Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction
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Moreover, Lee’s three corps commanders—James Longstreet (who had rejoined the Army of Northern Virginia with his corps after Bragg’s debacle at Missionary Ridge), A. P. Hill, and Richard Ewell—were all veteran officers with at least a full year of experience at corps command behind them. But each of them had failed Lee at Gettysburg. Even worse, Longstreet had performed ineffectively in Tennessee after Chickamauga, and quarreled so bitterly with his subordinates that two of them, LaFayette McLaws and Evander Law, resigned. Richard Ewell was “loved and admired” by his men, “but he was not always equal to his opportunities.” There would remain some question about how reliable their performance would be in the upcoming battles. Yet the morale of the ordinary soldier of the Army of Northern Virginia remained resilient. “The whole command is in fine health and excellent spirits and ready for the coming struggle confident of whipping Grant, and that badly. We all believe that this is the last year of the war.” John L. Runzer, of the 2nd Florida, resolved: “Whereas, we… believe, as we did, from the first, that the cause in which we are engaged… is just and right… Be it resolved, That we are determined never to give that cause up.” 20
The most immediate problem that Lee had to face, however, was concentrating his forces to meet Grant. In the interest of casting his net for supplies as far as he dared, Lee’s three army corps, numbering only about 70,000 men, were widely scattered along the south side of the Rappahannock. When Lee ordered them to rendezvous to face Grant, Richard Ewell’s corps, moving eastward on the Orange Turnpike through the Wilderness, collided with the vanguard of the Army of the Potomac’s 5th Corps, heading south on the one usable north-south road through the Wilderness, the Germanna Plank Road. A firefight erupted. Meade, anxious to get out of the Wilderness before the main body of Lee’s army arrived, tried to shoulder the Confederates aside, only to find the rebels in significantly greater numbers than he had planned for, and with a more aggressive spirit. “These lunatics were sweeping along to that appallingly unequal fight, cracking jokes, laughing,” wrote a Virginia artilleryman of his fellow Southerners, “and with not the least idea in the world of anything else but victory.” 21
Meade called up John Sedgwick’s 6th Corps to cover the 5th Corps’s southward-extended left flank. They, in turn, were overlapped by rebel infantry from Hill’s corps, coming up to meet them along the Orange Plank Road (a parallel to the Orange Turnpike) as twilight descended. That night, Meade moved the 9th Corps (Burnside’s) and the 2nd Corps (under Winfield Scott Hancock) around behind the firing lines so that, at five o’clock on the morning of May 5, Hancock and the 2nd Corps were in position to attack Hill. With a gigantic lurch forward, they smashed right over Hill’s rebels on the Plank Road. “Tell Meade we are driving them most beautifully,” Hancock exulted. 22
The exultation lasted only for an hour. Without any warning, the last of Lee’s infantry corps, under James Longstreet, arrived and knocked the overconfident Federals back to their starting point. It was now Lee’s turn to exult, and he was so jubilant at the appearance of Longstreet that he almost tried to lead one of Longstreet’s brigades personally (until a Texas sergeant grabbed the bridle of Lee’s horse and the protective shout went up, “General Lee to the rear!”). This confused melee of attacks and counterattacks through the dense underbrush and burning woods, little of it with any sense, produced a total of 18,000 casualties for the Army of the Potomac and another 10,000 or so for the Army of Northern Virginia. By midnight on the evening of May 6, both armies had lapsed into an uncomfortable quiet, too exhausted and confused to carry the fight on further.23
Almost exactly one year before, Fighting Joe Hooker had found himself in the same situation and at the same location near the old Chancellorsville House, and he had elected to retreat. Much of the Army of the Potomac must have expected that Grant would make the same move, following the dingy and depressing pattern they had known for three years—attack, stall, withdraw across the Rappahannock. But Grant was not Hooker, and he was not like anything else the Army of the Potomac had ever seen. In the early morning hours of May 7, Grant arose, wrote out his orders, ate breakfast, and then moved out onto the road in the predawn darkness with his headquarters staff, past the burning wreck of the Wilderness and the long lines of Winfield S. Hancock’s 2nd Corps standing by the roadside—and headed south.
