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

by Shelby Foote

  Beauregard said afterwards that at this point, with his center pierced and Petersburg once more up for grabs, it seemed to him that “the last hour of the Confederacy had arrived.” In fact, he had been expecting his patched-up line to crack all day, and he had begun at noon the laying out of a new defensive position, the better part of a mile in rear of the present one, to fall back on when the time came. He had no engineers, and indeed no reserves of any kind for digging; all he could do was mark the proposed line with white stakes, easily seen at night, and hope the old intrenchments would hold long enough for darkness to cover the withdrawal of his soldiers, who would do the digging when they got there. The old works, or what was left of them, did hold; or anyhow they nearly did, and Gracie’s desperate counterattack delayed a farther blue advance until nightfall stopped the fighting. Old Bory ordered campfires lighted all along the front and sentinels posted well forward; then at midnight, behind this curtain of light and the fitful spatter of picket fire, the rest of his weary men fell back through the moon-drenched gloom to the site of their new line, which they then began to dig, using bayonets and tin cans for tools and getting what little sleep they could between shifts.

  At 12.40 a.m. their commander got off his final dispatch of the day to Lee. “All quiet at present. I expect renewal of attack in morning. My troops are becoming much exhausted. Without immediate and strong reinforcements results may be unfavorable. Prisoners report Grant on the field with his whole army.”

  Lee now had a definite statement, the first in five days, not only that Meade’s army was no longer in his front, but also that it was in Beauregard’s, and he reacted accordingly. In point of fact, he had begun to act on this premise in response to a dispatch written six hours earlier, in which the southside commander informed him that increasing pressure along his “already much extended lines” would compel him to retire to a shorter line, midway between his original works and the vital rail hub in his rear. “This I shall hold as long as practicable,” he added, “but without reinforcements I may have to evacuate the city very shortly.” Petersburg’s fate was Richmond’s; Lee moved, as he had done two nights ago when the Creole stripped the Howlett Line, to forestall disaster — or anyhow to be in a better position to forestall it — by ordering Anderson’s third division to proceed to Bermuda Neck and A. P. Hill to cross the James at Chaffin’s Bluff and await instructions for a march in either direction, back north or farther south down the Petersburg Turnpike, depending on developments.

  So much he had done already, and now that Beauregard’s 12.40 message was at hand, stating flatly that Grant was “on the field with his whole army,” he followed through by telling Anderson to send his third division on to Petersburg at once and follow with the second. A. P. Hill would go as well, leaving one of his three divisions north of the Appomattox in case Richmond came under attack. This last seemed highly unlikely, however; for a report came in, about this time, that cavalry had ridden down the Peninsula the previous afternoon, as far as Wilcox Landing, and found that all four of Meade’s corps had crossed to Windmill Point in the course of the past three days. Beauregard’s information, gathered from prisoners, thus was confirmed beyond all doubt. It was now past 3.30 in the morning, June 18; Lee’s whole army, except for one division left holding the Howlett Line against Butler — and of course Early, who made contact with Hunter at Lynchburg that same day — would be on the march for Petersburg within the hour.

  Two staff officers arrived just then from beyond the Appomattox, sent by their chief to lend verbal weight to his written pleas for help. “Unless reinforcements are sent before forty-eight hours,” one of them told Lee he had heard Old Bory declare, “God Almighty alone can save Petersburg and Richmond.” Normally, Lee did not approve of such talk; it seemed to him tinged with irreverence. But this was no normal time. “I hope God Almighty will,” he said.

  For the first time since the crossing of the James, Meade’s army gave him on schedule all he asked for. In line before dawn, the troops went forward before sunrise, under orders to take the Confederate works “at all costs.” They took them, in fact, at practically no cost at all; for they were deserted, covered only by a handful of pickets who got off a shot or two, then scampered rearward or surrendered.

