by Bruce Catton
Grant had seen the move as an attempt by Lee to make him ease the pressure on Petersburg, and he refused to rise to it. At the last minute, however, he realized that his own action in pulling the heavy artillery regiments out of the Washington fortifications had left the city almost defenseless, and he rushed the VI Army Corps up from the Army of the Potomac. It go to Washington just in time to drive Early off.
The VI Corps was probably the best combat unit in the army just then, and it was led by Horatio G. Wright, an unemotional, solid sort of fighting man, who was equal to the emergency. Wright got his men into the trenches north of Washington just as Early was preparing to assault. There was a brisk, somewhat indecisive little battle there — witnessed by Abraham Lincoln in person, who came out to Fort Stevens, in the center of things, and stood on the parapet to watch, almost giving General Wright apoplexy: a stray bullet might easily have killed him — and at last Early drew off, marched west through Maryland, and went back into the Shenandoah Valley. The whole venture had accomplished nothing very much except that it had thrown a prodigious scare into the Federal government and had reminded U. S. Grant that the attempt to take Lee’s army out of action would never succeed until the Shenandoah Valley had been made secure. Grant began casting about for ways to do something about this situation.
The valley was important for two reasons. It came up beyond the Blue Ridge, and all through the war it had offered the Confederates a handy approach for invasion of the North; it ran from southwest to northeast, so that a Confederate army that used it moved directly toward the heart of the North, while a Union army that followed it would go off at an angle, away from Richmond and the sensitive areas of the Confederacy. In addition, it was a highly fertile and productive garden spot whose meat, corn, and wheat helped supply Lee’s army and the people around Richmond and also served to support any southern army that chose to operate toward the Potomac. Before Lee could be taken out of the war the valley itself would have to be taken out.
Early in August, Grant picked the man for the job — wiry little Sheridan, who had begun his Civil War career as a quartermaster captain in the West, had become a cavalry colonel and then a brigadier and later divisional commander in the infantry, and who was now making the cavalry corps of the Army of the Potomac a fighting unit of considerable prowess. Sheridan was a driver. An echo of his quality comes down from a diary entry made by a private soldier in his command in the fall of 1862, when Sheridan’s infantry was moving up the Mississippi to help repel Bragg’s invasion of Kentucky. One of the troopships ran aground and seemed unable to get loose. Up came the steamer bearing Sheridan. As the soldier noted: “Rounding to within easy swearing range, he opened a volley of oaths on Captain Dickey [the troop commander aboard] and the captain of the boat which annihilated both of them and caused speedy repairs to be made.”3 Sheridan was the hurry-hurry sort, with a knack for getting up into the front line when a fight was going on, and as the son of an Irish immigrant he seems to have had a good deal of personal feeling against high-born southern aristocrats. If anybody could clean out the Shenandoah Valley, he could.
Meanwhile there was the situation at Petersburg itself. Grant had more men than Lee had — his losses during May and June had been huge, but he was getting reinforcements, and while the quality of the new troops was by no means up to the quality of the men who had been killed he still maintained the advantage — and he was holding his army in its trenches, constantly trying to extend his lines to his left. If he could reach out far enough he could eventually cut the all-important railroad lines, and once that happened Lee would have to come out of his lines and fight. The Army of the Potomac was no longer what it had been earlier in the spring, but for the matter of that neither was the Army of Northern Virginia; an all-out fight on open ground, away from the deadly fortifications, could hardly end in anything but a northern victory.
Grant’s problem was far from simple. If he held Lee where he was, the North should finally win — provided Sherman did what was expected of him in the West, provided everything else went right, and provided finally that sheer war-weariness did not induce the people of the North to consent to a separation and peace. (This last was becoming a serious problem, not in the least helped by the terrible list of killed and wounded that had been coming out of the Army of the Potomac since Grant took charge.) But if there was any way to strike one hard blow that would destroy Lee’s army and end things quickly, that way had to be tried. Late in July it appeared that such a way might be at hand.
This came about because in the IX Army Corps there was a regiment made up largely of coal miners — 48th Pennsylvania, recruited mostly in and around Schuylkill County, a veteran regiment that had served with distinction in Tennessee during the previous year. This regiment had a section of trench opposite a Confederate strong point, and it occurred to the former coal miners that they, if permitted, could easily dig a tunnel under the open space between the lines, hollow out a cavity under the Confederate trench, and explode enough blasting powder there to crack a big hole in the Confederate lines. Their corps commander was Ambrose E. Burnside — this bumbling, bewhiskered man had had many ups and downs, and after occupying Knoxville he had been brought back this spring to the Army of the Potomac — and when the idea was presented to him Burnside liked it. Meade, to whom Burnside went with it, had very little confidence in it, and the army engineers derided it and held that it was wildly impractical; but the army was not actually doing anything in those days except hold its lines and exchange tons of metal every day with the Confederates, and it was agreed at last that these Pennsylvanians might as well be digging a tunnel as sitting on the fire step ducking enemy explosives. So the orders went out, the miners dug their tunnel — it was upward of five hundred feet in length, much longer than anything military sappers had ever thought practical before — and by the end of the month eight tons of powder had been put in the end of it, a long fuse had been laid, and it was time to touch it off.
