On the morning of May 5, Ewell clashed with Warren, opening the battle of the Wilderness. Sedgwick arrived from the north, supporting Warren with three additional divisions, and Hancock approached from Todd’s Tavern, three miles south of Wilderness Tavern. The Yankees, spread along a northwest-southeast line across the Orange-Fredericksburg Turnpike, faced the five divisions of Ewell and Hill. Poor visibility and difficulty of holding formations meant attackers normally were heard well before they could fire on the defenders. It was far from ideal for the Northerners: Confederate troops seemed better adapted to the woods, and Federal troops were relying on poor maps. Moreover, Confederate attacks in such conditions were especially unnerving to the Yankees, due to the fearsome rebel yell. “The Federal, or ‘Yankee,’ yell, compared with that of the Confederate, lacked in vocal breadth, pitch, and resonance,” explained Harvie Dew of the Ninth Virginia Cavalry. Dew continued, “This was unquestionably attributable to the fact that the soldiery of the North was drawn and recruited chiefly from large cities and towns, from factory districts, and from the more densely settled portions of the country. In an instant every voice with one accord vigorously shouted that ‘Rebel yell,’ which was so often heard on the field of battle. ‘Woh-who-ey!, who-ey!, who-ey! Woh-oh-ey! who-ey! etc.’” 3
The Confederates worked their psychological advantages well, and because of various hesitations on the Federals’ part, held their lines in strong fashion until darkness fell. Each army planned an attack for the next morning. At 5 a.m. on May 6, much of the Federal line lunged forward on the offensive, with Ewell defending well on the north, and Hill, to the south, breaking in confusion. As the Confederate right was crumbling, Longstreet arrived and reinforced the position. On the northernmost end of the line, Confederate Brig. Gen. John B. Gordon launched an attack that succeeded until halted by darkness. On May 7 the armies reinforced their lines and mostly stayed inactive, with fires consuming parts of the Wilderness brush that separated them—fires that burned some wounded to death. Already the casualties were heavy, amounting to possibly as many as thirty thousand total, and neither side had gained a meaningful outcome. But rather than retreat, Grant chose to turn Lee’s left and race toward Richmond, necessitating the Confederate commander to block him at the junction of roads near Spotsylvania Court House.
On the Confederate side A. P. Hill was sick, and Longstreet, the senior corps commander, had been seriously wounded, accidentally, by his own men on the Brock Road on May 6. On May 8, as elements of both armies vied for position near Spotsylvania, Warren’s infantry clashed with Confederate units of Longstreet’s corps, now commanded by Maj. Gen. Richard H. Anderson. A Federal attack late in the afternoon was too poorly coordinated to achieve a significant result.
By May 9 the Confederate corps of Anderson, Ewell, and Maj. Gen. Jubal Early (replacing Hill, temporarily) formed a semicircle near Spotsylvania Court House, with the Federals approaching from the northwest (Hancock, Warren, and Sedgwick) and the northeast (Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside). On this day, as aides worried over his exposure to Confederate fire, Sedgwick was killed, hit below the left eye by a minié bullet. (Among his last words were, “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”) The following day, the Confederate line tightened, and part of Ewell’s position formed a Mule Shoe salient, a semicircular bulge, around two local houses. Grant had the opportunity to turn Lee’s left but remained determined that Hancock should assault from the front. At 4 p.m. on May 10, Hancock, Warren, and Maj. Gen. Horatio Wright (having replaced Sedgwick) struck vigorously into Anderson’s corps. The resulting casualties were monstrous. “Ambulances and army wagons with two tiers of flooring, loaded with wounded and drawn by four and six mule teams, pass along the plank, or rather, corduroy road to Fredericksburg,” wrote Augustus Brown of the Fourth New York Heavy Artillery. “Many of the wounds are full of maggots. I saw one man with an arm off at the shoulder, with maggots half an inch long crawling in the sloughing flesh, and several poor fellows were holding stumps of legs and arms straight up in the air so as to ease the pain the road and the heartless drivers subjected them to.” 4
The following day, May 11, was quiet, masking a grim determination on Grant’s part to engineer the end of the war. “I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer,” he wrote Henry Halleck on this day. All knew the heavy fighting—in what was becoming a micro-siege at Spotsylvania—would continue. “I shall come out of this fight a live major general or a dead brigadier,” wrote Brig. Gen. Abner Monroe Perrin, who commanded a brigade in A. P. Hill’s corps. 5 He was killed the next day. On May 12 a vicious frontal attack by Hancock plunged into the Mule Shoe. Attacks and counterattacks continued until dusk. The fighting was stubborn, and Lee slowly began to develop a new line, this time positioned south of the Mule Shoe.
