Jeb told Venable to ride with him to the left. They found a broken line and men who seemed close to the limit of organized resistance. As always, Stuart reasoned that the best way to defend was to attack, and he told Venable to remain there and help Lomax organize a counterthrust. Alone, Stuart rode to the extreme left. Whistling as he went, doubtless seeking to spread confidence among the men, he drew rein at a fence in the woods near the point where the left flank was “in the air.” There he waited for the next assault.
Soon it came. With a roar, three mounted regiments of Custer’s brigade advanced. Two of the regiments kept together to assail the left center; one advanced against the extreme left. The 5th Michigan dashed by Stuart. Out of his holster Jeb jerked his pistol and began to fire at the Federals. Quickly they were past, but soon they roared back, met by a countercharge by the 1st Virginia. “Steady, men, steady; give it to them!” Stuart called. Soon the recoiling bluecoats were gone, except for a few who had lost their horses in the advance and now were trying to get to the rear. Stuart felt a sudden shock that almost threw him off balance. His head dropped; his hat fell off. Instantly he put his hand to his side.
“General,” cried one of the boys with him, “are you hit?” They crowded around him and scarcely observed the Federal trooper, almost the last of the dismounted men, who ran off down the fence with the smoking pistol that had fired the one bullet that hit Stuart. “Are you wounded badly?” an anxious voice inquired. “I am afraid I am,” said Stuart calmly, “but don’t worry, boys: Fitz will do as well for you as I have done.”5
His companions must leave him, Stuart said, must collect the men and repel the enemy. It did not matter about himself. He feared he was mortally wounded and past all service. Fitz Lee dashed up. He was now the senior officer on the field, the man who must direct a difficult and doubtful battle. Stuart did not permit him to waste time on sympathy: “Go ahead, Fitz, old fellow, I know you will do what is right.” Presently an ambulance was found for him. As it crossed the field, he saw numbers of disorganized men who were making for the rear. Prostrate, Jeb wrathfully cried, as loudly as he could, “Go back, go back and do your duty…. Go back, go back!” Then, in complete self-revelation he shouted, “I had rather die than be whipped!”
The surgeon, Dr. J. B. Fontaine, must have realized, after examination of the wound, that Stuart had been shot through the abdomen, probably through the liver, and that the prognosis was hopeless. After some argument, Jeb agreed to take some whiskey as a stimulant and, once again in command, he repeated substantially to the men gathered around him what he had said to the fugitives: “Go back to the front, I will be well taken care of. I want you to do your duty to your country as I always have through my life.”
These words were his farewell to the field. The next move was in the ambulance toward Richmond. Custer’s attack had made two battles of one. Part of the conflict continued north of Yellow Tavern. Another phase of the conflict was carried to the outer line of the Richmond defenses. This was a dramatic advance and one that made the pulse of the Federals beat faster because they could hear plainly the tocsin in Richmond.
The ambulance had to make wide detours over poor and unfamiliar roads, and Stuart suffered cruelly. It was long after dark when he was lifted from the vehicle in front of the home on Grace Street of his brother-in-law, Dr. Charles Brewer. By that time, official Richmond and most of Stuart’s private friends knew that he had been wounded, though the seriousness of his condition was not realized by all. The night was one of misery for Jeb—the same night of foreboding that witnessed the withdrawal of the artillery from the Bloody Angle and the mysterious sounds from the Federal lines. In the same dawn with that of the battle for the salient, Jeb Stuart rallied his courageous spirits to face that “last enemy, Death.”6
He had, as reinforcement, the best medical men of the city, but they knew he was beaten. Staff officers came to comfort him and to execute his final orders. From the direction of the Chickahominy there rolled the sullen sound of cannon fire. In moments of relief from his paroxysms of pain, Stuart asked Henry McClellan what was happening. McClellan told how the Richmond garrison and the cavalry corps were seeking to trap the enemy. “God grant that they may be successful,” Stuart answered with his old eagerness. Then he checked himself and said with a sigh, “But I must be prepared for another world.” To the next visitor, an anxious President Davis, he said in an even voice that he was “willing to die if God and my country think I have fulfilled my destiny and done my duty.”
