Chapter Eleven
1. Year of Jubilo
EIGHTEEN hundred and sixty-four came in, and it would be the worst year of all — the year of victory made certain, the year of smoke and destruction and death, with an old dream going down in flames and an unfathomable new one taking form in the minds of men who hardly knew what they dreamed. Steadily and inescapably a new rhythm was being felt. The revolutionary times which old General Scott had detected away back in the early days, when hotheaded little Captain Lyon had to be equipped with irregular authority to meet a fantastic situation in Missouri, were enforcing their own hard rules. Visibly drawing nearer to its end, the war had paradoxically become a thing that could not be stopped.
Thoughtful Southerners saw the narrowing circle and the rising shadows and cried that the fight must continue to the final limits of endurance. The Confederate Congress, adopting a resolution addressed to constituents back home, touched the edge of hysteria in its fervor. If the Washington government (said this resolution) called for restoration of the old Union it was merely setting a cruel trap for the deluded; there could be no reunion, because the only possible relation between the reunited sections would be that between conqueror and conquered, and “nothing short of your utter subjugation, the destruction of your state governments, the overthrow of your social and political fabric, your personal and public degradation and ruin, will satisfy the demands of the North.”1
If there was in this the desperate overstatement common to wartime propaganda, there was nevertheless reason for thoughtful Southerners to feel this way. The attempt to make an independent confederacy had been, in a sense, nothing more than a despairing effort to do something about the problem of slavery. The war was a great forced draft applied to a long-smoldering flame, and under its white heat the problem was changing. Not for nothing was slavery called “the peculiar institution,” and its chief peculiarity seemed to be that it would not stay put. It changed when it came under examination; the question now was not so much what could be done about slavery as what could be done about the Negro, and this in turn was becoming a problem of what to do about white society itself. There was material here for an almost unlimited overthrow of human institutions, because existing institutions had been built, by and large, on the happy assumption that the basic problem would not have to be faced at all.
Lincoln himself had shared in this belief. Ten years earlier he had confessed that if he had all earthly power he would not know what to do about slavery; it was a wrong that cried for settlement, but millions of Negroes were physically here in America, and if they were not slaves they would be free men, headed for ultimate equality with white men; and “we cannot … make them equals.” More recently — in the middle of 1862 — he had protested to a Maryland correspondent that all thinking Southerners must know that “I never had a wish to touch the foundations of their society.” Yet the foundations were being touched with a hand of iron, and no one was more disturbed by this than Lincoln. As recently as July 31, 1863, he had seemed to be less than certain about the Emancipation Proclamation itself. Writing about this proclamation (to a general who had asked for guidance), he seemed to be brooding about a decision not yet final: “I think I shall not retract or repudiate it. Those who have tasted actual freedom I believe can never be slaves or quasi-slaves again. For the rest, I believe some plan, substantially being gradual emancipation, would be better for both black and white.”2
Yet even as he brooded the decision had been made, if not by the President, by the war itself. In that same summer Grant had written bluntly: “Slavery is already dead and cannot be resurrected. It would take a standing army to maintain slavery in the South if we were to make peace today, guaranteeing to the South all their former constitutional privileges.” And grim Sherman was contemptuously saying: “All the powers of earth cannot restore them their slaves any more than their dead grandfathers.”3 Now, early in 1864, Sherman’s soldiers were making fairly substantial strides with an operation that the Congress at Richmond would undoubtedly have considered part of the overthrow of the southern social and political fabric; they were doing it in a wild rough holiday mood, with taunting, boisterous laughter, simply as a means of getting on with the war.
Specifically, they were creating a smoky darkness at midday in Meridian, Mississippi, making a wasteland in order that Yankee armies a little farther north might thereafter go about their business with less difficulty.
Meridian lay 150 miles east of Vicksburg, and it was a railroad junction town, a military supply depot, and a modest industrial center. Mississippi produced many Confederate guerrillas, who had a pestiferous habit of riding up into western Tennessee to disrupt Federal supply lines and other arrangements. As far as they could be said to have a base, they were based on Meridian, and Sherman felt that if Meridian became an ash heap the Yankee machine in northern Mississippi and in Tennessee could operate more smoothly. So he brought troops down to Meridian — feinting smartly so that Bishop Polk, Confederate commander in the state, thought that Mobile was being menaced and took his own troops down there to head him off — and on February 14 Sherman’s heavy-handed foot soldiers reached Meridian and began to destroy the place. The railroads were torn up for twenty-five miles around; an arsenal, two hotels, various shops and factories, vast quantities of cotton and any amount of food, textiles, army equipment, and unassorted private property were burned. The soldiers said that they had been ordered to lay hands upon every sort of property “which could in any way be applied to aid the Rebel armies” — which, when one stopped to think about it, was a category broad enough to include anything from a railroad bridge to a smokehouse full of bacon — and they were men to whom such orders did not need to be given twice. (A year earlier Sherman had told Admiral Porter that “our new troops came in with ideas of making vigorous war, which means universal destruction,” and nothing that had happened in the past year had weakened that notion in them.) The 10th Missouri, it was said, took particular pleasure in the work; it contained men who had been driven from their homes by Confederate guerrillas, and they were out to get even. Their comrades in arms, however, acting without animus, were just about as effective.
In any case, Meridian was thoroughly sacked. Sherman had appointed a solid column of cavalry to come down from the Memphis area and join him, and he had further ventures in mind, but the cavalry ran afoul of Bedford Forrest along the way and went back in ignominious defeat, so Sherman pulled his infantry out, loaded down with all the loot that could be carried (as the Confederates charged) in three hundred wagons which had been appropriated in the nearby countryside. Black smoke lay on the land as the troops marched away, and a scar that would be a long time fading; and as the column swung back toward home territory it was followed, as Sherman recalled, by “about ten miles of Negroes.”4
No other Yankee raid into southern territory brought back such an array of contrabands — five thousand of them by soldiers’ count, at least eight thousand by the estimate of angry Mississippians. These fugitives had swarmed in from long distances, some of them carrying small children, none of them equipped for a long journey. Soldiers said some had come three hundred miles to join the column. Many died along the way. All were hungry and weary, yet they seemed to be cheerful, and while they had no real notion where the Army of the Tennessee was going they knew that its road was the road away from slavery, and they followed it with pathetic eagerness.
A Wisconsin soldier who watched them suspected that the average colored refugee had, deep within him, some very sober thoughts, for all his surface gaiety. “He was not only breaking up old associations, but was rushing out into a wholly new and untried world.… He was not certain of a full meal three times a day, or even once a day, and he must have sadly wondered what was to become of him.” Reflecting on all of this, the soldier remembered that a number of people in the North and in the South were arguing that the Negro slave was in reality quite satisfied with his lot, and he wrote angrily: “Such talk is mere twaddle.”5
Grant and Sherman were right; slavery was doomed, and the war was passing sentence upon it, no matter what doubts might assail the President. Of all societies, that of the South was least fitted to stand the shock of revolution, and the war was revolutionary. The destruction of Meridian and the ten-mile column of hopeless, hopeful colored folk who trailed out behind the triumphant northern army simply underlined the Confederacy’s inescapable problem.
For secession had been an attempt to perpetuate the past: to enable a society based on slavery to live on, as an out-of-date survival in the modern world. Slavery was above all else a primitive mechanism, and the society that relied on it could survive, in the long run, only if the outside world propped it up. But the southern society was not itself primitive at all. It needed all of the things the rest of the world needed — railroad iron, rolling mills, machine tools, textile machinery, chemicals, industrial knowledge, and an industrial labor force — yet it clung to the peculiar institution that prevented it from producing these things itself, and it relied on the rest of the world to make its deficiencies good. Now the rest of the world had ceased to contribute, except for the trickle that came in through the blockade. Instead, that part of the outside world that lay nearest — the North — was doing everything it could to destroy such industrial strength as the South possessed, and what it destroyed could not be replaced. The valor that sent southern youth out to fight barefooted in cotton uniforms with a handful of acorns in the haversack was not enough. Federal soldiers would be destructive because destruction pointed to victory, and as cotton gins and clothing factories went up in smoke the peculiar institution itself would crumble, dim human aspirations seeping down into a submerged layer and undermining all of the foundations.
The southern Congress was quite right; an overturn was coming, and it was precisely the sort of overturn that the men who had created the Confederacy could not at any price accept. No peace based on reunion (the only sort of peace that was really conceivable) could be contemplated, because reunion, by now, inevitably meant the end of slavery. The more hopeless the military outlook became — the more inescapable the cruel parallel between dead grandfathers and slaves escaped from bondage — the more bitterly would southern leaders insist on fighting.
In this fact lay the real horror of 1864. The end of the war could not be hastened, even though it might become visible; it would have to go on until the last ditch had in fact been reached. The peculiar institution was at last taking its own revenge; taking it by the singular dominance it exerted over the minds of men who had gone to arms to perpetuate it.