During all this, Union cavalry under Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan had been raiding Richmond, drawing J. E. B. Stuart away from Lee’s army. The approach to Richmond culminated in the battle of Yellow Tavern, where Stuart was mortally wounded on May 11, dying the next day. After destroying supplies and railroad, Sheridan returned to Grant’s army on May 24. After continued fighting around Spotsylvania Court House, Grant sent Hancock to Guinea’s Station, ten miles east of Spotsylvania, and interposed Federal forces between Lee’s army and Richmond. A rush to a potential next line of defenses ensued for Lee, who withdrew to a position along the North Anna River. After a fight on May 23, both armies again raced southward, Lee’s army arriving astride the old battlefields of the Peninsular campaign of 1862 by May 28. Elements of Grant’s army arrived east of Atlee’s Station and Cold Harbor by May 30 and June 1.
At Cold Harbor Lee’s army of about 59,000 faced Grant’s force of about 108,000. Between Richmond and Petersburg, Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler’s Army of the James, consisting of 14,600 men, faced Confederate general G. T. Beauregard’s 9,000 soldiers. Planning to take the offensive, Lee sent Anderson to strike Sheridan at Old Cold Harbor, with disastrous effect: once opposed, the Confederates scattered in retreat.
The next day both armies moved toward Cold Harbor. In the early morning of June 3, Grant ordered a frontal attack designed to push Lee to the Chickahominy, but more than seven thousand Yankee soldiers were cut down in less than one hour. “The dead and dying lay in front of the Confederate lines in triangles, of which the apexes were the bravest men who came nearest to the breastworks under the withering, deadly fire,” wrote Charles Venable, a staff officer of Lee’s, of the attack. The armies stubbornly fought from the trenches for the next nine days, with the cost in suffering and casualties fearfully high. “We are now at Cold Harbor, where we have been since June 1,” wrote Federal colonel Emory Upton on June 5. “On that day we had a murderous engagement. I say murderous, because we were recklessly ordered to assault the enemy’s intrenchments, knowing neither their strength nor position. Our loss was very heavy, and to no purpose. Our men are brave, but cannot accomplish impossibilities.” Despite the savagery of the fighting and the newspaper reports of monstrous casualties, young men were still anxious to support both armies with their sweat and blood. Richard Corbin, a young Southerner in Paris, ran the blockade to join his beloved army. “Veni, Vici, and as Julius Caesar remarked, we have gone in and won,” he wrote on June 5 from Wilmington. “Thank Heaven I am at last on Confederate soil, having most successfully passed through that awful ordeal . . . the blockade.” 6
On June 12 Grant initiated a movement that would set up the final act of the war. His plan was to shift his base of operations south of the James River, capture Petersburg, and threaten the last railroad supply line connecting Richmond with the outside world. To do this he established a second line at Cold Harbor and withdrew under the cover of darkness, sending Maj. Gen. William F. Smith’s Eighteenth Corps to Bermuda Hundred, on the James River twenty miles south of Richmond, where it arrived on June 15. The remaining corps also sped southward, and when Lee heard about the Yankee movements, he relocated Anderson and A. P. Hill south toward
Malvern Hill to block an approach toward Richmond.
Having fooled Lee entirely, Grant ordered Smith to attack and capture Petersburg at daybreak on June 15, but he approached cautiously and reconnoitered the city’s defenses so extensively that an attack was not launched until 7 p.m. He captured two redans, small gun emplacements, with ease, and by the fall of darkness nothing prevented him from marching straight into Petersburg. Unduly concerned about possible growing Confederate strength in the area, Smith stayed put, and the opportunity was lost.