As the afternoon slipped by, his paroxysms grew more excruciating, his lucid intervals fewer. He roused himself to ask Dr. Brewer whether he could survive the night. The physician answered honestly that death was near. Stuart nodded as if he had received an order to go forward: “I am resigned if it be God’s will….” When it became apparent, after 7 o’clock, that his end was at hand, two ministers came to his bedside. At his request they prayed and then they sang the hymn he asked, “Rock of Ages, cleft for me.” He turned his head toward Dr. Brewer. “I am going fast now,” he whispered, “I am resigned; God’s will be done.” Then, in spirit, he rode off to New Adventure.7
Stuart had the tribute of President, of press and Cabinet, and as impressive a funeral, May 13, as the war-wrung Confederate Capital could give. More impressive still was the tribute by one of his adversaries, Brigadier General James H. Wilson. Of Yellow Tavern and the death of Stuart, Wilson wrote, “From it may be dated the permanent superiority of the national cavalry over that of the rebels.” Even critical officers shared General Sedgwick’s opinion that Jeb was “the greatest cavalry officer ever foaled in America.”
The commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia had looked to Stuart for service of the sort Jeb had described in a letter to John R. Chambliss, April 4, 1864. Stuart had said then: “Bear in mind that your telegrams make the whole army strike tents, and night or day, rain or shine, take up the line of march. Endeavor, therefore, to secure accurate information…. Above all, vigilance! vigilance! vigilance!” By Stuart’s own fulfillment of that ideal of the outpost officer, more than by any other, Lee had judged him. The commanding general spoke in the fullness of grief a few unpremeditated words that showed how lofty was the estimate he put on Stuart. In the midst of the fighting for the Bloody Angle, someone placed in Lee’s hands a telegram. He opened it, read it, and had to get a firm grip on his emotions before he trusted himself to speak. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we have very bad news. General Stuart has been mortally wounded.” Lee paused and then exclaimed: “He never brought me a piece of false information!”8
Reliable information of the sort that Stuart sent him Lee seldom needed more than during those baffling days around Spotsylvania. Only during the Gettysburg campaign had he been more completely in the dark. Never had the army had so few discerning eyes. Daily the grim list of fallen leaders was lengthened—Longstreet wounded, Powell Hill sick, Ewell in danger of collapse under his burdens, Edward Johnson in the hands of the enemy, nine of the brigadiers killed, wounded, or captured, some of them among the best; and now Jeb Stuart dead. The Wilderness might be the graveyard of the army command.
2
THE DEBITS AND CREDITS OF MAY
The rain of May 11-12 fortunately continued through the fifteenth and into the sixteenth. “It looked,” said George Neese, “as if Heaven were trying to wash up the blood as fast as the civilized barbarians were spilling it.” While the Southerners peered from muddy trenches through the dripping forest at the dim position of an enemy held captive by mud, a few appointments were made for the command of leaderless troops. John B. Gordon was promoted major general as reward for his attack on May 6 and for his service in the Bloody Angle. When Hill’s recovery permitted the return of Early to his own division, Gordon’s old brigade was transferred to what was left of Edward Johnson’s command, at the head of which Gordon was placed. So many men in Johnson’s wrecked division had been captured in the Bloody Angle that the units could not operate as br
igades. Grievous as was the necessity, the Stonewall Brigade, Jones’s, and Steuart’s brigades had to be consolidated. Even after consolidation they remained pathetically small. John Casler’s company of the 33rd Virginia consisted of the captain and three privates. One of these was a cavalryman who had lost his horse.9
Another matter that could not be delayed was action in the case of Lafayette McLaws. On May 4, it will be remembered, Longstreet’s charges against McLaws had been dismissed, and Bragg recommended that he be ordered to rejoin his command. As it chanced, before his orders to return became effective, Bragg put the facts before General Lee. In framing a reply, Lee had to reason that if Longstreet recovered and resumed command, as there now was every reason to believe he would, he and McLaws could not work together. Moreover, Kershaw was handling McLaws’s old division with skill and success. It had to be admitted, further, that McLaws’s record as a divisional commander had not been one of uniform promptness and average success. To Bragg’s telegram, therefore, Lee dispatched this reply: “I request that Gen. McLaws be not ordered to this army, but assigned to duty elsewhere.” That settled the case. McLaws was assigned to command the District of Georgia, and there he remained till the final retreat.10