Six weeks before Sherman made his raid on Meridian there was a singular little meeting one evening in the headquarters tent of General Joe Johnston, commanding what had been Bragg’s hard-luck army, at Dalton, Georgia. All corps and division commanders, with one exception, were present; among them, Irish General Pat Cleburne, who had fought so stoutly against Sherman’s troops at Chattanooga. General Cleburne had been considering the plight of the South, and he had a paper to present. With Joe Johnston’s permission (although not, it would appear, with his outright approval) he read it to the other officers.
The Confederacy, said Cleburne, was fighting a hopeless struggle. It had lost more than a third of its territory; it had lost many men and had “lost, consumed or thrown to the flames an amount of property equal in value to the specie currency of the world.” It was badly outnumbered and the disparity was getting worse instead of better, and the Confederate soldier was “sinking into a fatal apathy” and was coming more and more to “a growing belief that some black catastrophe is not far ahead of us.” Worst of all, at the beginning of the war slavery was one of the Confederacy’s chief sources of strength; now, from a military point of view, it had become “one of our chief sources of weakness.”
In any area that had been touched by northern armies, said Cleburne, slavery was fatally weakened, and with this weakness came a corresponding weakness in the civilian economy. The Confederacy thus had an infinite number of vulnerable spots: there was “one of these in every point where there is a slave to set free.” The burden could not be carried any longer. Therefore — said Cleburne, reaching the unthinkable conclusion — the South must boldly and immediately recruit Negro troops, guaranteeing in return freedom to every slave who gave his support to the Confederacy. In substance, what Cleburne was asking for was emancipation and black armies. If the peculiar institution was a source of weakness, Cleburne would abolish the institution and turn its human material into a source of strength.
The war, said Cleburne, was killing slavery anyway. From one source or another, the Negro was going to get his freedom; as clearly as Sherman, Cleburne saw that the old relationship belonged in the grave with departed grandfathers. Make a virtue of necessity, then (said this foreign-born general), “and we change the race from a dreaded weakness to a position of strength.”
Cleburne’s proposal had certain support. It was signed by two brigadiers and a number of field officers from his own division, as well as by a stray cavalry general; and the first signature on the list, of course, was that of Cleburne himself. But the net effect of this modest proposal, dropped thus into a meeting of the commanding generals of the Confederacy’s western army, was about the effect that would be produced in a convention of devout churchmen by the unexpected recital of a grossly improper joke. It was received with a shocked, stunned, and utterly incredulous silence. Cleburne had mentioned the unmentionable.
One of the generals who had heard him hastened to write to good Bishop Polk. He began with a simple confession: “I will not attempt to describe my feelings on being confronted by a project so startling in its character — may I say so revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride and Southern honor.” He went on: “If this thing is once openly proposed to the Army the total disintegration of that Army will follow in a fortnight, and yet to speak and work in opposition to it is an agitation of the question scarcely less to be dreaded.” Secretary of War Seddon wrote earnestly to General Johnston, expressing Jefferson Davis’s conviction that “the dissemination or even promulgation of such opinions under the present circumstances of the Confederacy … can be productive only of discouragement, distraction and dissension.” General Johnston passed the word down the line, Cleburne put his paper away and agreed not to press it any farther, and the matter was buried.6
It had to be buried, for what Cleburne had quite unintentionally done was to force his fellow officers to gaze upon the race problem which lay beneath the institution of slavery, and that problem seemed to be literally insoluble. It did not, in that generation, seem possible to most men that white and black folk could dwell together in one community in simple amity. There had to be a barrier between them — some tangible thing that would compel everyone to act on the assumption that one race was superior and the other inferior. Slavery was the only barrier imaginable. If it were removed, society would be up against something monstrous and horrifying.
A great many men of good will felt that way. Lincoln himself had hoped that the business might be settled by some scheme of colonization, with freed Negroes transplanted bodily to some other continent in order that a free society might not have to admit them to full membership. Davis, addressing the Confederate Congress at the beginning of 1863, had denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty men”; it was a program, he said, “by which several millions of human beings of an inferior race, peaceful and contented laborers in their sphere, are doomed to extermination.” A junior officer in the Confederate War Department, addressing himself to Secretary Seddon about the time Cleburne was putting his own thoughts on paper, had spoken feelingly of “the difficulties and conflicts that must come from exterminating the Negro, which upon this continent is the only mode of exterminating slavery.”7
None of these folk who talked so lightly of extermination really meant it, of course. It would be left for a much more ruthless society in a far more brutal age to try the actual experiment of genocide. All anyone actually meant was that to make human brotherhood a working reality in everyday life seemed too big a contract for frail human beings. The privilege of belonging to an admittedly superior race — the deep conviction that there actually were superior and inferior races — could not be wrenched out of human society without a revolutionary convulsion. The convulsion was unthinkable, yet it was beginning to take place, even though hardly anyone had consciously willed it; it was coming down the country roads with the swaggering destructive columns in weathered blue, lying across the landscape behind the haze of smoke that came down from the ridges around Gettysburg and Chattanooga, and there was no stopping it. The bugle that would never call retreat had been heard by people who had not previously been allowed to look upon themselves as persons possessing any rights which other people were bound to respect. To end slavery was to commit the nation permanently to an ideal that might prove humanly unattainable. The inner meaning of the war now was that everything which America had done before — its dreams and its hopes, its sacrifices and its hard-bought victories — was no more than prologue to a new struggle that would go on and on for generations, with a remote ideal lying dim but discernible beyond the dust of the coming years.
Here was the real revolution: here was the fundamental and astounding conclusion, which had been implicit in the first crash of the marsh guns around Fort Sumter, which had followed Old Glory and Palmetto Flag down so many streets amid so many gaily cheering crowds. Here was what was being bought by infinite suffering, tragedy, and loss. Here was the showdown, not to be understood at once, not to be accepted for generations, but nevertheless wholly inexorable. Mr. Lincoln was worried and Mr. Davis was desperate, and General Cleburne was quietly snubbed; and down the dusty roads came ten miles of Negroes, bags packed for a journey longer than any man could understand, marching toward a future that could never again be built in the image of the past.
… If people could not see it or say it, they could sing it. There was a tinny, jingling little song in the air that year across the North: a Tin Pan Alley ditty, mocking and jeering and pulsing somehow with a Ca Ira sort of revolutionary drumbeat. It spoke for the colored folk in a queer inverted way, although it had not yet reached them, and in a ten-cent manner it voiced what the year meant. It was called “The Year of Jubilo”:
Say Darkies has you seen old Massa
Wid de muffstache on his face
Go long de road sometime dis mornin’
Like he gwine to leave de place?
It went on, shrill and imperious, the song of the great overturn, the cheap little tune to which a great gate was beginning to turn painfully on creaking hinges:
De massa run, ha-ha!
De darkey stay, ho-ho!
I tink it must be Kingdom Coming
And de year ob Jubilo!
It would be that sort of year: year of Jubilo, year of overturn and disaster and ruin, year of infinite bloodshed and suffering, with the foundations of the great deep broken up; hard tramp of marching military feet, endless shuffle of splay-footed refugees running away from something they understood little better than they could understand what they were running toward; the significance of their march being that it led toward the unknown and that all America, like it or not, was going to follow.
2. Vote of Confidence
Beyond the war there would be peace. It was still a long way off, and a great many young men would have to die before it could become real, but Abraham Lincoln never took his eyes off it. For the peace would have to justify its cost, which was immense beyond calculation, and if the war was being fought to bring the Union together again, the Union would need to be rebuilt on something better than hatred and suspicion and a sullen longing for revenge. So in the beginning of 1864, Lincoln was reaching out to shape the peace that had not yet been won.
In a moment of candor he once remarked that he could not claim to have controlled events but that events rather had controlled him. All in all, the events of war had not been kind to him. He had become the instrument through which more than he desired was being done. He wanted to restore something — the shape of a lost golden age, perhaps, which early America had thought that it possessed — and the past had gone beyond restoration. Among those who supported him (supported him reluctantly, and only because they could not help themselves) were men who wanted the very destruction and overturn which he himself most dreaded; hard men, made for hatred, to whom reconciliation was a paltry word and who would be happy to play the part of conquerors. As 1864 began, Lincoln was trying to lay his own hands on the peace before victory itself had been won.
In December of 1863 he had set forth his program, which was essentially an effort to get both seceded persons and seceded states back into the Union with the least possible difficulty. Pardon and restoration of full rights would go to any Confederate (with certain stated exceptions) who would swear to support the Constitution and the Union of the states and to abide by all of the Federal government’s acts and pronouncements in respect to slavery. And a state itself could return to its old position in the Union whenever as many as ten per cent of the state’s voters should re-establish a loyal Union government within that state. In effect, he was trying to get the citizens of southern states to make at least a start in the direction of rebuilding the old Union.
