by Bruce Catton
As he studied the lines Smith began to discover that there was a scarcity of defenders, and he concluded that Rebel strength just now consisted mostly of artillery. He would not assault with massed troops, which could be ripped apart by the guns; instead he would use a succession of skirmish lines, against which the guns would not be effective. If the trenches were held as lightly as he was beginning to believe, the skirmish lines could carry them, and if he was wrong and there were lots of Rebels in the trenches, then no attack would have a chance anyway;8 and by four o’clock, or such a matter, Smith finished his reconnoissance and ordered an attack.
Now came the first little hitch. Staff work had slipped, somewhere, and no one had warned the chief of artillery that a fight was imminent, so that officer had sent all of the artillery horses off to water. It seemed important to give the attacking troops plenty of artillery protection, and the guns could not be put into position until the horses got back. So there was a wait, and the afternoon died and evening came, and it was nearly sunset when everything was ready9—and north of the Appomattox, Confederate officers were driving lean columns down the roads, hurrying to get into the Petersburg lines before the war was lost beyond salvage.
Other troops were on the road, too—Union troops, two divisions of Hancock’s II Corps, who had crossed the James during the night and now were struggling along to come up and give Smith’s men a hand. Late in the afternoon, while he was waiting for the gunners to get their horses, Smith was told of their approach, and the news seems to have taken the edge off his eagerness. With strong reinforcements at hand, the delay in mounting the attack probably would not matter so much.
The artillery was moved forward at last and it began to smite the Confederate works, and around seven o’clock the Union lines rolled forward. The Confederates put up a good defense but their job was impossible. The Federal attackers simply swamped them, Hinks’s colored troops going forward as stoutly as the rest, and by nine o’clock or a little earlier most of the formidable line was in Union hands, with sixteen guns and several hundred prisoners. The colored troops were exultant and they capered about their captured cannon with whoops of pride, and General Hinks was equally optimistic. Smith came riding over, and Hinks proposed that the entire command move boldly forward and march into Petersburg without further ado.
Night had come, but the moon was out and its clear thin light lay across the ridges and valleys and the empty roads to the little city. There were no more forts to storm, and the Confederates who had retreated were not even bothering to maintain a rear-guard fire. Hinks thought that the Federals could walk into Petersburg just about as they chose.
So did Beauregard. He wrote later that at that moment “Petersburg was clearly at the mercy of the Federal commander, who had all but captured it.” But Smith did not think so. He told Hinks that Beauregard was going to be reinforced (which was true enough) and said that by the time the Federals could reach the town the defenders there would outnumber them (which was not true at all). He added that if they were not careful they would lose all that they had gained. It would be best to hold on where they were and wait for Hancock’s men, and very likely something decisive could be done tomorrow. Smith sent Ben Butler a wire saying, “Unless I misapprehend the topography, I hold the key to Petersburg.” Meanwhile, he ordered Hinks to make no advance.10
Hancock’s men were just coming on the scene—two divisions, Birney’s and Gibbon’s, dusty and half-exhausted, but full of enthusiasm. They had had a very hard march, but they would have been on hand a great deal earlier except for a few little mistakes that had been committed here and there along the way. Altogether, these mistakes added up to nothing much except faulty staff work, and they would not be worth mentioning except that they helped to prolong the war by eight months.
The first mistake lay in the fact that somehow no one had told either Meade or Hancock that there was going to be a fight at Petersburg that day. Hancock’s orders simply were to march to City Point, to wait long enough there to issue rations to his men, and then to march toward Petersburg and put his men in position at a spot where the City Point Railroad crossed something called Harrison’s Creek. He was given a map showing all of the roads to Petersburg, and on this map his objective point was clearly marked. It was stated that the Federals already had field works there.