For the first time since his arrival among them, the Army of the Potomac began to cheer Grant. “No doubt it was inspired by the fact that the movement was south,” wrote Grant with characteristic detachment. “It indicated to them that they had passed through the ‘beginning of the end’ in the battle just fought. The cheering was so lusty that the enemy must have taken it for a night attack.”24 Frank Wilkeson recalled that “Grant’s military standing with the enlisted men this day hung on the direction we turned at the Chancellorsville House.”
If to the left, he was to be rated with Meade and Hooker and Burnside and Pope—the generals who preceded him. At the Chancellorsville House we turned to the right. Instantly all of us heard a sigh of relief. Our spirits rose. We marched free. The men began to sing. The enlisted men understood the flanking movement. That night we were happy. 25
Sixty miles away, in Washington, Lincoln and Stanton had heard nothing from Grant after the last of the Army of the Potomac had disappeared into the maw of the Wilderness, and an aide noticed that the tension was so great for Stanton that he could not even reach for a piece of paper without twitching. But on May 8 Grant finally had an official dispatch to send to Lincoln, and John Hay noticed that, despite the punishing losses, for the first time Lincoln was happy with what one of his generals was doing in Virginia. Lincoln remarked to Hay, “How near we have been to this thing before and failed. I believe if any other general had been at the head of that army it would have not been on this side of the Rapidan. It is the dogged pertinacity of Grant that wins.” Two days later, Grant sent Halleck a letter that had an ever larger measure of “pertinacity” to it: “I am now sending back… all my wagons for a fresh supply of provisions and ammunition, and purpose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”26
Grant suspected that, as badly hurt as his own army was, Lee’s was probably weakened even more. So, shaking off the blow he had received in the Wilderness, Grant began feeling to his left, seeking to move southward around the battered flank of Lee’s army and out onto the open ground between the Rappahannock and Richmond. His first objective was Spotsylvania Courthouse, a little country crossroads eleven miles southeast of the Wilderness. If he could get there before Lee, the Army of the Potomac would lie at right angles to Richmond and the Army of Northern Virginia, and Lee would have no choice but to attack him there or abandon the Confederate capital. Once again, the roads were poor and the maps unreliable, and as a result, Lee managed to beat Grant to Spotsylvania Court House by the afternoon of May 8.
The Confederates had only a little time to build up their defenses before Grant’s army arrived, but by this point in the war, all but the greenest volunteers knew how to scratch up effective entrenchments by the rule of the minute. By the time Grant was ready to attack on May 10, the Army of Northern Virginia was dug into a five-mile-long line, featuring a prominent horseshoe-shaped bulge that easily fended off repeated headlong Federal attacks. For one moment that evening, a carefully selected division of twelve regiments under Colonel Emory Upton was allowed to try something different—a swift dash in column with bayonets only, no firing, no deploying into line of battle. Upton’s column waited under cover of a woodline until 6:35 that evening, then at a signal sprinted 200 yards to strike a point on the western side of the Confederate bulge. The rebels hardly had time to look up. “They came on us with a yell and never made any halt,” wrote a Georgian, “We were simply overwhelmed and forced to retire, every man for himself.” Unhappily, the success of Upton’s attack surprised the Army of the Potomac, too, because the orders for supports to come up behind Upton went astray. Upton’s men were left dangling and had to withdraw. 2
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Two days later, on May 12, Grant tried Upton’s tactic again, only with Winfield Hancock’s 2nd Corps and Horatio Wright’s 6th Corps, and this time the results were an exercise in military horror. At one point on the Confederate bulge, in a trench known as the “Bloody Angle,” attackers and defenders grappled in vicious hand-to-hand, rifle-to-rifle combat, like two crowds of enraged beasts. The commander of the Vermont Brigade remembered that “it was not only a desperate struggle but it was emphatically a hand-to-hand fight.”
