Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  Some 136,000 veterans re-enlisted. Another hundred thousand or so decided not to. This latter group experienced the usual aversion to risk-taking during their final weeks in the army, thus limiting their combat capacity and damaging the morale of their re-enlisted comrades at crucial times during the summer of 1864. To replace wounded, killed, and discharged soldiers the Union armies mustered conscripts, substitutes, and bounty men who had been obtained by the first draft in 1863. This procedure affected most the Army of the Potomac, which had suffered higher casualties than any other army and had a re-enlistment rate of only 50 percent. Veteran officers and men regarded most of these new recruits with contempt. "Such another depraved, vice-hardened and desperate set of human beings never before disgraced an army," wrote a disgusted New Hampshire veteran. A Connecticut soldier described the new men in his regiment as "bounty jumpers, thieves, and cutthroats"; a Massachusetts officer reported that forty of the 186 "substitutes, bounty-jumpers . . . thieves and roughs" who had been assigned to his regiment disappeared the first night after they arrived. This he considered a blessing, as did a Pennsylvania officer who wrote that the "gamblers, thieves, pickpockets and blacklegs" given to his charge "would have disgraced the regiment beyond all recovery had they remained . . . but thanks to a kind Providence . . . they kept deserting, a dozen at a time, until they were nearly all gone."4 Much of the North's apparent superiority in numbers thus dissolved during 1864. "The men we have been getting in this way nearly all desert," Grant complained in September, "and out of five reported North as having enlisted we don't get more than one effective soldier."5

  Southern leaders discerned these flaws in their foe's sword. They hoped

  3. Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), 36.

  4. Ibid., 25, 26; Wiley, Billy Yank, 343–44; John J. Pullen, The Twentieth Maine: A Volunteer Regiment in the Civil War (Philadelphia, 1957), 154.

  5. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 42, pt. 2, p. 783.

  to exploit them in such a manner as to influence the 1864 presidential election in the North. The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz had defined war as the pursuit of political goals by other means. Confederate strategy in 1864 certainly conformed to this definition. If southern armies could hold out until the election, war weariness in the North might cause the voters to elect a Peace Democrat who would negotiate Confederate independence. Whether Lincoln "shall ever be elected or not depends upon . . . the battle-fields of 1864," predicted a Georgia newspaper. "If the tyrant at Washington be defeated, his infamous policy will be defeated with him." In Richmond a War Department official believed that "if we can only subsist" until the northern election, "giving an opportunity for the Democrats to elect a President . . . we may have peace."6 Recognizing "the importance of this [military] campaign to the administration of Mr. Lincoln," Lee intended to "resist manfully" in order to undermine the northern war party. "If we can break up the enemy's arrangements early, and throw him back," explained Longstreet, "he will not be able to recover his position or his morale until the Presidential election is over, and then we shall have a new President to treat with."7

  Grant was well aware of these southern hopes. But he intended to crush rebel armies and end the war before November. Eastern Yankees curious about the secret of this western general's success thought they saw the answer in his unpretentious but resolute demeanor. This "short, round-shouldered man" with "a slightly seedy look," according to observers in Washington who saw Grant for the first time, nevertheless possessed "a clear blue eye" and "an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it." Even a jaded New Yorker who had watched the reputations of a half-dozen Union generals perish "because their owners did not know how to march through Virginia to Richmond" believed that "Grant may possess the talisman."8

  6. Larry E. Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric: Confederate Policy for the United States Presidential Contest of 1864 (University, Ala., 1980), 14, 51; Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Swiggett), II, 229.

  7. Douglas Southall Freeman, ed., Lee's Dispatches: Unpublished Letters of General Robert E. Lee . . . to Jefferson Davis (New York, 1915), 185; Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana, Ill., 1983), 532; O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 32, pt. 3, p. 588.

