The American Military - A Narrative History

by Brad D. Lookingbill

  A few days later, Lincoln tapped “Fighting Joe” Hooker to command the Army of the Potomac. With a reputation as a drinker and a womanizer, he revived the faltering regiments. Among other things, he increased unit pride by devising badges for each corps. The Union fielded “the finest army on the planet,” or so the bombastic commander claimed.

  Hooker led 115,000 soldiers along the Rappahannock, nearly twice the force of Lee. On April 30, he positioned 40,000 bluecoats in Fredericksburg to feign another direct assault against Confederate lines. The rest of his troops headed upriver and then crossed into the Wilderness, an area of scrub forests, thick underbrush, and narrow roads. He planned to catch his enemy in a vise. By the next day, they advanced through the junction of Chancellorsville to flank the unsuspecting graybacks.

  In a daring countermove, Lee divided his forces and attacked the overconfident Hooker. After a preliminary skirmish in the Wilderness, he forced his rival to defend Chancellorsville on May 2. Once again, he directed an audacious maneuver that defied military maxims. With the Union flank “in the air,” Jackson took 28,000 troops on a roundabout march to hit their exposed right. Around 5:30 p.m., some of Hooker's regiments were playing cards while cooking supper. Suddenly, Jackson's yelling rebels burst out of the woods and pressed the federal camps.

  As darkness fell, Jackson rode ahead to reconnoiter the shifting lines. Nervous Confederates standing guard mistakenly fired three bullets at the shadowy figure. Wounded, Jackson's arm was amputated the next morning. While recovering, he contracted pneumonia and died. “I have lost my right arm,” Lee lamented afterward.

  Over the next few days, Union columns withdrew in disarray. With only half of his force engaged in battle, Hooker was knocked temporarily unconscious by an exploding shell. Dazed and confused, he refused to relinquish command. His troops huddled north of Chancellorsville, while Lee directed another strike against federals marching from Fredericksburg. By May 6, the Army of the Potomac had retreated across the Rappahannock. Despite the long odds, the Army of Northern Virginia won an amazing victory in the field. The Battle of Chancellorsville produced 13,000 Confederate casualties compared with 17,000 for the Union.

  The Union was down but not out. Owing to the daunting arithmetic of battle, gone were the lingering hopes for an affair of honor. Rifled musketry, which achieved an effective range of almost 800 yards, made the concepts of Napoleonic warfare foolhardy. Though once unthinkable, winning a revolutionary struggle demanded the massing of enough bodies and machines to utterly crush the Confederacy.

  Gettysburg

  During 1863, Confederate leaders decided upon a risky strategy. Davis suggested that Lee campaign near Vicksburg or in Tennessee, but the general preferred to launch an invasion of Pennsylvania. He hoped to divert Grant as well as to threaten Washington D.C. Furthermore, a major victory in the northern states might entice foreign intervention.

  With over 70,000 men, the Army of Northern Virginia moved northward. Hooker sent Union cavalry under General Alfred Pleasonton to scout Lee's movements. On June 9, they clashed with Stuart's cavalry at Brandy Station along the Rappahannock. While Stuart took three brigades on a pointless raid immediately afterward, the Army of the Potomac followed the rebels without engaging them in battle. Irritated by another inept commander, Lincoln replaced Hooker with General George Meade.

  At the crossroads town of Gettysburg, a Confederate scavenging party in search of shoes encountered Union cavalry. Both armies began converging on the town, as the rebels entered from the north and the federals arrived from the south. Neither side planned for the greatest land battle in the history of North America.

  On the morning of July 1, Union cavalry under General John Buford clashed with advance parties of Confederates at Gettysburg. While abandoning the town, the former held the high ground to the south. Their decisiveness delayed the onrush of the latter. Soon, Union infantry and artillery arrived to reinforce the cavalry, particularly at Cemetery Hill. That afternoon, Lee ordered General Richard Ewell, who inherited Jackson's old corps, to take the hill “if practicable.” Ewell hesitated, leaving the position in federal hands at nightfall. In the darkness, federals organized their interior lines while massing 85,000 men. They established a position resembling a “fishhook,” with the barbed end curving from Culp's Hill to Cemetery Hill and the shank extending southward for a mile along Cemetery Ridge. On their far left, the Union line ended at two other hills, Little Round Top and Big Round Top. Despite arriving late to the field, Meade resolved to defend the position against Lee.

