Chapter 24. If It Takes All Summer

I

"Upon the progress of our arms," said Lincoln late in the war, "all else chiefly depends."¹ Never was this more true than in 1864, when "all else" included Lincoln's own re-election as well as the fate of emancipation and of the Union.

In the spring of 1864 the progress of Union arms seemed assured. Congress had revived the rank of lieutenant general (last held by George Washington), and Lincoln had promoted Grant to this rank with the title of general in chief. Henry W. Halleck stepped down to the post of chief of staff. Grant designated Sherman as his successor to command western armies and came east to make his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac. Though Meade remained in charge of this army subject to Grant's strategic orders, Phil Sheridan also came east to take over its cavalry. With the Union's three best generals—Grant, Sherman, Sheridan—in top commands, the days of the Confederacy appeared numbered.

After their setbacks during the latter half of 1863, rebel armies had suffered through a hard winter of short rations. The South was scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel. The Confederate Congress abolished the privilege of substitution (making those who had previously bought substitutes liable to conscription) and required soldiers whose

1. CWL, VIII, 332. 718

three-year enlistments were about to expire to remain in the army. Congress also stretched the upper and lower age limits of the draft to fifty and seventeen. Despite these efforts to maintain the army's strength, southern forces numbered fewer than half the enemy's as spring sunshine began to dry the red clay roads of Virginia and Georgia.

But there were flaws in the Union sword and hidden strengths in the Confederate shield. Northern success paradoxically created military weakness. Union armies had to detach many divisions as occupation forces to police 100,000 square miles of conquered territory. Other divisions had similar responsibilities in the border slave states. Invading armies also had to drop off large numbers of troops to guard their supply lines against cavalry and guerrilla raids. In Sherman's campaign for Atlanta in 1864 the number of men protecting his rail communications 450 miles back to Louisville nearly equaled the number of front-line soldiers he could bring against the enemy.

These subtractions from Union forces reduced the odds against the Confederacy. In spite of defeat at Gettysburg and the hardships that followed, the morale of the Army of Northern Virginia remained high. Many of these lean, tough veterans had re-enlisted even before Congress on February 17 required them to do so. They had become a band of brothers fighting from motives of pride in themselves, comradeship with each other, and devotion to Marse Robert. Many of them also shared Lee's sentiments, expressed on the eve of the 1864 military campaign, that "if victorious, we have everything to hope for in the future. If defeated, nothing will be left for us to live for."² Joseph Johnston had not been able to instill the same esprit in the army he inherited from Brax-ton Bragg. But he had done more in that direction by May 1864 than anyone who watched these troops flee from Missionary Ridge the previous November would have thought possible.

Most of the Confederate soldiers were veterans. Many of the veterans in the Union army were due to go home in 1864 when their three-year enlistments were up. If this happened, the South might well seize victory from the jaws of defeat. The Union Congress did not emulate its southern counterpart and require these veterans to re-enlist. Regarding their three-year term as a contract that could not be abrogated, the Washington lawmakers relied instead on persuasion and inducements. Three-year veterans who re-enlisted would receive a special chevron to

2. Clifford Dowdey, Lee's Last Campaign: The Story of Lee and His Men against Grant—1864 (Boston, 1960), 60.

wear on their sleeves, a thirty-day furlough, a $400 federal bounty plus local and state bounties, and the spread-eagle praise of politicians back home. If three-quarters of the men in a regiment re-enlisted, that regiment would retain its identity and thus its unit pride. This provision created effective peer pressure on holdouts to re-enlist. "They use a man here," wrote a weary Massachusetts veteran, "just the same as they do a turkey at a shooting match, fire at it all day and if they don't kill it raffle it off in the evening; so with us, if they can't kill you in three years they want you for three more—but I will stay."³

Some 136,000 veterans re-enlisted. Another hundred thousand or so decided not to. This latter group experienced the usual aversion to risk-taking during their final weeks in the army, thus limiting their combat capacity and damaging the morale of their re-enlisted comrades at crucial times during the summer of 1864. To replace wounded, killed, and discharged soldiers the Union armies mustered conscripts, substitutes, and bounty men who had been obtained by the first draft in 1863. This procedure affected most the Army of the Potomac, which had suffered higher casualties than any other army and had a re-enlistment rate of only 50 percent. Veteran officers and men regarded most of these new recruits with contempt. "Such another depraved, vice-hardened and desperate set of human beings never before disgraced an army," wrote a disgusted New Hampshire veteran. A Connecticut soldier described the new men in his regiment as "bounty jumpers, thieves, and cutthroats"; a Massachusetts officer reported that forty of the 186 "substitutes, bounty-jumpers . . . thieves and roughs" who had been assigned to his regiment disappeared the first night after they arrived. This he considered a blessing, as did a Pennsylvania officer who wrote that the "gamblers, thieves, pickpockets and blacklegs" given to his charge "would have disgraced the regiment beyond all recovery had they remained . . . but thanks to a kind Providence . . . they kept deserting, a dozen at a time, until they were nearly all gone."⁴ Much of the North's apparent superiority in numbers thus dissolved during 1864. "The men we have been getting in this way nearly all desert," Grant complained in September, "and out of five reported North as having enlisted we don't get more than one effective soldier."⁵

Southern leaders discerned these flaws in their foe's sword. They hoped

3. Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), 36.

4. Ibid., 25, 26; Wiley, Billy Yank, 343–44; John J. Pullen, The Twentieth Maine: A Volunteer Regiment in the Civil War (Philadelphia, 1957), 154.

5. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 42, pt. 2, p. 783.

to exploit them in such a manner as to influence the 1864 presidential election in the North. The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz had defined war as the pursuit of political goals by other means. Confederate strategy in 1864 certainly conformed to this definition. If southern armies could hold out until the election, war weariness in the North might cause the voters to elect a Peace Democrat who would negotiate Confederate independence. Whether Lincoln "shall ever be elected or not depends upon . . . the battle-fields of 1864," predicted a Georgia newspaper. "If the tyrant at Washington be defeated, his infamous policy will be defeated with him." In Richmond a War Department official believed that "if we can only subsist" until the northern election, "giving an opportunity for the Democrats to elect a President . . . we may have peace."⁶ Recognizing "the importance of this [military] campaign to the administration of Mr. Lincoln," Lee intended to "resist manfully" in order to undermine the northern war party. "If we can break up the enemy's arrangements early, and throw him back," explained Longstreet, "he will not be able to recover his position or his morale until the Presidential election is over, and then we shall have a new President to treat with."⁷

Grant was well aware of these southern hopes. But he intended to crush rebel armies and end the war before November. Eastern Yankees curious about the secret of this western general's success thought they saw the answer in his unpretentious but resolute demeanor. This "short, round-shouldered man" with "a slightly seedy look," according to observers in Washington who saw Grant for the first time, nevertheless possessed "a clear blue eye" and "an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it." Even a jaded New Yorker who had watched the reputations of a half-dozen Union generals perish "because their owners did not know how to march through Virginia to Richmond" believed that "Grant may possess the talisman."⁸

6. Larry E. Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric: Confederate Policy for the United States Presidential Contest of 1864 (University, Ala., 1980), 14, 51; Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Swiggett), II, 229.

7. Douglas Southall Freeman, ed., Lee's Dispatches: Unpublished Letters of General Robert E. Lee . . . to Jefferson Davis (New York, 1915), 185; Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana, Ill., 1983), 532; O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 32, pt. 3, p. 588.

8. Foote, Civil War, III, 4, 5; Strong, Diary, 416.

Grant did not confine his attention solely to Virginia. Instead, believing that the various northern armies in the past had "acted independently and without concert, like a balky team, no two ever pulling together," he worked out plans for coordinated advances on several fronts to prevent any one of the Confederate armies from reinforcing another. "Lee's Army will be your objective point," Grant instructed Meade. "Wherever Lee goes, there will you go also." Sherman received orders "to move against Johnston's army, to break it up, and to get into the interior of the enemy's country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources."⁹ These two main Union armies would have a numerical advantage of nearly two to one over their adversaries, but Grant issued additional orders to increase the odds. On the periphery of the main theaters stood three northern armies commanded by political generals whose influence prevented even Grant from getting rid of them: Benjamin Butler's Army of the James on the Peninsula; Franz Sigel's scattered forces in West Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley; and Nathaniel Banks's Army of the Gulf in Louisiana. Grant directed Banks to plan a campaign to capture Mobile, after which he was to push northward and prevent rebel forces in Alabama from reinforcing Johnston. At the same time Butler was to advance up the James to cut the railroad between Petersburg and Richmond and threaten the Confederate capital from the south, while Sigel moved up the Valley to pin down its defenders and cut Lee's communications to that region. Lincoln was delighted with Grant's strategic design. With a typical backwoods metaphor, he described the auxiliary role of Banks, Butler, and Sigel: "Those not skinning can hold a leg."¹⁰

But the leg-holders bungled their jobs. The first to fail was Banks. The administration shared responsibility for this outcome, for it diverted Banks from the attack on Mobile to a drive up the Red River in Louisiana to seize cotton and expand the area of Union political control in the state. Only after achieving these objectives was he to turn eastward against Mobile. As it turned out, Banks achieved none of the goals except the seizure of a little cotton—along with the wanton destruction of much civilian property, an outcome that hardly won the hearts and minds of Louisianians for the Union.

Banks's nemesis was Richard Taylor (the son of Zachary Taylor), who had learned his fighting trade as a brigade commander under Stonewall Jackson in 1862. Taking command of some 15,000 men after the loss

9. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 46, pt. 1, p. 11, Vol. 33, pp. 827–28, Vol. 32, pt. 3, p. 246.

10. Dennett, Lincoln/Hay, 178–79.

of southern Louisiana to the Union, Taylor prepared to defend what was left of the state in which he had gained wealth as a planter. Banks had been humiliated in Virginia by Jackson; he suffered the same fate a thousand miles away at the hands of Stonewall's protégé. On April 8, Taylor struck the vanguard of Banks's army at Sabine Crossroads thirty-five miles south of the Union objective of Shreveport. Driving the routed Yankees pell-mell back to their supports, Taylor came on and attacked again next day at Pleasant Hill. This time the bluecoats held, forcing the rebels in turn to recoil after taking sharp punishment.

Despite this success, Banks was unnerved by the nonarrival of a cooperating Union force pushing south from Little Rock (it had been deflected by guerrillas and cavalry harassment) and by the abnormally low Red River, which threatened to strand the already damaged Union gunboat fleet above the rapids at Alexandria. Banks decided to retreat. Disaster to the gunboats was averted by the ingenuity of a Wisconsin colonel who used his lumbering experience to construct a series of wing dams that floated the fleet through the rapids. The dispirited army did not get back to southern Louisiana until May 26, a month too late to begin the aborted Mobile campaign. As a consequence Joseph Johnston received 15,000 reinforcements from Alabama. Moreover, 10,000 soldiers that Banks had borrowed from Sherman for the Red River campaign never rejoined the Union army in Georgia. Instead they remained in the Tennessee-Mississippi theater to cope with threats by Forrest against Sherman's rail communications. Banks was superseded as department commander and returned to his controversial role as military administrator of Louisiana's reconstruction.¹¹

Butler and Sigel fared no better than Banks in their assignments to hold rebel legs. Butler had a real chance to achieve the glory that had eluded him since the war's early days. With 30,000 men drawn from coastal operations in the Carolinas he steamed up the James River and landed midway between Richmond and Petersburg on May 5. The two cities were defended by only 5,000 troops plus hastily mobilized government clerks serving as militia. Their commander—none other than P. G. T. Beauregard, who was transferred from Charleston to southside Virginia—had not yet arrived on the scene. If Bulter had moved quickly to cut the railroad between Petersburg and Richmond he might have smashed into the capital against little opposition. Lee could have done nothing to prevent this, for he was otherwise engaged with the Army of

11. Ludwell H. Johnson, Red River Campaign: Politics and Cotton in the Civil War (Baltimore, 1958).

the Potomac sixty miles to the north. But the squint-eyed Union commander fumbled his chance. Instead of striking fast with overwhelming force, he advanced cautiously with detached units, which managed to tear up only a few miles of track while fending off rebel skirmishers. Not until May 12, a week after landing, did Butler get his main force on the march for Richmond. By then Beauregard had brought reinforcements from the Carolinas and was ready to meet Bulter on almost even terms. On May 16 the Confederates attacked near Drewry's Bluff, eight miles south of Richmond. After severe casualites on both sides, the rebels drove Bulter's men back to their trenches across a neck between the James and Appomattox rivers. There the southerners entrenched their own line and sealed off Butler's army, in Grant's caustic words, "as if it had been in a bottle strongly corked."¹²