On June 16 heavy reinforcements arrived, along with Grant, who ordered an assault at 6 p.m. A light attack on the following day and a heavier one on June 18 both failed against the strengthening Confederate defenses. “I shall never forget the hurricane of shot and shell which struck us as we emerged from the belt of trees,” wrote Augustus Brown of the battle on June 18. “The sound of the whizzing bullets and exploding shells, blending in awful volume, seemed like the terrific hissing of some gigantic furnace. Men, torn and bleeding, fell headlong from the ranks as the murderous hail swept through the line.” 7 The Petersburg operations were transforming into a siege. Indeed, sporadic fighting around a deepening network of trenches—punctuated by infrequent major attacks—would characterize the remainder of the war on the Petersburg front.
WHILE these many developments were transforming the war’s character in Virginia, Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman was transforming the war another way in Georgia. In May Sherman, who commanded the Military Division of the Mississippi, moved his three armies southward toward the Army of Tennessee, commanded by Gen. Joseph E. Johnston. He was not alone: Sherman brought the Army of the Tennessee (24,000 men commanded by Maj. Gen. James B. McPherson), the Army of the Cumberland (61,000 under Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas), and the Army of the Ohio (13,500 under Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield) against some 50,000 of Johnston’s defenders. The plan was for Sherman to crush Johnston’s army, move against the rail center of Atlanta, and destroy the heart of Georgia’s capacity to support wartime operations.
The armies clashed at Rocky Face Ridge, north of Dalton, between May 5 and 7. On May 13 Johnston fell back to Resaca, south of Dalton, hoping to lure Sherman into a foolish attack. Elements of the armies skirmished at this position for three days before Johnston again pulled back, allowing Sherman to capture the manufacturing town of Rome. After additional minor engagements, Johnston retreated to the heavily defended position of Allatoona Pass. Between May 25 and 27 the armies clashed, and Sherman continued turning movements that forced Johnston southward toward Atlanta. Thereafter, Union soldiers established a supply depot at Big Shanty—the position from which James Andrews’s raid had departed two years before—and by late June Johnston constructed a heavy defensive line along Kennesaw Mountain, northwest of Marietta. There, on June 27, a savage frontal assault from Sherman resulted in bloody casualties, particularly for the Union attackers, who amassed three thousand killed, wounded, and missing.
The armies of Sherman and Johnston contrasted starkly to those of the east. They were largely made up of western and midwestern men, many of whom were rough, rugged characters. “With regard to the general appearance of the Westerners, it is not so different from our own as I had supposed, but certain it is that discipline is most astonishingly lax,” wrote Federal staff officer John Chipman Gray that summer. 8 Despite their lack of discipline, the Yankees continued moving south. Johnston next dug in along the Chattahoochie River, where again Sherman turned his line, forcing a withdrawal to Peachtree Creek, two miles farther south and on the outskirts of Atlanta, on July 9. For a week Sherman prepared for a major, coordinated movement across the river. Meanwhile, Jefferson Davis had reached the limits of his tolerance with Joe Johnston, whose repeated movements southward initiated a near panic in the Confederate capital. The replacement for Johnston, assigned on July 17, was Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood, the veteran of many battles that, among other things, left him without his right leg (lost at Chickamauga) and the use of his left arm (at Gettysburg). Now he would attempt to defend the heart of the rail system supporting the Deep South.
In the battle of Peachtree Creek on July 20, Hood attacked and suffered heavy casualties. He then backed into the defenses of Atlanta. The battle of Atlanta, during which McPherson was killed, resulted two days later—as Sherman believed Hood was withdrawing from the city. By July 28 Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard, who replaced McPherson, pushed northwestward around the city and toward Ezra Church, two miles west of the city’s edge, where he attempted, unsuccessfully, to cut the rail lines and isolate the Confederates. A detachment of cavalry left on a mission to free Union prisoners at Andersonville far to the south but was captured. Sherman finally advanced on August 26, and Hood’s groggy response led to the battle of Jonesboro, south of the city, between August 30 and September 1. Hood pulled out of Atlanta in the late afternoon of September 1, when Federal troops marched into the city, escorting civilians out of the area and converting Atlanta into a fortified supply camp. “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will,” Sherman wrote Atlanta’s mayor, James M. Calhoun, on September 12. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. . . . You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war.” 9 Hood moved his troops northward into the first phase of what would become a campaign of pure folly.