  The result was about as disruptive to the attackers, however, as if they had met the stiffest kind of resistance. First, there was the confusion of calling a halt in the abandoned trenches, which had to be occupied for defense against a tricky counterstroke, and then there followed the testy business of groping about to locate the vanished rebels. All this took time. It was midmorning before they found them, nearly a mile to the west, and presently they had cause to wish they hadn’t. Beauregard had established a new and shorter line, due south from the Appomattox to a connection with the old works beyond the Jerusalem Plank Road, and was dug in all along it, guns clustered thicker than ever. A noon assault, spearheaded by Birney, was bloodily repulsed: so bloodily and decisively, indeed, that old-timers among the survivors — who had encountered this kind of fire only too often throughout six weeks of crablike sidling from the Rapidan to the Chickahominy — sent back word that Old Bory had been reinforced: by Lee.

  It was true. Anderson’s lead division had arrived at 7.30 and the second marched in two hours later, followed at 11 o’clock by Lee himself, who rode out to confer with Beauregard, now second-in-command, his lonely ordeal ended. As fast as the lean, dusty marchers came up they were put into line alongside the nearly fought-out defenders, some of whom tried to raise a feeble cheer of welcome, while others wept from exhaustion at the sudden release from tension. They were pleased to hear that A. P. Hill would also be up by nightfall to reduce the all-but-unbearable odds to the accustomed two-to-one, but as far as they were concerned the situation was stabilized already; they had considered their line unbreakable from the time the first of the First Corps veterans arrived to slide their rifles across the newly dug earth of the parapets and sight down them in the direction from which the Yankees would have to come when they attacked.

  Across the way, the men who would be expected to do the coming flatly agreed. Remembering one Cold Harbor, they saw here the makings of another, and they wanted no part of it. The result, after the costly noon repulse, was a breakdown of the command system, so complete that Meade got hopping mad and retired, in effect, from any further participation in the effort. “I find it useless to appoint an hour to effect coöperation.… What additional orders to attack you require I cannot imagine,” he complained in a message sent to all corps commanders. His solution, if it could be called such, was for them “to attack at all hazards and without reference to each other.”

  Under these circumstances, the army was spared another Cold Harbor only because its members, for the most part, declined to obey such orders as would have brought on a restaging of that fiasco. Hancock’s troops had come up in high spirits, three days ago; “We knew that we had outmarched Lee’s veterans and that our reward was at hand,” one would recall. These expectations had died since then, however, along with a great many of the men who shared them. “Are you going to charge those works?” a cannoneer asked as a column of infantry passed his battery, headed for the front, and was told by a foot soldier: “No, we are not going to charge. We are going to run toward the Confederate earthworks and then we are going to run back. We have had enough of assaulting earthworks.”

  As the afternoon wore on, many declined to do even that much. Around 4 o’clock, for example, Birney massed a brigade for an all-out attack on the rebel center. He formed the troops in four lines, the front two made up of half a dozen veteran units, the rear two of a pair of outsized heavy-artillery regiments, 1st Massachusetts and 1st Maine. All four lines were under instructions to remain prone until the order came to rise and charge; but when it was given, the men in the front ranks continued to hug the ground, paying no attention to the shouts and exhortations of their saber-waving officers. They looked back and saw that the rear-rank heavies had ri
sen and were preparing to go forward. “Lay down, you damn fools! You can’t take them works!” they cried over their shoulders. For all their greenness, the Bay State troops knew sound advice when they heard it. They lay back down. But the Maine men were rugged. They stepped through and over the prone ranks of veterans and moved at the double against the enemy intrenchments, which broke into flame at their approach. None of them made it up to the clattering rebel line, and few of them made it back to their own. Of the 850 who went forward, 632 fell in less than half an hour. That was just over 74 percent, the severest loss suffered in a single engagement by any Union regiment in the whole course of the war.

