by Bruce Catton
Technically, his army (Meade’s army, actually, but from now on to the end people would think of it as Grant’s) had been whipped quite as badly as Hooker’s army had been whipped at Chancellorsville, almost on the same ground, one year earlier. It had had horrifying losses — seventeen thousand men or thereabouts shot or blown loose from their commands — its flanks had been beaten in, it had completely failed to drive Lee away from his chosen ground, and in 1863, Hooker no more roughly handled, had gone back north of the Rapidan to recruit and refit and to let Lee decide where the next fight would take place. Now it was up to Grant, and the crucial decision of all the war was his to make.
Grant thought it over, taking counsel of nobody, throughout the day of May 7. The armies stayed in each other’s presence, there was picket-line firing all day long, and although things were easy compared with what happened on the two days before nothing seemed to be settled; as far as the men in the ranks were concerned, the battle was still going on. Finally night came in once more, and after dark the divisions of the Army of the Potomac were pulled out of line and put on the road for another march. And when they moved, they all moved — south.
In other words, the battle of the Wilderness was no defeat, simply because Grant refused to admit that it was a defeat. He would keep moving on, which was the great point he had laid down in his offhand sketch of the secret of strategy, and he would move in the direction that made continued fighting inevitable.
The army headed that night for Spotsylvania Court House, ten miles off to the southeast; a country town, like Gettysburg in that its importance derived from the fact that all the roads met there. If Grant could get his men on these road crossings before Lee’s men got there, then he would be between the Army of Northern Virginia and Richmond, and Lee would have to do the attacking — which, under the circumstances, could hardly mean anything but defeat for Lee’s army. The move failed by a very narrow margin. Lee’s advance guards got to Spotsylvania a few rods ahead of the advance guard of the Army of the Potomac, and what began as an affair of skirmishers around a country market town blew up quickly into an enormous fight that seemed to have no beginning, no end, and no visible result.
For the fight that started at Spotsylvania lasted for ten uninterrupted days, and it was even worse than the Wilderness fight had been. It was like the Wilderness in a way, in that so much of the ground was heavily wooded and the troops had to fight blindly, nobody from commanding general down to private ever being quite sure just where everybody was and what was going on. As the fight developed, Grant’s army kept on edging around to the left, trying vainly to get around the Confederate flank and interpose between the battlefield and the Confederate capital. It never quite made it, but in the ten days the two armies swung completely around three quarters of a circle, and on May 12 they had what may have been the most vicious fight of the whole war — a headlong contest for a horseshoe-shaped arc of Confederate trench guarding the principal road crossing, with hand-to-hand fighting that lasted from dawn to dusk, in a pelting rain, over a stretch of breastworks known forever after as the Bloody Angle. Here men fought with bayonets and clubbed muskets, dead and wounded men were trodden out of sight in the sticky mud, batteries would come floundering up into close-range action and then fall silent because gun crews had been killed; and after a day of it the Union army gained a square mile of useless ground, thousands upon thousands of men had been killed, and the end of the war seemed no nearer than it had been before.
Yet all of this made no difference. In all the welter of promiscuous killing, one thing had passed unnoticed: the great counterattack in the Wilderness, in which Lee had driven in the Yankee flank and had almost (but not quite) taken control of the battle for himself, was the last great counterblow the Army of Northern Virginia would ever make. The Confederate army was resisting destruction, it could not be driven out of the road, it was killing Yankees at a horrifying rate, but it had lost its old capacity to seize the initiative and turn sullen defensive into brilliant offensive. It was being crowded now, it was being made to fight all day and every day, and this was a war that was bound to go against it. It was not losing, but it was not winning either, and if the Confederacy was to live the Army of Northern Virginia had to win.
Side-slipping constantly, the two armies moved in a wide semicircle: out of the Wilderness and down to Spotsylvania, out of Spotsylvania at last and down to the North Anna, past that to the Pamunkey, over the Pamunkey and finally, as May drew to an end, close to the Chickahominy — down to the ground where McClellan and Lee had fought two years earlier, down to the swampy, pine-studded flatlands where Fitz-John Porter had held his ground through two days of flaming battle, down to the area where the church bells of Richmond could be heard (whenever the guns were quiet, which was not often) and where the Confederates had no room to maneuver. Remorselessly and at immense cost Grant was pinning his enemies down to the place where they could do nothing more than fight a wearing, dogged, and ultimately fatal defense of their capital city.
As June began the two armies faced each other not far north of the Chickahominy, and once more a casual road crossing became a place of vast importance; a sun-baked spot on the featureless plain, Cold Harbor, where a second-rate tavern sat by a dusty crossroads; and here Grant massed his troops and made one final attempt to break the Confederate line and pulverize Lee’s army once and for all.
The attempt failed, and the price was high. On June 1, and then on June 3 — after a day in which beaten-out armies tried to catch their breath in murderous heat — the Union army came in with old-fashioned frontal assaults on strong Confederate entrenchments. They had no luck. On June 1 they gained insignificant patches of ground; on June 3 they tried again, lost several thousand men in half an hour of unimaginable fighting, and then settled down to trench warfare, with every mile of line spurting flame and death every hour of the twenty-four, the loathsome odor of unburied bodies always in the air, sharpshooters and cunningly posted batteries forever alert to shoot whenever they saw movement. The Union cause apparently was no nearer victory than it had been before the campaign began.