There were difficulties. Radical Republicans were asserting that the southern states, by the act of secession, had in effect committed suicide; they would have to be rebuilt anew, and the agency that must say how and when they could be rebuilt must be the Federal Congress, not the President. Furthermore, the first steps which Lincoln so greatly desired could be taken, obviously, only in such southern states as were already largely occupied by the Union army. The most conspicuous of these was Louisiana, a large part of which had been effectively held since the middle of 1862. Here was the logical place to make a beginning. Yet Louisiana had been ruled for a time by Ben Butler, with whom even the most Union-minded of Southerners would hesitate to co-operate; and after Butler’s removal there was divided Federal authority in the state, with purely military problems competing for attention with the problems of reconstruction, and the work went forward very slowly.
Nevertheless, the start was being made, and Major General Nathaniel P. Banks, that devoted politician and maladroit strategist, was in charge of it. As the winter progressed, Banks was calling for elections — election of a civilian governor and election of delegates to a convention that should create a new constitution. (In Washington, bitter-enders like Thaddeus Stevens and Ben Wade were sputtering furiously against all of this, but the work was going forward.) The basic complication lay in the fact that Banks’s effort to reconstruct Louisiana politically was going hand in hand with an effort to conquer another section of the Confederacy by force of arms, and under Banks’s handling the two projects got in each other’s way. Banks was to lead a military expedition up the Red River toward Texas. This would complete the occupation of Louisiana, would enable a Union army to move down toward the Texas border — thereby, presumably, putting the fear into Napoleon III of France, who had been ostentatiously fracturing the Monroe Doctrine by installing luckless Maximilian on the throne in Mexico — and just incidentally it should scoop up considerable quantities of cotton for the hungry textile mills of New England, with whose problems General Banks was closely familiar.
So Banks was a busy man in this winter of 1864, and Louisiana was buzzing with activities which unfortunately were not entirely compatible. In the end, none of these ventures would actually come to anything; Wade and Stevens and their cohorts would scuttle Lincoln’s cherished “ten per cent plan,” and there were armed Confederates in waiting to defeat the Red River expedition, and the whole program would come to look like an eccentric thrust, a diversion of effort away from the main channels of the war program. Yet it did represent a valiant attempt to shape the war with post-war ideals in mind; an effort to reassert control over those events that thus far had been out of control. Every other ounce of attention had to go simply to the task of making victory certain. Here, at least, was a try at looking beyond victory. It would not work, finally, for a variety of reasons, among them the grim fact that war lays down its own rules, but the motives back of it were good. Not unless it was forced upon him would Lincoln accept the war as a complete uprooting and overturning.1
Meanwhile there was the war itself; and in March 1864 the Federal government took the decisive step. Congress created the post of lieutenant general in the regular army and Lincoln gave the job to U. S. Grant; solid insurance, finally, that the war would be fought remorselessly and methodically until the South was capable of no further resistance.
Now Grant was the top northern general, and Halleck was reduced to the position of chief of staff. Broadly speaking, Grant would have a free hand. He could make his headquarters where he chose, and within wide limits he could do as he pleased with the country’s armies, with White House and War Department pledged to give him full support. He was the fourth man to hold this position during the war, and he stood in odd contrast to the generals who had gone before.
First there had been Winfield Scott — old, swollen with dropsy, vain and fussy, a stouthearted man and a sound strategist, but so infirm physically he could not mount a horse, could indeed hardly so much as get out from behind his desk without help. Scott had understood the kind of war that was being fought, and he had done his part to get the country off to a good start; his only trouble was that he was fifteen years past his prime, and he had been quietly shelved after a few months, his place taken by the brilliant young McClellan. McClellan, too, had contributed his bit; he had given organization, order, and high morale to the Army of the Potomac, but he had never understood either the war itself or his own place in it; he had become obsessed by his picture of himself as the virtuous hero forever hampered by scheming and treacherous men of ill will, and the capacity for hard driving fighting was not in him. So he had gone, too, and Halleck had come in: Halleck, the book soldier who quickly reduced himself to the role of paper-shuffler, a man fond of details of office work and given to writing long, gossipy letters to his subordinates, pettish and querulous, wholly unfitted for the direction of a war that went by none of the old rules. Now there was Grant.
He had had his ups and his downs, and nobody in his senses would ever give him any of the nicknames that had been given to his predecessors — Old Fuss and Feathers, the Young Napoleon, Old Brains. He was not a man for nicknames, or for striking attitudes, or for impressing other people. A physician on his staff once asked him about the art of war, expecting a dissertation on Jomini or some other world authority. Grant replied that the art of war was really simple enough; at bottom, it meant to “find out where your enemy is, get at him as soon as you can and strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”2 This uncomplicated creed he had followed ever since Belmont and Fort Henry, and it precisely expressed the quality that Abraham Lincoln had been looking for in his generals for so long a time. Now Lincoln had the man he wanted; from the spring of 1864 the Federal armies would keep moving on, and sooner or later the end would come.
Grant took over the high command in a little ceremony at the White House on March 9, and he got to work at once. As he sat down to survey the situation and figure out the best way to put his little creed into effect, he could see that in a way his task was quite simple. The Confederacy possessed two principal armies — the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by Robert E. Lee, and the Army of Tennessee, commanded by Joseph E. Johnston. Lee’s army was in camp below the Rapidan River, lean and taut and ready for action; Johnston’s was encamped in northern Georgia, near the town of Dalton. Behind Lee lay Richmond, and behind Johnston lay Atlanta. These armies and the territories they defended were Grant’s destined striking points. To get at them as quickly as possible, hit them hard and keep moving on, was the Federal commander’s main responsibility. If they could be put out of action, the war would be won.
There were side shows: most notably, General Banks’s expedition, of which Grant heartily disapproved, on the twin grounds that it was not aimed at a vulnerable point and that it drew men and effort away from the real targets. Banks was getting progressively deeper into trouble while Grant was taking over his new job; he captured the Louisiana city of Alexandria and pushed forward hopefully enough, but within weeks he was to be so roundly defeated that he would narrowly escape losing his entire army and Admiral Porter’s pet fleet of ironclads along with it. But what he might or might not be able to do would make very little difference. Johnston and Lee were the real antagonists, and the war would be won or lost in Virginia and Georgia. It was these points that got Grant’s attention.
In the West things looked favorable. When he moved east Grant gave Sherman top command in the West, and Sherman kept prodigiously busy during the winter getting his supplies and transportation in shape for the big drive. Technically Sherman was what would now be called an army group commander. Under him there were close to one hundred thousand combat soldiers, more than half of whom belonged to George Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland. Then there was Sherman’s old Army of the Tennessee, led now by James B. McPherson — smaller than the Army of the Cumberland, less well disciplined, cockier and faster on its feet. With these there was a third army, led by General John Schofield: the little Army of the Ohio, really no more than an army corps, its leader the young man who had served as very junior assistant to Lyon out in Missouri in the early days of the war. With these three armies, made as ready as the enormous resources of the North could make them, Sherman was waiting for the signal. His instructions were clear and uncomplicated; as he himself put it later, “I was to go for Joe Johnston.”3
As Sherman’s army went for Joe Johnston, the Army of the Potomac was to go for Robert E. Lee, and it was with this army that Grant himself decided to move. It was believed in Washington that this army needed the all-out drive that only the general-in-chief could provide. George Gordon Meade, its own commander, was a solid and conscientious soldier, but neither he nor any of his predecessors had ever quite been able to make the army fight all out. The Virginia theater of operations was the war’s show window, closest to the capital and to the big eastern centers of population, most thoroughly covered by the newspapers, so that it sometimes seemed as if the real war was being fought here and that everything else was a side show; yet the Army of the Potomac, for all the glamor that was attached to its name, was in reality the inglorious hod carrier for the Union cause. It had been blooded at Bull Run, and it had fought on the Virginia peninsula, along the Rappahannock, in Maryland and in Pennsylvania. The evil forces of politics had flickered over it; Robert E. Lee had played cruel games with its generals, deceiving them and leading them on so that they would get many of their men killed to no good purpose. The army had tramped through the choking red dust and the clinging mud of Virginia without seeming to accomplish much, its two victories were purely defensive, and all in all it had never got the habit of triumph. Its men were fatalists, doing the best they could, taking their beatings — Gaines’s Mill, Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville — and coming back for more, always ready but never really confident, clinging to fond memories of the departed McClellan, and ready enough to admit that the greatest general of all was the man who commanded the opposing Confederate army, General Lee.