Grant and Meade had not been enthusiastic about the project, but they concluded that if it was to be done at all some real weight ought to be put behind it, and so elaborate plans for a break-through were made. A feint was ordered on the far side of Bermuda Hundred to draw Confederate reserves out of Petersburg; Burnside was told to attack with his entire corps, another corps was alerted to be ready to go in beside him, heavy masses of artillery were put in line to bombard the Confederate position as soon as the mine was sprung — and just at dawn on July 30, after an agonizing delay during which a daring soldier had to crawl into the tunnel to splice a defective fuse, the thing blew up with a shattering crash that opened a 150-foot crater where the Rebel strong point had been and gave the Federal army a clear shot at Petersburg.
Trench warfare had all but made offensive movement impossible. The weapons of the Civil War era were muzzle-loaders, primitive enough by modern standards, but they were rifles and they were highly effective at tolerably extensive ranges, and men properly protected by fieldworks were almost completely invulnerable. But the explosion of the mine had suddenly restored open warfare. For several hundred yards the Confederate defenses had in effect ceased to exist. All that Burnside’s men had to do now was drive on through the opening and they would cut Lee’s army in half.
The opportunity was completely lost. The mine itself could not have worked better, but the arrangements for exploiting it could not have worked worse. Federal defensive works had not been leveled so that the assault wave could make a real charge; the first regiments that advanced came through in dribbles and then discovered that they totally lacked leadership. Burnside was far to the rear, looking on from an artillery emplacement; the division commander who should have been directing things was in a dugout getting drunk as fast as a jug of commissary whiskey would enable him to do. Instead of marching on through to the naked Confederate rear, the Federals huddled aimlessly in the crater, helping half-buried Confederates to dig themselves out, picking up souvenirs, and waiting for orders. Rein
forcements came up, and they also got into the crater, until this great hole in the ground was packed full of blue-clad soldiers. Minutes passed, half an hour, an hour — and the Confederate high command had the time it needed to piece a new line together in the rear. When the assault finally began to move it ran up against the same old, fatal obstacle — well-manned fieldworks that could not be carried by direct assault.
Of all the missed chances of the war, this one probably was the most tragic and the most inexcusable. Grant commented bitterly after the affair had finally ground its way to complete futility that he had never before seen and never expected again to see such a wide-open opportunity to carry an entrenched position. To underline the pathetic story of mismanagement, when the attack had finally bogged down and it should have been obvious that there was no point in carrying it any farther, Burnside sent in a division of colored troops to leap-frog over the earlier waves and break the Confederate line. The Confederates were waiting now, and the colored division was butchered. (It had originally been slated to lead the entire charge, and the men’s morale had been high. Grant had canceled these arrangements, arguing that the offensive was a chancy affair at best and that if it failed people would say the army had put the colored troops in front because it was willing to sacrifice them. But they had been sacrificed anyway, not when they had a chance to win, but after defeat had become certain, and the morale of the survivors dropped to zero.)4
By midday the attack had been given up. New lines were formed, the Union army glumly counted several thousand casualties (and, it may be, took comfort from the fact that it had gained an acre or so of wholly worthless ground), and the war went on as before. There remained, as tokens of what had been tried, nothing but a prodigious hole in the ground — it is still there, an item to be looked at when folk tour the Petersburg battlefields — and the record of a solemn court of inquiry, which looked at the dreary record of mistakes and oversights and expressed certain conclusions, as a result of which Burnside was finally removed from his command.
And it began to look to many folk in the North that the Confederacy perhaps could never really be beaten, that the attempt to win might after all be too heavy a load to carry, and that perhaps it was time to agree to a peace without victory. This sentiment would affect the presidential election, which was only a few months away. Conceivably — even probably, as things looked in midsummer — it could bring about the election of a President who would consent to a division of the country if he could get peace in no other way. It was not long after the battle of the Crater that Abraham Lincoln wrote out a despairing yet defiant little document, which he signed, sealed, and put away for later use:
“This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President-elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward.”5
It might come to that, and it might not. Victory was only a question of time, but time moved now with unendurable slowness, each moment bought by a new record of men killed and maimed, a new scar of loss and suffering laid on a people who had already endured much. The people themselves would finally decide, and they would decide by showing whether their endurance went all the way to the foundations of the American dream.
Chapter Twelve
WE WILL NOT CEASE
1. That Bright Particular Star
SHORTLY after the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan and plunged into the Wilderness, ninety thousand young men led by William Tecumseh Sherman abandoned their camps in the neighborhood of Chattanooga and started to walk in the general direction of Atlanta, one hundred miles to the southeast. As they began to move, the last act of the war was opened.