Never had armies fought like this. For a solid month they had not been out of contact. Every day, somewhere along the lines, there had been action. During this month Union losses had averaged two thousand men every single day. Old formations had been wrecked. Generals had been killed — most notable of these being John Sedgwick, slain by a sharpshooter in the fighting at Spotsylvania Court House — and no soldier had bathed, changed his clothing, or had an unbroken night’s sleep for more than four agonizing weeks. Yet morale, somehow, did not slacken; the men took what they had to take with the matter-of-fact air of old soldiers, and a New Englander in the VI Corps, noting one day that there was continuous firing going on a little way to the right, wrote casually: “I suppose it’s skirmishing, as they don’t call anything a battle now without the whole army is engaged and a loss of some eight or ten thousands.” He added that it was hard to see what would happen to the men if this routine went on much longer — “but this army has been through so much that I don’t know as you can kill them off.4
Elsewhere in Virginia things had gone badly. When the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan, Ben Butler had started to move up the James River from the Norfolk area with an army of thirty thousand men; his way had been fairly open, and a competent soldier might well have gone on, cut the railroads below Richmond, and made victory certain. But Butler, a man of many parts, was in no part a soldier. He let himself be deceived and then defeated by a scratch Confederate army, and while the Army of the Potomac was slugging its weary way down toward Cold Harbor he and his own army managed to get locked up on a peninsula in the James River, thirty miles below Rickmond, known as Bermuda Hundred — theoretically a standing menace to Confederate communications, actually as much out of the war as if they had been transported bodily to South America.
It was the same in the Shenandoah Valley. Franz Sigel had been appointed to lead an ar
my up the Shenandoah Valley, destroying the traditional Confederate granary and avenue of attack and curling in on Richmond, finally, from the west. He had been routed and had been removed from his command, and David Hunter, who took his place, had done very little better — had in fact run into disastrous defeat, at last, near Charlottesville and in panic had fled off into the West Virginia mountains, leaving the Confederacy in better shape as far as the Shenandoah Valley was concerned than it had been in for two years; and neither Butler nor the Sigel-Hunter move had done the Army of the Potomac the slightest bit of good.
Yet it did not matter. The Army of the Potomac had reached and held its objective — continuous contact with Lee’s army, which could no longer make the daring thrusts that in the past had always upset Federal strategy. From now on to the end of the war Lee’s role would be defensive. The Army of the Potomac was half destroyed, with its brigades led by colonels, its regiments by captains, and its companies, often enough, by sergeants; but it was carrying out its appointed assignment. Somewhere far ahead there would be victory, even if most of the men who had made it possible would not be around to see it.
4. A Question of Time
Shortly after the spring campaign began, Robert E. Lee remarked that Grant’s army must on no account be allowed to reach the James River. If that happened, he said, the Army of Northern Virginia would be compelled to withstand a siege, “and then it will be a mere question of time.”1 In six weeks of bitter fighting he had managed to stave off that fate; yet he was now so close to the Richmond fortifications that he could have put his army into them by no more than one short march, and in the middle of June, Grant made a swift, decisive move whose final effect was to force upon Lee the siege warfare that Lee had so greatly dreaded.
The rival armies stayed in the trenches around Cold Harbor for the better part of two weeks, and they were not weeks that any soldier afterward recalled with pleasure. All along the front the two armies were in intimate contact — each one entrenched up to the ears, dug in so that no conceivable frontal attack could ever accomplish anything. There was firing every hour, from dawn to darkness, and at night the pickets were alert to detect any movement, which invariably would call forth a burst of musketry and cannon fire. An unspeakable stench lay over the battlefield, the weather was excessively hot, soldiers were caked with dirt and plagued by vermin and by thirst, and sharpshooters on both sides were ready to drill any luckless soldier who incautiously raised his head above the parapet, even for a moment.
To all appearances, it was deadlock. The Army of the Potomac could no longer sidle to its left, which was what it had been doing all the way down from the Rapidan; its left touched the Chickahominy now, and one more side-slip would do nothing better than put it up against the Richmond trenches, which Grant was no more anxious to encounter than Lee was to occupy. It could not move by its right, for that would take it too far away from its tidewater base and expose its supply line to rupture by Confederate cavalry.
Confederate cavalry, to be sure, was not having things its own way now, as it had had in 1862 when McClellan was on this ground. Phil Sheridan was swinging the Yankee cavalry around like a scythe; had raided far in Lee’s rear during the Spotsylvania fight, forcing Jeb Stuart to make a hell-for-leather ride after him, fighting a bitter battle in the very suburbs of Richmond, and — sponging one more of the bright romantic streaks off of the board of this war — killing Stuart himself in the process. Nevertheless, the Army of the Potomac was deep in enemy country, and for its own security it had to keep its line line short, which meant that it could not move far from one or another of the rivers where Federal gunboats and supply steamers could anchor.
