Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  While the cavalry played its deadly game of cut and thrust near Richmond, the infantry back at Spotsylvania grappled like muscle-bound giants. By this stage of the war the spade had become almost as important for defense as the rifle. Wherever they stopped, soldiers quickly constructed elaborate networks of trenches, breastworks, artillery emplacements, traverses, a second line in the rear, and a cleared field of fire in front with the branches of felled trees (abatis) placed at point-blank range to entangle attackers. At Spotsylvania the rebels built the strongest such fieldworks in the war so far. Grant's two options were to flank these defenses or smash through them; he tried both. On May 9 he sent Winfield Scott Hancock's 2nd Corps to turn the Confederate left. But this maneuver required the crossing of a meandering river twice, giving Lee time to shift two divisions on May 10 to counter it. Believing that this weakening of the Confederate line made it vulnerable to assault,

  16. Ibid., 189–91; Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 91–92.

  Grant ordered five divisions to attack the enemy's left-center on a mile-wide front during the afternoon of May 10. But they found no weakness, for Lee had shifted those reinforcements from his right.

  Farther along toward the center of the line, however, on the west face of a salient jutting out a half-mile along high ground and dubbed the Mule Shoe because of its shape, a Union assault achieved a potentially decisive breakthrough. Here Colonel Emory Upton, a young and intensely professional West Pointer who rarely restrained his impatience with the incompetence he found among fellow officers, made a practical demonstration of his theory on how to attack trenches. With twelve picked regiments formed in four lines, Upton took them across 200 yards of open ground and through the abatis at a run. Not stopping to fire until they reached the trenches, screaming like madmen and fighting like wild animals, the first line breached the defenses and fanned left and right to widen the breach while the following line kept going to attack the second network of trenches a hundred yards farther on. The third and fourth lines came on and rounded up a thousand dazed prisoners. The road to Richmond never seemed more open. But the division assigned to support Upton's penetration came forward halfheartedly and retreated wholeheartedly when it ran into massed artillery fire. Stranded without support a half-mile from their own lines, Upton's regiments could not withstand a withering counterattack by rebel reinforcements. The Yankees fell back in the gathering darkness after losing a quarter of their numbers.

  Their temporary success, however, won Upton a battlefield promotion and persuaded Grant to try the same tactics with a whole corps backed by follow-up attacks all along the line. As a cold, sullen rain set in next day (May 11) to end two weeks of hot weather, reports by rebel patrols of Union supply wagons moving to the rear caused Lee to make a wrong guess about Grant's intentions. Believing that the wagon traffic presaged another flanking maneuver, Lee ordered the removal of twenty-two guns in preparation for a quick countermove. The apex of the salient defended by these guns was exactly the point that Hancock's corps planned to hit at dawn on May 12. Too late the guns were ordered back—just in time to be captured by yelling bluecoats as fifteen thousand of them swarmed out of the mist and burst through the Confederate trenches. Advancing another half-mile and capturing most of the famed Stonewall division, Hancock's corps split Lee's army in two. At this crisis the southern commander came forward with a reserve division. As he had done six days previously in the Wilderness, Lee started to lead them himself in a desperate counterattack. Again the soldiers—Virginians and Georgians this time—shouted "General Lee to the rear!" and vowed to drive back "those people" if Marse Robert would only stay safely behind. Lee acceded, and the division swept forward. Their counterattack benefited from the very success of the Yankees, whose rapid advance in rain and fog had jumbled units together in a disorganized mass beyond control of their officers. Forced back to the toe of the Mule Shoe, bluecoats rallied in the trenches they had originally captured and there turned to lock horns with the enemy in endless hours of combat across a no-man's land at some places but a few yards wide.