Grant received the news of Butler's corking about the same time he learned of a similar setback to Franz Sigel in that vale of Union sorrows, the Shenandoah Valley. With 6,500 men Sigel had advanced up the Valley to capture Staunton, whence Lee's army received some of its meager supplies. Before Sigel could get there, however, former U.S. Vice President John C. Breckinridge, now commanding a scraped-together rebel force of 5,000, attacked Sigel at New Market on May 15 and drove him back. This small battle was marked on one side by Sigel's skill at retreating and on the other by a spirited charge of 247 V.M.I, cadets aged fifteen to seventeen, who were ever after immortalized in southern legend. Convinced that Sigel "will do nothing but run; he never did anything else," Halleck and Grant prevailed upon Lincoln to remove him from command.¹³

The failure of Grant's leg-holders in Virginia complicated the task of skinning Lee. The Armies of the Potomac and of Northern Virginia had wintered a few miles apart on opposite sides of the Rapidan. As the dogwood bloomed, Grant prepared to cross the river and turn Lee's right. He hoped to bring the rebels out of their trenches for a showdown battle somewhere south of the Wilderness, that gloomy expanse of scrub oaks and pines where Lee had mousetrapped Joe Hooker exactly a year earlier. Remembering that occasion, Lee decided not to contest the river crossing but instead to hit the bluecoats in the flank as they marched through the Wilderness, where their superiority in numbers—115,000 to 64,000—would count for less than in the open.

12. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 46, pt. 1, p. 20.

13. Ibid., Vol. 36, pt. 2, p. 840.

Accordingly on May 5 two of Lee's corps coming from the west ran into three Union corps moving south from the Rapidan. For Lee this collision proved a bit premature, for Longstreet's corps had only recently returned from Tennessee and could not come up in time for this first day of the battle of the Wilderness. The Federals thus managed to get more than 70,000 men into action against fewer than 40,000 rebels. But the southerners knew the terrain and the Yankees' preponderance of troops produced only immobility in these dense, smoke-filled woods where soldiers could rarely see the enemy, units blundered the wrong way in the directionless jungle, friendly troops fired on each other by mistake, gaps in the opposing line went unexploited because unseen, while muzzle flashes and exploding shells set the underbrush on fire to threaten wounded men with a fiery death. Savage fighting surged back and forth near two road intersections that the bluecoats needed to hold in order to continue their passage southward. They held on and by dusk had gained a position to attack Lee's right.

Grant ordered this done at dawn next day. Lee likewise planned a dawn assault in the same sector to be spearheaded by Longstreet's corps, which was on the march and expected to arrive before light. The Yankees attacked first and nearly achieved a spectacular success. After driving the rebels almost a mile through the woods they emerged into a small clearing where Lee had his field headquarters. Agitated, the gray commander tried personally to lead a counterattack at the head of one of Longstreet's arriving units, a Texas brigade. "Go back, General Lee, go back!" shouted the Texans as they swept forward. Lee finally did fall back as more of Longstreet's troops double-timed into the clearing and brought the Union advance to a halt.

The initiative now shifted to the Confederates. By mid-morning Longstreet's fresh brigades drove the bluecoats in confusion almost back to their starting point. The southerners' local knowledge now came into play. Unmarked on any map, the roadbed of an unfinished railroad ran past the Union left. Vines and underbrush had so choked the cut that an unwary observer saw nothing until he stumbled into it. One of Longstreet's brigadiers knew of this roadbed and suggested using it as a concealed route for an attack against the Union flank. Longstreet sent four brigades on this mission. Shortly before noon they burst out of thickets and rolled up the surprised northern regiments. Then tragedy struck the Confederates as it had done a year earlier only three miles away in this same Wilderness. As the whooping rebels drove in from the flank they converged at right angles with Longstreet's other units attacking straight ahead. In the smoke-filled woods Longstreet went down with a bullet in his shoulder fired by a Confederate. Unlike Jackson he recovered, but he was out of the war for five months.

With Longstreet's wounding the steam went out of this southern assault. Lee straightened out the lines and renewed the attack in late afternoon. Combat raged near the road intersection amid a forest fire that ignited Union breastworks. The Federals held their ground and the fighting gradually died toward evening as survivors sought to rescue the wounded from cremation. At the other end of the line General John B. Gordon, a rising brigadier from Georgia, discovered that Grant's right flank was also exposed. After trying for hours to get his corps commander Richard Ewell to authorize an attack, Gordon went to the top and finally obtained Lee's permission to pitch in. The evening assault achieved initial success and drove the Federal flank back a mile while capturing two northern generals. Panic spread all the way to Grant's headquarters, where a distraught brigadier galloped up on a lathered horse to tell the Union commander that all was lost—that Lee was repeating Jackson's tactics of a year earlier in these same woods. But Grant did not share the belief in Lee's superhuman qualities that seemed to paralyze so many eastern officers. "I am heartily tired of hearing what Lee is going to do," Grant told the brigadier. "Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land on our rear and on both our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do."¹⁴

Grant soon showed that he meant what he said. Both flanks had been badly bruised, and his 17,500 casualties in two days exceeded the Confederate total by at least 7,000. Under such circumstances previous Union commanders in Virginia had withdrawn behind the nearest river. Men in the ranks expected the same thing to happen again. But Grant had told Lincoln that "whatever happens, there will be no turning back."¹⁵ While the armies skirmished warily on May 7, Grant prepared to march around Lee's right during the night to seize the crossroads village of Spotsylvania a dozen miles to the south. If successful, this move would place the Union army closer to Richmond than the enemy and force Lee to fight or retreat. All day Union supply wagons and the reserve artillery moved to the rear, confirming the soldiers' weary expectation of retreat. After dark the blue divisions pulled out one by one. But

