known in historical annals as the Bloody Angle. As an emblem of the sheer hell of war, few places surpass this claustrophobic spot, its ground strangely corrugated by earthworks. Trenches filled with a soupy mixture of rain, mud, and blood, leading some wounded men to drown. Troops fought hand-to-hand atop the parapets in such squalid disorder that they often stood on dead men as they battled. One Massachusetts soldier remembered dead and wounded rebels “piled up in heaps three or four deep.”98 Each new wave of oncoming men trampled comrades fallen before them until the ground grew slippery with spilled blood. Frantic soldiers thrust swords and bayonets through gaps in the log parapets, killing foes only partly visible until a welter of mangled limbs accumulated. The incessant musket fire shredded trees and shrubs into twigs, leading Porter to comment memorably, “We had not only shot down an army, but also a forest.” For Porter, the savagery “was probably the most desperate engagement in the history of modern warfare.”99 Union forces had managed to capture three thousand prisoners.