The army tended to be suspicious of Grant when he established his headquarters near Meade’s. Peppery little General Rawlins, Grant’s chief of staff, found the suspicion freely expressed. Officers of the Potomac army would admit that the western troops had done well enough, but would always add: “Well, you have never met Bobby Lee and his boys; it would be quite different if you had.” If any of Grant’s people expressed optimism about the coming campaign in Virginia, someone was sure to wag his head and say: “Well, that may be, but mind you, Bobby Lee is just over the Rapidan.”4
Grant did not have a great deal of time in which to pull this army together; just six weeks from the moment he pitched his tents along the Rapidan to the day when the great offensive would start. They were busy weeks. There were reviews, to let the troops have a look at the new general-in-chief and to let him have a look at them; there was an endless bustle of reorganization and re-equipping, a tightening up of details, a ruthless combing out of the snug, comfortable forts around Washington so that more combat men could be added to the army — this latter a move that was highly popular with the veterans, who rejoiced to see the big heavy artillery regiments deprived of their soft assignments, given muskets, and told to soldier it along with everybody else. Grant reorganized his cavalry, bringing hard little Phil Sheridan in from the West to turn the cavalry corps into a fighting organization. As April wore away, the effect of all of this began to be felt, and the army displayed a quiet new confidence. Lee might be just over the Rapidan, but there was a different feeling in the air; maybe this spring it would be different.
Maybe it would; what a general could do would be done. But in the last analysis everything would depend on the men in the ranks, and both in the East and in the West the enlisted man was called on that winter to give his conclusive vote of confidence in the conduct of the war. He gave his vote in the most direct way imaginable — by re-enlisting voluntarily for another hitch.
Union armies in the Civil War did not sign up for the duration. They enlisted by regiments, and the top term was three years. This meant — since the hard core of the United States Army was made up of the volunteers who had enlisted in 1861 — that as the climactic year of 1864 began the army was on the verge of falling apart. Of 956 volunteer infantry regiments, as 1863 drew to a close 455 were about to go out of existence because their time would very soon be up. Of 158 volunteer batteries, 81 would presently cease to exist.5
There was no way on earth by which these veterans could be made to remain in the army if they did not choose to stay. If they took their discharges and went home — as they were legally and morally entitled to do — the war effort would simply collapse. New recruits were coming in but because Congress in its wisdom had devised the worst possible system for keeping the army up to strength, the war could not be won without the veterans. Enlistments there were, in plenty; and yet — leaving out of consideration the fact that raw recruits could not hope to stand up to the battle-trained old-timers led by Lee and Johnston — they were not doing the army very much good. Heavy cash bounties were offered to men who would enlist; when cities, states, and Federal government offers were added up, a man might get as much as a thousand dollars just for joining the army. This meant that vast numbers of men were enlisting for the money they would get and then were deserting as quickly as possible — which was usually pretty quickly, since the Civil War authorities never really solved the problem of checking desertion — and going off to some other town to enlist all over again under a different name, collecting another bounty, and then deserting again to try the same game in still a third place. The “bounty man” was notorious as a shirker, and the veterans detested him. Grant once estimated that not 12 per cent of the bounty men ever did any useful service at the front.
There was a draft act, to be sure, but it contained a flagrant loophole. A man who was drafted could avoid service (unless and until his number was drawn again) by paying a three-hundred-dollar commutation fee; better yet, he could permanently escape military service by hiring a substitute to go to war for him. Clever entrepreneurs eager to make a quick dollar set themselves up in business as substitute brokers, and any drafted man who could afford the price — which often ran up to a thousand dollars or more — could get a broker to find a substitute for him. The substitutes who were thus provided were, if possible, even more worthless as a class than the bounty men. Cripples, diseased men, outright half-wits, epileptics, fugitives from workhouse and poor farm — all were brought forward by the substitute brokers and presented to the harassed recruiting agents as potential cannon fodder. The brokers made such immense profits that they could usually afford any bribery that might be necessary to get their infirm candidates past the medical examination, and the great bulk of the men they sent into the army were of no use whatever.
Any regiment that contained any substantial percentage of bounty men or substitutes felt itself weakened rather than strengthened by its reinforcements. The 5th New Hampshire — originally one of the stoutest combat units in the Army of the Potomac — got so many of these people that it leaked a steady stream of deserters over to the Confederacy; so many, indeed, that at one time the Rebels opposite this regiment sent over a message asking when they might expect to get the regimental colors, and put up a sign reading: “Headquarters, 5th New Hampshire Volunteers. Recruits wanted.” It is recorded that a Federal company commander, finding some of his bounty men actually under fire, sharply ordered the men to take cover: “You cost twelve hundred dollars apiece and I’m damned if I am going to have you throw your lives away — you’re too expensive!”6
The war could not be won, in other words, unless a substantial percentage of the veterans would consent to re-enlist, and the most searching test the Union cause ever got came early in 1864, when the government — hat in hand, so to speak — went to the veteran regiments and pleaded with the men to join up for another hitch. It offered certain inducements — a four-hundred-dollar bounty (plus whatever sum a man’s own city or county might be offering), a thirty-day furlough, the right to call oneself a “veteran volunteer,” and a neat chevron that could be worn on the sleeve.
Astoundingly, 136,000 three-year veterans re-enlisted. They were men who had seen the worst of it — men who had eaten bad food, slept in the mud and the rain, made killing marches, and stood up to Rebel fire in battles like Antietam and Stone’s River, Chickamauga and Gettysburg — and they had long since lost the fine flush of innocent enthusiasm that had brought them into the army in the first place. They appear to have signed up for a variety of reasons. The furlough was attractive, and an Illinois soldier confessed that the four-hundred-dollar bounty “seemed to be about the right amount for spending money while on furlough.” Pride in the regiment was also important; to be able to denominate one’s regiment veteran volunteers, instead of plain volunteers, meant a good deal. In many cases the men had just got used to soldiering. A Massachusetts man wrote home, confessing that he had re-enlisted and remarking, “So you see I am sold again,” and then went on to explain why he had done it: “There are many things in a soldier’s life that I don’t like, and we have to put up with privation and hardship that we should get rid of in civil life. But then again there are things in it that I do like, and if it was not for the distinction that is made between a private and a lunk head of an officer I should like it better than I do.” A Wisconsin veteran felt that he and his mates had justified their integrity by re-enlisting: “Out of 614 men present for duty in the Regt., 521 have re-enlisted for three years more. This does not seem to indicate that the soldiers are discouraged, does it?”
In the western armies a company that had re-enlisted to the extent of three fourths of its numbers (this was the percentage required if a regiment was to keep its old number and its organizational status) would parade through the camps, fife and drum corps playing and everybody cheering; the example was contagious and led others to sign up. In many cases men seem to have been moved by nothing more complex than the fact that they were adjusted to army life and liked the comradeship which the regiment offered. An Iowa soldier who re-enlisted and then went home on his thirty-day furlough found himself writing after one week back on the farm: “I almost wish myself back in the army; everything seems to be so lonesome here. There is nothing going on that is new.”7
Whatever their reason, the men did re-enlist, and in numbers adequate to carry on the war. It was noteworthy that re-enlistments were hardest to get in the Army of the Potomac; when Meade added up the results at the end of March he found that he had twenty-six thousand re-enlistments, which meant that at least half of the men whose time was expiring had refused to stay with the army.8 Nevertheless, even this figure was encouraging. It was insurance; the army would not dissolve just when Grant was starting to use it.
The big drive would begin on May 4; East and West, the armies would move forward then. Along the Rapidan, the Army of the Potomac waited, tense but hopeful; and in northern Georgia, Sherman’s boys got ready for the long march and told one another that this campaign ought to end things. The night before the Westerners moved, the camps were all ablaze with lights. Candles were government issue in those days, and it occurred to the soldiers that since the candles would be of little use in the weeks just ahead they might as well burn them up all at once. So every soldier in camp lit his candle and put it on his tent pole, or wedged it in a bayonet socket and jabbed the bayonet in the ground, or simply held it aloft and waved it; and for miles across the darkened countryside the glimmer and glitter of these little fires twinkled through the spring night, and the men looked at the strange spectacle they were making and set up a cheer that went from end to end of the army.9
3. The Great Decision
The story of the Civil War is really the story of a great many young man who got into uniform by a process they never quite understood and who hoped, every individual one of them, that they would somehow live through it and get back home to nurse the great memories of old soldiers. The Army of the Potomac was like every other army. It had its own character and its own involved sets of hopes and dreams and memories, and it crossed the Rapidan River on a sunny day in May 1864 believing that this was the last bright morning and that everything that had gone before would presently be redeemed and justified by the victory that was about to be won.
The trouble was that the Army of the Potomac did not quite understand the kind of war that was being fought now. It had had various commanders in its three years of desperate life. There had been men whom it loved, men who embodied the irrational image which each soldier had once had of his own blue-clad person, men like McClellan and Hooker; and there had been men whom it came to despise, such as well-intentioned Burnside and blustering John Pope; also, there was grizzled, honest, uninspired George Meade, whom it had learned to tolerate. All of these commanders had believed that by bravery, good luck, and perseverance the war could be won right here in Virginia and that the storied Confederate capital at Richmond could at last be brought down in flame and smoke as a final, spectacular climax to a war in which valor would get its proper reward. But now there was stolid little U. S. Grant, who chewed on the stub of a cigar and who never quite seemed to have his coat buttoned, and he saw things differently. The war could conceivably be lost here in Virginia, but it could never really be won here.
