America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  As Sherman’s army prepared to march through Georgia in the fall of 1864, the Confederates disbanded most of Andersonville. They exchanged the remaining prisoners when Sherman took Savannah in December. The following month, the Davis administration agreed to parole black prisoners, and the exchanges accelerated. As the prisoners trickled out from liberated camps or were exchanged, their condition provoked horror and demands for retribution. “Now sir,” an Indiana Republican railed, “if this is to be a war of extermination, let not the extermination be all upon one side.” Walt Whitman, who had seen almost every form of human deformity imaginable, was shaken to his core by the sight of emaciated Union prisoners. “The sight is worse than any sight of battlefields, or any collection of wounded, even the bloodiest.… Can these be men—these little, livid brown, ash-streaked, monkey-looking dwarfs? Are they really not mummied, dwindled corpses?… Probably no more appalling sight was ever seen on this earth.”23

  The prisoners’ fate shocked civilian sensibilities on both sides in a war that had already produced shocking casualties and cruelty. The prisons were an atrocity because war was an atrocity. And the war was not yet finished. The grim rhythm of death continued in the hospitals and prisons. On the battlefield, the slaughter quickened, and this time with no respite. With the approaching spring, the Civil War would become a war for all seasons.

  Ulysses S. Grant became an advocate of relentless war. The conflict had gone on too long with too many casualties and too many of the enemy’s soldiers still in the field. Grant understood that the Union successes in the second half of 1863 would not sustain northern support if the Federals continued to prosecute the war at the leisurely pace that had characterized the first three years of the struggle. War-weariness and peace movements sprouted like wildflowers on both sides as winter turned to spring. Grant believed that a massive, sustained, and coordinated campaign could end the war, save the Union, and preserve freedom for the slaves. Peace through victory.

  President Lincoln promoted Grant to commander of all Union armies in March 1864. Grant deduced that Confederate strength by this time was “far inferior” to the federal forces. Seasonal campaigning and the lack of coordination between the eastern and western theaters enabled the Confederacy to shift troops between the regions and maintain the integrity of its two armies, the Army of Northern Virginia in the East under Lee, and the Army of Tennessee in the West, now under the command of Joseph Johnston. As long as these two armies lived, the Confederacy would not die.

  To change this equation required a comprehensive plan. As Grant explained, “I therefore determined, first, to use the greatest number of troops practicable against the armed force of the enemy, preventing him from using the same force at different seasons [and] … second, to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until by mere attrition … there should be nothing left to him but submission.” Lincoln had advocated this strategy almost since the outset of the war but lacked the right general to implement it. Grant was the right general.24

  Northerners enthusiastically supported Grant’s appointment. Walt Whitman learned of the general’s presence in Washington and wrote excitedly that Grant “is determined to bend everything to take Richmond and break up the banditti of scoundrels that have stuck themselves up there as a ‘government.’ He is in earnest about it; his whole soul and all his thoughts night and day are upon it.” Yet both sides had heard the “On to Richmond” cry before. Grant had built a credible reputation in the West, but he had never faced an army commanded by Robert E. Lee.25

  On May 4, 1864, the Army of the Potomac, 118,000 strong, following the dubious footsteps of Fighting Joe Hooker a year earlier, crossed the Rapidan River to confront the 62,000-man Army of Northern Virginia in the Wilderness, near the site of the Confederates’ last great victory at Chancellorsville. Grant’s immediate objective was Lee’s army, not Richmond. If he could destroy the Army of Northern Virginia, Richmond would fall. Setting the western phase of his grand plan in motion, Grant directed General William T. Sherman, the new commander of the Army of the Cumberland, to attack Joseph Johnston’s Army of Tennessee, “break it up and get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.” These coordinated offensives, pursued without surcease, would strain Rebel resources to the breaking point, prohibit the shifting of troops, and bring an end to the war, Grant believed.26

  A private in Lee’s army awoke on May 5 and pronounced it “a beautiful spring day.” Parts of the two armies joined battle that day in fierce fighting that ended inconclusively. The area’s tangled undergrowth negated Grant’s troop advantage and rendered artillery ineffective. Soldiers aimed by ear more than sight. The armies spent the night entrenching and waiting for the onslaught at sunrise. The Federals attacked part of the Rebel line, and the Confederates launched an assault of their own, both to little advantage but much carnage. Dry weather had turned the Wilderness into tinder for gunfire. Forest fires killed many of the wounded, sometimes horribly by exploding the cartridge belts around their waists. Wounded soldiers committed suicide to avoid being consumed by the flames. A North Carolina soldier reduced the battle to its basic element: “a butchery pure and simple.” Colonel Horace Porter, Grant’s aide-de-camp, agreed. “It seemed as though Christian men had turned to fiends, and hell itself had usurped the place of earth.” The battle ended in a tactical draw, though at a frightful toll to both armies. The Federals suffered nearly 18,000 casualties and the Confederates 7,800.27

