The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

by Shelby Foote

  Forbearance came hard, but he soon had other matters on his mind. Withdrawal, under present circumstances, called for perhaps more daring, and certainly more skill, then did staying where he was or going in. Gordon was still clawing at his rear on Brook Turnpike, and Fitz Lee was somewhere off in the darkness, hovering on his flank; Bragg, for all he knew, had summoned any number of reinforcements from beyond the James, and presently the confusion was compounded by a howling wind- and rainstorm (the one that was giving Hancock so much trouble, out on its fringes, on the night march into position for his dawn assault on the toe of Ewell’s Mule Shoe) so severe that the steeple of old St John’s Church, on the opposite side of Richmond, was blown away. Sheridan turned eastward, headed for Meadow Bridge on the Chickahominy, which he intended to cross at that point, putting the river between him and his pursuers, and then recross, well downstream, to find sanctuary within Butler’s lines, as had been prearranged, at Haxall’s Landing on the James. In addition to the rain-lashed darkness, which made any sense of direction hard to maintain, the march was complicated by the presence of land mines in his path; “torpedoes,” they were called, buried artillery projectiles equipped with trip wires, and the first one encountered killed a number of horses and wounded several men. Sheridan had an answer to that, however. Bringing a couple of dozen prisoners forward to the head of the column, he made them “get down on their knees, feel for the wires in the darkness, follow them up and unearth the shells.” Despite the delay he reached Meadow Bridge at daylight: only to find that the rebels had set it afire the night before to prevent his getaway. At the same time he discovered this, Bragg’s infantry came up in his rear and Fitz Lee’s vengeance-minded troopers descended whooping on his flank.

  He faced Wilson and Gregg about to meet the double challenge, and gave Merritt the task of repairing the bridge for a crossing. Fortunately, last night’s rain had put the fire out before the stringers and ties burned through; a new floor could be improvised from fence rails. While these were being collected and put in place, the two divisions fighting rearward gave a good account of themselves, having acquired by now some of the foxhunt jauntiness formerly limited to their gray-clad adversaries. For example, when instructed by Sheridan to “hold your position at all hazards while I arrange to withdraw the corps to the north side of the river,” James Wilson made a jocular reply. “Our hair is badly entangled in [the enemy’s] fingers and our nose firmly inserted in his mouth. We shall, therefore, hold on here till something breaks.” Nothing broke; not in the blue ranks anyhow, though James Gordon was mortally wounded on the other side, shot from his horse while leading a charge by his brigade. Merritt finished his repair work in short order and the three divisions withdrew, without heavy losses, to camp for the night down the left bank of the Chickahominy, near the old Gaines Mill battlefield. Proceeding by easy marches they rode past other scenes from the Seven Days, including Malvern Hill, to Haxall’s Landing, which they reached on May 14. The raid was over, all but the return, and Sheridan was greatly pleased with the results, not only because of the specific damage accomplished at Beaver Dam and Ashland, but also because of other damage, no less grave for being more difficult to assess. At a cost of 625 killed and wounded and missing, he had freed nearly 400 Union prisoners and brought them with him into Butler’s lines, along with some 300 captive rebels. How many of the enemy he had killed or wounded in the course of the raid he could not say, but he knew at least of one whose loss to Lee and the Confederacy was well-nigh immeasurable. The killing of Jeb Stuart at Yellow Tavern, he declared, “inflicted a blow from which entire recovery was impossible.”

  After three days’ rest with Butler he was off to rejoin Grant. The northward march was uneventful except for a rather spectacular demonstration, staged while crossing the high railroad bridge over Pamunkey River, of the indestructibility of the army pack mule. Falling from a height of thirty feet, one of these creatures — watched in amazement by a regiment of troopers whose colonel recorded the incident in his memoirs — “turned a somersault, struck an abutment, disappeared under water, came up, and swam ashore without disturbing his pack.” On May 24 the three divisions rejoined the army they had left, two weeks and one day ago, near Spotsylvania.