Scores were shot down within a few feet of the death-dealing muskets. A breastwork of logs and earth separated the combatants. Our men would reach over the breastworks and discharge their muskets in the very face of the enemy. Some men clubbed their muskets, and in some instances used clubs and rails. … The slaughter of the enemy was terrible. The sight next day was repulsive and sickening, indeed. Behind their traverses, and in the pits and holes they had dug for protection, the rebel dead were found piled upon each other. Some of the wounded were almost entirely buried by the dead bodies of their companions that had fallen upon them. Many of the dead men were horribly mangled, and the logs, trees, and brush exhibited unmistakeable signs of a fearful conflict.28
The 2nd Corps actually tore its way through the Bloody Angle, but a fallback line had already been improvised by the Confederates, and the Federal attack ground to a halt. By the close of day, with another 18,000 casualties to add to those in the Wilderness, the Army of the Potomac was still unable to dislodge Lee from his position around Spotsylvania Court House. But Grant had lost nothing of his pertinacity. On May 14, true to his promise to fight matters out “if it takes all summer,” Grant again decided to move around Lee’s right.29
From that point on, Grant’s campaign became a deadly leapfrog with Lee, Grant and the Army of the Potomac always looking to slide quickly and deftly around Lee’s right, and Lee always moving just fast enough to get his army in front of them again. In a violent arc of turning movements, over poor roads and through bottomless mud, always dropping closer and closer to Richmond, Grant pushed his army one step ahead of Lee, until finally by the first of June, Grant had fought his way down to another desolate little crossroads called Cold Harbor, only ten miles northeast of Richmond.
At that point he ran out of maneuvering room. In front of Grant was Lee, his men arriving just in the nick of time on June 1 to throw up instant entrenchments and repulse an initial assault by the Army of the Potomac’s 6th Corps; on Grant’s left was a familiar and fatal stream, the Chickahominy River, trickling into the James; on the right was the road back north, which he had promised not to take. His options gone, Grant ordered a massive frontal assault on June 3, and the results were even worse than Spotsylvania. In less than eight hours, 4,500 Federal soldiers were shot down. The regimental chaplain of the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery, which had been pulled out of its comfortable barracks in the Washington fortifications to fight as infantry in this campaign, noted that his unit lost their colonel and 51 others dead, plus 333 wounded, in one charge on June 1. The traumatized chaplain wrote home despairingly, “You cannot conceive the horror & awfulness of a battle. I never wish to hear another much less see it. I went out to see this but found myself in such danger I soon fled. … Pray for me. I cannot write—am not in a fit state of mind.” 30
Now was the moment of decision for Grant. He had sustained 55,000 casualties since crossing the Rapidan a month before, and he was losing still more veteran soldiers as regimental enlistments expired. The old story that Grant was a military butcher who simply kept feeding an unlimited supply of Union reinforcements at the Confederates until the Southerners were finally overwhelmed by sheer numbers surfaced for the first time after Cold Harbor, although it is surprising how, even with the horrendous casualty lists, Grant still lost proportionately fewer men than Lee. All through the war, Robert E. Lee lost more men in one offensive gambit after another than any Federal commander; even when facing Grant directly, Lee still lost a higher percentage of his forces in battle than Grant, despite the fact that Grant took the offensive at every point from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor. Nor did Grant always have a bottomless barrel of fresh troops to draw upon. Andrew Humphreys, as Meade’s chief of staff, recorded after the war that the Army of the Potomac received only about 12,000 effective reinforcements during the first six weeks of the overland campaign, while it lost not only the names on the bloody casualty lists but also thirty-six infantry regiments that simply chose to go home rather than reenlist. Over the long haul, Grant husbanded the lives of his men far more effectively than Lee; it was Lee, not Grant, who bled armies dry.31
One other thing that was evident, too, was that Grant was far from overwhelming Lee or anyone else at Cold Harbor, and all Grant had to show for a month’s grinding campaigning was the lesson that the Confederates could not be beaten by an army marching overland at them. The McClellan odor had made anyone else’s proposals for sieges and operations along the James guilty by mere association. But Grant had now played all the cards there were to play on the overland route, and the Army of the Potomac was no closer to victory now than when he started.
