On the recommendation of Lincoln’s advisers—and Lincoln himself—Grant did not share his plans with Lincoln. The reason was simple. “He was so kind-hearted,” Grant would later recall, “so averse to refusing anything asked of him, that some friend would be sure to get from him all he knew.” For good measure, Grant also refused to share his plans with Secretary of War Stanton or Chief of Staff General Halleck, confirming just how autonomous commanding generals were.
While unwilling to hear Grant’s plan, Lincoln was only too eager to share his own military thoughts on the situation. According to Grant: [Lincoln] suggested that the army might be moved on boats and landed between the mouths of these streams. We would then have the Potomac to bring our supplies, and the tributaries would protect our flanks while we moved out. I listened respectfully, but did not suggest that the same streams would protect Lee’s flanks while he was shutting us up.5
A large wagon park at Brandy Station, Virginia (December 1863—April 1864). The logistical challenges to supplying large armies in the field were immense. These wagons stand ready to feed and provision Union soldiers in winter quarters.
Grant’s presence in the field, meanwhile, compromised the authority of General Meade, the titular commander of the Army of the Potomac. It bespeaks all the more the quality of Grant’s leadership that the two worked hard to avoid a rupture. But Grant’s two most valuable warrior priests were not with the Army of the Potomac. One, the redeemed General Sherman, advanced to Grant’s former command in the West. The other, the youthful Irishman General Philip Sheridan, had command of the cavalry in the Shenandoah Valley and was already the stuff of legend.
Grant’s strategy was brutally simple. In the past, Union armies had operated independently, allowing Confederates to shift defenses to trouble spots as needed. Under Grant, “concentration of force” on all fronts would be the order of the day. In a communique to Sherman, written on April 4, Grant confided, “It is my design, if the enemy keep quiet and allow me to take the initiative in the spring campaign, to work all parts of the army together, and somewhat towards a common centre.”6
That center, of course, would be Richmond. The Army of the Potomac under Meade’s and Grant’s command would dog Lee’s army: “Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.” Sherman would march into Georgia against the formidable General Joe Johnston and reduce Atlanta. Sheridan would operate in the Shenandoah Valley, checking Forrest’s equally legendary cavalry, and razing the land to cut off Lee’s food supply and demoralize the citizenry.
Alongside these central campaigns, Grant intended to see every other major Confederate army pinned down and unable to assist Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. Grant’s lesser (political) generals—Nathaniel P. Banks, who moved from the Red River campaign in Texas (which he badly mishandled) to Mobile, Alabama, and Franz Sigel (appointed to appease German Americans)—were to march south in the Shenandoah. Grant appointed the ineffective Benjamin Butler, a political Democrat whom Lincoln felt he had to retain until the national elections, commander of the Department of Virginia and North Carolina with orders to move against Richmond from the south side of the James River.7
To this bold but simple strategy Grant applied tactics intended to be equally direct—and harsh. For these armies to succeed, the Confederate will to fight must be crushed so completely that Davis and his generals would finally recognize the futility of continuing the war. Lincoln and Grant realized that in this newly escalated citizens’ war, the people must be engaged and crushed. Otherwise the armies could fight forever.
That the back had not yet been broken on Confederate morale appeared on many fronts. Sheet music, for example, continued to thrive in the dying Confederacy, often in denial of realities. In “Wait Till the War, Love, Is Over,” one stanza glossed war and the home front:Twas gentle spring the flowers were bright,
The bird’s sweet song was lonely,
I wander’d in the moon’s pale light,
With her I loved so fondly,
Her face with smiles shone cheerfully,
My heart with joy ran over,
As tenderly she whisper’d me
Wait ’till the war, love, is over.