Hancock undertook to obey orders, but there were problems. The first was that there were no rations for him at City Point, and after waiting several hours he got impatient and had the column move on without them. The next trouble was that the map that had been given him turned out to be totally in error. Roads and streams did not run how or where the map said they did, and the troops were let in for a great deal of countermarching and backtracking. As the day wore on Hancock began to suspect that the spot he was going to did not exist; either the inhabitants of the region had never heard of any Harrison’s Creek or they were refusing to share their knowledge with Yankees. (It turned out later that the designated place was well within the Rebel lines.) With all of this, the II Corps had a long day on the roads, and along toward 5:30 P.M. a message arrived from U. S. Grant telling Hancock to hurry because Smith had carried the outer works of the Petersburg defense system and needed help at once. A few minutes later Hancock got a similar note from Smith.
Thus, for the first time, Hancock knew that he was supposed to be marching up to take part in a fight. If he had known this at dawn he could have had his men up beside Smith’s by midafternoon, bad maps or no: instead, as he wrote in his report, “I spent the best hours of the day … in marching by an incorrect map in search of a designated position which, as described, was not in existence.” As a result his men began to come up beside Smith’s men after all of the fighting had stopped. Smith had made his decision, and when Hancock asked him, as the man on the spot, what was going to happen next, Smith simply suggested that Hancock have his men relieve Hinks’s boys in the captured trenches. Tomorrow would be time enough to renew the attack.11
The II Corps of the Army of the Potomac was a battle-wise outfit, and during the last six weeks it had been hammered so hard that most of the spring had gone out of it. Nevertheless, it is recorded that for once in their lives the men in this corps made furious and profane objections when they were told that they would not immediately be rushed into battle.
During their march that day an electric sense of coming victory had gone through the ranks. The men had a fairly clear idea of what was going on, and they understood that at last a flank march had been fully successful. They had got ahead of their opponents, they were going to get to Petersburg before Lee’s army could get there, and they were strategists enough to know what that was going to mean.12 So they tramped along perkily, while the sun went down and the twilight faded into ghostly moonlight, and up ahead they heard firing. They came up through the backwash of Smith’s battle, at last, and they passed some of Hinks’s colored soldiers, gaily hauling brass cannon to the rear with long ropes, fifty men on a cannon, everybody shouting and laughing. The II Corps looked at this with interest and called out the obvious question: Where did you get those guns? Proudly the colored soldiers replied that they had just captured them from the Rebels.
The deduction which Hancock’s veterans drew from this was not complimentary to Hinks’s division, but it sent II Corps morale sky-high. If these colored troops had captured guns in prepared earthworks, Hancock’s men figured, that could only mean that Lee’s veterans had not yet reached Petersburg. The Army of the Potomac was winning the race! Up and down the moving column the men shifted their blanket rolls, moved cartridge boxes around to where they could get at them more easily, and remarked to no one in particular: “Put us into it, Hancock, my boy, and we’ll end this damned rebellion tonight!”
But instead of going into line of battle and making an advance, they filed into the captured works, watched Smith’s troops retire, ate their supper and boiled their coffee, and put out sentinels for the night. Slowly the men came to understand
that there would be no fight that night, and one of them wrote afterward: “The rage of the enlisted men was devilish. The most bloodcurdling blasphemy I ever listened to I heard that night, uttered by men who knew they were to be sacrificed on the morrow. The whole corps was furiously excited.” 13
So the II Corps went grumpily to sleep, and Smith’s men went to sleep, and Beauregard’s men stayed awake and worked hard. On a north-south ridge between the city and the works they had just lost, the Confederates were hard at it building new trenches and gun pits. During the night Hoke’s division, which had been on loan north of the James, began to come in, and as the men were rushed out to the new defense line Beauregard took the last desperate step that was available: he ordered abandonment of the lines which held Butler’s army immured at Bermuda Hundred, left a thin line of pickets there to watch the situation, and brought the men down to Petersburg. As a result of all of this, by morning he had 10,000 men or more in position to defend the town.14 The odds against him were still long, but they were nothing like what they had been the day before, and it was just possible now that Beauregard could hold on until Lee’s army could come down below the river and help.