From the proximity of the enemy to his defenses around Richmond it was impossible by any flank movement to interpose between him and the city. I was still in a condition to either move by his left flank and invest Richmond from the north side or continue my move by his right flank to the south side of the James. While the former might have been better as a covering for Washington, yet a full survey of all the ground satisfied me that it would be impracticable to hold a line north and east of Richmond that would protect the Fredericksburg railroad—a long, vulnerable line which would exhaust much of our strength to guard, and that would have to be protected to supply the army, and would leave open to the enemy all his lines of communication on the south side of the James.32
So Grant imperturbably sat down and informed Halleck that he intended to change his line of operations from the Fredericksburg-Richmond line to the James River, “transfer the army to the south side” of the James, and either barge into Richmond from below or “besiege Lee in Richmond.”33
This, of course, was what Halleck and Lincoln had always been sure they must prevent their generals from doing. Lincoln’s methodology, ever since McClellan, had been to push his generals after Lee, not Richmond. However, Grant merely observed that Lee’s men had acquired a considerable knack for entrenching themselves and making head-on attacks a very costly proposition. By June, he and the Army of the Potomac had paid enough for George McClellan’s sins, and Grant was ready to do what he had suspected in the first place needed to be done: strike directly at Richmond and the Army of Northern Virginia’s vital depots and rail links, then force the Confederates out into the open country, where they would be compelled to fight, starve, or both.
This was, of course, essentially the same thing he had done at Vicksburg. And with the memory of Vicksburg in mind, Grant aimed to pull back secretly from the Cold Harbor lines, steal a march down to the James, cross the river over a 2,100-foot-long pontoon bridge that is still one of the greatest wonders of military engineering, and wind up on the south side of the James below Richmond while Lee was still in his lines above the city. He would then cross the Appomattox River and seize the vital rail junction at Petersburg, twelve miles below Richmond, where all the major rail lines from the rest of the South—Norfolk & Petersburg, Weldon, Southside, Richmond & Danville—came together to form the logistical lifeline of the Army of Northern Virginia. Cut those lines at Petersburg, and both Richmond and the Army of Northern Virginia were doomed to die on a withered vine.34
Coming from any other general, not a syllable of this plan would have been even remotely acceptable to Lincoln. But Grant had Lincoln’s confidence to a degree that no other general had in this war, and Lincoln was inclined to give Grant his head. Lincoln remarked in the spring of 1864 to one of his White House secretaries, William O. Stoddard, that “Grant is the first general I’ve had” who
“hasn’t told me what his plans are. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. I’m glad to find a man who can go ahead without me.” That, of course, was not literally true: Grant had telegraphed all the details to Halleck, Halleck had passed them on to Lincoln, and Lincoln had taken the whole plan in at once. “Have just read your despatch,” Lincoln wired Grant while Grant was already on the road. “I begin to see it. You will succeed. God bless you.”35
On June 12, Grant quietly evacuated his Cold Harbor lines, moving so swiftly and unobtrusively that Lee knew nothing of the withdrawal until the next morning. Lee “was in a furious passion” when he discovered that Grant had slipped away under his nose. It was “one of the few times in the war” when Lee completely lost his temper, and as Eppa Hunton, who commanded a brigade in George Pickett’s division, warned, “when he did get mad, he was mad all over.” Grant then proceeded to execute the biggest turning movement of the war, quick-marching his men, corps by corps, down to the James and across the marvelous pontoon bridge, and then across the Appomattox, while Lee was still trying to decide where they had gone. The first of Grant’s troops to arrive hurled a preliminary attack against the Confederate defenses, capturing one and a half miles’ worth of the thinly manned lines (which had only been built as a precaution in 1862). By the sixteenth, three Federal army corps with more than 50,000 men were poised at the gates of Petersburg, with no more than 10,000 Confederates, some of them merely “transient forces” called out for the emergency, to bar the way. “The city is ours. There is not a brigade of the Army of Northern Virginia ahead of us,” shouted the jubilant men of Frank Wilkeson’s battery. “On all sides I heard men assert that Petersburg and Richmond were ours; that the war would virtually be ended in less than twenty-four hours.”