Richmond was not actually the goal, despite all of the “On to Richmond” slogans. It was necessary to move toward it, to threaten it, to compel the Confederacy to spend its lifeblood in defense of it — and if, at last, the city could in fact be taken, that would be well and good; but for the Army of the Potomac the only objective that now had any real meaning was the opposing Army of Northern Virginia. Lean, swift, and deadly, that army had frustrated every Federal offensive that had ever been launched in Virginia. It had been elusive and unpredictable, and it had moved across the war-torn landscape like a whiplash; now it must be pinned down and compelled to fight when and where the northern commander chose, with never a chance for one of those quick, furious strokes of reprisal which, always before, had restored strategic control to Lee. Quite simply, the function of the Army of the Potomac now was to fight, even if it half destroyed itself in the process. It it never lost contact with its enemy, and fought hard as long as that enemy remained in its front, it would do its part and the war finally would end with the United States one nation.
The real area of decision was in the West. The Confederacy had been fragmented already; it was crowded into the area east of the Mississippi and south of the Tennessee highlands, and now the North had the strength — if it used it right — to drive down into the Deep South, cutting the remnant of the southern nation into bits and stamping the independent life out of each severed piece. Sherman had seen it, and when Grant became lieutenant general Sherman wrote him an impassioned plea: “For God’s sake and your country’s sake, come out of Washington!” He went on in words that showed his own conception of the strategic task that remained to be done:
“Come west; take to yourself the whole Mississippi valley. Let us make it dead-sure, and I tell you the Atlantic and Pacific shores will follow its destiny as sure as the limbs of a tree live or die with the main trunk.… Here lies the seat of the coming empire; and from the west when our task is done we will make short work of Charleston and Richmond and the impoverished coast of the Atlantic.”1
Grant had to stay in the East, but Sherman had seen it. The fight in Virginia would be essentially a holding operation. Lee must be kept so busy that he could not send help to any other part of the Confederacy, and his army must be made to fight so constantly that it could never again seize the initiative, upset Federal strategy, and threaten a new invasion of the North. If this could be done, victory would be won. The difficulty was that it would mean for the Army of the Potomac an unbroken round of hard, bitter fighting — more fighting than it had had in all of its experiences, without a letup or a breathing spell, an eternity of combat in which no one would be allowed to stop to count the cost.
The men of the Army of the Potomac did not understand any of this as the spring campaign got under way. They marched down to the crossings of the Rapidan on a spring day when the May sunlight was bright, and the wild flowers sparkled along the roadside and the dogwood blossoms lit the gloomy forests, and as the long columns moved down to the river the sunlight glinted on musket barrels and bayonets and trundling brass cannon, and the movement of armed men looked like a vast pageant of immeasurable significance. On the plain above the river the long lines were ranked in brigade and division front, mounted officers gesturing with their swords; and one after another these long polished lines wheeled and broke into marching columns, and the unbroken stream of men in blue swept on down to the pontoon bridges and the fords, flags flying, bands making music, everyone full of hope and the tingling feeling that perhaps the final act had commenced.2
Beyond the river there was a vast stretch of dark, almost roadless second-growth timber, known locally as the Wilderness. Somewhere off beyond this forest was the Army of Northern Virginia, and the immediate task of the Army of the Potomac was to get through the forest, reach the open country beyond it, and engage the Confederates in a stand-up fight. The Wilderness itself was no place for a battle. Even the best of its roads were no better than enclosed lanes; its long stretches of forest were full of spiky little saplings and heavy underbrush, there were few clearings, and the whole country was crisscrossed with meaningless little streams that created unexpected ravines or dank fragments of bogland.
Yet it was precisely in the middle of the Wilderness that the great battle began. Lee had no intention of waiting for his enemies to get out in the open country to make their fight. He was outnumbered and outgunned, but here in the almost trackless forest these handicaps would not matter so much; and on the morning of May 5 he drove straight ahead, to find the Federals as quickly as he could and to attack them as soon as he found them. The left wing of his army collided with the right center of the Army of the Potomac a little after daybreak, and after a brief moment of skirmish-line firing the battle got under way.
Grant reacted with vigor. If the Confederates were here in the Wilderness, here he would fight them; orders for the advance were countermanded, and the great ungainly mass of the Federal army turned slowly about and went groping forward through the woodland twilight, men scrambling through almost impenetrable underbrush as they struggled to get out of marching columns into fighting lines. The Confederates were advancing along two parallel roads, the roads three or four miles apart, no place on either road visible from any spot on the other; two separate battles began as the Federals swarmed in to meet them — began, grew moment by moment, and boiled over at last into one enormous fight, with the harsh fog of powder smoke trapped under the trees and seeping out as if all the woodland were an immense boiling cauldron.
Artillery was of little use here; the guns could not be moved through the wood, and if they were moved they had no field of fire. Infantry lines broke into company and platoon units as they moved, sometimes reassembling when the undergrowth thinned, sometimes remaining broken and going forward without cohesion. Men came under heavy fire before they saw their enemies — in most places no one could see one hundred yards in any direction, and as the battle smoke thickened, visibility grew less and less. Often enough there was nothing but the sound of firing to tell men where the battle lines were, and as more and more brigades were thrown into action this sound became appalling in its weight, seeming to come from all directions at once.
It was one fight, and yet it was many separate fights, all carried on almost independently, the co-ordination that existed being little more than the instinctive responses of veteran fighting men. Opportunity and dire peril went hand in hand for each commander, and often enough they went unnoticed because almost nothing about this strange battle could actually be seen by anybody. At one stage the two halves of Lee’s army were separated, a wide gap between them, and the Army of Northern Virginia might have been destroyed if a strong Federal force could have gone through the gap. But the gap went undiscovered, and when its existence was sensed a Federal division that was sent up to take advantage of it lost its way in the dense forest, swung half around without intending to, and exposed its flank to waiting Confederates, who broke it and drove it off in retreat. On the Union left, the first Federal elements engaged were driven back, and for a time it was the Union army that was in danger of being cut in half; Hancock’s II Corps, which had had the advance, was still off to the south somewhere, hurrying up a narrow lane to get into the fight, and the Confederates had a brief chance to come through the opening before Hancock’s men could arrive. But reinforcements came up to hold them off, Hancock got his men on the scene in time, and the Confederates were driven back, outnumbered and all but disorganized.
The woods took fire, helpless wounded men were burned to death, and wood smoke mingled with the smoke from the rifles to create a choking, blinding gloom. Night came at last, and the wild tempo of battle became slower; yet some of the men who fought in the Wilderness felt that the fighting never actually stopped all night long, and there were nervous outbursts of firing at intervals all up and down the lines. Off to the rear, such batteries as had been able to get into position sent shells over at random all through the night, and there was a constant shuffling movement of troops as brigade and division commanders tried desperately to pull their fighting lines together.
The battle flamed up in full strength as soon as daylight came. Hancock, on the Union left, held a strong advantage. Not all of Lee’s army was up: Longstreet’s corps, back at last from its long tour of duty in Tennessee, was hurrying in from the west, but it had not arrived in time to get into the first day’s firing, and A. P. Hill’s corps, which held that part of the Confederate line, had been fearfully cut up and was badly outnumbered. Hancock sent his men in at dawn, the Confederates gave ground, and before long the Federal assaulting column had reached the edge of one the Wilderness’s rare clearings, a run-down farm owned by a widow named Tapp. Here was Lee himself, with a good part of the Confederate wagon train visible not far to the rear; if this clearing could be seized and held, Lee’s right would be broken once and for all and his army would be well on the way to destruction. The Federals paused to straighten their lines and then went pounding in, flags in front, everybody cheering at the top of his voice.
Final victory was not ten minutes away, and the surging blue lines came in toward the guns … and then ran into a shattering countercharge. The head of Longstreet’s corps had come on the scene at the last crucial moment, and its tough Texas brigade — the Grenadier Guard of the Confederacy, as one historian has called it — struck like a trip hammer. Lee himself was riding in with the men, swinging his hat, his usual calm broken for once by the hot excitement of battle; he would have led the countercharge if the Texans had not compelled him to go to the rear, out of harm’s way.3 The massed Confederate artillery blazed away at point-blank range, the Federal assault came to a standstill and then broke up in a tangle of disorganized fugitives, and the victory that had seemed so near dissolved and vanished while the pitch of battle rose to a new crescendo.
Then, abruptly, the pendulum swung the other way, and before long it was the Army of the Potomac that was in trouble, with disaster looking as imminent as triumph had looked just before.
Ordered troop movements were almost impossible in the Wilderness, but somehow Longstreet managed one. The left flank of Hancock’s corps was “in the air,” after the repulse of the attack on the Tapp farm clearing; the Confederates saw it, and Longstreet swung a part of his crops around and came in from the south with a crushing flank attack … and suddenly Hancock’s line went to pieces, masses of Union troops were going back to the rear, and the Confederates had seized what might be a decisive advantage.