But there was still a move Grant could make. If he could get his army out of its trenches without tipping his hand, he could leave the Cold Harbor sector entirely, march southeast down to the James River, get over to the southern shore (provided his engineers could throw a pontoon bridge over a deep stream nearly half a mile wide), and drive on for the little city of Petersburg, which lay on the south bank of the Appomattox River, some ten miles from the place where the Appomattox flows into the James. Petersburg was a place the Confederacy had to hold if it meant to hold Richmond; for of the railroads that came up from the Carolinas and brought the supplies which the capital and its defenders had to have, all but one came up through Petersburg. In effect, the North could win Richmond by winning Petersburg. A blow at Petersburg was a blow Lee would have to parry no matter what it might cost him.
The move was handled with skill. Despite the closeness of enemy pickets, Grant got his men out of the trenches without arousing Confederate attention, put them on the roads in the night, moved down and crossed the Chickahominy, and tramped on toward the bank of the James. Lee was a hard man to fool, but it appears that for a day or two this move deceived him; the Army of the Potomac had vanished, and although it had obviously moved off somewhere to the southeast it was well screened behind a cordon of cavalry and infantry and there was no way to tell where it might appear next. It was quite possible that it would wheel and come back up on the north side of the James, and Lee held his army in position to counter such a move. Meanwhile Meade’s engineers laid a 2100-foot pontoon bridge over the James — completing the job in eight hours, cutting a long approach road on the northern bank, and performing a prodigy of labor — and the Army of the Potomac began to cross and to march for Petersburg, picking up some of Butler’s men from Bermuda Hundred as they went.
Petersburg should have fallen on June 15, for the better part of two army corps reached the place then and found it defended by the merest handful of Confederates under Beauregard — who was aware of his danger and was sending to Lee and to the Rebel War Department desperate appeals for aid. But the attack was muffed. Commander of the Union advance was the same General Baldy Smith who had done so well in the matter of opening a supply line at beleaguered Chattanooga in the preceding autumn. He had won Grant’s good opinion then, but today he lost what he had won, and lost as well a dazzling chance to cut the artery that fed the Confederate capital. He seized trenches and guns, won a position from which one determined drive would inevitably have put him into Petersburg — and then grew cautious, concluded that he ought to wait for reinforcements, and let the opportunity slip away.
The next three days repeated the same story. Beauregard began to get reinforcements, but the Army of the Potomac was coming up faster, and on each day Beauregard had ample reason to believe that he was about to be driven away in total defeat. Yet the opportunity was never quite grasped. Union attacks were poorly co-ordinated and driven home without vigor — one reason may have been that the army as a whole was simply exhausted from the work of the past six weeks — and in the end Lee managed to get the Army of Northern Virginia down just in time to make the place secure. By June 20, Grant had called off further attacks and was settling down to make a siege of it.2
In the technical sense it was not really a siege, for Petersburg was by no means surrounded. Two railroads to the south were still open, and the roads between Petersburg and Richmond were not cut. The Army of the Potomac was dug in with a rambling arc of trenches and fieldworks that confronted Petersburg only from the east; north of the Appomattox there were other works that ran across the neck of Bermuda Hundred, and above the James, close to Richmond, Federal and Confederate patrols confronted each other, and all along this lengthy line there were intermittent firing and constant sniping while the two armies labored mightily to make their defenses strong.
But although Grant had not done all that he had hoped to do he had finally done one thing Lee was extremely anxious to prevent; he had compelled the Army of Northern Virginia to occupy a fixed position — had put it into a spot from which it could not withdraw and in which the greater resources of the North could be consistently applied with a steadily rising pressure. Freedom of movement was very largely gone now, as far as Lee was concerned, and without it he was condemned to the kind of warfare the Confederacy could ha
rdly hope to win. Lee was pinned; Grant’s problem now was to keep him pinned and build up the pressure.
Some freedom, to be sure, was left, and Lee would use it to the very best of his ability, which was great. Union defeats in the Shenandoah Valley had left that area open for Confederate use, and by scraping up detachments from here and there and sending away a part of his own forces Lee made up a small army (twelve or fifteen thousand men, or thereabouts) which began to move down the valley for one more try at upsetting Yankee strategy. The army was led by Jubal Early, who was no Stonewall Jackson but who was a canny soldier and a tough customer to boot, and at the beginning of July, Early started north to see how much trouble he could create.
As it turned out, he could create quite a lot. He got across the Potomac, knocked a pick-up Federal army out of the way on the banks of the Monocacy River, and then went straight for Washington, arriving just north of the city on July 11 and creating in the city a general hullabaloo such as had not been seen since the ironclad Merrimac had thrown Secretary Stanton into a panic in the spring of 1862. Government clerks, non-combat soldiers in the quartermaster corps, and convalescents from the hospitals were hastily called out, welded into something resembling a combat outfit along with a handful of state militia, and sent out to hold the fortifications that lay in Early’s path. The fortifications were very strong, but this scratch force was very weak, and it is just possible that Early could have plowed on through it and gone into Washington if he had moved fast. He could not have stayed there very long, to be sure, but the amount of harm he could have done to the Union cause just by occupying the town for a few hours is something to brood over.