  Despite the casualties, Grant had raised Lincoln’s hopes. “The great thing about Grant,” the president offered, “is his perfect coolness and persistency of purpose.… [H]e is not easily excited … and he has the grit of a bull-dog! Once let him get his ‘teeth’ in, and nothing can shake him off.” Indeed, after a particularly bloody day on the battlefield, Grant could be found in his tent, puffing on a cigar and calmly planning the next day’s assault.28

  Rather than withdrawing across the Rapidan in the face of his losses as Hooker had done the previous year, Grant pressed on, to the cheers of his men. He attacked Lee’s right flank at nearby Spotsylvania Court House on May 8. The Confederates met the challenge and halted the Union advance. Lee entrenched now whenever he fought, making Union assaults particularly costly. Grant’s charge on the trenches produced no significant gains and considerable casualties. In nearly two weeks of fighting at Spotsylvania, the Union casualties stood at nearly eighteen thousand, and the Confederates lost twelve thousand men. Grant wired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” Grant believed ultimate victory was in his grasp. In a dispatch to General Meade at the conclusion of the Spotsylvania battles, he asserted, “Lee’s army is really whipped. The prisoners we now take show it.… Our men feel that they have gained the morale over the enemy, and attack him with confidence. I may be mistaken, but I feel that our success over Lee’s army is already assured.”29

  This was a new kind of war, and while it initially exhilarated some, it soon exhausted all. A week into the offensive, a Union officer wrote home, “Dust is sweeping over me like smoke; my face is black with dirt and perspiration, clothes soiled and torn almost to pieces. I am too tired to sleep, too tired to stand.” Confederate private Marion Fitzpatrick expressed what most soldiers on both sides already knew, that they were experiencing a dramatic change in the war: “Never has such fighting been known before.… It is useless to talk about how tired and sore I am. I have not changed clothes or shaved since the fighting commenced. Now it is nothing but fight, fight, and we are in danger more or less all the time and God alone knows when it will end.” Two weeks into the fighting, and a growing disgust at the cost joined the feeling of exhaustion. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote home to his parents, “Before you get this you will know how immense the butchers bill has been— … [N]early every Regimental off[icer] I knew or cared for is dead or wounded—I have made up my min
d to stay on the staff if possible till the end of the campaign & then if I am alive, I shall resign—I have felt for sometime that I didn’t any longer believe in this being a duty.” Holmes left the army later that summer, admitting, “I am not the same man” as when he enlisted.30

  Grant marched forward toward Richmond. Lee dashed along with him to keep his army between the Federals and the capital. He entrenched his forces at Cold Harbor, so named because the local tavern offered cold drinks but no hot meals. The crossroads lay near the site of the Seven Days’ Battles two years earlier. By now, the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac knew that entrenchments would not deter their general. Many pinned their names and addresses to the back of their tunics so burial parties could identify them and notify their families. If Grant’s army smashed through Lee’s fortifications, Richmond loomed just eight miles away. On June 3, at four thirty in the morning, Grant threw his troops at Lee. The result was catastrophic. The Federals lost seven thousand men in less than thirty minutes. If ever a Civil War battle proved the futility of charging over open ground before entrenched soldiers firing rifled weapons, this was the place. The Confederates suffered fifteen hundred casualties.31

  From the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, Grant had lost fifty-two thousand men, 41 percent of his army, or almost the size of Lee’s army. Lee did not escape the slaughter. His total losses for the month amounted to twenty thousand men, or 32 percent of his force. Grant knew he would receive replacements; Lee could not cover his casualties. The Army of the Potomac continued to move forward. An astonished Rebel soldier remarked of Grant, “We have met a man this time, who either does not know when he is whipped, or who cares not if he loses his whole Army.”32

  Grant simply refused to accept defeat. Blocked from Richmond from the north, he swung south to attack Petersburg, twenty-five miles below the Confederate capital, and where three of the four rail lines serving the capital converged. Lincoln endorsed the move in a dispatch to Grant, though the mounting casualties disturbed him. He hoped Grant “may find a way that the effort shall not be desparate [sic] in the sense of great loss of life.”33

  General P. G. T. Beauregard protected Petersburg with only four thousand men but held off an assault by forty-eight thousand federal troops on June 16, proving again the value of trenches in overcoming superior numbers of an attacking enemy. Lee’s force quickly joined Beauregard, increasing the Rebel army to forty-one thousand men. Grant’s army, though, was exhausted, and some troops mutinied against the order to launch yet another assault against entrenched Confederates. The Federals attacked Petersburg four times, the last on June 18, with a listless and uncoordinated performance that one might expect from a tired and demoralized army. Private Frank Wilkeson described the mood of the troops sent forward on these futile charges. “The soldiers were thoroughly discouraged. They had no heart for the assault. It was evident that they had determined not to fight staunchly, not to attempt to accomplish the impossible.… The infantry was sent to the slaughter, and the Confederates promptly killed a sufficient number of them to satisfy our generals that the works could not be taken by assaults delivered by exhausted and discouraged troops.”34

  Grant dug trenches and settled into a siege that would last almost until the end of the war the following year. After six weeks of fighting, Grant had lost sixty-five thousand men. The Confederates suffered thirty-five thousand casualties. Grant had hoped to destroy Lee’s army in open field combat but had not counted on the Confederates’ strategy of fighting a defensive war from entrenchments. A war of attrition prolonged the conflict, which was Lee’s only realistic hope: that northern public opinion would rebel against the war as too costly and force a peace.

