Death Piled Hard: A Tale of the Confederate Secret Services

by W. Patrick Lang

  It has been quiet there for months. Jake and the others should be all right. I wonder what has happened in the last week. Grant planned to land a force south of Richmond and north of Petersburg at the same time he attacked Lee frontally…

  He asked a colonel in the 1st Corps headquarters if there was any news from the New Bern area. “My brother is there,” he explained.

  “Ah,” the man said. “The Yanks are stuck down around Petersburg. They landed from the sea, but the Petersburg and Richmond Home Guard pushed them back into the Bermuda Hundred peninsula, and there they are, caught in that swamp. Beauregard is moving troops from all over to handle them.

  Yes. Beauregard is in charge down there. I wonder if he can find enough men to deal with this. I wish I were there, anywhere but here.

  Chapter 18

  John Sedgwick

  Devereux was present that day in the 1st Corps lines when one of their sharpshooter teams killed Major General John Sedgwick, the US Sixth Corps commander.

  The three sharpshooters, with their heavy barreled English hunting rifle had been busy scrabbling at the ground with mess tins and biscuit box boards to make themselves a hole. Along the line, the veteran Confederate infantry were sinking into the ground like moles as they dug rapidly, seeking protection from enemy fire. The day was clear. Birds sang in the hardwood trees. The rain had temporarily stopped and the cloud cover had blown away. The refreshing coolness in the air after the rain made this May day seem almost festive. This same sharpshooter team had been shooting at the Union line before beginning their excavation. They had fired as much as seemed necessary to keep the federals from becoming too comfortable as they dug their own line. The Union men did not seem to have anyone with them who could come close to hitting a mark at this distance. The range was a thousand yards. Every minute or so, a rifle bullet had passed over from the blue line. The sharpshooters in butternut had listened to the passage of each shot to make sure the fire was inaccurate, and satisfied, they had begun to dig their own hole.

  Claude was chatting with the first sergeant of an infantry company near the sharpshooters when a fuss in the distant blue haze along the wood line attracted attention.

  Men with good vision, like Devereux, could see that some of the tiny blue men stood up for a minute and then lay down again.

  An officer pointed at that part of the enemy line and ordered a halt to the digging.

  The leader of the sharpshooters looked at the distant tree line through a short telescope. “Ah,” he said, ‘there’s a fool sittin’ on a box or sumpthin’.

  The officer asked if he could see the buttons on the sitter’s tunic.

  The shooter stared for a bit and then announced that the buttons were shiny and in two rows.

  “Shoot me that man,” the officer demanded.

  The marksman lay down, settling himself among the tree roots and stones, removing a few from strategically inconvenient spots where they hurt his bones.

  His assistants fired the rifle in the air to clear the bore and then reloaded it to make sure that they were satisfied with the load that would be fired against the seated Union officer.

  The shooter took the gun as they knelt to hand it to him. Looking through the long telescopic sight, he studied the prey. “He’s talkin’ to’em some,” he eventually pronounced. “The’re tellin’ him to leave. He’s laffin.”

  “Shoot him now,” the Confederate officer ordered, “before he gets smart and listens to them...”

  At that moment, Uncle John Sedgwick, the well liked commander of the Sixth US Army Corps was telling the enlisted men lying on the ground around him that “the Johhnies can’t hit an elephant at this range.”

  The bullet hit him just below the left eye, knocking him backward off his seat on the upturned box. It passed through the brain and killed him instantly.

  Claude knew Sedgwick well and liked him. He learned of the man’s end some time later and felt guilty for having been present at his death.

  “I hit his Yankee ass,” the marksman reported and while his men reloaded the rifle, examined the place of Sedgwick’s death to see if another target would present itself.

  More than a little unhappy at the immediacy of this death, Claude wandered away from the front line and found his way back to Balthazar’s newly entrenched position.

  Charles Marshall waited for him there. He smiled at Devereux but did not offer his hand.

  Smoot stood to one side listening.

  “Claude, you are a lot of bother,” Marshall said. “We sent word to Richmond that you are here and now we have a message brought from the rail depot at Orange that we are to send you to them there at ‘our first opportunity.’ But, alas! There is no opportunity just now. General Grant’s Army is still here and we are busy with them. If they would be reasonable and go back, then all would be well, but, here they still are… To make matters worse, the damned Yankee cavalry is running around in strength all over the countryside between here and Richmond. We would like to send you but… can not.” He waited for a reaction.

  There was none. Devereux was looking at Smoot who watched him from a few yards away. “Anything else?” Claude asked turning back to Marshall.

  Marshall approached him to whisper, “Yes, I have some very bad news. Your father has suffered a severe heart crisis.

  Devereux stared at him. “How do we know this?”

  “The Signal Corps courier brought word across the river a few days ago. I have to get back, and you are going with me, but take a few minutes. I will wait.”

  Figure 5 - The Mule Shoe All through the 8th of May the two armies extended themselves farther and farther to the southeast, probing for the enemy’s presence, digging in when the hostile force was too close to allow progress. The process continued into the night.