14. Horace Porter, Campaigning with Grant (New York, 1897), 69–70.

15. Foote, Civil War, III, 186.

instead of heading north they turned south. A mental sunburst brightened their minds. It was not "another Chancellorsville . . . another skedaddle" after all. "Our spirits rose," recalled one veteran who remembered this moment as a turning point in the war. Despite the terrors of the past three days and those to come, "we marched free. The men began to sing." For the first time in a Virginia campaign the Army of the Potomac stayed on the offensive after its initial battle.¹⁶

Sheridan's cavalry had thus far contributed little to the campaign. Their bandy-legged leader was eager to take on Jeb Stuart's fabled troopers. Grant obliged Sheridan by sending him on a raid to cut Lee's communications in the rear while Grant tried to pry him out of his defenses in front. Aggressive as always, Sheridan took 10,000 horsemen at a deliberate pace southward with no attempt at deception, challenging Stuart to attack. The plumed cavalier chased the Yankees with only half his men (leaving the others to patrol Lee's flanks at Spotsylvania), nipping at Sheridan's heels but failing to prevent the destruction of twenty miles of railroad, a quantity of rolling stock, and three weeks' supply of rations for Lee's army. On May 11, Stuart made a stand at Yellow Tavern, only six miles north of Richmond. Outnumbering the rebels by two to one and outgunning them with rapid-fire carbines, the blue troopers rolled over the once-invincible southern cavalry and dispersed them in two directions. A grim bonus of this Union victory was the mortal wounding of Stuart—a blow to Confederate leadership next only to the death of Jackson a year and a day earlier.

While the cavalry played its deadly game of cut and thrust near Richmond, the infantry back at Spotsylvania grappled like muscle-bound giants. By this stage of the war the spade had become almost as important for defense as the rifle. Wherever they stopped, soldiers quickly constructed elaborate networks of trenches, breastworks, artillery emplacements, traverses, a second line in the rear, and a cleared field of fire in front with the branches of felled trees (abatis) placed at point-blank range to entangle attackers. At Spotsylvania the rebels built the strongest such fieldworks in the war so far. Grant's two options were to flank these defenses or smash through them; he tried both. On May 9 he sent Winfield Scott Hancock's 2nd Corps to turn the Confederate left. But this maneuver required the crossing of a meandering river twice, giving Lee time to shift two divisions on May 10 to counter it. Believing that this weakening of the Confederate line made it vulnerable to assault,

16. Ibid., 189–91; Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 91–92.

Grant ordered five divisions to attack the enemy's left-center on a mile-wide front during the afternoon of May 10. But they found no weakness, for Lee had shifted those reinforcements from his right.

Farther along toward the center of the line, however, on the west face of a salient jutting out a half-mile along high ground and dubbed the Mule Shoe because of its shape, a Union assault achieved a potentially decisive breakthrough. Here Colonel Emory Upton, a young and intensely professional West Pointer who rarely restrained his impatience with the incompetence he found among fellow officers, made a practical demonstration of his theory on how to attack trenches. With twelve picked regiments formed in four lines, Upton took them across 200 yards of open ground and through the abatis at a run. Not stopping to fire until they reached the trenches, screaming like madmen and fighting like wild animals, the first line breached the defenses and fanned left and right to widen the breach while the following line kept going to attack the second network of trenches a hundred yards farther on. The third and fourth lines came on and rounded up a thousand dazed prisoners. The road to Richmond never seemed more open. But the division assigned to support Upton's penetration came forward halfheartedly and retreated wholeheartedly when it ran into massed artillery fire. Stranded without support a half-mile from their own lines, Upton's regiments could not withstand a withering counterattack by rebel reinforcements. The Yankees fell back in the gathering darkness after losing a quarter of their numbers.

Their temporary success, however, won Upton a battlefield promotion and persuaded Grant to try the same tactics with a whole corps backed by follow-up attacks all along the line. As a cold, sullen rain set in next day (May 11) to end two weeks of hot weather, reports by rebel patrols of Union supply wagons moving to the rear caused Lee to make a wrong guess about Grant's intentions. Believing that the wagon traffic presaged another flanking maneuver, Lee ordered the removal of twenty-two guns in preparation for a quick countermove. The apex of the salient defended by these guns was exactly the point that Hancock's corps planned to hit at dawn on May 12. Too late the guns were ordered back—just in time to be captured by yelling bluecoats as fifteen thousand of them swarmed out of the mist and burst through the Confederate trenches. Advancing another half-mile and capturing most of the famed Stonewall division, Hancock's corps split Lee's army in two. At this crisis the southern commander came forward with a reserve division. As he had done six days previously in the Wilderness, Lee started to lead them himself in a desperate counterattack. Again the soldiers—Virginians and Georgians this time—shouted "General Lee to the rear!" and vowed to drive back "those people" if Marse Robert would only stay safely behind. Lee acceded, and the division swept forward. Their counterattack benefited from the very success of the Yankees, whose rapid advance in rain and fog had jumbled units together in a disorganized mass beyond control of their officers. Forced back to the toe of the Mule Shoe, bluecoats rallied in the trenches they had originally captured and there turned to lock horns with the enemy in endless hours of combat across a no-man's land at some places but a few yards wide.

While this was going on the Union 5th and 9th Corps attacked the left and right of the Confederate line with little success, while the 6th Corps came in on Hancock's right to add weight to a renewed attempt to crush the salient. Here was the famous Bloody Angle of Spotsylvania. For eighteen hours in the rain, from early morning to midnight, some of the war's most horrific fighting raged along a few hundred yards of rebel trenches. "The flags of both armies waved at the same moment over the same breastworks," recalled a 6th Corps veteran, "while beneath them Federal and Confederate endeavored to drive home the bayonet through the interstices of the logs."¹⁷ Impelled by a sort of frenzy, soldiers on both sides leaped on the parapet and fired down at enemy troops with bayoneted rifles handed up from comrades, hurling each empty gun like a spear before firing the next one until shot down or bayoneted themselves. So intense was the firing that at one point just behind the southern lines an oak tree nearly two feet thick was cut down by minié balls.¹⁸

Hand-to-hand fighting like this usually ended quickly when one side broke and ran; but today neither line broke and few men ran. It became an atavistic territorial battle. Blood flowed as copiously as the rain, turning trench floors into a slimy ooze where dead and wounded were trampled

17. Joseph P. Cullen, Where a Hundred Thousand Fell: The Battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Court House (Washington, 1966), 52–53