  This could not continue, nor did it. Before sunset Meade wired Grant that he believed nothing more could be accomplished here today. “Our men are tired,” he informed his chief, “and the attacks have not been made with the vigor and force which characterized our fighting in the Wilderness; if they had been,” he added, “I think we should have been more successful.” Grant — who had maintained a curious hands-off attitude throughout the southside contest, even as he watched his well-laid plan being frustrated by inept staff work and the bone-deep disconsolation of the troops — invoked no ifs and leveled no reproaches. Declaring that he was “perfectly satisfied that all has been done that could be done,” he agreed that the time had come to call a halt. “Now we will rest the men,” he said, “and use the spade for their protection until a new vein can be struck.”

  A new vein might be struck, in time, but not by the old army, which had suffered a further subtraction of 11,386 killed, wounded, or captured from its ranks since it crossed the James. That brought the grand total of Grant’s losses, including Butler’s, to nearly 75,000 men — more than Lee and Beauregard had had in both their armies at the start of the campaign. Of these, a precisely tabulated 66,315 were from the five corps under Meade (including Smith’s, such time as it was with him) and that was only part of the basis for the statement by its historian, William Swinton, that at this juncture “the Army of the Potomac, shaken in its structure, its valor quenched in blood, and thousands of its ablest officers killed and wounded, was the Army of the Potomac no more.”

  Much the same thing could be said of the army in the Petersburg intrenchments. Though its valor was by no means “quenched,” it was no longer the Army of Northern Virginia in the old aggressive sense, ready to lash out at the first glimpse of a chance to strike an unwary adversary; nor would it see again that part of the Old Dominion where its proudest victories had been won and from which it took its name. When Lee arrived that morning, hard on the heels of one corps and a few hours in advance of the other, Beauregard was in such a state of elation (“He was at last where I had, for the past three days, so anxiously hoped to see him,” the Creole later wrote) that he proposed an all-out attack on the Union flank and rear, as soon as A. P. Hill came up. Lee rejected the notion out of hand, in the conviction that his troops were far too weary for any such exertion and that Hill’s corps would be needed to extend the present line westward to cover the two remaining railroads, the Weldon and the Southside, upon which Richmond — and perhaps, for that matter, the Confederacy itself — depended for survival. He did not add, as he might have done, that he foresaw the need for conserving, not expending in futile counterstrokes, the life of every soldier he could muster if he was to maintain, through the months ahead, the stalemate he had achieved at the price of his old mobility. “We must destroy this army of Grant’s before he gets to James River,” he had told Early three weeks ago, in the course of the shift from the Totopotomoy. “If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.” It was not that yet; Richmond was not under direct pressure, north of the James, and Petersburg was no more than semi-beleaguered; but that too, he knew, was only a “question of time.”

  Grant agreed, knowing that the length of time in question would depend on the rate of his success in reaching around Lee’s right for control of the two railroads in his rear. First, though, there was the need for making the hastily occupied Federal line secure against dislodgment. The following day, June 19, was a Sunday (it was also the summer solstice; Kearsarge and Alabama were engaged off Cherbourg, firing at each other across the narrowing circles they described in the choppy waters of the Channel, and Sherman was maneuvering, down in Georgia, for ground from which to launch his Kennesaw assault); Meade’s troops kept busy constructing bombproofs and hauling up heavy guns and mortars that would make life edgy, not only for the grayback soldiers just across the way, but also for the civilians in Petersburg, whose downtown streets were so little distance away that the blue gun crews could hear its public clocks strike the hours when all but the pickets of both armies were rolled in blankets. Grant had it in mind, however, to try one more sudden lunge — a two-corps strike beyond the Jerusalem Plank Road — before settling down to “gradual approaches.”

  Warning orders went out Monday to Wright, whose three divisions would be reunited by bringing the detached two from Bermuda Hundred, and to Birney, whose corps would pull back out of line for the westward march, and on Tuesday, June 21, the movement got under way. Simultaneously, while still waiting for Sheridan to return from his failure to link up with Hunter near the Blue Ridge, Wilson, reinforced by Kautz, was sent on a wide-ranging strike at both the Petersburg & Weldon and the Southside railroads, with instructions to rip up sizeable stretches of both before returning. Grant had settled down at his City Point headquarters that afternoon to await the outcome of this double effort by half of Meade’s infantry and all of the cavalry on hand, when “there appeared very suddenly before us,” a staff colonel wrote his wife, “a long, lank-looking personage, dressed all in black and looking very much like a boss undertaker.”