In fact, many Confederate brides were not telling their soldier men to wait but to come home now. This was especially true for wives separated from battlefields—and from the sight of occupying Federal forces. For them (unlike wives closer to war zones), need and grief displaced rage and revenge. What began as a united home front and war front had, by 1864, extended too long for many women to tolerate. They began to launch their own private moral crusade questioning the war’s integrity. In a letter to her husband, George, Martha Fort angrily asked: “How many lives are to be laid on the alter of ambition of men. I look on this war as nothing else but to gratify unholy ambition.”8 Yet the Confederates were far from ready to capitulate. Lincoln and Grant intended to change that.
In 1864 civilian suffering did not mean mass murder of innocent civilians (that would wait for another century) nor rape. In fact, such tactics would backfire by stiffening enemy civilian resolve and eroding Union soldiers’ discipline. Starvation, destruction of homes and property, and widespread marauding, however, were a different story.
Here the Federal commanders engaged a moral gray zone. Generals could not command rapine to get their wishes. That would not look good in subsequent review. Instead, they had only not to discourage it with mass courts-martial or executions. Already by 1863, Sherman had noted the fact that generals “make feeble efforts to stay the disorder, but it is idle.” The fact was that war—or at least this war—could not be controlled: “You cannot help yourself, and the only possible remedy is to stop war.” This, in turn, required Sherman “to destroy both the rebel army and whatever of wealth or property it has founded its boasted strength upon.”9
With sentiments like these, generals could rely on the soldiers to follow their instincts, steeled by three years of war and unremitting civilian hatred. Whether this civilian suffering should be termed “hard” war, “destructive” war, or “total” war is a scholar’s game. The point was that citizens must suffer. This, in turn, meant an irrevocable end to the ideals of “Christian civilization” touted by McClellan and the Democratic Party for their own racist ends. With Lieber’s Code at the ready, the justification for waging a war of deprivation on civilians was in place. And with the leadership of Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, the men to accomplish it were assembled and in place. Each general had dealt directly with guerrilla and “irregular” warfare in the West and border states, and each had lost whatever vestiges of the West Point Code they originally harbored.
Clearly Grant had a draconian plan. But would it work? For three years the two armies had dueled with severe casualty rates, but neither could achieve a decisive victory. In fact, soldiers on both sides questioned “which would whip” in the event of a final showdown.
Grant, however, knew he would whip—as long as the press and people supported him. His orders—and inclinations—were to promote a final engagement from which there would be no retreat, no matter what the casualties. No proportionality of losses could mitigate against this end—moral reflection about acceptable losses could not even be part of the equation. Instead, pragmatism must define the line between acceptable and unacceptable losses, and the cost would be high indeed. Grant understood that to annihilate Lee he would have to engage in “as desperate fighting as the world has ever witnessed.”10
Perhaps more than any other battles, the spring 1864 campaigns of Grant and Lee highlighted the nearly mythical status of generals and their people’s loyalties. Lee’s veteran lieutenant James Longstreet summarized the situation on the eve of the battles:The commanders had chosen their battle after mature deliberation. They knew of each other’s numbers and resources before they laid their plans, and they had even known each other personally for more than twenty years. Each had the undivided support and confidence of his government and his army, and it was time no
w to leave the past and give attention to the future.11
Predictably, as massive battles loomed, Congressman Samuel S. Cox again urged restraint and conciliation. In a congressional speech delivered on May 4 he insisted:History teaches in vain, if it does not contain lessons of moderation in civil wars.... Will our rulers heed these lessons in time? Will they return to the purpose of the war, as declared by General McClellan, for the sole great object of the restoration of the unity of the nation, the preservation of the Constitution, and the supremacy of the laws ... let them remember, also, that all our labors to rebuild the old fabric will fail, unless out of the “brotherly dissimilitudes” of section and interest, we evoke the spirit of fraternity, which has its true similitude in the perfect spirit of Christian fellowship!12
Though eloquent in his compassion, Cox left unsaid the underlying reality that his “spirit of fraternity” and “Christian fellowship” was a whites-only fraternity, and its “fabric” woven with the racist thread of white supremacy.