Meade was busy, too. During the evening of June 15 he got word from Grant that Smith was fighting hard and that the rest of the army must come up as soon as possible, and so Burnside and his IX Corps crossed the river with orders to move up and take position on the left of Hancock’s corps. The V Corps was to follow Burnside, artillery and trains and cavalry were to follow that, and Wright’s VI Corps would hold the north bank of the James until everyone else was south of the river. Then the VI Corps would come up, the pontoon bridge would be removed, and everything would be south of the James with City Point as the new supply base.
Meade himself crossed the river on the morning of June 16, and as he rode up from City Point toward Petersburg, along toward noon, he met Grant, just returning from an inspection of the front. Grant was full of enthusiasm, and he told Meade: “Smith has taken a line of works stronger than anything we have seen this campaign. If it is a possible thing I want an assault made at six o’clock this evening.” 15
So ordered. Late in the day Hancock’s and Burnside’s troops were in line, the guns were in position in the captured works, and a great thunder of gunfire rolled out as the artillerists began to hammer the new Rebel trenches, which lay on the far side of a shallow valley. The sun was going down and the air was full of dust and smoke, and as Meade and his staff rode out to watch the fight there was a strange, coppery tinge in the atmosphere and on the landscape. Things looked posed and unreal, and one of Meade’s party saw the gunners silhouetted against the unearthly light as they sponged out the guns and rammed the charges home and mused that they might have been lifted out of the old mezzotint engravings of Napoleon’s battles which he used to see on the parlor wall of his parents’ home.16
The Confederates had made good use of their time and the new line of works was strong. Hancock and Burnside sent their troops forward and there was bitter, inconclusive fighting. Gains were made, and the II Corps got in close around a commanding hill which anchored the left center of the Rebel line, but the Rebels lashed out with sharp counterattacks which made Meade think that Beauregard had a lot of troops in reserve, and in the end it was clear that the work could not be finished that day. The firing died out with a few spiteful rifle shots from the skirmish lines, and the hot guns on the ridge cooled as the sun went down, and Meade sent an officer back to City Point to give Grant a report.
This officer entered the general’s tent and found Grant sitting on the edge of his cot, mostly undressed, just ready to go to sleep. He made his report, and Grant knew that Lee had only that afternoon begun to pull his troops out of the works north of the James to march for Petersburg; and he smiled a little and permitted himself a rare moment of self-congratulation, remarking: “I think it is pretty well, to get across a great river and come up here and attack Lee in the rear before he is ready for us.” Then Grant went to bed and the staff officer returned to Meade, and everybody made ready for the next day.17
Next day ought to do it. Most of the army was up, by now—all of the II and V Corps, two divisions of Smith’s corps and one of Wright’s and three of Burnside’s—in all, more than 80,000 fighting men. The men were very tired, for they had not yet had a chance to recover from six weeks’ unbroken fighting and marching, and both Meade and Hancock noted that attacks now were not driven home as they used to be.18 But morale was high, for the men sniffed victory in the air, and as June 17 dawned opportunity was bright.
Beauregard’s trenches were strong, but the line was uneven. It ran south from the Appomattox for four miles, or thereabouts, and it had two principal strong points—the Hare house hill, around which Hancock’s men had gained a foothold the night before, and a similar hill a mile or two south and a little east of there, crowned by the house of a man named Shand. This latter hill lay in front of Burnside, and it seemed likely that it could be flanked, and Meade considered that a hard joint attack by Hancock and Burnside ought to knock out both of these strong points and break the line wide open.