A second question of command that would not wait for more merciful days was that of a successor to Jeb Stuart. Hampton was the senior of the three major generals of cavalry and had more prestige. In combat he undeniably was the peer if not the superior of Fitz Lee. Fitz, on the other hand, had been closer to Stuart personally and had much of Jeb’s joy of battle. The difficulty was that Hampton and Fitz Lee were secret rivals. At heart, Fitz Lee represented and Wade Hampton challenged the Virginia domination of the cavalry corps and, some would say, of the entire Army of Northern Virginia. Advancement of one man over the other might be demoralizing. Lee directed that the three divisions of cavalry “will constitute separate commands and will report directly to and receive orders from these headquarters.”11 This was a heavy burden to add to the overloaded shoulders of the commanding general. It was, moreover, a dangerous gamble in coordination, even though the chief of one division was the son and the chief of another division the nephew of the man to whom they were to report. The risk had to be taken. There appeared at the moment to be no sound alternative.
Not all the news of those mid-May days was as gloomy as the weather or as grim as that of promotion to fill dead men’s saddles. Within less than a fortnight after Grant launched offensives in southwest Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, and up the James River, all three of these subordinate operations had been ended or frustrated. Sheridan’s raid lost its momentum after the action at Yellow Tavern. His troopers hammered feebly at the Richmond defenses and then rode away down the James. This raid and all the subsidiary operations of the Federals were brought to naught without the dispatch from Lee’s army of any troops besides the cavalry that Stuart had used against Sheridan.
Lee was doing everything possible to procure reinforcements from the other fronts, because he felt sure Grant’s attack would be renewed as soon as the rain ceased. Promptly at 4:00 A.M. on May 18 the Federal advance began, again at the Bloody Angle. The Confederates scarcely could believe their eyes that a frontal assault on that line was to be made by the enemy. The moment the Unionists came within shrapnel range, orders were given to fire case shot and shell. Hotter grew the artillery fire; nearer raced the enemy; then orders to serve canister along with the shrapnel. The short-range artillery fire was past endurance now. The lines hesitated and broke. The attack was abandoned. General Long was justified in saying, “this attack illustrates the immense power of artillery well handled.” General Meade, beyond the woods, was realistic: “… we found the enemy so strongly entrenched that even Grant thought it useless to knock our heads against a brick wall….”12
Evidence accumulated that the enemy was shifting to his left again. An ominous and threatening move that might prove to be. Unless met as Grant’s flank march of May 7 was, the side-slip might put the Federals between Lee’s army and Richmond. Such scant intelligence as was available suggested that the Federals might be abandoning their positions opposite Ewell on the Confederate left. Ewell accordingly was ordered to demonstrate on the nineteenth to ascertain whether the Federals still were in his front.
Ewell did not relish the prospect of a frontal demonstration, and obtained leave for a flank operation as a substitute. In mid-afternoon on the nineteenth, as Ewell naively stated it, “I came on the enemy prepared to receive me.” A spoiling attack by Dodson Ramseur held the initiative for a time, but presently Ramseur and then Gordon were pushed back to the ground from which the North Carolinian had started his assault. They might have been overwhelmed but for Wade Hampton’s battery of horse artillery. When Ewell’s confused plight was close to disaster, Hampton’s guns helped to hold off the enemy until nightfall. Ewell then was able to withdraw. He had demonstrated that the Federals still occupied the right of their line, and he delayed for twenty-four hours the start of another turning movement, but he paid with 900 casualties.13
With this unhappy affair, the ghastly fighting around Spotsylvania Court House came to its conclusion. Grant now undertook a farther advance by his left flank. A race similar to that from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania was beginning. Insofar as this again was to challenge the command of the Army of Northern Virginia, the one encouraging circumstance was that Powell Hill had sufficiently recovered from his illness to resume direction of the Third Corps on May 20.