  On the morning of July 2, Lee ordered his army to attack. Defending the right flank, Union forces drove Ewell's rebels off Cemetery Hill and stopped them at Culp's Hill. To prevent Meade from shifting reinforcements, Lee sent Longstreet's corps on a coordinated move against the Union left flank at the Round Tops. A countermarch delayed their primary advance, which did not commence until late afternoon.

  Contrary to orders, General Daniel Sickles marched the Union III Corps to meet the Confederates near Emmitsburg road. Longstreet's men fought their way through a peach orchard, where Sickles was wounded. The 1st Minnesota Regiment closed a gap in a wheat field but lost nearly all of their men in only five minutes. Ferocious combat raged in the “Devil's Den,” a mound of boulders across a boggy creek. As the Confederates swept forward, the Union dispositions at Little Round Top appeared vulnerable. In response, the Union V Corps dispatched regiments from Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, and Maine to defend the end of the line “at all hazards.”

  In command of the 20th Maine Regiment was a 33-year-old college professor, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Standing with 386 bluecoats, he nervously watched the graybacks advance up Little Round Top. Both sides opened a brisk fire at close range, as smoke enveloped the steep, rocky slopes. In an hour and a half, a third of the soldiers fell. The fighting surged back and forth five times, but the men from Maine “refused the line.”

  With their ammunition exhausted and their ranks decimated, Chamberlain made a critical decision. “The bayonet,” he ordered, and he led his regiment on a charge. Holding fast by the right and swinging forward to the left, they formed an extended “right wheel” that swept downhill. Suddenly, a lost company rejoined the fray. Taken by surprise, the stunned rebels broke and ran. The federal position at Little Round Top was saved by one of the finest small-unit actions of the Civil War.

  Once the day ended, the federals retained the high ground. However, Lee believed that Meade was forced to weaken his center to reinforce the flanks. He planned to mass his force for a direct assault on Cemetery Ridge in the morning. Longstreet opposed the plan, urging his superior to consider a broad turning movement that would bypass the heights. “The enemy is there” Lee announced with a gesture, “and I am going to strike him.”

  On July 3, Lee's plan resulted in a disaster. On the flank, Stuart's cavalry swung east of the battlefield almost 2.5 miles, but was stopped by Union cavalry commanded by General George Armstrong Custer. That afternoon, General E. Porter Alexander massed 143 Confederate cannons along Seminary Ridge for a 2-hour bombardment of the Union center. Though the earth shook, Meade kept Cemetery Ridge reinforced.

  After rebel guns ceased firing at 2:45 p.m., General George E. Pickett led his division out of the woods at Seminary Ridge. With other divisions from Longstreet's corps added to the long gray line, more than 13,000 men paraded across a mile of open terrain. They marched toward a clump of trees, as Union infantry and artillery on Cemetery Ridge decimated their ranks. “Give them the cold steel!” shouted General Lewis Armistead, a Confederate brigade commander, who fell at the federal dispositions. “Pickett's Charge” lasted less than an hour. No more than half of the rebel attackers returned to the woods alive.

  The three days of fighting exhausted the armies in the field, although the Battle of Gettysburg produced a dramatic Union victory. American casualties numbered 51,000 men, many of whom were left strewn for weeks between the lines. The Army of Northern Virginia
counted around 4,300 killed in action, while the Army of the Potomac suffered 3,155 fatalities. Because Meade failed to order a counterattack, Lee withdrew his army southward across the Potomac River to recover.

  Winning the West

  The most innovative operations occurred in the western theater, which extended from the Mississippi River to the Appalachian Mountains. Because the vast area lacked suitable infrastructure, Union commanders confronted serious logistical problems. As a military solution, they targeted the railroads, wagons, depots, livestock, and crops that sustained the population. Widespread foraging not only supplied federals on the move but also starved rebels in the countryside. Under pressure, civilian support for the Confederacy began to collapse.

  No individual grasped the significance of pressure better than Grant, who resolved to take Vicksburg in 1863. With his strength mounting to 75,000 men, he led four attempts – and four failures. By April, he devised a new plan to bypass the Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River with the help of Admiral David Dixon Porter, the naval officer in charge of the Union flotilla. More than half his army rendezvoused at Bruinsburg, Mississippi, 35 miles to the south, and began an overland campaign without conventional lines of supply and communication. Grant's men would “live off the country” until they reached Vicksburg.

