by Bruce Catton
“Wilson, what is the matter with this army?”
Wilson replied that a good deal was the matter—so much that it would hardly do to go into detail—but he said that he could easily suggest a good remedy. One of Grant’s staff officers was Colonel Ely Parker, swarthy and massive and black-haired, a full-blooded Indian of the Iroquois persuasion. Give Parker, said Wilson, a scalping knife and a tomahawk, fill him full of the worst commissary whisky available, and send him out to bring in the scalps of a number of major generals.
Grant chuckled mildly and asked which ones. That did not really matter much, said Wilson; just tell Parker to attack the first ones he came to and not to quit until he had scalped at least half a dozen. After that Grant would have a better army.13
The soldiers themselves were not complaining a great deal. They felt toward their officers about as private soldiers usually do, but there is little to show that Cold Harbor affected that feeling very much. Their complaints were usually like the one voiced by the Michigan private, who inquired grumpily: “Who is putting down this monster rebellion? Is it the officers?” These, he noted, had servants to wait on them, and good food in their baggage wagons, whereas “the poor wearied soldiers who do the fighting” got nothing but dry hardtack to eat and had to sleep in the mud.14
Clearly enough, the soldiers hated Cold Harbor and the trenches and the dust and the heat, and most of them would have agreed with the New York private who wrote: “A fellow sufferer very truly remarked that we are in a very bad state—the state of Virginia.” 15 Yet there is nothing to show that they had had any especial loss in morale. What the men left in writing shows weariness and a longing to get away from the sound of gunfire for a while, but nothing more.16 If the generals were clumsy, most of them had always been that way and there was no reason to expect them to be any different. The Army of the Potomac seems to have spent more time talking and thinking about its opposite number, the Army of Northern Virginia, than about its own high command.
Its relationship with the Confederate army was unusual, a queer blend of antagonism and understanding. At times the feeling between the two armies was downright savage. A man in Smith’s corps complained bitterly that long after the June 3 attacks had ended, Confederate riflemen amused themselves by shooting at the wounded men between the lines. Sometimes, he said, they even fired at corpses. There was a wounded New Hampshire officer who lay, helpless, twenty yards in front of the Union trenches, and all day long the Confederate sharpshooters kept anyone from going out to help him. One man was killed in the attempt, and after that the Union soldiers tried throwing canteens of water and bags of hardtack out to the wounded man, but nothing effective could be done for him as long as the Rebels could see to shoot. After dark, men dug a shallow trench out to where the officer lay, and after three hours’ work they managed to get him back to safety. All of the soldiers in the line set up a cheer when the officer was brought in, and the cheer promptly drew a volley from the Confederate rifle pits.17
That was one side of the coin. For the other side, there was the fact that the pickets constantly arranged informal truces, meeting between the lines to trade knives, tobacco, newspapers, and other small valuables, and as they traded they talked things over. One of these peaceful meetings, unhappily, broke up in a row. A Confederate asked a Yankee who was going to win the Northern presidential election, and the Yankee said that he reckoned he himself would vote for Old Abe.
“He,” said the Southerner, “is a damned abolitionist.”
This immediately brought on a fist fight, and officers had to come out to break it up. Still, men who felt enough at home with each other to argue about politics and fight with their fists over it were hardly, at bottom, sworn enemies estranged by hatred.
A Massachusetts soldier on the II Corps front told how his regiment made friends with a Confederate regiment opposite it and worked out a fairly extended cessation of hostilities, and he said that if the enlisted men of the two armies had the power to settle the war, “not another shot would have been fired.” The friendly Confederate regiment was at length moved away from there, and just before it left a Rebel soldier stood up on the rampart and called out a warning: “Keep down, Yanks—we ’uns are going away.” As soon as the replacements came in the firing was resumed. When the V Corps was shifted around to the left of the Union line, so that it faced the Confederates across the Chickahominy River, the 118th Pennsylvania and the 35th North Carolina put in the day sitting on opposite banks of the narrow stream, fishing and chatting.