Meanwhile, Lincoln fretted that a lack of convincing victories would cost him the 1864 election to McClellan. Yet his party remained overwhelmingly supportive of the war, not only in the army, but among the rank and file. The exception was John C. Frémont, the disgruntled general who was deprived of a high command by his humiliation in Missouri. Frémont tried to create a third party composed of Republican abolitionists and radical German Americans with a platform that was nearly the mirror opposite of Cox’s. Cox branded Lincoln with the icon “nigger lover”; Frémont accused Lincoln of being a rebel lover, unwilling to extract the last measure of blood revenge. Frémont intended to be God’s self-proclaimed enforcer, with radical congressmen as his henchmen. The tragedy of the Civil War’s legacy would be the triumph of both: white supremacy and vengeful reconstruction.
But in 1864, Frémont attracted little support. Frémont’s strongest supporter, the radical anti-Lincoln abolitionist Wendell Phillips, represented an alliance sure to win more enemies than friends. Few Republicans or Democrats expressed much interest. At the nominating convention on May 31 in Cleveland, the “Radical Democratic Party” denounced Lincoln’s softness on abolition and reconstruction. They further advocated that Congress, not the executive, set plans for reconstruction that included the confiscation of rebel land for redistribution. But they garnered little national support.13
For Martha LeBaron Goddard, an admirer of Wendell Phillips, the prospects did not look good: “I was dreadfully disappointed in the Cleveland convention, for I had hopes that the opposition to Lincoln might accomplish something. Now I despair—Fremont is my man, but his party looks forlornly weak to me, so far as I know anything about it; and I suppose we and the poor negroes must suffer another 4 years of Abe’s slowness and feel guilty and mean explaining and apologising for every decent thing he has done.”14 If Lincoln failed to impress Goddard, the generals were a different story: “This last month of fighting has told upon the Worcester soldiers, and some of our best and bravest soldiers have fallen.... Grant and Lee are by far the most interesting men in the country to me now.”15
Abijah Marvin, an abolitionist minister, also evidenced concern over a war fought for war’s sake. Citing earlier American barbarities in the Seminole War and Mexican War, he wondered if the present war was any different: “When I picture to myself two armies composed of such profane men rushing into deadly conflict, the idea of humanity seems to be withdrawn, and to my mind’s eye, two armies of incarnate fiends are venting the rage of hell itself. O what a terrible necessity is war!”16
In the Confederacy President Davis continued to do battle with the Carolinas and Georgia over his policy of centralization and conscription, but the army seemed in good spirits.17 Longstreet’s corps returned to Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, ready to help “Marse Lee” beat off a Union attack. And General P. G. T. Beauregard was reassigned from Charleston to lead the Department of North Carolina and Southern Virginia, with responsibility for defending Richmond and North Carolina against Butler’s threatened invasion from the South. While no large battles had taken place since the fall of 1863, the pieces were falling neatly into place for destruction of military and civilian lives and property on an unprecedented scale. A shaken writer for the Richmond Daily Whig recognized that “upon the eve of a momentous campaign, within the period of which lie undisclosed events, inscrutable to the most earnest gaze, affecting the destiny—the very existence perhaps—of our people as a free people.”18
In his classic treatise On War, Carl von Clausewitz defined war as “politics by other means,” and so it had begun with the Civil War. But by 1864, as battles resumed, war was becoming its own end. Richmond’s papers could print little else than news of the war—and with it stories of the generals who dueled like industrial knights commanding engines and explosives alongside horses and sabers. Headlines fed the public lust for new conquests. Civilian anticipation for massive battles would not wait long to be satisfied. If Antietam stands as the military and political “crossroads” of the war, 1864 would stand as the moral crossroads of a war pursued with unprecedented violence on soldier and civilian alike. By 1864 even Lincoln was through with efforts at compromise and conciliation. With black soldiers under arms, there would be no further talk from Lincoln of colonization or compensated emancipation. Instead, it was all-out war.