  While this was going on the Union 5th and 9th Corps attacked the left and right of the Confederate line with little success, while the 6th Corps came in on Hancock's right to add weight to a renewed attempt to crush the salient. Here was the famous Bloody Angle of Spotsylvania. For eighteen hours in the rain, from early morning to midnight, some of the war's most horrific fighting raged along a few hundred yards of rebel trenches. "The flags of both armies waved at the same moment over the same breastworks," recalled a 6th Corps veteran, "while beneath them Federal and Confederate endeavored to drive home the bayonet through the interstices of the logs."17 Impelled by a sort of frenzy, soldiers on both sides leaped on the parapet and fired down at enemy troops with bayoneted rifles handed up from comrades, hurling each empty gun like a spear before firing the next one until shot down or bayoneted themselves. So intense was the firing that at one point just behind the southern lines an oak tree nearly two feet thick was cut down by minié balls.18

  Hand-to-hand fighting like this usually ended quickly when one side broke and ran; but today neither line broke and few men ran. It became an atavistic territorial battle. Blood flowed as copiously as the rain, turning trench floors into a slimy ooze where dead and wounded were trampled

  17. Joseph P. Cullen, Where a Hundred Thousand Fell: The Battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Court House (Washington, 1966), 52–53

  18. In postwar reminiscences several northern regiments claimed to have accomplished this feat. The stump was later exhibited at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and preserved in the Smithsonian Institution. Splinters from the tree seemed to become as ubiquitous as relics of the true Cross. G. Norton Galloway, "Hand-to-Hand Fighting at Spotsylvania," Robert McAllister, "McAllister's Brigade at the Bloody Angle," and James L. Bowen, "General Edwards's Brigade at the Bloody Angle," in Battles and Leaders, IV, 173, 176, 177.

  down by men fighting for their lives. "I never expect to be fully believed when I tell what I saw of the horrors of Spotsylvania," wrote a Union officer, "because I should be loath to believe it myself were the case reversed." Long after nightfall Lee finally sent word to exhausted Confederate survivors to fall back to a new line a half-mile in the rear which his engineers had worked feverishly to fortify. Next morning the Bloody Angle contained only corpses; Union soldiers on a burial detail found 150 dead southerners piled several deep in one area of trench measuring 200 square feet, and buried them by simply pushing in the parapet on top of them.19

  As the armies battered each other in Virginia, citizens back home crowded newspaper and telegraph offices in a mood of "painful suspense [that] unfits the mind for mental activity." These were "fearfully critical, anxious days," wrote a New Yorker, in which "the destines of the continent for centuries" would be decided. In Richmond, elation at the first reports of Lee's victories in the Wilderness turned to "grave apprehension" and "feverish anxiety" as his army fell back to Spotsylvania while Butler and Sheridan approached Richmond.20 The day before the Bloody Angle, Grant had sent a dispatch to Washington declaring that "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." Newspapers picked up this phrase and made it as famous as Grant's unconditional surrender note at Fort Donelson. Coupled with reports describing the Union advance southward from the Wilderness, Grant's dispatch produced jubilant headlines in northern newspapers: "Glorious Successes"; "Lee Terribly Beaten"; "The End Draws Near." A veteran newspaper reporter recalled that "everybody seemed to think that Grant would close the war and enter Richmond before the autumn leaves began to fall."21

  Lincoln feared that such high expectations would boomerang if they turned out to be overly optimistic—as indeed they did. "The people are too sanguine," he told a reporter. "They expect too much at once." To a group of serenaders who appeared at the White House, Lincoln said that "I am very glad at what has happened; but there is a great deal still to be done." When it becam
e clear by May 17 that Grant had not

  19. Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 127; Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command (Boston, 1968), 235; Galloway, "Hand-to-Hand Fighting at Spotsylvania," Battlesand Leaders, IV, 174.

  20. Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York, 1960), II, 33; Strong, Diary, 449; Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Swiggett), 213, 219.