ELSEWHERE, a variety of land and naval actions were under way. On June 10 at Brice’s Crossroads, Mississippi, north of Tupelo, Confederate cavalry great Nathan Bedford Forrest, now a major general, defeated Federal Maj. Gen. Samuel D. Sturgis’s force of 7,800 with less than half as many soldiers. The war touched Europe on June 19, when off the coast of Cherbourg, France, the USS Kearsarge sank the CSS Alabama, the notorious raider that had sunk, burned, or captured sixty-nine ships. In the Shenandoah Valley on June 23, Confederate Maj. Gen. Jubal A. Early began a raid that would bring the terror of war to the outskirts of Washington. Early was checked by Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace along the Monocacy River near Frederick, Maryland, on July 9. Although this battle stopped his advance only briefly, it allowed the Union defenses of Washington to tighten. On July 11 and 12 Early made his closest pass to the capital when he skirmished at Fort Stevens, a battle briefly witnessed by President Lincoln.
The focus, however, remained on the Petersburg defense lines, where the tedium of trench warfare ground on. “I have only one earthly want,” Robert E. Lee wrote his son Custis, “that God in His infinite mercy will send our enemies back to their homes.” 10 Grant had no such idea, however. The frustrating stalemate led to a novel idea from a regiment of Pennsylvania coal miners—to tunnel underneath the Confederate works, pack the tunnel with black powder, and blow a breach in the line so troops could rush through to victory. Lt. Col. Henry Pleasants of the Forty-eighth Pennsylvania Infantry received permission to proceed with the plan, and by July 23 a shaft measuring 511 feet long extended to a position some 20 feet below the Confederate line. Federal soldiers placed about four tons of black powder—roughly 320 kegs—into the mine adit. Confederates had detected the tunneling operation and constructed a smaller countermine, but they had no indication of the impending explosion. At 4:45 a.m. on July 30, the powder exploded, forming a crater 170 feet long, 80 feet wide, and 30 feet deep. Nine companies of Confederate soldiers were hurled into the air, and some 278 soldiers were killed instantly. In the ensuing melee Union soldiers became mired in the debris rather than pushing forward, and two officers commanding the attack, Brig. Gens. Edward Ferrero and James H. Ledlie, cowered in a bombproof, drinking liquor. It was one of the great disasters of the war. After the smoke, the destruction, and the death, nothing had changed—the Petersburg siege continued.
FAR to the southwest, near Mobile, Alabama, a Federal naval force commanded by Rear Adm. David G. Farragut prepared to cut off one of the Confederacy’s remaining major ports. In addition to his flagship, USS Hartford, Farragut’s force consisted of four monitors and thirteen wooden ships. He faced the ironclad ram CSS Tennessee and three gunboats, t
he CSS Morgan, CSS Gaines, and CSS Selma, commanded by Adm. Franklin Buchanan. At 6 a.m. on August 5, Farragut attacked, attempting to run the guns of the nearby forts. The heavy guns of Fort Morgan opened fire on Farragut’s fleet slightly more than an hour later. After more than half an hour of intense action, Farragut’s lead ship, the USS Tecumseh, struck a torpedo (naval mine) and sank. At this point Farragut allegedly stated, “Damn the torpedoes—full speed ahead!” 11 He pressed through, pushed the Tennessee into surrender, and captured the imaginations of Northerners as another Union hero.
IN Richmond, meanwhile, the Second Congress of the Confederate States of America had convened on May 2. The first session was brief, lasting only until June 14. Despite his sagging relationship with Congress, President Davis attempted to put the best spin on the events that were bearing down on the capital. With Grant’s forces on the march toward the city, he wrote, “The recent events of the war are highly creditable to our troops. . . . The armies in northern Georgia and in northern Virginia still oppose with unshaken front a formidable barrier to the progress of the invader, and our generals, armies, and people are animated by cheerful confidence.” 12
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