But Hancock was just about as good a man for moments of crisis as Pap Thomas. A north-and-south road crossed the road along which the Confederates were advancing, a mile or so to the Union rear, and along this road Hancock had his men prepare a stout log breastwork. He rallied them here, prepared a solid new battle line, and when the Confederate drive reached the point, it was stopped and then driven back. The woods were on fire all along the front here, Longstreet’s men were almost as disorganized by their victory as the Federals had been by their defeat, Longstreet himself was badly wounded — shot by his own men, in the blind confusion, just as Stonewall Jackson had been shot at nearby Chancellorsville a year earlier — and the crisis was met and passed. By the end of the day Union and Confederate armies on this part of the field were about where they had been in the morning, except that many thousands of men on each side had been shot.
One more blow the Confederates swung before the battle ended. The extreme right of the Army of the Potomac, operating in dense woods where no regimental commander could see all of his own men, had an exposed flank. Lee found it, and at dusk the Federal right flank was driven in just as the left flank had been driven during the morning. But John Sedgwick, who was still another imperturbable Union corps commander cut to the Thomas pattern, was in charge here; and as the Rebel drive lost its impetus in the smoky darkness he brought up reserves, stabilized a new line, and got the flank securely anchored. And at last the noise died down, the firing stopped, the smoke drifted off in the night, and the two exhausted armies settled down to get what sleep they could, while the cries of wounded men in the smoldering forest (flames creeping up through the matted dead leaves and dried underbrush) made a steady, despairing murmur in the dark.
… The fearful story of war is mostly the story of ordinary men who are called upon to suffer and endure and die to no purpose that they can easily discover; and generally the story of a great battle is no more than the story of how some thousands of these men acquit themselves. But once in a great while the terrible drama of war narrows to a very small focus: to a place in the heart and mind of one man who has been burdened with the great responsibility of making a decision and who at last, alone with himself in a darkened tent, must speak the word that will determine how history is to go.
It was this way in the Wilderness after the two days of battle were over. Here were the two armies, lying crosswise in a burned-out forest, death all around them, the scent and feel of death in the soiled air. They had done all they could, nobody had won or lost anything that amounted to very much, and the men who had to carry the muskets would go on doing whatever they were told even if they were destroyed doing it. But someone at the top must finally say what was going to happen next, and as the night of May 6 settled down this someone was U. S. Grant.
Technically, his army (Meade’s army, actually, but from now on to the end people would think of it as Grant’s) had been whipped quite as badly as Hooker’s army had been whipped at Chancellorsville, almost on the same ground, one year earlier. It had had horrifying losses — seventeen thousand men or thereabouts shot or blown loose from their commands — its flanks had been beaten in, it had completely failed to drive Lee away from his chosen ground, and in 1863, Hooker no more roughly handled, had gone back north of the Rapidan to recruit and refit and to let Lee decide where the next fight would take place. Now it was up to Grant, and the crucial decision of all the war was his to make.
Grant thought it over, taking counsel of nobody, throughout the day of May 7. The armies stayed in each other’s presence, there was picket-line firing all day long, and although things were easy compared with what happened on the two days before nothing seemed to be settled; as far as the men in the ranks were concerned, the battle was still going on. Finally night came in once more, and after dark the divisions of the Army of the Potomac were pulled out of line and put on the road for another march. And when they moved, they all moved — south.
In other words, the battle of the Wilderness was no defeat, simply because Grant refused to admit that it was a defeat. He would keep moving on, which was the great point he had laid down in his offhand sketch of the secret of strategy, and he would move in the direction that made continued fighting inevitable.
The army headed that night for Spotsylvania Court House, ten miles off to the southeast; a country town, like Gettysburg in that its importance derived from the fact that all the roads met there. If Grant could get his men on these road crossings before Lee’s men got there, then he would be between the Army of Northern Virginia and Richmond, and Lee would have to do the attacking — which, under the circumstances, could hardly mean anything but defeat for Lee’s army. The move failed by a very narrow margin. Lee’s advance guards got to Spotsylvania a few rods ahead of the advance guard of the Army of the Potomac, and what began as an affair of skirmishers around a country market town blew up quickly into an enormous fight that seemed to have no beginning, no end, and no visible result.
For the fight that started at Spotsylvania lasted for ten uninterrupted days, and it was even worse than the Wilderness fight had been. It was like the Wilderness in a way, in that so much of the ground was heavily wooded and the troops had to fight blindly, nobody from commanding general down to private ever being quite sure just where everybody was and what was going on. As the fight developed, Grant’s army kept on edging around to the left, trying vainly to get around the Confederate flank and interpose between the battlefield and the Confederate capital. It never quite made it, but in the ten days the two armies swung completely around three quarters of a circle, and on May 12 they had what may have been the most vicious fight of the whole war — a headlong contest for a horseshoe-shaped arc of Confederate trench guarding the principal road crossing, with hand-to-hand fighting that lasted from dawn to dusk, in a pelting rain, over a stretch of breastworks known forever after as the Bloody Angle. Here men fought with bayonets and clubbed muskets, dead and wounded men were trodden out of sight in the sticky mud, batteries would come floundering up into close-range action and then fall silent because gun crews had been killed; and after a day of it the Union army gained a square mile of useless ground, thousands upon thousands of men had been killed, and the end of the war seemed no nearer than it had been before.
Yet all of this made no difference. In all the welter of promiscuous killing, one thing had passed unnoticed: the great counterattack in the Wilderness, in which Lee had driven in the Yankee flank and had almost (but not quite) taken control of the battle for himself, was the last great counterblow the Army of Northern Virginia would ever make. The Confederate army was resisting destruction, it could not be driven out of the road, it was killing Yankees at a horrifying rate, but it had lost its old capacity to seize the initiative and turn sullen defensive into brilliant offensive. It was being crowded now, it was being made to fight all day and every day, and this was a war that was bound to go against it. It was not losing, but it was not winning either, and if the Confederacy was to live the Army of Northern Virginia had to win.
Side-slipping constantly, the two armies moved in a wide semicircle: out of the Wilderness and down to Spotsylvania, out of Spotsylvania at last and down to the North Anna, past that to the Pamunkey, over the Pamunkey and finally, as May drew to an end, close to the Chickahominy — down to the ground where McClellan and Lee had fought two years earlier, down to the swampy, pine-studded flatlands where Fitz-John Porter had held his ground through two days of flaming battle, down to the area where the church bells of Richmond could be heard (whenever the guns were quiet, which was not often) and where the Confederates had no room to maneuver. Remorselessly and at immense cost Grant was pinning his enemies down to the place where they could do nothing more than fight a wearing, dogged, and ultimately fatal defense of their capital city.
As June began the two armies faced each other not far north of the Chickahominy, and once more a casual road crossing became a place of vast importance; a sun-baked spot on the featureless plain, Cold Harbor, where a second-rate tavern sat by a dusty crossroads; and here Grant massed his troops and made one final attempt to break the Confederate line and pulverize Lee’s army once and for all.
The attempt failed, and the price was high. On June 1, and then on June 3 — after a day in which beaten-out armies tried to catch their breath in murderous heat — the Union army came in with old-fashioned frontal assaults on strong Confederate entrenchments. They had no luck. On June 1 they gained insignificant patches of ground; on June 3 they tried again, lost several thousand men in half an hour of unimaginable fighting, and then settled down to trench warfare, with every mile of line spurting flame and death every hour of the twenty-four, the loathsome odor of unburied bodies always in the air, sharpshooters and cunningly posted batteries forever alert to shoot whenever they saw movement. The Union cause apparently was no nearer victory than it had been before the campaign began.
Never had armies fought like this. For a solid month they had not been out of contact. Every day, somewhere along the lines, there had been action. During this month Union losses had averaged two thousand men every single day. Old formations had been wrecked. Generals had been killed — most notable of these being John Sedgwick, slain by a sharpshooter in the fighting at Spotsylvania Court House — and no soldier had bathed, changed his clothing, or had an unbroken night’s sleep for more than four agonizing weeks. Yet morale, somehow, did not slacken; the men took what they had to take with the matter-of-fact air of old soldiers, and a New Englander in the VI Corps, noting one day that there was continuous firing going on a little way to the right, wrote casually: “I suppose it’s skirmishing, as they don’t call anything a battle now without the whole army is engaged and a loss of some eight or ten thousands.” He added that it was hard to see what would happen to the men if this routine went on much longer — “but this army has been through so much that I don’t know as you can kill them off.4
Elsewhere in Virginia things had gone badly. When the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan, Ben Butler had started to move up the James River from the Norfolk area with an army of thirty thousand men; his way had been fairly open, and a competent soldier might well have gone on, cut the railroads below Richmond, and made victory certain. But Butler, a man of many parts, was in no part a soldier. He let himself be deceived and then defeated by a scratch Confederate army, and while the Army of the Potomac was slugging its weary way down toward Cold Harbor he and his own army managed to get locked up on a peninsula in the James River, thirty miles below Rickmond, known as Bermuda Hundred — theoretically a standing menace to Confederate communications, actually as much out of the war as if they had been transported bodily to South America.