  21. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 36, pt. 2, p. 672; Nevins, War, IV, 35; Noah Brooks, Washington in Lincoln's Time (New York, 1895), 148–49.

  broken Lee's lines at Spotsylvania and that Butler had been "bottled up" south of Richmond, the northern mood turned "despondent and bad."22 The price of gold, an inverse barometer of public opinion, rose from 171 to 191 during the last two weeks of May.23 The appalling casualty reports that began to filter up from Virginia did not help morale. From May 5 through May 12 the Army of the Potomac lost some 32,000 men killed, wounded, and missing—a total greater than for all Union armies combined in any previous week of the war. As anxious relatives scanned the casualty lists, a pall of gloom settled over hundreds of northern communities.

  Lee's casualties had been proportionately as great—about 18,000—and his loss of twenty of fifty-seven commanders of infantry corps, divisions, and brigades was devastating. Yet it could truly be said that both sides had just begun to fight. Each army made good about half of its losses by calling in reinforcements. Six brigades from the Richmond front and two from the Shenandoah Valley joined Lee. Grant received a few thousand new recruits and combed several heavy artillery regiments out of the Washington defenses and converted them to infantry. Lee's replacements were higher in quality though lower in number than Grant's, for the southerners were combat veterans, while the "heavies" from Washington had seen no real fighting during their two or three years of garrison duty. And even as the Union reinforcements came forward, the first of the thirty-six regiments whose time would expire in the next six weeks began to leave the army.24 While the available manpower pool in the North was much larger, therefore, Lee could more readily replace his losses with veterans than Grant could during these crucial weeks of May and June.

  After the Bloody Angle Grant wasted no time licking his wounds. During the next week he tried several maneuvers on Lee's flanks and another assault up the middle. Aided by rains that slowed Union movements, the rebels countered all these moves. All that the Yankees could

  22. Brooks, Washington in Lincoln's Time, 149; CWL, VII, 334; Strong, Diary, 447.

  23. The price of gold measured the value of the dollar in relation to the value of gold. A price of 191 meant that this many greenback dollars were required to purchase 100 gold dollars. The value of the greenback dollar rose and fell in proportion to confidence in northern military prospects; the higher the price of gold, the lower the value of the dollar.

  24. Not all the soldiers in these regiments went home. Some had re-enlisted as individuals; the enlistments of others had not yet expired. Men in these categories were incorporated into other regiments from the same states.

  show for these six days of maneuvering and fighting were three thousand more casualties. Recognizing the impossibility of loosening the Confederate hold on Spotsylvania by head-on attacks or short-range flanking efforts, Grant decided to lure Lee out by another race twenty-five miles south toward a rail junction just beyond the North Anna River. Lee detected the move by a reconnaissance in force on May 19 that cost him a thousand men and blooded one of Grant's converted heavy artillery divisions.

  Holding the inside track, Lee got his army behind the North Anna River before the Union vanguard arrived. Entrenching a strong position on the south bank, the Confederates fought several small actions against probing bluecoats. Grant decided to move twenty miles downriver for another attempt to get around Lee's right. The Federals crossed the Pamunkey River unscathed, only to find the rebels, who again moved on shorter interior lines, entrenched behind Totopotomy Creek nine miles northeast of Richmond. Although half-starved from lack of rations, the southerners were still full of fight. After two days of skirmishing at the end of May the Yankees sidled southward once more—moving to their left as always, to maintain a short, secure supply line via the tidal rivers controlled by the navy.

  Grant's objective was a dusty crossroads named Cold Harbor near the Gaines' Mill battlefield of 1862. Sheridan's cavalry seized the junction after an intense fight on May 31 with southern horsemen commanded by Lee's nephew Fitzhugh Lee. Next day Sheridan's troopers held on against an infantry counterattack until Union infantry came up and pushed the rebels back. During the night of June 1–2 the remainder of both armies arrived and entrenched lines facing each other for seven miles from the Totopotomy to the Chickahominy. To match additional southern reinforcements from south of the James, Grant pried one of Butler's corps from the same sector. At Cold Harbor, 59,000 Confederates confronted 109,000 Federals. Both armies had thus built themselves back up almost to the numbers with which they started the campaign four long weeks earlier.