  8. Foote, Civil War, III, 4, 5; Strong, Diary, 416.

  Grant did not confine his attention solely to Virginia. Instead, believing that the various northern armies in the past had "acted independently and without concert, like a balky team, no two ever pulling together," he worked out plans for coordinated advances on several fronts to prevent any one of the Confederate armies from reinforcing another. "Lee's Army will be your objective point," Grant instructed Meade. "Wherever Lee goes, there will you go also." Sherman received orders "to move against Johnston's army, to break it up, and to get into the interior of the enemy's country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources."9 These two main Union armies would have a numerical advantage of nearly two to one over their adversaries, but Grant issued additional orders to increase the odds. On the periphery of the main theaters stood three northern armies commanded by political generals whose influence prevented even Grant from getting rid of them: Benjamin Butler's Army of the James on the Peninsula; Franz Sigel's scattered forces in West Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley; and Nathaniel Banks's Army of the Gulf in Louisiana. Grant directed Banks to plan a campaign to capture Mobile, after which he was to push northward and prevent rebel forces in Alabama from reinforcing Johnston. At the same time Butler was to advance up the James to cut the railroad between Petersburg and Richmond and threaten the Confederate capital from the south, while Sigel moved up the Valley to pin down its defenders and cut Lee's communications to that region. Lincoln was delighted with Grant's strategic design. With a typical backwoods metaphor, he described the auxiliary role of Banks, Butler, and Sigel: "Those not skinning can hold a leg."10

  But the leg-holders bungled their jobs. The first to fail was Banks. The administration shared responsibility for this outcome, for it diverted Banks from the attack on Mobile to a drive up the Red River in Louisiana to seize cotton and expand the area of Union political control in the state. Only after achieving these objectives was he to turn eastward against Mobile. As it turned out, Banks achieved none of the goals except the seizure of a little cotton—along with the wanton destruction of much civilian property, an outcome that hardly won the hearts and minds of Louisianians for the Union.

  Banks's nemesis was Richard Taylor (the son of Zachary Taylor), who had learned his fighting trade as a brigade commander under Stonewall Jackson in 1862. Taking command of some 15,000 men after the loss

  9. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 46, pt. 1, p. 11, Vol. 33, pp. 827–28, Vol. 32, pt. 3, p. 246.

  10. Dennett, Lincoln/Hay, 178–79.

  of southern Louisiana to the Union, Taylor prepared to defend what was left of the state in which he had gained wealth as a planter. Banks had been humiliated in Virginia by Jackson; he suffered the same fate a thousand miles away at the hands of Stonewall's protégé. On April 8, Taylor struck the vanguard of Banks's army at Sabine Crossroads thirty-five miles south of the Union objective of Shreveport. Driving the routed Yankees pell-mell back to their supports, Taylor came on and attacked again next day at Pleasant Hill. This time the bluecoats held, forcing the rebels in turn to recoil after taking sharp punishment.

  Despite this success, Banks was unnerved by the nonarrival of a cooperating Union force pushing south from Little Rock (it had been deflected by guerrillas and cavalry harassment) and by the abnormally low Red River, which threatened to strand the already damaged Union gunboat fleet above the rapids at Alexandria. Banks decided to retreat. Disaster to the gunboats was averted by the ingenuity of a Wisconsin colonel who used his lumbering experience to construct a series of wing dams that floated the fleet through the rapids. The dispirited army did not get back to southern Louisiana until May 2
6, a month too late to begin the aborted Mobile campaign. As a consequence Joseph Johnston received 15,000 reinforcements from Alabama. Moreover, 10,000 soldiers that Banks had borrowed from Sherman for the Red River campaign never rejoined the Union army in Georgia. Instead they remained in the Tennessee-Mississippi theater to cope with threats by Forrest against Sherman's rail communications. Banks was superseded as department commander and returned to his controversial role as military administrator of Louisiana's reconstruction.11

  Butler and Sigel fared no better than Banks in their assignments to hold rebel legs. Butler had a real chance to achieve the glory that had eluded him since the war's early days. With 30,000 men drawn from coastal operations in the Carolinas he steamed up the James River and landed midway between Richmond and Petersburg on May 5. The two cities were defended by only 5,000 troops plus hastily mobilized government clerks serving as militia. Their commander—none other than P. G. T. Beauregard, who was transferred from Charleston to southside Virginia—had not yet arrived on the scene. If Bulter had moved quickly to cut the railroad between Petersburg and Richmond he might have smashed into the capital against little opposition. Lee could have done nothing to prevent this, for he was otherwise engaged with the Army of