18. In postwar reminiscences several northern regiments claimed to have accomplished this feat. The stump was later exhibited at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and preserved in the Smithsonian Institution. Splinters from the tree seemed to become as ubiquitous as relics of the true Cross. G. Norton Galloway, "Hand-to-Hand Fighting at Spotsylvania," Robert McAllister, "McAllister's Brigade at the Bloody Angle," and James L. Bowen, "General Edwards's Brigade at the Bloody Angle," in Battles and Leaders, IV, 173, 176, 177.

down by men fighting for their lives. "I never expect to be fully believed when I tell what I saw of the horrors of Spotsylvania," wrote a Union officer, "because I should be loath to believe it myself were the case reversed." Long after nightfall Lee finally sent word to exhausted Confederate survivors to fall back to a new line a half-mile in the rear which his engineers had worked feverishly to fortify. Next morning the Bloody Angle contained only corpses; Union soldiers on a burial detail found 150 dead southerners piled several deep in one area of trench measuring 200 square feet, and buried them by simply pushing in the parapet on top of them.¹⁹

As the armies battered each other in Virginia, citizens back home crowded newspaper and telegraph offices in a mood of "painful suspense [that] unfits the mind for mental activity." These were "fearfully critical, anxious days," wrote a New Yorker, in which "the destines of the continent for centuries" would be decided. In Richmond, elation at the first reports of Lee's victories in the Wilderness turned to "grave apprehension" and "feverish anxiety" as his army fell back to Spotsylvania while Butler and Sheridan approached Richmond.²⁰ The day before the Bloody Angle, Grant had sent a dispatch to Washington declaring that "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." Newspapers picked up this phrase and made it as famous as Grant's unconditional surrender note at Fort Donelson. Coupled with reports describing the Union advance southward from the Wilderness, Grant's dispatch produced jubilant headlines in northern newspapers: "Glorious Successes"; "Lee Terribly Beaten"; "The End Draws Near." A veteran newspaper reporter recalled that "everybody seemed to think that Grant would close the war and enter Richmond before the autumn leaves began to fall."²¹

Lincoln feared that such high expectations would boomerang if they turned out to be overly optimistic—as indeed they did. "The people are too sanguine," he told a reporter. "They expect too much at once." To a group of serenaders who appeared at the White House, Lincoln said that "I am very glad at what has happened; but there is a great deal still to be done." When it became clear by May 17 that Grant had not

19. Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 127; Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command (Boston, 1968), 235; Galloway, "Hand-to-Hand Fighting at Spotsylvania," Battlesand Leaders, IV, 174.

20. Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York, 1960), II, 33; Strong, Diary, 449; Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Swiggett), 213, 219.

21. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 36, pt. 2, p. 672; Nevins, War, IV, 35; Noah Brooks, Washington in Lincoln's Time (New York, 1895), 148–49.

broken Lee's lines at Spotsylvania and that Butler had been "bottled up" south of Richmond, the northern mood turned "despondent and bad."²² The price of gold, an inverse barometer of public opinion, rose from 171 to 191 during the last two weeks of May.²³ The appalling casualty reports that began to filter up from Virginia did not help morale. From May 5 through May 12 the Army of the Potomac lost some 32,000 men killed, wounded, and missing—a total greater than for all Union armies combined in any previous week of the war. As anxious relatives scanned the casualty lists, a pall of gloom settled over hundreds of northern communities.

Lee's casualties had been proportionately as great—about 18,000—and his loss of twenty of fifty-seven commanders of infantry corps, divisions, and brigades was devastating. Yet it could truly be said that both sides had just begun to fight. Each army made good about half of its losses by calling in reinforcements. Six brigades from the Richmond front and two from the Shenandoah Valley joined Lee. Grant received a few thousand new recruits and combed several heavy artillery regiments out of the Washington defenses and converted them to infantry. Lee's replacements were higher in quality though lower in number than Grant's, for the southerners were combat veterans, while the "heavies" from Washington had seen no real fighting during their two or three years of garrison duty. And even as the Union reinforcements came forward, the first of the thirty-six regiments whose time would expire in the next six weeks began to leave the army.²⁴ While the available manpower pool in the North was much larger, therefore, Lee could more readily replace his losses with veterans than Grant could during these crucial weeks of May and June.

After the Bloody Angle Grant wasted no time licking his wounds. During the next week he tried several maneuvers on Lee's flanks and another assault up the middle. Aided by rains that slowed Union movements, the rebels countered all these moves. All that the Yankees could

22. Brooks, Washington in Lincoln's Time, 149; CWL, VII, 334; Strong, Diary, 447.

23. The price of gold measured the value of the dollar in relation to the value of gold. A price of 191 meant that this many greenback dollars were required to purchase 100 gold dollars. The value of the greenback dollar rose and fell in proportion to confidence in northern military prospects; the higher the price of gold, the lower the value of the dollar.

24. Not all the soldiers in these regiments went home. Some had re-enlisted as individuals; the enlistments of others had not yet expired. Men in these categories were incorporated into other regiments from the same states.

show for these six days of maneuvering and fighting were three thousand more casualties. Recognizing the impossibility of loosening the Confederate hold on Spotsylvania by head-on attacks or short-range flanking efforts, Grant decided to lure Lee out by another race twenty-five miles south toward a rail junction just beyond the North Anna River. Lee detected the move by a reconnaissance in force on May 19 that cost him a thousand men and blooded one of Grant's converted heavy artillery divisions.

Holding the inside track, Lee got his army behind the North Anna River before the Union vanguard arrived. Entrenching a strong position on the south bank, the Confederates fought several small actions against probing bluecoats. Grant decided to move twenty miles downriver for another attempt to get around Lee's right. The Federals crossed the Pamunkey River unscathed, only to find the rebels, who again moved on shorter interior lines, entrenched behind Totopotomy Creek nine miles northeast of Richmond. Although half-starved from lack of rations, the southerners were still full of fight. After two days of skirmishing at the end of May the Yankees sidled southward once more—moving to their left as always, to maintain a short, secure supply line via the tidal rivers controlled by the navy.