  Stuart by then had been eleven days in his grave, not far from the church that lost its steeple in the windstorm on the night he arrived from Yellow Tavern. After six mortal hours of being jounced on rutted country roads because the ambulance had to take a roundabout route to avoid the raiders on the turnpike, he reached his wife’s sister’s house on Grace Street at 11 o’clock that evening, and there, attended by four of Richmond’s leading physicians through another twenty hours of suffering, he made what was called “a good death” — a matter of considerable importance in those days, from the historical as well as the religious point of view. After sending word of his condition to his wife at Beaver Dam, in hope that she and the children would reach him before the end, he gave instructions for the disposition of his few belongings, including his spurs and various horses. “My sword I leave to my son,” the impromptu will concluded. The night was a hard one, with stretches of delirium, but toward morning he seemed to improve; an aide reported him “calm and composed, in the full possession of his mind.” Shortly after sunrise on May 12, when the rumble of guns was heard from the north, he asked what it meant, and on being told that part of the capital garrison had gone out to work with the cavalry in an attempt to trap the raiders at Meadow Bridge: “God grant that they may be successful,” he said fervently, then turned his head aside and returned with a sigh to the matter at hand: “But I must be prepared for another world.” Later that morning the President arrived to sit briefly at his bedside. “General, how do you feel?” he asked, taking the cavalryman’s hand. “Easy; but willing to die,” Jeb said, “if God and my country think I have fulfilled my destiny and done my duty.”

  Davis could scarcely believe the thirty-one-year-old Virginian was near death; he seemed, he said afterward, “so calm, and physically so strong.” But one of the doctors, seeing the Chief Executive out, told him there was no chance for Stuart’s recovery. The bullet had pierced his abdomen, causing heavy internal bleeding, and probably his liver and stomach as well; “mortification” — peritonitis — had set in, and he was not likely to see another dawn. That afternoon Jeb himself was told as much. “Can I last the night?” he asked, realizing that his wife might not arrive before tomorrow because of the damage to the railroad north of Richmond, and received the doctor’s answer: “I’m afraid the end is near.” Stuart nodded. “I am resigned, if it be God’s will,” he said. “I would like to see my wife. But God’s will be done.” Near sunset he asked a clergyman to lead in the singing of “Rock of Ages,” and it was painful to see the effort he made to join the slow chorus of the hymn. “I am going fast now, I am resigned; God’s will be done,” he murmured. That was shortly after 7 o’clock, and within another half hour he was dead.

  Flora Stuart and the children did not arrive until four hours later, but were with him in plenty of time for the funeral next day at St James Church and the burial in Hollywood Cemetery. There was no military escort; the home guard was in the field and Lee could spare no soldiers from the Spotsylvania line. Davis and Bragg were there, along with other government dignitaries, but Fitz Lee’s troopers were still out after Sheridan, down the Peninsula. Such were the last rites for the man John Sedgwick, dead himself for four days now, had called “the greatest cavalry officer ever foaled in America.”

  * * *

  “His achievements form a conspicuous part of the history of this army, with which his name and services will be forever associated,” Lee was presently to declare in a general order mourning the fallen Jeb. This was the hardest loss he had had to bear since the death of Jackson, and coupled as it was with the disablement of Longstreet, the indisposition of A. P. Hill, and the increasing evidence that one-legged Ewell would never fulfill the expectations which had attended his appointment as Stonewall�
�s successor, there was cause for despair in the Confederate army, near exhaustion from its twenty-hour struggle for the Mule Shoe. Fortunately, as if in respectful observation of Stuart’s funeral fifty miles away in Richmond, the following day was one of rest. For the next two days, and into a third, rain fell steadily — “as if Heaven were trying to wash up the blood as fast as the civilized barbarians were spilling it,” a South Carolina sergeant of artillery observed. Such killing as there was was mostly done at long range, by cannoneers and snipers on both sides. There was little actual fighting, only a lumbering shift by the Union army, east and south. Lee conformed to cover Spotsylvania, extending his right southward, beyond the courthouse, to the crossing of the Po. The blue maneuver seemed quite purposeless, not at all like Grant; Lee was puzzled. Unable to make out what the Federals were up to, if anything, he remarked sadly to a companion: “Ah, Major, if my poor friend Stuart were here I should know all about what those people are doing.”