  By the morning of the 9th, Ewell’s corps was in position to the right of the troops Claude visited the previous day. Officers had groped their way forward in the darkness struggling to tie flanks together so that units would not discover in the dawn that they were exposed to Federals unseen and silent in the night. The tentative and probing nature of this process resulted in men halting along the forward edges of rambling bits of insignificant terrain. The edge of patches of trees, gullies, fences and small streams, all loomed large at midnight, but what the coming of the sun revealed was that this fumbling around in the blackness had caused the creation of a large bulge in Lee’s line. It was a half mile deep in its projection into the federal position and over a quarter mile wide across its open end on the Southern side... Once the shape of it was clear, some wag quickly named it the Mule Shoe.

  Early’s Corps continued the line to the southeast and physically stood between the federal army and the county court house. As Early’s headquarters’ reserve, Balthazar’s little battalion took residence in the village itself. The battalion headquarters moved into the court house. A solid roof was welcome. Spring rains had been sporadic for days. The rain was growing more persistent and intense. Balthazar believed that “misery does not require practice” and so he occupied most of the buildings in the crossroads hamlet, tied them together with trenches and settled in to wait.

  Lee was so distraught when he saw the Mule Shoe drawn on a map that he could hardly be restrained from visiting it. He knew that it was a fatal weakness in his defenses and that it must be eliminated. Grant and Meade would see this bulge as vulnerable to an attack from both its sides with the opportunity to “pinch out” and destroy a major part of his small army. He ordered another line to be constructed across the “shoulders” so that Ewell’s troops in the salient could be withdrawn to safety behind it. The men in the Mule Shoe were the “Stonewall Division” and their artillery. “Allegheny” Johnson was still their commander.

  The work on the new line began slowly.

  Lee was ill. The long illness that would someday kill him was now evident to those around him. The pain deep in the chest made him cross. He was usually kind and the change disturbed the staff and
distracted them in their work. He hurt badly and it was hard to think, even harder to keep pushing the men when they were so tired and hungry.

  The engineer troops were exhausted after their labors on the forest road and the new entrenchments.

  As a result, nothing much happened that day as the Army of Northern Virginia sat down in a weary hope for a little rest.

  Fortunately for them, Grant and Meade were slow to realize what had happened on the ground. The 18,000 casualties suffered in the previous week took its toll on the collective mind of the Union Army’s leadership on the Wilderness front. The strange shape of Lee’s line was not at first apparent. It was only late in the day on the 9th that the slowly accumulating reports of his own army’s locations began to form a picture for Grant of what Lee’s line must look like. Colonel George Sharpe would generally have done a better job of “seeing” that, but that day he did not.

  The weather had been mixed for days. Now it seemed to be raining more with showers lasting longer and longer. The ground was becoming a sea of mud, red in places but more often the kind of sandy soil in which conifers grow well.

  In a shoddy roadside building, Grant, Meade and Sharpe stood over a little table. Sharpe’s disintegrating paper map lay on it. Water dripped on it from the rubber rain capes. The colors were running together in little streams.

  “He will withdraw as soon as he can,” Meade said as soon as Sharpe finished explaining the two positions.

  Grant nodded in agreement behind a screen of cigar smoke.

  “If he does not…” Sharpe began.

  “No. He will. I know he will,” Meade said firmly. He was filled with confidence in his colleague from the old army.

  Grant looked at him. He knew that Meade must feel very differently about him than he did about Lee. Grant’s failures in life were always close to the surface of his mind.

  I wonder if I can ever have their respect. I wonder…

  “If Lee is still in the salient tomorrow evening, have someone push him hard to see if he can be broken there. A brigade would be about the right size. Pick one with some young devil in charge, someone looking to make a name…”

  “Upton,” Meade said after a second’s thought” “Emory Upton”

  “Whatever you think best… I need to get some sleep.” He left the building, mounted his shivering horse in the cold rain, and rode down the track toward his tent camp.

  His cavalry escort followed. They hoped for some shelter themselves.

  The 10th of May passed uneventfully in the rain as soldiers tried to make themselves as comfortable as the mud and bugs allowed. The Southern chigger had made an early appearance this year because of the wet weather. This tiny red arachnid swarmed over the two armies, wandering on their bodies and burrowing into their skin. Once entrenched in the epidermis they inspired endless scratching and cursing. On the Confederate side, the shortage of rations wore down patience and strength. Men began to look at the army’s animals with hunger and desire.

  Chapter 19

  Emory Upton

  At 6: 30 in the evening on the 10th, an oversized brigade of Union infantry waited quietly near the northwest corner of the Mule Shoe. The front ranks were in the Union trench line and the rest stretched away to the rear for two hundred yards.

  Emory Upton, an 1861 graduate of West Point, waited with them for the artillery barrage to begin. He was 25 years old and a full colonel of volunteer infantry. His instructors at the academy had noted that he seemed a particularly bright and intense prospect for an officer’s commission.