It was the same in the Shenandoah Valley. Franz Sigel had been appointed to lead an army up the Shenandoah Valley, destroying the traditional Confederate granary and avenue of attack and curling in on Richmond, finally, from the west. He had been routed and had been removed from his command, and David Hunter, who took his place, had done very little better — had in fact run into disastrous defeat, at last, near Charlottesville and in panic had fled off into the West Virginia mountains, leaving the Confederacy in better shape as far as the Shenandoah Valley was concerned than it had been in for two years; and neither Butler nor the Sigel-Hunter move had done the Army of the Potomac the slightest bit of good.
Yet it did not matter. The Army of the Potomac had reached and held its objective — continuous contact with Lee’s army, which could no longer make the daring thrusts that in the past had always upset Federal strategy. From now on to the end of the war Lee’s role would be defensive. The Army of the Potomac was half destroyed, with its brigades led by colonels, its regiments by captains, and its companies, often enough, by sergeants; but it was carrying out its appointed assignment. Somewhere far ahead there would be victory, even if most of the men who had made it possible would not be around to see it.
4. A Question of Time
Shortly after the spring campaign began, Robert E. Lee remarked that Grant’s army must on no account be allowed to reach the James River. If that happened, he said, the Army of Northern Virginia would be compelled to withstand a siege, “and then it will be a mere question of time.”1 In six weeks of bitter fighting he had managed to stave off that fate; yet he was now so close to the Richmond fortifications that he could have put his army into them by no more than one short march, and in the middle of June, Grant made a swift, decisive move whose final effect was to force upon Lee the siege warfare that Lee had so greatly dreaded.
The rival armies stayed in the trenches around Cold Harbor for the better part of two weeks, and they were not weeks that any soldier afterward recalled with pleasure. All along the front the two armies were in intimate contact — each one entrenched up to the ears, dug in so that no conceivable frontal attack could ever accomplish anything. There was firing every hour, from dawn to darkness, and at night the pickets were alert to detect any movement, which invariably would call forth a burst of musketry and cannon fire. An unspeakable stench lay over the battlefield, the weather was excessively hot, soldiers were caked with dirt and plagued by vermin and by thirst, and sharpshooters on both sides were ready to drill any luckless soldier who incautiously raised his head above the parapet, even for a moment.
To all appearances, it was deadlock. The Army of the Potomac could no longer sidle to its left, which was what it had been doing all the way down from the Rapidan; its left touched the Chickahominy now, and one more side-slip would do nothing better than put it up against the Richmond trenches, which Grant was no more anxious to encounter than Lee was to occupy. It could not move by its right, for that would take it too far away from its tidewater base and expose its supply line to rupture by Confederate cavalry.
Confederate cavalry, to be sure, was not having things its own way now, as it had had in 1862 when McClellan was on this ground. Phil Sheridan was swinging the Yankee cavalry around like a scythe; had raided far in Lee’s rear during the Spotsylvania fight, forcing Jeb Stuart to make a hell-for-leather ride after him, fighting a bitter battle in the very suburbs of Richmond, and — sponging one more of the bright romantic streaks off of the board of this war — killing Stuart himself in the process. Nevertheless, the Army of the Potomac was deep in enemy country, and for its own security it had to keep its line line short, which meant that it could not move far from one or another of the rivers where Federal gunboats and supply steamers could anchor.
But there was still a move Grant could make. If he could get his army out of its trenches without tipping his hand, he could leave the Cold Harbor sector entirely, march southeast down to the James River, get over to the southern shore (provided his engineers could throw a pontoon bridge over a deep stream nearly half a mile wide), and drive on for the little city of Petersburg, which lay on the south bank of the Appomattox River, some ten miles from the place where the Appomattox flows into the James. Petersburg was a place the Confederacy had to hold if it meant to hold Richmond; for of the railroads that came up from the Carolinas and brought the supplies which the capital and its defenders had to have, all but one came up through Petersburg. In effect, the North could win Richmond by winning Petersburg. A blow at Petersburg was a blow Lee would have to parry no matter what it might cost him.
The move was handled with skill. Despite the closeness of enemy pickets, Grant got his men out of the trenches without arousing Confederate attention, put them on the roads in the night, moved down and crossed the Chickahominy, and tramped on toward the bank of the James. Lee was a hard man to fool, but it appears that for a day or two this move deceived him; the Army of the Potomac had vanished, and although it had obviously moved off somewhere to the southeast it was well screened behind a cordon of cavalry and infantry and there was no way to tell where it might appear next. It was quite possible that it would wheel and come back up on the north side of the James, and Lee held his army in position to counter such a move. Meanwhile Meade’s engineers laid a 2100-foot pontoon bridge over the James — completing the job in eight hours, cutting a long approach road on the northern bank, and performing a prodigy of labor — and the Army of the Potomac began to cross and to march for Petersburg, picking up some of Butler’s men from Bermuda Hundred as they went.
Petersburg should have fallen on June 15, for the better part of two army corps reached the place then and found it defended by the merest handful of Confederates under Beauregard — who was aware of his danger and was sending to Lee and to the Rebel War Department desperate appeals for aid. But the attack was muffed. Commander of the Union advance was the same General Baldy Smith who had done so well in the matter of opening a supply line at beleaguered Chattanooga in the preceding autumn. He had won Grant’s good opinion then, but today he lost what he had won, and lost as well a dazzling chance to cut the artery that fed the Confederate capital. He seized trenches and guns, won a position from which one determined drive would inevitably have put him into Petersburg — and then grew cautious, concluded that he ought to wait for reinforcements, and let the opportunity slip away.
The next three days repeated the same story. Beauregard began to get reinforcements, but the Army of the Potomac was coming up faster, and on each day Beauregard had ample reason to believe that he was about to be driven away in total defeat. Yet the opportunity was never quite grasped. Union attacks were poorly co-ordinated and driven home without vigor — one reason may have been that the army as a whole was simply exhausted from the work of the past six weeks — and in the end Lee managed to get the Army of Northern Virginia down just in time to make the place secure. By June 20, Grant had called off further attacks and was settling down to make a siege of it.2
In the technical sense it was not really a siege, for Petersburg was by no means surrounded. Two railroads to the south were still open, and the roads between Petersburg and Richmond were not cut. The Army of the Potomac was dug in with a rambling arc of trenches and fieldworks that confronted Petersburg only from the east; north of the Appomattox there were other works that ran across the neck of Bermuda Hundred, and above the James, close to Richmond, Federal and Confederate patrols confronted each other, and all along this lengthy line there were intermittent firing and constant sniping while the two armies labored mightily to make their defenses strong.
But although Grant had not done all that he had hoped to do he had finally done one thing Lee was extremely anxious to prevent; he had compelled the Army of Northern Virginia to occupy a fixed position — had put it into a spot from which it could not withdraw and in which the greater resources of the North could be consistently applied with a steadily rising pressure. Freedom of movement was very largely gone now, as far as Lee was concerned, and without it he was condemned to the kind of warfare the Confederacy could hardly hope to win. Lee was pinned; Grant’s problem now was to keep him pinned and build up the pressure.
Some freedom, to be sure, was left, and Lee would use it to the very best of his ability, which was great. Union defeats in the Shenandoah Valley had left that area open for Confederate use, and by scraping up detachments from here and there and sending away a part of his own forces Lee made up a small army (twelve or fifteen thousand men, or thereabouts) which began to move down the valley for one more try at upsetting Yankee strategy. The army was led by Jubal Early, who was no Stonewall Jackson but who was a canny soldier and a tough customer to boot, and at the beginning of July, Early started north to see how much trouble he could create.
As it turned out, he could create quite a lot. He got across the Potomac, knocked a pick-up Federal army out of the way on the banks of the Monocacy River, and then went straight for Washington, arriving just north of the city on July 11 and creating in the city a general hullabaloo such as had not been seen since the ironclad Merrimac had thrown Secretary Stanton into a panic in the spring of 1862. Government clerks, non-combat soldiers in the quartermaster corps, and convalescents from the hospitals were hastily called out, welded into something resembling a combat outfit along with a handful of state militia, and sent out to hold the fortifications that lay in Early’s path. The fortifications were very strong, but this scratch force was very weak, and it is just possible that Early could have plowed on through it and gone into Washington if he had moved fast. He could not have stayed there very long, to be sure, but the amount of harm he could have done to the Union cause just by occupying the town for a few hours is something to brood over.
Grant had seen the move as an attempt by Lee to make him ease the pressure on Petersburg, and he refused to rise to it. At the last minute, however, he realized that his own action in pulling the heavy artillery regiments out of the Washington fortifications had left the city almost defenseless, and he rushed the VI Army Corps up from the Army of the Potomac. It go to Washington just in time to drive Early off.