Grant's objective was a dusty crossroads named Cold Harbor near the Gaines' Mill battlefield of 1862. Sheridan's cavalry seized the junction after an intense fight on May 31 with southern horsemen commanded by Lee's nephew Fitzhugh Lee. Next day Sheridan's troopers held on against an infantry counterattack until Union infantry came up and pushed the rebels back. During the night of June 1–2 the remainder of both armies arrived and entrenched lines facing each other for seven miles from the Totopotomy to the Chickahominy. To match additional southern reinforcements from south of the James, Grant pried one of Butler's corps from the same sector. At Cold Harbor, 59,000 Confederates confronted 109,000 Federals. Both armies had thus built themselves back up almost to the numbers with which they started the campaign four long weeks earlier.

These four weeks had been exhausting as well as bloody beyond all precedent. The Federals had suffered some 44,000 casualties, the Confederates about 25,000.²⁵ This was a new kind of relentless, ceaseless warfare. These two armies had previously fought several big set-piece

25. Since no records exist for overall Confederate losses during this campaign, casualty figures for Lee's army are at best an estimate.

battles followed by the retreat of one or the other behind the nearest river, after which both sides rested and recuperated before going at it again. Since the beginning of this campaign, however, the armies had never been out of contact with each other. Some kind of fighting along with a great deal of marching and digging took place almost every day and a good many nights as well. Mental and physical exhaustion began to take a toll; officers and men suffered what in later wars would be called shell shock. Two of Lee's unwounded corps commanders, A. P. Hill and Richard Ewell, broke down for a time during the campaign, and Ewell had to be replaced by Jubal Early. Lee fell sick for a week. On the Union side an officer noted that in three weeks men "had grown thin and haggard. The experience of those twenty days seemed to have added twenty years to their age." "Many a man," wrote Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., "has gone crazy since this campaign began from the terrible pressure on mind & body."²⁶

All of this was on Grant's mind as he pondered his next move. Another flanking maneuver to the left would entangle his army in the Chickahominy bottomlands where McClellan had come to grief. And it would only drive Lee back into the Richmond defenses, which had been so strengthened during the past two years that the usual defensive advantage of fieldworks would be doubled. Another dozen Union regiments were scheduled to leave the army when their time expired in July; this factor also argued against postponement of a showdown battle. Grant's purpose was not a war of attrition—though numerous historians have mislabeled it thus. From the outset he had tried to maneuver Lee into open-field combat, where Union superiority in numbers and firepower could cripple the enemy. It was Lee who turned it into a war of attrition by skillfully matching Grant's moves and confronting him with an entrenched defense at every turn. Although it galled Lee to yield the initiative to an opponent, his defensive strategy exacted two enemy casualties for every one of his own. This was a rate of attrition that might stun northern voters into denying Lincoln re-election and ending the war. To avoid such a consequence Grant had vowed to fight it out on this line if it took all summer. "This line" had now become Cold Harbor, and the results of a successful attack there might win the war. If beaten, the Confederates would be driven back on the Chickahominy

26. Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 138; Mark DeWolfe Howe, ed., Touched with Fire; Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1861–1864 (Cambridge, Mass., 1946), 149–50.

and perhaps annihilated. Grant knew that the rebels were tired and hungry; so were his own men, but he believed that they had the edge in morale. "Lee's army is really whipped," he had written to Halleck a few days earlier. "The prisoners we now take show it, and the action of his army shows it unmistakably. A battle with them outside of intrenchments cannot be had. Our men feel that they have gained the morale over the enemy and attack with confidence."²⁷ So Grant ordered an assault at dawn on June 3.

The outcome revealed his mistake in two crucial respects. Lee's army was not whipped, nor did Grant's men attack with confidence. Indeed, hundreds of them pinned slips of paper with name and address on their uniforms so their bodies could be identified after the battle. At dawn came the straight-ahead assault delivered primarily by three corps on the left and center of the Union line. A sheet of flame greeted the blue uniforms with names pinned on them. The rebels fought from trenches described by a newspaper reporter as "intricate, zig-zagged lines within lines, lines protecting flanks of lines, lines built to enfilade opposing lines . . . works within works and works without works."²⁸ Although a few regiments in Hancock's 2nd Corps—the same that had breached the Angle at Spotsylvania—managed to penetrate the first line of trenches, they were quickly driven out at the cost of eight colonels and 2,500 other casualties. Elsewhere along the front the result was worse—indeed it was the most shattering Union repulse since the stone wall below Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg. The Yankees suffered 7,000 casualties this day; the Confederates fewer than 1,500. By early afternoon Grant admitted defeat and called off further efforts. "I regret this assault more than any one I have ever ordered," he said that evening. "I think Grant has had his eyes opened," Meade wrote dryly to his wife, "and is willing to admit now that Virginia and Lee's army is not Tennessee and Bragg's army."²⁹

The horrors of this day, added to those of Spotsylvania, created something of a Cold Harbor syndrome in the Army of the Potomac. Men in the ranks had learned what European armies on the Western Front a half-century later would have to learn all over again about trench warfare. "The men feel at present a great horror and dread of attacking

27. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 36, pt. 3, p. 206.

28. Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 159.

29. Porter, Campaigning with Grant, 179; George Meade, Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, 2 vols. (New York, 1913), II, 201.

earthworks again," was how one officer put it.³⁰ So Grant devised a new three-part plan to cut Lee's supply lines and flank him out of his trenches. He ordered the army in the Shenandoah Valley, now led by David Hunter, to renew Sigel's aborted effort to move up the Valley (southward) and destroy its railroads, cross the Blue Ridge to smash the Confederate supply depot at Lynchburg, and continue east toward Richmond, wrecking the railroads and the James River Canal. At the same time Sheridan was to take two cavalry divisions westward on a raid to lay waste the same railroads from the other end and link up with Hunter midway for a grand climax of demolition before rejoining the Army of the Potomac somewhere south of Richmond. While all this was going on, Grant planned to disengage from Cold Harbor, march swiftly to cross the James, seize Petersburg with its hub of railroads linking Richmond to the South, and force Lee into the open.

Federal units carried out handsomely the first step in each part of this intricate plan. But thereafter the vigorous Confederate responses plus failures of nerve by subordinate Union commanders brought all three efforts to a halt. Out in the Valley, Hunter's 15,000 men constituted his first field command since he had been wounded at Bull Run in 1861. His main distinction in the war stemmed from his abortive attempt in 1862 to abolish slavery along the south Atlantic coast and to raise the first black regiment there. He was eager to achieve a military success. On June 5 at Piedmont, Virginia—halfway between Harrison-burg and Staunton—his men got him off on the right foot by overrunning a smaller rebel force, killing its commander, and capturing more than a thousand prisoners. Hunter moved on through Staunton to Lexington, home of the Virginia Military Institute.