  11. Ludwell H. Johnson, Red River Campaign: Politics and Cotton in the Civil War (Baltimore, 1958).

  the Potomac sixty miles to the north. But the squint-eyed Union commander fumbled his chance. Instead of striking fast with overwhelming force, he advanced cautiously with detached units, which managed to tear up only a few miles of track while fending off rebel skirmishers. Not until May 12, a week after landing, did Butler get his main force on the march for Richmond. By then Beauregard had brought reinforcements from the Carolinas and was ready to meet Bulter on almost even terms. On May 16 the Confederates attacked near Drewry's Bluff, eight miles south of Richmond. After severe casualites on both sides, the rebels drove Bulter's men back to their trenches across a neck between the James and Appomattox rivers. There the southerners entrenched their own line and sealed off Butler's army, in Grant's caustic words, "as if it had been in a bottle strongly corked."12

  Grant received the news of Butler's corking about the same time he learned of a similar setback to Franz Sigel in that vale of Union sorrows, the Shenandoah Valley. With 6,500 men Sigel had advanced up the Valley to capture Staunton, whence Lee's army received some of its meager supplies. Before Sigel could get there, however, former U.S. Vice President John C. Breckinridge, now commanding a scraped-together rebel force of 5,000, attacked Sigel at New Market on May 15 and drove him back. This small battle was marked on one side by Sigel's skill at retreating and on the other by a spirited charge of 247 V.M.I, cadets aged fifteen to seventeen, who were ever after immortalized in southern legend. Convinced that Sigel "will do nothing but run; he never did anything else," Halleck and Grant prevailed upon Lincoln to remove him from command.13

  The failure of Grant's leg-holders in Virginia complicated the task of skinning Lee. The Armies of the Potomac and of Northern Virginia had wintered a few miles apart on opposite sides of the Rapidan. As the dogwood bloomed, Grant prepared to cross the river and turn Lee's right. He hoped to bring the rebels out of their trenches for a showdown battle somewhere south of the Wilderness, that gloomy expanse of scrub oaks and pines where Lee had mousetrapped Joe Hooker exactly a year earlier. Remembering that occasion, Lee decided not to contest the river crossing but instead to hit the bluecoats in the flank as they marched through the Wilderness, where their superiority in numbers—115,000 to 64,000—would count for less than in the open.

  12. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 46, pt. 1, p. 20.

  13. Ibid., Vol. 36, pt. 2, p. 840.

  Accordingly on May 5 two of Lee's corps coming from the west ran into three Union corps moving south from the Rapidan. For Lee this collision proved a bit premature, for Longstreet's corps had only recently returned from Tennessee and could not come up in time for this first day of the battle of the Wilderness. The Federals thus managed to get more than 70,000 men into action against fewer than 40,000 rebels. But the southerners knew the terrain and the Yankees' preponderance of troops produced only immobility in these dense, smoke-filled woods where soldiers could rarely see the enemy, units blundered the wrong way in the directionless jungle, friendly troops fired on each other by mistake, gaps in the opposing line went unexploited because unseen, while muzzle flashes and exploding shells set the underbrush on fire to threaten wounded men with a fiery death. Savage fighting surged back and forth near two road intersections that the bluecoats needed to hold in order to continue their passage southward. They held on and by dusk had gained a position to attack Lee's right.

  Grant ordered this done at dawn next day. Lee likewise planned a dawn assault in the same sector to be spearheaded by Longstreet's corps, which was on the march and expected to arrive before light. The Yankees attacked first and nearly achieved a spectacular success. After driving the rebels almost a mile through the woods they emerged into a small clearing where Lee had his field headquarters. Agitated, the gray commander tried personally to lead a counterattack at the head of one of Longstreet's arriving units, a Texas brigade. "Go back, General Lee, go back!" shouted the Texans as they swept forward. Lee finally did fall back as more of Longstreet's troops double-timed into the clearing and brought the Union advance to a halt.