CHAPTER 34
“IF IT TAKES ALL SUMMER”
Shortly after midnight on May 4, 1864, Grant began the dreaded spring campaign by posting the Army of the Potomac across the Rapidan under cover of darkness. On the other side, Lee waited patiently in his command headquarters at Orange Court House with his veteran army of just under sixty-five thousand loyal disciples willing to sacrifice themselves for their master. Instead of challenging Grant’s invasion at the Rapidan, Lee posted his army north of Richmond in the thick and familiar tangle of trees and undergrowth that was the Wilderness.
The choice was brilliant. Rather than confront Grant’s superior numbers in a frontal assault, Lee would force Grant to come to him on his turf, just as he had done with Hooker at Chancellorsville, five miles to the north. In the Wilderness, there would be no massed army to flank—or even to see. Artillery, which had proved so devastating at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, would be of little use. Lee hoped that by effectively silencing Federal artillery and capitalizing on the advantages of terrain and local knowledge, he might once again humble the Goliath from the North.
Winslow Homer’s painting of the Wilderness captured the haunting, almost surreal quality of the terrain where the two armies would soon grapple in a desperate battle. The dark forestation was so thick with small pines and scrub oak, cedar, and dogwood that visibility all but ended beyond ten yards, making coordination between large military elements virtually impossible.
Though fighting without Stonewall Jackson and unhappy with Longstreet’s tardiness at Gettysburg, Lee still enjoyed a general corps roughly the equal of Grant’s in terms of ability and experience. Such were the talents of the battle-hardened commanders on both sides that none would flinch or run. Neither would the equally hardened soldiers, Darwinian survivors all. Great commanders and veteran soldiers ensured great battles—and great losses.
“Bones of Dead Soldiers in the Wilderness.” This photograph of skeletons in the woods captured the tangled morass of the Wilderness, where some of the war’s fiercest fighting took place.
Grant thought he knew all about the terrain from reports about the debacle at Chancellorsville. Hoping to get through the Wilderness as quickly as possible, he divided his forces into two columns marching in two directions. But his hopes were not realized.1
Like Gettysburg, the Battle of the Wilderness began accidentally with a chance early-morning encounter on May 5 between Gouverneur K. Warren’s Fifth Corps and Richard Ewell’s Second Corps on the Orange Turnpike. Warren was ordered to attack what he believed to be no more than a division. When it became apparent that Ewell’s entire corps was on the road before him, W
arren realized that this attack would soon rise to the dignity of a full-fledged battle. Fierce fighting broke out on Orange Plank Road between Confederate A. P. Hill’s advancing Third Corps and Winfield Scott Hancock’s Second Corps. Though outnumbered forty thousand to fifteen thousand, Hill fought a brilliant and successful holding action by shifting his interior lines to concentrate his limited forces against the specific points of Federal attack.
In the immediate aftermath of the battle, Hill was so exhausted and weakened from the day’s fighting that he failed to adequately reorganize his front, which remained scattered and unprepared for renewed fighting the next morning. At the same time, Lee worried about Ewell’s health and resolution in the face of battle. Lee could ill afford to lose any of his depleted warrior priests. Fortunately, he still had Longstreet, who was moving rapidly to join up with him.
By morning Longstreet had still not arrived, leaving Lee shorthanded and desperate. But timing is everything in battles, and just as hope was waning, Lee spotted approaching soldiers. He asked where they were coming from. When the answer came back “Texas,” he knew that Longstreet had arrived.
With uncharacteristic glee, Lee left his position and rode to meet the loyal Texans. For their part, they were no less moved by the sight of “Marse Robert” in the field. One courier cried out, “I would charge hell itself for that old man.” Caught up in a frenzy of his own, Lee assumed a position as if to lead the charge until cries of “Go back!” “Lee to the rear!” rang through Longstreet’s corps. When, at length, Lee’s staff officer caught the bridle of Lee’s mount Old Traveller and turned Lee back, the rebels followed Longstreet with renewed passion into the fray.
Upon the Altar of the Nation Page 41