  These four weeks had been exhausting as well as bloody beyond all precedent. The Federals had suffered some 44,000 casualties, the Confederates about 25,000.25 This was a new kind of relentless, ceaseless warfare. These two armies had previously fought several big set-piece

  25. Since no records exist for overall Confederate losses during this campaign, casualty figures for Lee's army are at best an estimate.

  battles followed by the retreat of one or the other behind the nearest river, after which both sides rested and recuperated before going at it again. Since the beginning of this campaign, however, the armies had never been out of contact with each other. Some kind of fighting along with a great deal of marching and digging took place almost every day and a good many nights as well. Mental and physical exhaustion began to take a toll; officers and men suffered what in later wars would be called shell shock. Two of Lee's unwounded corps commanders, A. P. Hill and Richard Ewell, broke down for a time during the campaign, and Ewell had to be replaced by Jubal Early. Lee fell sick for a week. On the Union side an officer noted that in three weeks men "had grown thin and haggard. The experience of those twenty days seemed to have added twenty years to their age." "Many a man," wrote Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., "has gone crazy since this campaign began from the terrible pressure on mind & body."26

  All of this was on Grant's mind as he pondered his next move. Another flanking maneuver to the left would entangle his army in the Chickahominy bottomlands where McClellan had come to grief. And it would only drive Lee back into the Richmond defenses, which had been so strengthened during the past two years that the usual defensive advantage of fieldworks would be doubled. Another dozen Union regiments were scheduled to leave the army when their time expired in July; this factor also argued against postponement of a showdown battle. Grant's purpose was not a war of attrition—though numerous historians have mislabeled it thus. From the outset he had tried to maneuver Lee into open-field combat, where Union superiority in numbers and firepower could cripple the enemy. It was Lee who turned it into a war of attrition by skillfully matching Grant's moves and confronting him with an entrenched defense at every turn. Although it galled Lee to yield the initiative to an opponent, his defensive strategy exacted two enemy casualties for every one of his own. This was a rate of attrition that might stun northern voters into denying Lincoln re-election and ending the war. To avoid such a consequence Grant had vowed to fight it out on this line if it took all summer. "This line" had now become Cold Harbor, and the results of a successful attack there might win the war. If beaten, the Confederates would be driven back on the Chickahominy

  26. Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 138; Mark DeWolfe Howe, ed., Touched with Fire; Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1861–1864 (Cambridge, Mass., 1946), 149–50.

  and perhaps annihilated. Grant knew that the rebels were tired and hungry; so were his own men, but he believed that they had the edge in morale. "Lee's army is really whipped," he had written to Halleck a few d
ays earlier. "The prisoners we now take show it, and the action of his army shows it unmistakably. A battle with them outside of intrenchments cannot be had. Our men feel that they have gained the morale over the enemy and attack with confidence."27 So Grant ordered an assault at dawn on June 3.

  The outcome revealed his mistake in two crucial respects. Lee's army was not whipped, nor did Grant's men attack with confidence. Indeed, hundreds of them pinned slips of paper with name and address on their uniforms so their bodies could be identified after the battle. At dawn came the straight-ahead assault delivered primarily by three corps on the left and center of the Union line. A sheet of flame greeted the blue uniforms with names pinned on them. The rebels fought from trenches described by a newspaper reporter as "intricate, zig-zagged lines within lines, lines protecting flanks of lines, lines built to enfilade opposing lines . . . works within works and works without works."28 Although a few regiments in Hancock's 2nd Corps—the same that had breached the Angle at Spotsylvania—managed to penetrate the first line of trenches, they were quickly driven out at the cost of eight colonels and 2,500 other casualties. Elsewhere along the front the result was worse—indeed it was the most shattering Union repulse since the stone wall below Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg. The Yankees suffered 7,000 casualties this day; the Confederates fewer than 1,500. By early afternoon Grant admitted defeat and called off further efforts. "I regret this assault more than any one I have ever ordered," he said that evening. "I think Grant has had his eyes opened," Meade wrote dryly to his wife, "and is willing to admit now that Virginia and Lee's army is not Tennessee and Bragg's army."29