Along the way his soldiers destroyed a good deal more than military property. Many of them had spent the war fighting guerrillas in western Virginia. The foremost of such enemies was John Singleton Mosby. A diminutive but fearless man who a decade earlier had been expelled from the University of Virginia and jailed for shooting a fellow student, Mosby studied law in prison, received a pardon from the governor, and became a lawyer. After serving as a cavalry scout for Jeb Stuart, Mosby raised a guerrilla company under the Partisan Ranger Act of April 1862. His fame spread with such exploits as the capture of a northern general in bed ten miles from Washington in March 1863. Never totaling more than 800 men, Mosby's partisans operated in squads of twenty to eighty

30. Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 159.

and attacked Union outposts, wagon trains, and stragglers with such fury and efficiency that whole counties in northern Virginia became known as Mosby's Confederacy. No Union supplies could move in this area except under heavy guard.

Southerners lionized Mosby's partisans and numerous other guerrilla bands in Virginia for their boldness and dash. Northern soldiers expressed a different view. To one bitter bluecoat, Mosby's raiders were " 'honest farmers' who have taken the oath of allegiance [to the Union] a few times" and then

arm[ed] themselves with anything that comes handy—pistols, sabres, carbines, shotguns, etc. and being mounted and in citizen clothes proceed to lay in wait for some poor devil of a blue jacket. If they can catch a few after berries, without arms, their valor shines—they take 'em and kill them on the spot. . . . But if a body of troops come upon them they plunge into a piece of woods, hide their arms, and "dig" for some house. . . . The gallant Chevalier of Southern Maidens, Mosby, continues to dash out on sutlers, where he can find them unguarded or broken down, and he generally takes them without loss of a man. Now and then an ambulance or two, full of sick men, is taken by him without loss.³¹

Union soldiers were not likely to treat with kid gloves any guerrillas they caught or the civilian population among whom—in Mao Tse-tung's phrase—the partisans swam like fish in the sea. During Hunter's advance up the Valley, guerrillas swarmed over his supply wagons. The farther from his base he marched, the more vulnerable became his communications. For a month after May 20 only one wagon train got through. Getting angrier as they grew hungrier, Hunter's men foraged savagely from civilians and burned what they did not take. By the time they reached Lexington on June 12 the soldiers were in a foul mood. Looting escalated to terrorizing of citizens; destruction of military property escalated to the burning of V.M.I, and the home of the current governor—who had recently called on civilians to take up arms as guerrillas. Justifying their behavior, one Union soldier wrote: "Many of the women look sad and do much weeping over the destruction that is going

31. Letters from a soldier of the 122nd New York in the Syracuse Daily Journal, Aug. 10, 1863, Sept. 19, 1864, quoted in David B. Swinfen, Ruggles Regiment: The 122nd New York Volunteers in the American Civil War (Hanover, N.H., 1982), 91.

on. We feel that the South brought on the war and the State of Virginia is paying dear for her part."³²

Short of ammunition because none could get through, Hunter left Lexington in flames and moved on toward Lynchburg. Lee regarded this threat to his rear as most serious. To meet it he sent Jubal Early with Jackson's old corps back to the vicinity of their great achievements two years earlier. Though reduced by casualties to 10,000 men, Early's veterans brought Confederate strength at Lynchburg equal to Hunter's 15,000. Hunter tapped at the Lynchburg defenses on June 17–18, learned of Early's arrival, pondered his shortage of ammunition, and decided to retreat. And he did so westward, into West Virginia, rather than risk a movement back down the Valley with guerrillas on his flanks and Early in his rear. This path of retreat left the Valley open to the Confederates. Believing that Early would draw more strength away from Grant by staying there than by returning to the Richmond front, Lee authorized him to emulate Jackson by using the Valley as an avenue to threaten Maryland and Washington. Hunter spent the rest of the war rationalizing his decision to retreat into West Virginia, but he soon lost his command as well as his reputation.

Sheridan's raid fared only slightly better than Hunter's expedition. Lee sent 5,000 of his cavalry to head off Sheridan's 7,000. The rebel horsemen were now commanded by Wade Hampton, a South Carolina planter reputed to be the richest man in the South, who had already been wounded three times in this war. Catching up with the Federals sixty miles northwest of Richmond, the gray troopers slugged it out with Sheridan's men for two days near Trevilian Station on June 11–12. With casualties of 20 percent on each side, this was the bloodiest cavalry action of the war. On the Union side a Michigan brigade commanded by George Armstrong Custer did the hardest fighting. Sheridan managed to keep the graybacks at bay while he tore up the railroad, but he abandoned the plan to link up with Hunter, and the southerners soon repaired the railroad.

While all this was going on, the whole Army of the Potomac withdrew from Cold Harbor on the night of June 12–13. While one corps went around to the James by water, the other four marched overland, screened by the one cavalry division that Sheridan had left behind. So smoothly was the operation carried out, with feints toward Richmond

32. Virgil Carrington Jones, Gray Ghosts and Rebel Raiders, 2 vols. (Mockingird Books ed., Atlanta, 1973), II, 73.

to confuse Lee, that the Confederate commander remained puzzled for several days about Grant's intentions. Meanwhile Union engineers built perhaps the longest pontoon bridge in military history, 2,100 feet, anchored to hold against strong tidal currents and a four-foot tidal rise and fall. Bluecoats began crossing the James on June 14 and next day two corps approached Petersburg, which was held by Beauregard with a scratch force of 2,500. Grant had borrowed a leaf from his Vicksburg campaign and gotten in the enemy's rear before his opponent realized what was happening.