  The initiative now shifted to the Confederates. By mid-morning Longstreet's fresh brigades drove the bluecoats in confusion almost back to their starting point. The southerners' local knowledge now came into play. Unmarked on any map, the roadbed of an unfinished railroad ran past the Union left. Vines and underbrush had so choked the cut that an unwary observer saw nothing until he stumbled into it. One of Longstreet's brigadiers knew of this roadbed and suggested using it as a concealed route for an attack against the Union flank. Longstreet sent four brigades on this mission. Shortly before noon they burst out of thickets and rolled up the surprised northern regiments. Then tragedy struck the Confederates as it had done a year earlier only three miles away in this same Wilderness. As the whooping rebels drove in from the flank they converged at right angles with Longstreet's other units attacking straight ahead. In the smoke-filled woods Longstreet went down with a bullet in his shoulder fired by a Confederate. Unlike Jackson he recovered, but he was out of the war for five months.

  With Longstreet's wounding the steam went out of this southern assault. Lee straightened out the lines and renewed the attack in late afternoon. Combat raged near the road intersection amid a forest fire that ignited Union breastworks. The Federals held their ground and the fighting gradually died toward evening as survivors sought to rescue the wounded from cremation. At the other end of the line General John B. Gordon, a rising brigadier from Georgia, discovered that Grant's right flank was also exposed. After trying for hours to get his corps commander Richard Ewell to authorize an attack, Gordon went to the top and finally obtained Lee's permission to pitch in. The evening assault achieved initial success and drove the Federal flank back a mile while capturing two northern generals. Panic spread all the way to Grant's headquarters, where a distraught brigadier galloped up on a lathered horse to tell the Union commander that all was lost—that Lee was repeating Jackson's tactics of a year earlier in these same woods. But Grant did not share the belief in Lee's superhuman qualities that seemed to paralyze so many eastern officers. "I am heartily tired of hearing what Lee is going to do," Grant told the brigadier. "Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land on our rear and on both our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do."14

  Grant soon showed that he meant what he said. Both flanks had been badly bruised, and his 17,500 casualties in two days exceeded the Confederate total by at least 7,000. Under such circumstances previous Union commanders in Virginia had withdrawn behind the nearest river. Men in the ranks expected the same thing to
happen again. But Grant had told Lincoln that "whatever happens, there will be no turning back."15 While the armies skirmished warily on May 7, Grant prepared to march around Lee's right during the night to seize the crossroads village of Spotsylvania a dozen miles to the south. If successful, this move would place the Union army closer to Richmond than the enemy and force Lee to fight or retreat. All day Union supply wagons and the reserve artillery moved to the rear, confirming the soldiers' weary expectation of retreat. After dark the blue divisions pulled out one by one. But

  14. Horace Porter, Campaigning with Grant (New York, 1897), 69–70.

  15. Foote, Civil War, III, 186.

  instead of heading north they turned south. A mental sunburst brightened their minds. It was not "another Chancellorsville . . . another skedaddle" after all. "Our spirits rose," recalled one veteran who remembered this moment as a turning point in the war. Despite the terrors of the past three days and those to come, "we marched free. The men began to sing." For the first time in a Virginia campaign the Army of the Potomac stayed on the offensive after its initial battle.16

  Sheridan's cavalry had thus far contributed little to the campaign. Their bandy-legged leader was eager to take on Jeb Stuart's fabled troopers. Grant obliged Sheridan by sending him on a raid to cut Lee's communications in the rear while Grant tried to pry him out of his defenses in front. Aggressive as always, Sheridan took 10,000 horsemen at a deliberate pace southward with no attempt at deception, challenging Stuart to attack. The plumed cavalier chased the Yankees with only half his men (leaving the others to patrol Lee's flanks at Spotsylvania), nipping at Sheridan's heels but failing to prevent the destruction of twenty miles of railroad, a quantity of rolling stock, and three weeks' supply of rations for Lee's army. On May 11, Stuart made a stand at Yellow Tavern, only six miles north of Richmond. Outnumbering the rebels by two to one and outgunning them with rapid-fire carbines, the blue troopers rolled over the once-invincible southern cavalry and dispersed them in two directions. A grim bonus of this Union victory was the mortal wounding of Stuart—a blow to Confederate leadership next only to the death of Jackson a year and a day earlier.