Farther south the prospects were even better. The Confederates months ago had built trenches completely encircling Petersburg, but they did not begin to have men enough to occupy all of them. Because the whole Yankee army was massed east of town, Beauregard had massed all of his troops there to meet the threat. On the south he was wide open. There was a country turnpike that dropped south from Petersburg, bearing the pleasing name of the Jerusalem Plank Road, and it and the country west of it held no Rebel troops at all, except for a thin cordon of cavalry pickets. Beauregard was painfully aware that he was defenseless in that quarter, and he wrote later that if Meade had put so much as one army corps over on the Jerusalem Road and told it to march due north, “I would have been compelled to evacuate Petersburg without much resistance.” 19
The army corps which might have made such a march was readily available—Warren’s V Corps, which held the extreme left of Meade’s line. It was the freshest outfit in the army, for it had not been involved in the hard fighting at Cold Harbor and had not, in fact, been heavily engaged since Spotsylvania. On June 16 Grant had wired Meade to get Warren over to the Jerusalem Road as fast as possible, and in a general way this was supposed to be Warren’s objective on June 17. But Warren found Rebel skirmishers in his front and they were busy and seemed to be very bold and cocky, and Warren was cautious about pressing them too hard—and, in the end, nothing in particular was done and the empty country west of the Jerusalem Plank Road remained empty all day long.
On Warren’s right there was hard fighting. Burnside dutifully moved up to attack the Shand house hill, where his men fought manfully but without intelligent direction. There was a ravine in front of the hill, and on the Yankee side the ground was full of gullies and patches of thick wood, which made it hard to form and move a line of battle. During the night Burnside’s leading division, Potter’s, struggled across this uneven ground. The going was hard, and the men had just made an all-night march after being under arms for thirty-six hours, and whenever a brigade or regiment was temporarily halted the men would drop where they were and go to sleep. When it was time to move on again they could be aroused only with much difficulty.
Line was formed close to the Confederate position. Orders were passed in a whisper, and the men were required to put their canteens in their haversacks so that they would not rattle. Just at dawn, with bayonets fixed, the division swept over the crest, plunged down into the ravine, and made for the Rebel position.20
The position was strong, but there were few Rebels in it, and Potter’s tired men seized the hill, dug some rifle pits, and looked around for the support that had been promised. On their right a division of the II Corps had been told to make a simultaneous attack, but orders had gone sour somewhere and the attack was not being made. (One trouble probably was that Hancock had finally been disabled by his old Gettysburg wound and had had
to turn the corps over to the senior division commander, General Birney; in any case, liaison had broken down and the support was not there.)
In the rear things were no better. Another of Burnside’s divisions, Ledlie’s, had been supposed to follow on Potter’s heels, but through some incredible breakdown in staff work nobody had told Ledlie about it and he and his men were sound asleep when the attack was launched. For the time being Potter’s men could do nothing but dig in and wait.
Birney finally got his attack moving and it was successful, swamping the Confederate defenses on the Hare house hill, from which position the II Corps might have made a sweep toward the south, taking in flank what was left of the Confederate line. But control of the fight seems to have slipped out of Meade’s hands, and no unit commander up front was concerned with anything except what lay immediately before him, and although the Confederate line had been broken in two places before noon nothing effective was done to exploit the openings.
Several hours passed. Burnside finally got a second division forward and it charged through Potter’s troops and attacked the new line which Beauregard had patched up there. The men had to cross a railroad cut and climb a steep slope and there was a Confederate battery placed so that it could fire down the length of the railroad cut, and the new division was broken up and forced to retreat with nothing accomplished. Toward dusk, Burnside brought up Ledlie’s division, and it went slamming down into the railroad cut and up the far side in the face of a furious fire. There were confused attacks and counterattacks all up and down the slope, and men used bayonets and clubbed muskets in desperate fights for gun pits. The 39th Massachusetts won an advanced position, losing three color-bearers, and at last was forced back, leaving its colors on the ground. Its colonel asked for volunteers to go out and get the flags. A corporal and a private responded and ran out to get them, and suddenly—and quite unexpectedly—the Confederates stopped firing, allowed the men to pick up the flags, and as they went back to the regiment the Rebels waved their hats and raised a cheer. Night came, and Ledlie’s men got to the crest of the slope, seized the Confederate works there, and then had to stop because they had run out of ammunition.