  Grant marched them approximately 130 miles, fighting and winning four battles against Confederate forces. With orders to hold Vicksburg at all costs, General John C. Pemberton commanded the rebel diehards. By May 1, Union troops had captured Port Gibson and began choking off supplies to the city. Two weeks later, they drove graybacks under Johnston out of Jackson, Mississippi. Next, they prevailed at Champion's Hill, a ridgeline about midway between Jackson and Vicksburg. Following another victory at Black River Bridge, Grant reached the outskirts of Vicksburg with 45,000 bluecoats.

  Facing fortifications and earthworks around Vicksburg, Grant's initial assaults were halted by a firewall of rifles and cannons. While Union gunboats pounded Confederate defenses, he settled into a siege. Civilians huddled in caves within the hillsides, where many resorted to eating mules, horses, dogs, and rats. On July 4, Pemberton ordered his 31,000 Confederates to surrender. The campaign against Vicksburg produced 10,142 Union casualties, but Confederates lost almost the same number. Five days later, more rebels downriver at Port Hudson, Louisiana, surrendered under pressure. Because the Union controlled “The Father of Waters,” the Confederacy was divided in two.

  With momentum shifting, Union advances unhinged Confederate defenses inside eastern Tennessee. While federal forces captured Knoxville, Rosecrans maneuvered the Army of the Cumberland to Chattanooga. Feinting one direction, he steered 63,000 bluecoats across the Tennessee River and placed them in Bragg's rear. They forced the rebels out of Chattanooga while concentrating their lines at Chickamauga Creek, a dozen miles south of the city.

  After Longstreet arrived with reinforcements, Bragg attacked at Chickamauga on September 19. The lines of blue and gray crossed inside dense timberlands. Given the limited visibility, the divisions initially engaged without adhering to a plan of action. The next day, Bragg ordered a series of sequential attacks followed by a straightforward thrust. Seeking to plug a supposed gap in his line, Rosecrans ordered a division shifted from one part of the field to another. The shifting actually created a notable gap on the Union left, which Longstreet quickly breached. In haste, Rosecrans abandoned the field to Bragg.

  Left behind, General George H. Thomas rallied the Union troops at Snodgrass Hill. Again and again, the Confederates assailed his line without success. Because his stubborn defense saved the Army of the Cumberland from complete disaster, he was known thereafter as the “Rock of Chickamauga.” After dark, his soldiers found their way into Chattanooga.

  Even though the Battle of Chickamauga represented a jarring defeat for Rosecrans, Bragg allowed his foe to reposition the retiring divisions. In two days of vicious combat, more than 4,000 Americans gave their lives. Confederate casualties reached 18,454, compared with Union losses of 16,170. The former could not replace their losses, but the latter did.

  On October 17, the Lincoln administration appointed Grant to command the reorganized Federal Military Division of the Mississippi. Immediately, he relieved Rosecrans and elevated Thomas to command the Army of the Cumberland. He gave Sherman command of the Army of the Tennessee. Moreover, he personally journeyed to Chattanooga to direct operations from the front. Thanks to the arrival of 20,000 reinforcements under Hooker, Union troops reestablished a supply system through the Tennessee Valley known as “the Cracker Line.”

  In early November, Bragg sent Longstreet with nearly 20,000 soldiers against Knoxville. However, the diversionary attack reduced Confederate strength near Chattanooga to fewer than 45,000. As the month ended, Longstreet accomplished nothing at Knoxville.

  With nearly 60,000 men, Grant decided to dislodge Confederates from the high ground outside of Chattanooga. On November 24, he sent Hooker against the 2,000-foot summit of Lookout Mountain. In the “Battle above the Clouds,” the bluecoats drove the graybacks off the slopes. The next day, Sherman moved forward against a 6-mile line on the 400-foot-high Missionary Ridge. However, the Union assault was blocked on the Confederate flank to the north.

  Conducting operations from his command post, Grant called on Thomas to order a diversionary attack against the center of Missionary Ridge. With rebel artillery lining the crest, rifle pits covered the slopes. Trenches stretched along the base, which made the Confederate defenses appear impregnable. Without pausing, the Army of the Cumberland swept through the trenches and scrambled up the slope. The infantrymen found ravines and dips for cover, as the line officers barked impromptu commands to swarm the crest. The graybacks surrendered by the thousands, while the bluecoats shouted derisively: “Chickamauga! Chickamauga!”