  Grant was not as quiescent as he seemed; anyhow he hadn’t meant to be. During the day of rest from his exertions of May 12 he considered what to do to break the stalemate his headlong efforts had produced. A move around Lee’s left would draw the old fox into open country, but in the absence of Sheridan’s troopers Grant would be at a disadvantage, maneuvering blind against a foe who still had half his cavalry on hand. His decision, then, was to strike the enemy right by shifting Warren from his own right to his left on a night march that would end in a surprise attack at first light, May 14; Wright would follow to extend the envelopment which, if successful, would turn Lee out of his Spotsylvania works and expose him to destruction when he retreated. Orders to effect this were issued before the day of rest was over; but all that came of them was lumbering confusion and the loss of many tempers. Floundering through roadless mud, rain-whipped underbrush, and swollen creeks, the V Corps did not reach its jump-off position on the Fredericksburg Road until 6 a.m., two hours behind schedule, and had to spend the rest of the day collecting the thousands of mud-caked stragglers left exhausted in its wake. The attack had to be called off, and instead there followed another day of rest.

  This time it was Wright who had a notion. The Confederates having conformed to the Union movement by shifting Anderson to their right, Wright suggested that a sudden reversal of last night’s march — left to right, instead of right to left — would provide a capital opportunity for a breakthrough on the rebel left, which had been thinned to furnish troops for the extension of the line down to Snell’s Bridge on the Po. Grant liked and enlarged the plan to include Hancock, setting dawn of May 18 as the time of attack. Reoccupying the abandoned Mule Shoe in the darkness of the preceding night, Hancock and Wright were to assault the new works across its base, while Burnside made a diversionary effort on their left and Warren stood by to join them once the fortifications were overrun. That gave two full days for getting ready; Grant wanted the thing done right, despite the mud. Moreover, on the first of these two days the rain left off, letting the roads begin to dry, and the second — May 17 — hastened the drying process with a sun as hot as summer. Everything went smoothly and on schedule: up to the point at which the six divisions moved into the Mule Shoe in the darkness, under instructions to take up positions for the 4 a.m. assault. So much time was spent occupying and moving through the first and second lines of the original intrenchments, undefended though they were, that it was 8 o’clock before the troops were in position to make the surprise attack that should have been launched four hours ago, at the first blush of dawn.

  It would not have been a surprise in any case, even if the attackers had stayed on schedule. Rebel cavalry scouts, undistracted by the blue troopers taking their rest at Haxall’s Landing, and lookouts in the Spotsylvania belfry, surveying the Union rear with glasses, had reported the countermovement yesterday. That left only the question of just where on the left the blow was going to land, and this in turn was answered by Ewell’s outpost pickets, who came back in the night to announce that the assault would be delivered from the Mule Shoe. At first the defenders could not credit their luck; this must be a feint, designed to cover the main effort elsewhere. An artillery major, whose battalion had lost eight of its twelve guns in the dawn assault six days ago, reported later that he and his cannoneers “could not believe a serious attempt would be made to assail such a line as Ewell had, in open day, at such a distance,” but he added that “when it was found that a real assault was to be made, it was welcomed by the Confederates as a chance to pay off old scores.” Pay them off they did, and with a vengeance, from the muzzles of 29 guns commanding the gorge of the abandoned salient and the shell-ripped woods beyond, first with round shot, then with case and canister as the Federals pressed forward “in successive lines, apparently several brigades deep, well aligned and steady, without bands, but with flags flying, a most magnificent and thrilling sight, covering Ewell’s whole front as far as could be seen.” The conclusion was foregone, but the gunners made the most of their opportunity while it lasted. Double-timing over the mangled corpses of the fallen, the attackers managed to reach the abatis at scattered points, only to find the fire unendurable at that range. They fell back with heavy losses and the worst wounds of the campaign, and when they reëntered the woods they had emerged from such a short time back, the guns fell silent, not out of mercy, but simply to save ammunition in case the attack was resumed. It was not. “We found the enemy so strongly intrenched,” Meade admitted in a letter to his wife, “that even Grant thought it useless to knock our heads against a brick wall, and directed a suspension.” By 10 o’clock the onesided carnage was over, and nowhere along the line had the opposing infantry come to grips. “This attack fairly illustrates the immense power of artillery well handled,” Ewell’s chief of artillery said proudly.