A soldier in a New York heavy artillery regiment wrote that it seemed, now and then, as if an increasing number of Confederates were willing to slip over to the Union side after dark and surrender, yet he added wryly that “when it comes to fighting, one would not suppose that any of them had the faintest idea of surrendering.” Between fights, he said, Northerners and Southerners talked things over, concluded that peace would be a very fine thing, and agreed that “if a few men on both sides who stayed at home were hung, matters could easily be arranged.”18
Yet the soldiers were only a part of it, and what happened to them out along the rifle pits amid the choking dust was having a queer reverse effect on men back home who would never know what it was like to charge a line of riflemen in the smoky twilight, gun butt raised to crush a human being’s skull. For this was the year when the shadow of death lay all across America, and grotesque shapes moved within the shadow and laid hold of men’s hearts and minds. The soldiers at the front could look ahead to peace without seeing it through a veil of hatred, and if they talked lightly about the need to hang a few stay-at-homes, they spoke as men who had seen so many killings that a few more might not make much difference. Yet there were quiet civilians who were talking of hangings, too, these days. They were men of years and peace, who might inspire violence but who had never actually seen any of it, and the war had worked upon them until they could feel that death and heartbreak were positive goods.
Some were men who had always lived by the sword, and they were beginning to see in this war a chance to reach a monstrous goal, with an undying fire blazing across a wasteland which had once been peopled by men who disagreed with them. But others were moderates, not usually given to thoughts of vengeance and reprisal, carried away now by the fury of war.
There was Gideon Welles, for instance, Secretary of the Navy, a white-whiskered, brown-wigged man, God-fearing and humorless and gossipy, a good Connecticut editor and politician who lived austerely, fathered a large family, and worshiped at the shrine of the Union. While the worst of the Cold Harbor fighting was going on, Welles communed with himself in his diary, seeing death and suffering as abstractions, remarking sagely that no man had been prepared for the extraordinary changes the war had brought. It often came to him, he wrote, that “greater severity” might well be invoked against the South—yet the thought had to be dealt with cautiously, for “it would tend to barbarism.” And in his quiet study, where the night’s peace was broken by no sound worse than the clatter of horse-drawn cabs on the paving stones outside the curtained windows, Welles reflected on the business of hanging one’s enemies:
“No traitor has been hung. I doubt if there will be, but an example should be made of some of the leaders, for present and future good.”
To be sure, the Southern leaders could be imprisoned or exiled, once the war was safely won, but that might not answer. People would try to rescue them, and parties would form to uphold their principles, and in the end these principles might revive and grow strong again. Perhaps ideas and emotions could be destroyed forever, if the men who held them were destroyed; and the thought led Mr. Welles to set down his conclusion:
“Death is the proper penalty and atonement, and will be enduringly beneficent in its influence.”
But perhaps hangings would not be possible, since there is in man a deep tendency toward softness of heart. In such case, Mr. Welles felt, the Rebel leaders could at least be stripped of their wealth and their families i
mpoverished. The effect of this (wrote the good family man) would be wholesome. Yet it did not really seem likely that any of these stern things would be done, and he concluded regretfully: “I apprehend there will be very gentle measures in closing up the rebellion.” 19
Mr. Welles might be wrong about the inevitability of gentleness. In this year when blood-red fantasies danced against the clouded moon of war, men who had never seen the grotesque indignity of violent death could talk easily about the good fruits that might grow at the foot of the gallows tree, and devout Christians could wonder if something precious might not slip too easily through the loose meshes of Christian charity. At this moment, when casualties in the Army of the Potomac had averaged 2,000 men a day for a solid month, Abraham Lincoln was waging the hardest fight of his life to uphold the dream that peace could finally be made decently and justly, without malice or a desire to have revenge.