  It was Lincoln. After sending his “I begin to see it” telegram to Grant on the 15th, he had gone up to Philadelphia for his speech next day at the Sanitary Fair; after which he returned to Washington, fidgeted through another three days while the Petersburg struggle mounted to climax, and finally, this morning, boarded a steamer for a cruise down the Potomac and a first-hand look at the war up the James. “I just thought I would jump aboard a boat and come down and see you,” he said, after shaking hands all round. “I don’t expect I can do any good, and in fact I’m afraid I may do harm, but I’ll just put myself under your orders and if you find me doing anything wrong just send me right away.”

  Grant replied, not altogether jokingly, that he would do that, and the group settled down for talk. By way of reassurance as to the outcome of the campaign, which now had entered a new phase — one that opened with his army twice as far from the rebel capital as it had been the week before — the general took occasion to remark that his present course was certain to lead to victory. “You will never hear of me farther from Richmond than now, till I have taken it,” he declared. “I am just as sure of going into Richmond as I am of any future event. It may take a long summer day, as they say in the rebel papers, but I will do it.”

  Lincoln was glad to hear that; but he had been watching the casualty lists, along with the public reaction they provoked. “I cannot pretend to advise,” he said, somewhat hesitantly, “but I do sincerely hope that all may be accomplished with as little bloodshed as possible.”

  Aside from this, which was as close to an admonition as he came, he kept the conversation light. “The old fellow remained with us till the next day, and told stories all the time,” the staff colonel informed his wife, adding: “On the whole he behaved very well.”

  One feature of the holiday was a horseback visit to Hincks’s division, where news of Lincoln’s coming gathered around him a throng of black soldiers (“grinning from ear to ear,” the staffer wrote, “and displaying an amount of ivory terrible to behold”) anxious for a chance to touch the Great Emancipator or his horse in passing. Tears in his eyes, he took off his hat in salute to them, and his voice broke when he thanked them for their cheers. This done, he rode back to City Point for the night, then
reboarded the steamer next morning for an extension of his trip upriver to pay a courtesy call on Ben Butler, whose views on politics were as helpful, in their way, as were Grant’s on army matters. He returned to Washington overnight, refreshed in spirit and apparently reinforced in the determination he had expressed a week ago at the Sanitary Fair: “We accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when that object is attained. Under God, I hope it never will until that time.”

  Helpful though the two-day outing was for Lincoln, by way of providing relaxation and lifting his morale, the events of that brief span around Petersburg had an altogether different effect on Grant, or at any rate on the troops involved in his intended probe around Lee’s right. After moving up, as ordered, on the night of June 21, Wright and Birney (Hancock was still incapacitated, sloughing fragments of bone from the reopened wound in his thigh) lost contact as they advanced next morning through the woods just west of the Jerusalem Plank Road, under instructions to extend the Federal left to the Weldon Railroad. Suddenly, without warning, both were struck from within the gap created by their loss of contact. Lee had unleashed A. P. Hill, who attacked with his old fire and savagery, using one division to hold Wright’s three in check while mauling Birney’s three with the other two. The result was not only a repulse; it was also a humiliation. Though his loss in killed and wounded was comparatively light, no fewer than 1700 of Birney’s men — including those in a six-gun battery of field artillery, who then stood by and watched their former weapons being used against their former comrades — surrendered rather than risk their lives in what he called “this most unfortunate and disgraceful affair.” Hardest hit of all was Gibbon’s division, which had crossed the Rapidan seven weeks ago with 6799 men and had suffered, including heavy reinforcements, a total of 7970 casualties, forty of them regimental commanders. Such losses, Gibbon declared in his formal report, “show why it is that troops, which at the commencement of the campaign were equal to almost any undertaking, became toward the end of it unfit for almost any.”