  Three years later, he reached the apogee of his creative life in the Army. To achieve that height he made an imaginative leap that would have surprised his teachers. Having survived two years of experience with failed frontal attacks conducted in extended order, he decided that the way to breach entrenched Confederate positions was to mass artillery fire for a short but intensive barrage on the section of trench to be attacked, and then to charge with a column of massed infantry straight into the momentary “hole” in the enemy’s defenses that had been created by the artillery. A key part of this tactic was that the infantry would charge without pause until they broke through the enemy line and that they would not fire their rifles until that was accomplished.

  There was nothing very original in this method. Bonaparte would have been comfortable with it, but, in their relative ignorance of the military art, the Union Army high command thought it was radical.

  Emory Upton and Claude Devereux had something in common. They did not seem to feel fear on the battlefield in the way that most men do. Their soldiers feared this. Soldiers tend to dislike officers whose recklessness threatens their own chance of survival. The fear of needless death or wounds wars in soldiers’ hearts with their desire to follow a brave leader. The net outcome of that struggle between competing emotions often decides the officer’s own chance of survival.

  The artillery opened with a roar.

  Upton walked to the color party of his leading regiment.

  Now or never he thought. The artillery will stop while we go forward. If

  they do not, they will kill us and none of this will matter.

  “Brigade will advance!” he roared over the noise of the guns. “Forward!”

  he yelled and ran toward the Confederate lines. After a moment he looked

  back and saw that the front ranks were pressing on his heels. The color party

  of the 121st New York Infantry was ten yards behind him and a solid phalanx

  of men stretched back as far as he could see. They cheered “huzzah! huzzah!

  as they went forward.

  It began to rain again. The ground was soft everywhere.

  Upton splashed across a little stream with Confederate bullets singing

  around him. The artillery stopped as he ran past the last trees. The muddy

  glacis of the Rebel field fortifications was twenty five yards in front of

  him…

  An hour later, he was carried out of the “hole” in the Mule Shoe that his men had made. They had swarmed over the front line Confederates with the power of the depth of their column carrying them forward. The Southern line did not so much fall back as simply cease to exist in the section they captured. He was shot in the leg in the moment of his triumph. He went down with men hovering over him. There were dead and wounded Rebel infantrymen everywhere. The light of day was dimming.

  A Confederate surgeon, captured in his brigade’s field dressing station applied a bandage and tourniquet to Upton’s leg. “Thank you, doctor,” he said through the pain.

  The prisoner did not respond at first, and then said, “I hope you bleed to death.” He was hustled away.

  Upton laughed through his pain.

  Oh, well, would I feel differently?

  He refused to be taken to the rear until reinforcements arrived. He very nearly bled to death waiting. Reinforcements never came in spite of the personal assurances he had received. It had not been believed that he would succeed, and so preparations had not been made to support him.

  As night spread its shadows, John Gordon’s Confederate division drove hard through the fields and woods to reach the breach in the “wall” of the Mule Shoe. With a collective roar they swept through the woods striking Upton’s force at a moment when exhilaration was giving way to emotional exhaustion. The Federal infantry went reeling back in confusion, back all the way to their old line. Upton was carried out with them, his leg bleeding badly as he slipped into a state of wound shock that could easily have ended him. He did not die. The resilience of youth saved him. Grant promoted him to brigadier general the next day. Lincoln confirmed the order over the new-fangled field telegraph line that was laid into Grant’s headquarters as it moved forward. Promotions in the war time volunteer service were easy to do. Upton would live to become the foremost theoretician of the US Army in the 19th Century. Many years later, like so many of his old comrades and foes alike, he became more and more mad. At the end, wh
ile stationed at San Francisco, he found a soldier’s death with a pistol in his hand.

  Grant and Meade reluctantly understood that somehow, unbelievably, Lee was not reacting to his danger in the Mule Shoe. Why that would be, they knew not. They had no way to know that the marble man’s time on earth was beginning its last act. The two men most in charge of the Union’s fate decided that if there was any chance at all that Lee would not act to eliminate the salient, then they would take advantage of his negligence.

  Winfield Scott Hancock was summoned and told to put his whole II Army Corps in against the nose of the Mule Shoe in a massed attack.

  Hancock’s reaction was to look at the headquarters map and ask to be allowed to attack at night.

  They did not like that idea. It was an uncommon proposal. There was fear of disorganization, fear of masses of men being lost in the darkness. There was even more fear of innovation.

  Hancock pointed on the map at the fixed position he would attack. He insisted that if given until four or five in the morning the next day, he could reproduce Upton’s feat on a much grander scale.

  “So, you would be inside the enemy position by first light?” Grant asked. He was fascinated by the thought.

  Why haven’t we done this before, he asked himself? Even if the Rebels can hear the men coming they won’t be able to aim at them.

  “Any thoughts on how many guns Lee has in his front line?”

  Hancock knew what Grant was thinking. Artillery firing canister at assaulting troops would be the biggest hazard. “No idea,” he replied, “Sharpe has been questioning prisoners and deserters, but the location of the artillery is unclear. Nevertheless, this is still the best plan.”

  Please God, please. Make them let me do it this way. We can’t do this many more times. We are running out of men who will do this. Let me break them now…

  Grant looked at Meade. “I think you should let him try.”