  The unrelieved fighting left both sides precious little time to bury their dead. Grant rejected Lee’s request for a forty-eight-hour truce to attend to the corpses after Cold Harbor, offering a twenty-four-hour pause instead. The Union general explained, “Lee was on his knees begging for time to bury his dead. But in this cruel war the business of generals is with the living.” A long line of ambulances from the battlefields of Virginia wended its way through the streets of Washington. Walt Whitman was at his post at the Armory Hospital in the city, where soldiers were dying at the rate of one every hour. President Lincoln, spotting the procession of ambulances, exclaimed, “Look yonder at those poor fellows. I cannot bear it. This suffering this loss of life is dreadful.”35

  The northern press, with an assist from War Department censors, had translated Grant’s persistent forward movements into triumphs, exclaiming that the general had “won a great victory,” that the Army of the Potomac “again is victorious,” and that Grant had forced Lee “to retreat step by step to the very confines of Richmond.” The usually staid New York Times blared, “GLORIOUS NEWS … IMMENSE REBEL LOSSES.” Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune was even more declarative. “Lee’s Army as an effective force has practically ceased to exist,” he wrote, and “LIBERTY—UNION—PEACE” were moments away. Then the casualty lists appeared, hospital beds filled up, and letters from exhausted and troubled soldiers arrived at homes throughout the North, and the mood shifted. Murmurs about Grant’s profligate use of troops turned into demands for his removal. “The fumbling butcher,” they called him. The Democratic press called Grant’s campaign “a national humiliation.” The massive casualties and meager results repulsed even staunch Republicans. “The immense slaughter of our brave men chills and sickens us all,” wrote Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. Perhaps this was the beginning of the shift in northern public opinion that Confederates had hoped for.36

  The two months of uninterrupted battle had a significant impact on the soldiers of both sides. They were unaccustomed to the new tempo of the war. Though casualty figures listed only the dead and wounded, an unknown number of men had succumbed to the stress in other ways. A report from the front in July 1864 suggested that the problem was fairly widespread, at least among Union soldiers. “The unexampled campaign of sixty continuous days, the excitement, exhaustion, hard work and loss of sleep broke down great numbers of men who had received no wounds in battle. Some who began the campaign with zealous and eager bravery, ended it with nervous and feverish apprehension of danger in the ascendancy.”37

  Though Grant had failed to destroy Lee’s army, he prevented the Confederates from sending reinforcements south to support Joseph E. Johnston’s troops in their battle for Georgia. William T. Sherman’s hundred-thousand-man army moved against Johnston on May 7, three days after Grant’s army crossed the Rapidan in Virginia. Sherman would not hurl his army directly at Johnston. He would, rather, outmaneuver it and take Atlanta, the prized rail junction, without huge casualties. The city had become a manufacturing center, the main connecting point between the Confederate forces in the East and West, and a nexus for the distribution of food and supplies to the armies. Neither would Johnston confront Sherman; rather he would snipe, stall, and frustrate the Union’s advance to the city. Johnston traded territory to conserve his army and protract the war. He would not be lured into a war of attrition.

  Sherman and Johnston danced through northwest Georgia, the latter attempting to lure the former into a deadly frontal assault while the former sashayed around the Confederate army. Johnston fell back and established a line, invariably on a hill or some other defensible position, and the process repeated itself, with Sherman covering much more territory sideways than forward and Johnston keeping his smaller army of sixty-two thousand men intact and harassing the Federals at every opportunity. President Davis wondered why his general would not stand and fight, and Confederate officials called Johnston “the Great Retreater,” but the dance continued. Frustration also mounted in Washington. At this pace, Sherman would be in Atlanta in another year or so.38

  Sherman broke first. Whether it was the frustration over Johnston’s maneuvers, mounting criticism in the North, or his confidence in his men, Sherman violated his own rule of avoiding direct assaults. Johnston’s Confederates were entrenched on
Kennesaw Mountain near Marietta in an almost impregnable position. Sherman’s attack, launched in 110-degree heat, was futile and costly, losing 2,000 men to 440 for the Rebels. For the first time, however, the residents of Atlanta could hear the sound of battle. Kennesaw was only twenty-two miles away.39

  The dance resumed, both armies marching in a fog of dust. By mid-July Sherman’s army could see the spires of Atlanta quivering through the haze of heat. Johnston set up defensive positions on the outskirts of the city. It had taken Sherman seventy-four days to advance one hundred miles. Johnston had almost the same number of men as he had at the outset of the campaign. Jefferson Davis, however, had seen enough. One more retreat by Johnston and Atlanta would be flying the Stars and Stripes. Johnston’s maneuvers had harassed the enemy and preserved his army, but at some point he had to fight. On July 17, Davis relieved Johnston of his command and appointed General John Bell Hood of Texas to lead the Army of Tennessee. Lee’s assessment of the change: “We may lose Atlanta and the army too.”40