  Wearing the Confederate uniform that day, 23-year-old Sam R. Watkins was a private in Company “Aytch” of the 1st Tennessee Regiment. “The Yankees were cutting and slashing,” he recalled, “and the cannoneers were running in every direction.” As the rebel lines disintegrated, his beaten comrades broke “like quarter horses.” Despite the rout, Confederates regrouped near Dalton, Georgia, 25 miles to the south.

  By defeating the Confederate Army of the Tennessee, the Federal Military Division of the Mississippi controlled virtually all of the western theater. Grant's losses reached 5,800 during the storming of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, but Bragg's casualties reached 6,700. Both sides paused for the winter. Reassigning Halleck to staff work in the War Department, Lincoln promoted Grant for winning. On March 9, 1864, Grant became the general-in-chief of all Union armies and the highest-ranking American officer since George Washington.

  The Surrender

  Grant commanded five Union armies deployed across a 1,000-mile front. While coordinating simultaneous advances against Confederate forces, he made his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac. “Lee's army will be your objective point,” he told Meade. Banks's Army of the Gulf inched up the Red River in Louisiana to separate Texas from the rest of the Confederacy. In Georgia, Sherman confronted the remnants of an army led by Johnston, who replaced Bragg. Auxiliary campaigns along the James River and in the Shenandoah Valley would “hold a leg,” as Lincoln put it, while Grant did the “skinning” in northern Virginia.

  Figure 7.4 General Ulysses S. Grant at his headquarters, 1864. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

  With 115,000 bluecoats, Grant launched the Wilderness campaign on May 5, 1864. Lee confronted the marching columns with only 65,000 graybacks. After crossing the Rappahannock and Rapidan Rivers, the Army of the Potomac battled the Army of Northern Virginia near the intersection of two main roads. After twilight, many of the wounded burned to death in brushfires started by muzzle flashes. The next day, the federals attacked the rebels again but soon retreated through the woods and thickets.

  Grant ordered a movement south toward Spotsylvania Courthouse, where he
slid around Lee's right flank to interpose the Army of the Potomac between the Army of Northern Virginia and Richmond. However, the rebels raced to a junction north of the capital to intercept the federals. Confederate troops entrenched along a 5-mile line to block Union progress. Surveying the entrenchments, Grant pledged “to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” On May 12, the Union VI Corps bent the opposing lines into the “Bloody Angle.” Soldiers battled in the rain and fog for days, as the slain piled up in the trenches.

  Grant dispatched General Philip Sheridan to stop the raiding of Stuart's cavalry, which harassed and slowed Union infantry and artillery. Sheridan's cavalry fought a series of running battles that culminated in a victory at Yellow Tavern, just 6 miles north of Richmond. In addition to destroying supply depots and railroad tracks, they killed Stuart. Though operating elsewhere in Virginia, auxiliary campaigns by Union troops on the James River and at New Market failed to dislodge Confederate forces.

  Still trying to envelop Lee's right flank, Grant sidled southward again. Lee entrenched at the North Anna River before the federals arrived, which prompted Grant to maneuver across the Pamunkey River. They encountered each other at a crossroads known as Cold Harbor, 10 miles northeast of Richmond. With Confederate flanks protected on one side by the Totopotomoy Creek and on the other by the Chickahominy River, nearly 60,000 graybacks entrenched along a 6-mile line. Ordered to conduct a deadly charge, Union veterans pinned slips of paper to their uniforms for post-mortem identification. At 4:30 a.m. on June 3, Grant oversaw a direct assault by 60,000 men in blue against withering rifle and artillery fire. Almost 7,000 of them fell in 20 minutes, while the rebels lost 1,500. The Battle of Cold Harbor climaxed a month of campaigning in which Grant absorbed 55,000 casualties compared to 32,000 for Lee.

  As the northern press denounced Grant as a “butcher,” he quietly crossed the Chickahominy River to prolong the campaign. He ordered engineers to construct a 2,200-foot pontoon bridge across the James River. Union troops passed over to the south bank and sprinted toward Petersburg, where major railroads converged 20 miles south of Richmond. Although they cut supplies to the capital, their opponents prepared trenches, redoubts, redans, and abatis that remained impenetrable. By June 18, the Army of the Potomac extended the lines southward and westward while settling down for a siege of Petersburg.