If the repair of the unparalleled losses had not occupied the full thought of Lee during every hour he could spare from the direction of operations, appraisal of individual performance during the campaign would have shown, as usual, much that was admirable and at least as much that was mediocre.
For Longstreet’s brief part in the campaign there could be nothing but praise. Charges made subsequently that he was slow in his advance to the Wilderness rest on no sure foundation. Primarily the question is whether he was wise in allowing his men as many as five or six hours of sleep on the night of May 5-6. The probability is that the troops fought the better on the sixth because of that rest. Once Longstreet was on the field, his management of his men and his entire conduct were at his top pitch of performance. If his behavior in the Wilderness was an indication of what was to be expected of him, his recently developed penchant for strategy had not marred him as an executive officer under Lee.
Ewell’s record in the Wilderness might have prompted Lee to make the same criticism he subsequently passed on that officer’s action at Gettysburg—that he could not get Ewell to act with decision. The command of the Second Corps on the fifth of May was undistinguished. On the sixth, so far as Ewell was concerned, indecision cost the army the superb opportunity offered by the exposure of Grant’s right. An attack on that flank, delivered while Longstreet was rolling up the left, might have involved a complete defeat of the Union forces. This was the first and only time during the campaign that both flanks were found to be vulnerable simultaneously. Ewell failed at that great hour because he could not make up his mind when his subordinates were divided in opinion.
Malady left Powell Hill unable, after the first days fighting, to exercise field command. The one decision he made on May 6, when he already was sick, was unwise and might have been fatal. It was proper, of course, to provide for Heth’s and Wilcox’s men such sleep as they could get in the presence of the enemy, but on the night of May 5 his alternatives were not those of allowing the men to sleep or of forcing them to entrench. He could easily have left a strong picket in the woods and moved the divisions of Heth and Wilcox back to form a new line. Lee evidently thought Hill erred in doing nothing to protect the men from sudden onslaught. In fact, Heth believed that Lee never forgave him and Wilcox for failing to protect their front. Heth brought up the subject in a later conversation with the commanding general, explaining how he and Wilcox had sought to get Hill to act. Lee was unconvinced. “A division commander,” said Lee, “should always have
his division prepared to receive an attack.” Heth answered, “That is certainly so, but he must also obey the positive orders of his superior.” Lee said no more.14
The divisional command in the Wilderness had been competent but no more than that. Johnson had done well on May 5. Kershaw had fulfilled expectations and Field had exceeded them on the sixth. The other major generals had not shone. In particular, Jube Early’s refusal to believe John Gordon’s report concerning the Federal flank was not creditable. It was not even open-minded. Early was satisfied his intelligence reports accurately reflected the situation on the Union right and that Gordon was wholly wrong in thinking the flank unprotected. In that belief, Early would not verify either set of reports. He may have tried to browbeat both Gordon and Ewell. More than that, in later writings Early persisted in asserting that Burnside was in rear of the Federal right, though the contrary was demonstrable from the records.
Perhaps the strangest part of the whole affair was Early’s statement that Gordon’s attack before sunset on May 6 was suggested by Early himself. Not one word did Early say of Lee’s visit to the left, which visit, according to Gordon, alone was responsible for the order to deliver the attack. Ewell, for his part, reported that “after examination” of the ground, he “ordered the attack.” Lee’s judgment was expressed in his prompt shuffling of commands to give Early’s division temporarily to Gordon, who was promoted eight days later to the rank of major general. This was an honor due Gordon. He shared with Old Pete the laurels of the Battle of the Wilderness. In recognizing Gordon’s service, Lee did not disparage or rebuke Early. On the contrary, to Jube was entrusted the Third Corps during the illness of Hill. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Lee thought Ewell, not Early, to blame for failure to act promptly on Gordon’s report of as glorious an opportunity as Jackson had found the previous year in that same treacherous Wilderness.15
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