For of all the men who controlled and directed the war, Lincoln was the one who most deeply shared the spirit that moved across the steaming trenches at Cold Harbor—fight to the limit as long as the fighting has to go on, but strike hands and be friends the moment the fighting stops. Before the war even began, in that haunted springtime when its dark shape was rising, Lincoln had tried to warn North and South that they could never travel on separate roads. Win or lose, someday they would have to get along with each other again, and whatever they did before that day came had better be done in such a way that getting along together would still be possible. The soldiers had got the point perfectly, and they expressed it very simply: Hang a few troublemakers and we’ll all go home. Mysteriously, the fighting seemed to be bringing them mutual understanding, and they may almost have been closer to each other, in spirit, than they were to their own civilians back home. Yet there was nothing they could do about it. They had not made the war and they would not end it. They could only fight it.
And the men who had made the war—the sharp politicians and the devoted patriots, the men who dreamed the American dream in different ways and the other men who never dreamed any dreams at all but who had a canny eye for power and influence—most of these, by now, were prisoners of their own creation.
The hospitals in Washington were full as never before, and every day steamers came up the river with more broken bodies to be unloaded, and it was easy for those who watched this pathetic pageant to be embittered by what had happened to these men rather than inspired by what they had dreamed of. It was hard to think clearly, and the act of embracing unmitigated violence could be a substitute for thought.
There was a colonel on Grant’s staff who typified the trend perfectly. He could see that Southern resistance was still very strong, although he did not seem to be able to see anything else very clearly, and he was going about the tents these days smiting an open palm with a clenched fist and growling: “Smash ’em up! Smash ’em up!” 20 As a tactical slogan this had its faults, since logically it led to nothing better than Cold Harbor assaults, but it was a perfect expression of the growing state of mind behind the fighting fronts. Smash ’em up: the war cannot be settled, it can only be won; smash ’em up—and afterward, on the pulverized fragments, we can sit down quietly and decide what we are going to do next.
If the war was to be won, it was important that it be won soon. It had been born of anger and misunderstanding and it was breeding more as it went along. It was pushing men to the point where vengeance seemed essential, driving even a man like Secretary Welles to think well of the process of dangling a political opponent by the neck, with convulsive feet kicking at the unsustaining air. The longer the war lasted, the harder it was for people to think beyond victory, the more probable that victory when it finally came would have to be total and unconditional. What Lincoln and the soldiers wanted was a dream, and 2,000 casualties a day created an atmosphere in which dreams could not live.
So a Cold Harbor stalemate was unendurable, and among the people who saw this was General Grant. He had been commissioned to break the fighting power of the Confederacy, and he still hoped that it could be done by one bold stroke rather than by a slow process of grinding and strangling and wearing out. Before he even bothered to seek a truce so that dead men might be buried and wounded men brought back within the lines—they lay there, untended, for several days, bullets flying low above them—he set things in motion for a new move. The network of trenches grew deep and strong, but even as they took on their air of grim permanence the army that crouched in them was given a new objective.
From the moment he crossed the Rapidan, Grant’s ruling idea had been to go for Lee’s army without a letup—to keep that dangerous body of fighting men so everlastingly busy that it could never again seize the initiative, to compel it to fight its battles when and where Grant chose rather than by Lee’s selection. The chance for decisive victory lay that way, and in the past month’s fighting the army had come tolerably close to it two or three times. To stay in the Cold Harbor lines would be to give up all hope of decisive victory, for if anything was clear, it was that no offensive at or near Cold Harbor could possibly succeed. General Halleck was clucking like a worried mother hen, urging that the army stay put and conduct a siege, running no risks and counting on time and general military erosion to wear the enemy down.21 But even though Grant had given the Army of the Potomac more trench warfare in a month than it had had in all of its earlier existence, he still believed in a war of movement. He had taken Vicksburg by maneuver and he had one maneuver left, and now he would try it.
