by Bruce Catton
Five Forks was nowhere at all, but it was important because it was where the road from Dinwiddie Court House to the Southside Railroad crossed the east-and-west road that led to Lee's right flank and rear. Lee's army could not stay in Petersburg if the Yankees held this crossroads, and so Lee had scraped his last reserves to make a fight for the place. Dug in behind temporary breastworks were five brigades of infantry under the legendary George Pickett. With the infantry was practically all of Lee's cavalry.
Up against this powerful force came one division of Yankee cavalry led by General Thomas C. Devin, a former New York militia colonel who had become enough of a soldier to suit the most exacting of Regulars. He had been a favorite of tough John Buford in the old Gettysburg days, and nowadays he was dubbed "Sheridan's hard hitter"—which, considering the general reputation of Sheridan's cavalry, was a fairly substantial compliment. This day he had his hands full. When his patrols reported Rebel infantry at Five Forks he dismounted his division and got ready to fight on foot. Pickett immediately obliged him, rolling forward a heavier battle line than Devin's men could handle, and before long the blue cavalry was in full retreat.
The Federals fought hard, withdrawing as slowly as they could manage and maintaining a steady fire, but they were heavily outnumbered and Confederate cavalry kept curling in around both flanks, and presently Devin had to warn Sheridan that he was badly overmatched and that they might have trouble holding Dinwiddie itself. He kept his fighting line dismounted because the men could put up a more stubborn resistance that way, and as they fought the area immediately behind the firing line was a howling madhouse.
All of the division's horses were here, four thousand and odd of them, one trooper to every four horses. The country was densely wooded, with few roads and many rail fences, and the air was full of smoke and bullets and shouting men, and the conditions under which one mounted man could easily lead three riderless horses did not exist. The horses became panicky and fractious, and they kept running on the wrong side of trees, or colliding with each other, creating fearful tangles of kicking, plunging animals and snarled reins and cursing soldiers—and, said one of the men afterward, the whole business was enough to make anybody understand why an exceptionally profane man was always said to swear like a trooper.18
While Devin's men gave ground Sheridan got the rest of his men strung out in line in front of Dinwiddie Court House, and at dusk the Confederates came storming up to drive the whole lot of Yankee cavalry back where it belonged. When Devin's men came in Sheridan put them into line with the rest, and he rolled forward all the guns he could lay his hands on. Then he rounded up all of the regimental bands and put them up on the firing line and ordered them to play the gayest tunes they knew—play them loud and keep on playing them, and never mind if a bullet goes through a trombone, or even a trombonist, now and then.
The late afternoon sun broke through the clouds, and all of these bands were playing, and there was a clatter of musketry and a booming of cannon and a floating loom of battle smoke. Sheridan got his little battle flag with the two stars on it and rode out in front of his lines, going from one end to the other at a full gallop, waving his hat and telling every last soldier—by his presence, by his gestures, and by the hard look in his black eyes—that nobody was going to make them retreat another step.
They held the line. At dusk Sheridan tried a counterattack, ordering Custer to make a mounted charge on a line of Rebel infantry. A man who saw him giving Custer his orders remembered Sheridan's emphasis: "You understand? I want you to give it to them I" Custer nodded, and he drove his squadrons forward—to a muddy anticlimax. The field across which the men tried to charge was so soupy with wet clay and rain water that the horses immediately bogged down, the charge came to nothing, and at last it was dark, with the Federals holding the town and the Confederates facing them just out of musket range.19
It looked like trouble, for these venturesome Confederates had more men than Sheridan had and they were well behind the left end of the main Union line. But Sheridan saw it as opportunity; it was Pickett's force and not his that was in trouble, the Rebels were isolated and they could be cut off, and if the business were handled right none of them should ever get back to Lee's army. Off through the night to Grant went Sheridan's couriers with the message: "Let me have the old VI Corps once more and I can really smash things."
The VI Corps Sheridan could not have, because it was too far off and with the roads as they were it would take two days to get it to him. Warren and the V Corps were available, however, no more than half a dozen miles away, and late that evening Warren was ordered to get his men over to Dinwiddie at top speed. Sheridan was told that they would show up at dawn, and they would be coming in from the northeast, behind Pickett's flank. Warren had much more infantry than Pickett had, and Sheridan had much more cavalry. Between the two of them they might be able to destroy his entire force.20 Lee was so pinched for manpower that a loss of such dimensions would practically bankrupt him.
So Sheridan put his men into bivouac and waited impatiently for the morning. It was a restless night, since every square foot of open space behind the line was jammed with led horses and their grouchy caretakers, and it was an all-night job to get all of these straightened out so that the squadrons could be mounted next day if necessary. Trains of pack mules came up, bringing forage and rations, and the ambulances had got through—that work on the roads had been effective—and lanterns twinkled in the damp groves as stretcher parties went through, gathering up the wounded men21
It was the last day of March 1865, and the Army of the Potomac had just nine more days of campaigning ahead of it.