The VI Corps was probably the best combat unit in the army just then, and it was led by Horatio G. Wright, an unemotional, solid sort of fighting man, who was equal to the emergency. Wright got his men into the trenches north of Washington just as Early was preparing to assault. There was a brisk, somewhat indecisive little battle there — witnessed by Abraham Lincoln in person, who came out to Fort Stevens, in the center of things, and stood on the parapet to watch, almost giving General Wright apoplexy: a stray bullet might easily have killed him — and at last Early drew off, marched west through Maryland, and went back into the Shenandoah Valley. The whole venture had accomplished nothing very much except that it had thrown a prodigious scare into the Federal government and had reminded U. S. Grant that the attempt to take Lee’s army out of action would never succeed until the Shenandoah Valley had been made secure. Grant began casting about for ways to do something about this situation.
The valley was important for two reasons. It came up beyond the Blue Ridge, and all through the war it had offered the Confederates a handy approach for invasion of the North; it ran from southwest to northeast, so that a Confederate army that used it moved directly toward the heart of the North, while a Union army that followed it would go off at an angle, away from Richmond and the sensitive areas of the Confederacy. In addition, it was a highly fertile and productive garden spot whose meat, corn, and wheat helped supply Lee’s army and the people around Richmond and also served to support any southern army that chose to operate toward the Potomac. Before Lee could be taken out of the war the valley itself would have to be taken out.
Early in August, Grant picked the man for the job — wiry little Sheridan, who had begun his Civil War career as a quartermaster captain in the West, had become a cavalry colonel and then a brigadier and later divisional commander in the infantry, and who was now making the cavalry corps of the Army of the Potomac a fighting unit of considerable prowess. Sheridan was a driver. An echo of his quality comes down from a diary entry made by a private soldier in his command in the fall of 1862, when Sheridan’s infantry was moving up the Mississippi to help repel Bragg’s invasion of Kentucky. One of the troopships ran aground and seemed unable to get loose. Up came the steamer bearing Sheridan. As the soldier noted: “Rounding to within easy swearing range, he opened a volley of oaths on Captain Dickey [the troop commander aboard] and the captain of the boat which annihilated both of them and caused speedy repairs to be made.”3 Sheridan was the hurry-hurry sort, with a knack for getting up into the front line when a fight was going on, and as the son of an Irish immigrant he seems to have had a good deal of personal feeling against high-born southern aristocrats. If anybody could clean out the Shenandoah Valley, he could.
Meanwhile there was the situation at Petersburg itself. Grant had more men than Lee had — his losses during May and June had been huge, but he was getting reinforcements, and while the quality of the new troops was by no means up to the quality of the men who had been killed he still maintained the advantage — and he was holding his army in its trenches, constantly trying to extend his lines to his left. If he could reach out far enough he could eventually cut the all-important railroad lines, and once that happened Lee would have to come out of his lines and fight. The Army of the Potomac was no longer what it had been earlier in the spring, but for the matter of that neither was the Army of Northern Virginia; an all-out fight on open ground, away from the deadly fortifications, could hardly end in anything but a northern victory.
Grant’s problem was far from simple. If he held Lee where he was, the North should finally win — provided Sherman did what was expected of him in the West, provided everything else went right, and provided finally that sheer war-weariness did not induce the people of the North to consent to a separation and peace. (This last was becoming a serious problem, not in the least helped by the terrible list of killed and wounded that had been coming out of the Army of the Potomac since Grant took charge.) But if there was any way to strike one hard blow that would destroy Lee’s army and end things quickly, that way had to be tried. Late in July it appeared that such a way might be at hand.
This came about because in the IX Army Corps there was a regiment made up largely of coal miners — 48th Pennsylvania, recruited mostly in and around Schuylkill County, a veteran regiment that had served with distinction in Tennessee during the previous year. This regiment had a section of trench opposite a Confederate strong point, and it occurred to the former coal miners that they, if permitted, could easily dig a tunnel under the open space between the lines, hollow out a cavity under the Confederate trench, and explode enough blasting powder there to crack a big hole in the Confederate lines. Their corps commander was Ambrose E. Burnside — this bumbling, bewhiskered man had had many ups and downs, and after occupying Knoxville he had been brought back this spring to the Army of the Potomac — and when the idea was presented to him Burnside liked it. Meade, to whom Burnside went with it, had very little confidence in it, and the army engineers derided it and held that it was wildly impractical; but the army was not actually doing anything in those days except hold its lines and exchange tons of metal every day with the Confederates, and it was agreed at last that these Pennsylvanians might as well be digging a tunnel as sitting on the fire step ducking enemy explosives. So the orders went out, the miners dug their tunnel — it was upward of five hundred feet in length, much longer than anything military sappers had ever thought practical before — and by the end of the month eight tons of powder had been put in the end of it, a long fuse had been laid, and it was time to touch it off.
Grant and Meade had not been enthusiastic about the project, but they concluded that if it was to be done at all some real weight ought to be put behind it, and so elaborate plans for a break-through were made. A feint was ordered on the far side of Bermuda Hundred to draw Confederate reserves out of Petersburg; Burnside was told to attack with his entire corps, another corps was alerted to be ready to go in beside him, heavy masses of artillery were put in line to bombard the Confederate position as soon as the mine was sprung — and just at dawn on July 30, after an agonizing delay during which a daring soldier had to crawl into the tunnel to splice a defective fuse, the thing blew up with a shattering crash that opened a 150-foot crater where the Rebel strong point had been and gave the Federal army a clear shot at Petersburg.
Trench warfare had all but made offensive movement impossible. The weapons of the Civil War era were muzzle-loaders, primitive enough by modern standards, but they were rifles and they were highly effective at tolerably extensive ranges, and men properly protected by fieldworks were almost completely invulnerable. But the explosion of the mine had suddenly restored open warfare. For several hundred yards the Confederate defenses had in effect ceased to exist. All that Burnside’s men had to do now was drive on through the opening and they would cut Lee’s army in half.
The opportunity was completely lost. The mine itself could not have worked better, but the arrangements for exploiting it could not have worked worse. Federal defensive works had not been leveled so that the assault wave could make a real charge; the first regiments that advanced came through in dribbles and then discovered that they totally lacked leadership. Burnside was far to the rear, looking on from an artillery emplacement; the division commander who should have been directing things was in a dugout getting drunk as fast as a jug of commissary whiskey would enable him to do. Instead of marching on through to the naked Confederate rear, the Federals huddled aimlessly in the crater, helping half-buried Confederates to dig themselves out, picking up souvenirs, and waiting for orders. Reinforcements came up, and they also got into the crater, until this great hole in the ground was packed full of blue-clad soldiers. Minutes passed, half an hour, an hour — and the Confederate high command had the time it needed to piece a new line together in the rear. When the assault finally began to move it ran up against the same old, fatal obstacle — well-manned fieldworks that could not be carried by direct assault.
Of all the missed chances of the war, this one probably was the most tragic and the most inexcusable. Grant commented bitterly after the affair had finally ground its way to complete futility that he had never before seen and never expected again to see such a wide-open opportunity to carry an entrenched position. To underline the pathetic story of mismanagement, when the attack had finally bogged down and it should have been obvious that there was no point in carrying it any farther, Burnside sent in a division of colored troops to leap-frog over the earlier waves and break the Confederate line. The Confederates were waiting now, and the colored division was butchered. (It had originally been slated to lead the entire charge, and the men’s morale had been high. Grant had canceled these arrangements, arguing that the offensive was a chancy affair at best and that if it failed people would say the army had put the colored troops in front because it was willing to sacrifice them. But they had been sacrificed anyway, not when they had a chance to win, but after defeat had become certain, and the morale of the survivors dropped to zero.)4
By midday the attack had been given up. New lines were formed, the Union army glumly counted several thousand casualties (and, it may be, took comfort from the fact that it had gained an acre or so of wholly worthless ground), and the war went on as before. There remained, as tokens of what had been tried, nothing but a prodigious hole in the ground — it is still there, an item to be looked at when folk tour the Petersburg battlefields — and the record of a solemn court of inquiry, which looked at the dreary record of mistakes and oversights and expressed certain conclusions, as a result of which Burnside was finally removed from his command.
And it began to look to many folk in the North that the Confederacy perhaps could never really be beaten, that the attempt to win might after all be too heavy a load to carry, and that perhaps it was time to agree to a peace without victory. This sentiment would affect the presidential election, which was only a few months away. Conceivably — even probably, as things looked in midsummer — it could bring about the election of a President who would consent to a division of the country if he could get peace in no other way. It was not long after the battle of the Crater that Abraham Lincoln wrote out a despairing yet defiant little document, which he signed, sealed, and put away for later use:
“This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President-elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward.”5
It might come to that, and it might not. Victory was only a question of time, but time moved now with unendurable slowness, each moment bought by a new record of men killed and maimed, a new scar of loss and suffering laid on a people who had already endured much. The people themselves would finally decide, and they would decide by showing whether their endurance went all the way to the foundations of the American dream.