Most of the ninety thousand were veterans, and most of them came from the western states. It was noticed that they averaged a little larger than the Easterners — army quartermasters had found that when they ordered shoes for these men they had to specify larger sizes than were ordered for the Army of the Potomac1 — and they were loose-jointed, supple, rangy, tramping off the miles with a long, swinging stride as if they were used to long marches. They had walked across Kentucky and Tennessee and Mississippi, and some of them had gone far out in Missouri and Arkansas as well; they had been burned a deep mahogany color by three years of southern sunlight, and they were men without inhibitions or reverence. If an officer or courier rode by and the men felt that his horse was skinny and underfed, whole regiments would begin to caw lustily, until it appeared that a convention of derisive crows was in session. Frank Blair — the same who had, as a civilian, exercised so much extra-legal power in Missouri back in the war’s youth — was a major general commanding the XVII Army Corps now, and he drove his men hard in forced marches to overtake the rest of the army; and when he came in sight his troops began to cry “Bla-a-a-i-r! Bla-a-a-i-r!” like a herd of indignant sheep, the bleating call running from one end of the column to the other. Passing a country cemetery, Illinois soldiers saw one of their number who had collapsed, from heat and weariness, amid the gravestones; they gave him a casual look and agreed that he was in luck to have had his sunstroke so handy to a convenient burying ground.2
Quiet little Joe Johnston, with his winsome smile, his courtly air, and his ability to lash out with a deadly counterattack against any people who looked like enemies, was waiting for these rowdy marchers with both barrels loaded. His army — it contained probably something like sixty thousand tested fighting men — had been in camp around the town of Dalton, Georgia, which was on the upper end of the railroad line that went from Chattanooga down to Atlanta, and between his army and Sherman’s there was a range of high hills known as Rocky Face Ridge, crossed by a highway that came through a gap with the unappetizing name of Buzzard’s Roost. At Buzzard’s Roost, Johnston had his men dug in, and if the Yankees came this way there would be feathers in the air.
Sherman sent Thomas and Schofield and their men — roughly two thirds of his entire force — up to the slopes, and there was a deal of skirmishing and sparring for a day or so while the Westerners tapped the Confederate defenses to see if they were as strong as they looked. Sherman himself had no taste for butting his army’s head against field fortifications; he wrote that this Buzzard’s Roost place was a “terrible door of death” and he sent curly-bearded McPherson and the Army of the Tennessee off to the right in a swift, wide flanking movement. McPherson got his men, after a day or so, far beyond Johnston’s flank and came through Snake Creek Gap toward the town of Resaca, ten miles to the south of Dalton; it was on the railroad, and if McPherson could seize it Johnston’s men could be driven off into the mountainous country to the east and annihilated at leisure.
McPherson could not quite make it. A cordon of Confederate troops held Resaca, McPherson felt there were too many of them to push out of the way easily, and although Sherman, when he learned that his advance guard had reached the edge of the town, hammered the table and exulted, “I’ve got Joe Johnston dead!” things did not work out as he had planned. McPherson’s men were delayed, Johnston got the rest of his army down there on the double, and after a couple of days of fighting, the flanking advance was resumed.3
Sherman was not duplicating Grant’s program in Virginia. Grant was driving in to fight wherever and whenever a fight could be had; Sherman wanted to maneuver rather than to fight, and when Johnston developed an uncanny ability to block the road with fieldworks Sherman refused to assault them and cast about instead for ways to go around them. In the Army of the Tennessee he had the perfect instrument. It had been his own army; men said that for at least two years it had never had either a brigade or divisional drill, and its soldiers had seen enough of war to place a high value on the art of self-preservation. The men refused to let the wagons carry their spades; they insisted on lugging these tools themselves, and when they came in contact with the enemy their first
impulse was to dig trenches in which they could escape enemy bullets. They could size up Confederate defensive works at a glance, and if the works looked too strong they simply did not believe in attacking them — unless they could use their spades and burrow their way forward in security. But they could march, and when a long hike would save their necks they would willingly hike until their legs were ready to fall off.4 So Sherman used them as his flankers. When he found Johnston’s army in his front — as he invariably did: Johnston had a sixth sense for determining where the Yankees were going to show up next — Sherman would put Thomas’s tough veterans in line and open a hot skirmish-line fire and send McPherson’s boys off on a wide swing around the Confederate flank.
Every day the armies were in contact. Every day there were firing and casualties and the wearing labor of digging trenches and rifle pits under the hot southern sun. But every day, too, Sherman would be trying to get around his enemy and reach some place where the Confederates could be caught off balance and compelled to fight in the open, and the Army of the Tennessee marched many miles and lashed out constantly toward the Confederate rear, avoiding head-on attacks like those of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House.
Johnston side-stepped and retreated to meet these threats, and the two armies went down through northern Georgia in a series of movements that were almost formalized, like some highly intricate and deadly dance. Johnston could never quite make a permanent stand, Sherman could never quite force a decision, and slowly but steadily the tide of war went on south toward Atlanta, while both governments began to worry. It seemed in Washington that Sherman was not really getting anywhere; Johnston was too elusive, every move Sherman made was countered by a skillful southern move, and although Sherman’s men were getting farther and farther into Georgia they did not seem to be able to win any real victories. In Richmond, on the other hand, there began to be complaints that Johnston could manage a retreat with the utmost skill but that he could not really fight. In Virginia, Lee was killing Union soldiers by wholesale; in Georgia, Johnston was never making a real stand-up fight, and he was getting backed up closer and closer to Atlanta, which the Confederacy could not afford to lose.