But the denouement was different from Vicksburg, because Grant's corps commanders failed him here and because Beauregard and Lee were not Pemberton and Johnston. The first Union troops to reach Petersburg were the 18th Corps, which Grant had borrowed from Butler two weeks earlier for the Cold Harbor assault. Their commander was William F. "Baldy" Smith, who had quarreled with Butler and had not distinguished himself in this theater. With a chance to retrieve his reputation, Smith became cautious as he approached Petersburg and surveyed the formidable defensive line: ten miles of twenty-foot thick breastworks and trenches fronted by fifteen-foot ditches and linking fifty-five artillery redans bristling with cannon. Having seen at Cold Harbor what happened-to soldiers attacking much less imposing works, Smith paused, not realizing that Beauregard had only a handful of men to hold them. The Union forces finally went forward near sundown and easily captured more than a mile of line and sixteen guns. One of Smith's three divisions was composed of black troops who tasted here their first combat and performed well. As a bright moon lighted the captured trenches, Smith took counsel of rumors that reinforcements from Lee had arrived and failed to push on. "Petersburg at that hour," wrote Beauregard after the war, "was clearly at the mercy of the Federal commander, who had all but captured it."³³

More such missed opportunities crowded the next three days. On the night of June 15–16, Beauregard's survivors desperately entrenched a new line while two rebel divisions from north of the James came to bolster it. Next day another two Union corps arrived and in late afternoon 48,000 bluecoats seized more of Beauregard's lines but did not achieve a breakthrough. By June 17, Lee recognized that Grant was bringing almost his whole army south of the James. Although the Union

33. P. G. T. Beauregard, "Four Days of Battle at Petersburg," Battles and Leaders, IV, 541.

forces that day missed a chance to turn the Confederate right, their disjointed attacks did force Beauregard to pull his whole line back at night almost to the outskirts of Petersburg while proclaiming, melodramatically, that "the last hour of the Confederacy had arrived."³⁴ At dawn on June 18 some 70,000 Federals stumbled forward but overran nothing but empty trenches. By the time they got into position again for an attack on the new rebel line, Lee with most of his troops had arrived to defend it.

The Cold Harbor syndrome inhibited Union soldiers from pressing home their assaults. Corps commanders executed orders sluggishly, waiting in Alphonse-Gaston fashion for other units on their left or right to move, so nobody moved at all. General Meade's famous temper snapped on the afternoon of June 18. "What additional orders to attack you require I cannot imagine," he railed at one hapless commander by field telegraph. To another: "Finding it impossible to effect cooperation by appointing an hour for attack, I have sent an order to each corps commander to attack at all hazards and without reference to each other."³⁵ But men who had survived previous assaults on trenches were not eager to try it again. In one 2nd Corps brigade, veterans wriggled forward under cover but refused to get up and charge across bullet-swept open ground. Next to them one of the converted heavy artillery regiments, the 1st Maine, prepared to sweep ahead in 1861 picture-book style. "Lie down, you damn fools," called the veterans. "You can't take them forts!" But the heavies went in anyway and were shot to pieces, losing 632 of 850 men in this one action. Meade finally called off the futile assaults because "our men are tired and the attacks have not been made with the vigor and force which characterized our fighting in the Wilderness; if they had been, I think we should have been more successful." Grant concurred: "We will rest the men and use the spade for their protection until a new vein has been struck."³⁶

Thus ended a seven-week campaign of movement and battle whose brutal intensity was unmatched in the war. Little wonder that the Army of the Potomac did not fight at Petersburg with "the vigor and force" it had shown in the Wilderness—it was no longer the same army. Many of its best and bravest had been killed or wounded; thousands of others,

34. Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 196.

35. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 40, pt. 2, pp. 179, 205.

36. Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 198, 199; O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 40, pt. 2, pp. 156–57.

their enlistments expired or about to expire, had left the war or were unwilling to risk their lives during the few days before leaving. Some 65,000 northern boys were killed, wounded, or missing since May 4. This figure amounted to three-fifths of the total number of combat casualties suffered by the Army of the Potomac during the previous three years. No army could take such punishment and retain its fighting edge. "For thirty days it has been one funeral procession past me," cried General Gouverneur K. Warren, commanding the 5th Corps, "and it has been too much!"³⁷

Could the northern people absorb such losses and continue to support the war? Financial markets were pessimistic; gold shot up to the ruinous height of 230. A Union general home on sick leave found "great discouragement over the North, great reluctance to recruiting, strong disposition for peace."³⁸ Democrats began denouncing Grant as a "butcher," a "bull-headed Suvarov" who was sacrificing the flower of American manhood to the malign god of abolition. "Patriotism is played out," proclaimed a Democratic newspaper. "Each hour is but sinking us deeper into bankruptcy and desolation." Even Benjamin Butler's wife wondered "what is all this struggling and fighting for? This ruin and death to thousands of families? . . . What advancement of mankind to compensate for the present horrible calamities?"³⁹

Lincoln tried to answer such anguished queries in a speech to a fund-raising fair of the Sanitary Commission in Philadelphia on June 16. He conceded that this "terrible war" had "carried mourning to almost every home, until it can almost be said that 'the heavens are hung in black.' " To the universal question, "when is the war to end?" Lincoln replied: "We accepted this war for [the] worthy object . . . of restoring the national authority over the whole national domain . . . and the war will end when that object is attained. Under God, I hope it never will until that time. [Great Cheering] . . . General Grant is reported to have said, I am going through on this line if it takes all summer. [Cheers] . . . I say we are going through on this line if it takes three years more.

37. George R. Agassiz, ed., Meade's Headquarters, 1863–1865; Letters of Colonel Theodore Lyman (Boston, 1922), 147.

38. John H. Martindale to Benjamin Butler, Aug. 5, 1864, in Jesse A. Marshall, ed., Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War, 5 vols. (Norwood, Mass., 1917), V, 5.

39. Frank L. Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago, 1960), 233; Mrs. Sarah Butler to Benjamin Butler, June 19, 1864, in Marshall, ed., Correspondence of Benjamin Butler, IV, 418.

[Cheers]" This Spartan call for a fight to the finish must have offered cold comfort to many listeners, despite the cheers.⁴⁰

In his speech Lincoln praised Grant for having gained "a position from whence he will never be dislodged until Richmond is taken." And indeed, despite its horrendous losses the Army of the Potomac had inflicted a similar percentage of casualties (at least 35,000) on Lee's smaller army, had driven them south eighty miles, cut part of Lee's communications with the rest of the South, pinned him down in defense of Richmond and Petersburg, and smothered the famed mobility of the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee recognized the importance of these enemy achievements. At the end of May he had told Jubal Early: "We must destroy this army of Grant's before it gets to the James River. If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time."⁴¹