Grant had a basilisk’s gaze. He could sit, whittling and smoking, looking off beyond the immediate scene, and what he was looking at was likely to come down in blood and ashes and crashing sound a little later. Right now he was looking all the way across the James River to a peaceful, sleepy Virginia city named Petersburg, which lay on the southern bank of the Appomattox River, twenty-odd miles south of Richmond, near the point where the Appomattox flows into the James.
What Grant saw when he stared off through the mists toward Petersburg was the Confederates’ problem of supply. The immediate vicinity of Richmond did not begin to produce enough food and forage to support either Lee’s army or the Confederate capital. An important part of this material came down from the Shenandoah Valley, over the Virginia Central Railroad and the James River Canal. Even more important, however, was what came up from the Deep South, and most of this came by railroads which ran through Petersburg. If the Federal army could seize Petersburg, the Army of Northern Virginia and the civil government which supported it would go on starvation rations. If, at the same time, the connection with the Shenandoah Valley could be broken, Richmond could no longer be defended.
Yet it was not Richmond itself which Grant wanted. He wanted to destroy Lee’s army, and to do that he had to get it out of its trenches. The one way to compel it to move was to cut off its supplies. So he made his plans: seize Petersburg, block the line to the Shenandoah, and let hunger drive Lee’s army out into the open. Once that happened there could be a finish fight, under conditions in which the Federal army’s advantage in numbers ought to be decisive.
Within forty-eight hours of the failure of the June 3 assaults Grant was writing his orders, and by June 7 Sheridan had two of his cavalry divisions on the road, heading west for Charlottesville. At Charlottesville Sheridan was to meet an army under Major General David Hunter, who had replaced Sigel after that general’s inglorious defeat at Newmarket. Hunter had the troops that had been Sigel’s, another division which General George Crook had led east from West Virginia, and a good body of cavalry under Averell. With these men he had marched up the Valley to Staunton, crushing a small Confederate force which tried to delay him, and at Staunton he was turning east, burning and destroying as he came. Grant’s idea was that Hunter and Sheridan would join forces and come down toward Richmond together, taking the Virginia Central Railroad apart as they came and rejoining the Army of the Potomac somewhere below the James River.22
Meade’s engineers were building
an inner line behind the front at Cold Harbor, and the army as a whole was shifting slowly to its left, with Warren’s corps lining up along the Chickahominy. A fleet of transports had come up the Pamunkey to the base at White House, and warships, transports, barges, and a great number of pontoons were being assembled at Fortress Monroe, ready to go up the James on order. The arrangements were intricate but they were well directed, and finally, late in the afternoon of June 12, Grant and Meade struck their headquarters tents and rode down the north bank of the Chickahominy, past Despatch Station, to make a new camp beside a cluster of catalpa trees in a farmhouse yard. As night came on, the hot air was filled with dust as 100,000 soldiers began moving out of the positions which they had occupied for the better part of a fortnight.
It was risky business. This was no mere repetition of the sidestep which had been done so many times on the march down from the Rapidan. This time the whole army was marching directly away from its foes, gambling that it could disappear completely even though the two armies were in intimate contact along a five-mile front, their lines nowhere more than a few hundred yards apart. Once it got clean away—if it did—the Federal army had to make a fifty-mile hike and cross a tidal river which was half a mile wide and fifteen fathoms deep: a river which, unlike all of the little streams which had been crossed earlier, bore on its surface a number of formidable ironclad Confederate gunboats. There were Yankee gunboats, to be sure, to keep these in check, but if even one Southern warship managed to slip past these defenders, it could turn the projected river crossing into disaster.
Much worse than the danger of the gunboats, however, was the chance that Lee would find out what was going on and would move out to interfere. If he should catch the Army of the Potomac in the act of turning its back on him and marching down to the James River, what he and his soldiers might do to it would hardly bear thinking about. Two years ago he had detected McClellan making the same move on the same ground, and only the utter greenness of his staff and command arrangements had kept him from destroying McClellan’s army. The greenness had long since been corrected.