3, The Soldiers Saw Daylight
Major General Gouverneur Kemble Warren and his V Army Corps had been having a bad day. The corps had been in position, wet and uncomfortable, a little west of Hatcher's Run, presumably a trifle south of the extreme right flank of Lee's main line, and during the morning—while Devin's troopers were meeting Rebel infantry in front of Five Forks and were beginning their difficult withdrawal to Dinwiddie Court House—Warren sent one division forward to make a reconnoissance and find out just where the Rebels might be.
By ill chance this division began to advance just when Lee ordered a force of his own to move forward and pick a fight with the Yankees in order to protect the move which Pickett was making a few miles farther west. This force caught the Federal infant2y division off guard and piled into it with savage vigor, and the Federals were driven back in disorder. In their retreat they ran through the bivouac of the second of Warren's three infantry divisions, and these troops were all gathered around smoky campfires trying to dry their clothing and their blankets, no one having alerted them to the fact that there might be action. So this second division was routed, too, and Warren had to send in his third division and call for help from the II Corps, over on his right, in order to restore the situation.
By evening he had won back the ground that had been lost, but his men had had a hard all-day fight, with painful losses; and now, just as they were collecting their wounded and trying to get snug for the night, there came these orders to make a forced march over to join Sheridan.1
It was a foul night to move troops. It was so dark, as one soldier said, that it was literally impossible to see a hand before one's face. The rain had stopped, but the roads were deep with mud, every little creek had overflowed, and there was a completely unfordable stream flowing straight across the principal highway that the troops had to use. Warren's engineers tore down a house and used the timbers to build a bridge, but construction work at midnight with everybody exhausted was slow work.
Warren had received conflicting orders about the routes he was to take, so that there was a good deal of wearing countermarching for some units, and there was much confusion about maps and place names. Also, at the time he got his marching orders Warren's skirmish line was in contact with the enemy, and he felt that he should use much caution in getting his men away. Some regiments s
tarted on time, but most of them did not, nothing that could conceivably go wrong went right, and by five in the morning—the hour at which it had been hoped that the whole corps would be taking position at Dinwiddie Court House—two of his divisions were just be-ginning to move.2
Sheridan was furious. He met the head of the infantry column in a gray dawn as the men came splashing up to the rendezvous, and he demanded of the brigadier commanding: "Where's Warren?" The brigadier explained that Warren was back with the rear of the column, and Sheridan growled: "That's where I expected to find him. What's he doing there?" The officer tried to explain that Warren was trying to make sure that his men could break contact with the Confederates without drawing an attack, but Sheridan was not appeased. Later, when Warren arrived, the two generals were seen tramping up and down by the roadside, Sheridan dark and tense, stamping angrily in the mud, Warren pale and tight-lipped, apparently trying to control himself.8
Wherever the fault lay, the early-morning attack that had been planned could not be made. It was noon before the V Corps was assembled, and by that time the Confederates were gone. During the night Pickett had got wind of the Yankee move, and around daybreak he took his entire force back to the breastworks at Five Forks.
These works ran for a mile or more along the edge of the White Oak Road, and they faced toward the south. At their eastern end, for flank protection, the line made nearly a right-angle turn and ran north for a few hundred yards. With his men in and behind these works, and cavalry patrolling both flanks, Pickett seems to have taken it for granted that he was safe from assault for the rest of the day. With a few other ranking officers he retired to a campfire some distance in the rear to enjoy the pleasures of a shad bake.
As far as Sheridan was concerned, however, Pickett was in as much danger as he had been in before. There was still a wide gap between his force and the rest of Lee's army, with only the thinnest chain of cavalry vedettes to maintain contact, and in that gap Sheridan could see a dazzling opportunity. He had his cavalry maintaining pressure along Pickett's front, and he had a whole mounted division waiting in reserve, ready to go slashing in around the Confederate right at the proper time. If, while the cavalry held the Southerners' attention, he could drive 16,000 good infantrymen into the open gap and bring their entire weight to bear on Pickett's left flank, just where the Rebel breastworks angled back toward the north, the war would be a good deal nearer its close by nightfall.
The 16,000 good infantrymen were at hand, and a comparatively short walk would put them into position. They were dog-tired. They had fought all of the day before, and they had spent practically all of the night and morning on the march, and while Sheridan and Warren discussed battle plans they were catching forty winks in some fields near a little country church. When Warren at last came over to move them up to the jump-off line they were sluggish, and getting them formed was slow work, and it seemed to Sheridan —watching the afternoon sun get lower in the sky, and reflecting that the whole situation might be very different by tomorrow morning—that Warren was not doing much to make things go faster.4 But the men would fight well when the time came, because they considered themselves a crack outfit and they had a great tradition.