  Perhaps by now, if not earlier, Grant had learned the error of his statement to Halleck, a week ago today: “I am satisfied the enemy are very shaky.” By now perhaps he also had discovered the basis for what had seemed to him the overexaltation of Lee by many high-ranking Federals, who had not agreed with their new general-in-chief that the Virginian would be likely to fall back in haste from the Rapidan when he found the blue army on his flank. “Lee is not retreating,” Colonel Theodore Lyman of Meade’s staff wrote home that night. “He is a brave and skillful soldier and will fight while he has a division or a day’s rations left.” As for the troops who served the gray commander, wretchedly fed and clad though they were, Lyman considered them anything but shaky. “These rebels are not half starved,” he added. “A more sinewy, tawny, formidable-looking set of men could not be. In education they are certainly inferior to our native-born people, but they are usually very quick-witted, and they know enough to handle weapons with terrible effect. Their great characteristic is their stoical manliness. They never beg or whimper or complain, but look you straight in the face with as little animosity as if they had never heard a gun fired.” Indeed, at this stage of the contest, there was a good deal more disaffection in the Union than there was in the Confederate ranks. “We fought here. We charged there. We accomplished nothing,” a blue artillerist complained, while a disgruntled infantryman protested specifically, in the wake of this second Mule Shoe fiasco, that the army was being mishandled from the top. The Wilderness had been “a soldier’s battle,” he said, in which no one could see what he was doing anyhow. “The enlisted men did not expect much generalship to be shown. All they expected was to have battle-torn portions of the line fed with fresh troops. There was no chance for a display of military talent.” But that was not the case at Spotsylvania, he went on. “Here the Confederates are strongly intrenched, and it was the duty of our generals to know the strength of the works before they launched the army against them.” He was bitter, and the bitterness was spreading: not without cause. There was a saying in the army, “A man likes to get the worth of his life if he gives it,” and the survivors here could not see that their fallen comrades, shot down in close-packed masses flung off-sche
dule against impregnable intrenchments, had gotten the smallest fraction of the worth of theirs.

  Whatever else he saw (or failed to see; he was admittedly not much given to engaging in hindsighted introspection) Grant saw clearly enough that something else he had said in the week-old letter to Halleck was going to have to be revised, despite the wide publicity it had received in the newspaper version: “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” Stalemate was little better than defeat, in his opinion, and yet — having assaulted headlong twice, without appreciable success, and tried in vain to turn both enemy flanks — that seemed the best he could do in this location. Ten May days were a long way short of “all summer,” yet they sufficed to show that he had nothing to gain from continuing the contest on “this line.” So he decided, quite simply, to abandon it: not, of course, by retreating (retreat never entered his mind) but by shifting his weight once more with a wide swing around Lee’s right, in the hope once more that he would catch him napping. Still without his cavalry to serve as a screen for the movement and keep him informed of his adversary’s reaction — although it was true Sheridan had failed him in both offices before — he decided to try a different method of achieving Lee’s destruction. He would mousetrap him.