The V Corps was one of the famous units of the whole Federal Army. Fitz-John Porter had commanded it, and it had been McClellan's favorite corps, and in general orders he had held it up as a model for the other corps to emulate, which caused jealousies that had not entirely worn away even yet. (It caused War Department suspicions, too, and promotion for higher officers in this corps was harder to get, it was said, than in the rest of the Army of the Potomac.) The corps had been built around a famous division of Regulars, and in the beginning all of its ranking officers had been Regulars, mostly of the stiff, old-army, knock-'em-dead variety. Its discipline tended to be severe, there was strict observance of military formalities, and the Regular Army flavor endured, even though many of the old officers and all of the Regular battalions had disappeared.5
This was the corps which Sheridan now was preparing to use as his striking force. When Grant first sent the corps out to operate on Lee's flank, he did two curious things. He detached it from Meade's command and put it entirely under Sheridan, promising to do the same with the II Corps if Sheridan needed it—which was a bit odd, considering that Sheridan was simply the cavalry commander, while Meade commanded the Army of the Potomac—and he specifically authorized Sheridan to relieve Warren of his command, if it seemed necessary, and to put someone else in his place.6
Grant's subsequent explanation of these acts was brief and vague, but what he was actually trying to do was to find a solution for the old, baffling command problem that had beset the Army of the Potomac from its earliest days.
Time and again the Army of the Potomac had missed a victory because someone did not move quite fast enough, or failed to put all of his weight into a blow, or came into action other than precisely as he was expected to do. This had happened before Grant became general in chief and it had happened since then, and the fact that Warren had been involved in a few such incidents was not especially important. What Grant was really shooting at was the sluggishness and caution that were forever cropping out, at some critical moment, somewhere in the army's chain of command. With the decisive moment of the war coming up Grant was going to have no more of that. Instinctively, he was turning to Sheridan, Sheridan the driver—giving him as much of the army as he needed and in effect telling him to take it and be tough with it.
Sheridan was the man for it. As Warren's brigades struggled into position Sheridan was everywhere, needling the laggards, pricking the general officers on, sending his staff galloping from end to end of the line. He rounded up the cavalry bands, which had made music on the firing line the evening before, and he put them on horseback with orders to go into action along with the fighting men when the advance sounded. It was four o'clock by now, and there would not be a great deal more daylight, and at last the infantry began to move. Sheridan spurred away to send the cavalry forward too. There was the peal of many bugles and then a great crash of musketry, and thousands of men broke into a cheer, and the battle was on.
A skirmisher trotting forward a few hundred yards ahead of the V Corps turned once to look back, and he saw what neither he nor any of his mates had seen in a dreary year of wilderness fighting and trench warfare, and he remembered it as the most stirring thing he had ever looked upon in all of his life. There they were, coming up behind him as if all the power of a nation had been put into one disciplined mass —the fighting men of the V Corps, walking forward in battle lines that were a mile wide and many ranks deep, sunlight glinting on thousands of bright muskets, flags snapping in the breeze, brigade fronts taut with parade-ground Regular Army precision, everybody keeping step, tramping forward into battle to the sound of gunfire and distant music. To see this, wrote the skirmisher, was to see and to know "the grandeur and the sublimity of war." 7
It was grand and inspiring—and, unfortunately, there was a hitch in it.
Warren was sending his men in with two divisions abreast and a third division following in support, and by some mischance he was hitting the White Oak Road far to the east of the place where he was supposed to hit it. Instead of coming in on the knuckle of Pickett's line, he was coming in on nothing at all. His men were marching resolutely toward the north and the battle was going on somewhere to the west, out of their sight and reach.
The left division in the first line was commanded by General Ayres, a hard-bitten survivor of the original old-army set of officers, and the left of his division brushed against the left flank of Pickett's force and came under a sharp fire. Ayres spun the whole division around, brigade by brigade, making almost a 90-degree turn to the left—hot enough work it was, too, with Rebel infantry and cavalry firing steadily and the ground all broken—and as he turned the rest of the corps lost contact with him. The division that had been advancing beside him was led by General Crawford, who fell a good deal short of be
ing one of the most skillful soldiers in the army, and Crawford kept marching to the north, getting farther away from the battle every minute. Most of the third division followed Crawford, Ayres's men were for the moment so entangled in their maneuver that they could not do much fighting—and, in sum, instead of crunching in on the Rebel flank with overpowering force, the V Corps was hardly doing more than giving it a brisk nudge.8
A confusing long-range fire, heavy enough to hurt, kept coming in from the left, and smoke fog was drifting through woods and fields. Warren had gone riding frantically on to try to find Crawford and set him straight, and entire brigades had lost touch with their corps and division commanders. One of these, presently, got into action, led by one of the most remarkable soldiers in the army, the hawk-nosed theologian turned general, Joshua Chamberlain of Maine.
Before the war Chamberlain had done nothing more militant than teach courses in natural and revealed religion, and later on in romance languages, at Bowdoin College. In 1862 he had been given a two-year leave of absence to study in Europe. Instead of going to Europe he had joined the army, and in a short time he showed up at Gettysburg as colonel of the 20th Maine Infantry, winning the Congressional Medal of Honor for his defense of Little Round Top. Since then he had been several times wounded—he had an arm in a sling today, as a matter of fact, from a wound received twenty-four hours earlier in the fight near Hatchers Run—and he had twice won brevet promotions for bravery under fire. It was occurring to him now that since bullets were coming from the left there must be Confederates over that way, so he took his brigade over to do something about it.