[10]

Gouverneur Kemble Warren and Little Phil

 

Major General Gouverneur K. Warren

 

IT IS DUSK on the victorious battleground. The dead and wounded define the smoking, muddy, trodden field. Dimly in the distance are the flashes and rumble of the last guns. Prisoners in ragged butternut are led away. Up to a group of mounted Union officers surveying their triumph, records an eyewitness, rides a lone general “with almost the agony of death upon his face.” Singling out the senior commander, Philip H. Sheridan, the general asks him quietly if he will reconsider his order. “Reconsider, hell!” Sheridan barks. “I don’t reconsider my decisions. Obey the order!” In the sudden stunned silence the general bows his head and turns his horse and rides off the darkening field.

Gouverneur Kemble Warren, major general, Army of the Potomac, is remembered for two things. First, of course, is his fame as a hero of Gettysburg. On Day Two of the battle, recognizing the critical importance of Little Round Top, Warren rushed troops to the site in the nick of time to hold it for the Union. Today General Warren, memorialized in bronze, stands guard in singular splendor on the heights of Little Round Top. Warren’s second noteworthy Civil War moment is infamous. Virtually at war’s end, in the act of directing his troops to a sweeping victory at Five Forks near Petersburg, he was relieved of his corps command and sent unceremoniously to the rear. Nothing like it had ever happened in the Army of the Potomac, and the shock of it would reverberate for the better part of two decades.

In 1865, before Five Forks, Gouverneur Warren was ostensibly an elite member of the Potomac army’s high command. His number-two ranking in the West Point class of 1850 had allowed him to pick his branch of service, and he selected the exclusive company of the topographical engineers. At the outbreak of war he had followed the volunteer route to the colonelcy of the 5th New York, and on the way fought in the Army of the Potomac’s first battle, at Big Bethel. Warren would take part in that army’s every campaign thereafter but the last one, and be twice wounded. By the end of 1862 he was a brigadier and commanding a brigade in the Fifth Corps. He served Hooker at Chancellorsville and Meade at Gettysburg as the army’s chief engineer, and his Gettysburg exploit helped earn him his second star and temporary command of the Second Corps. In the reorganization of the army for the Overland campaign in 1864, he was promoted to permanent head of one of the three corps, the Fifth. At the time, General-in-Chief Grant was heard to say that should anything happen to Meade, he would seriously consider Warren to command the Army of the Potomac. At Five Forks “Little Phil” Sheridan did not sack just any general.¹

The Five Forks incident, abrupt as it appeared, was deeply rooted in past events on old battlefields. Warren had first displayed his distinctive notions of corps command at Mine Rim back in November 1863. Throughout that post-Gettysburg period Meade and Lee had been maneuvering against each other without much result, and at last Meade believed he had found an opening along Mine Run, below the Rapidan. Careful plans were laid, with Warren’s Second Corps scheduled to spearhead a pivotal turning movement. The appointed hour came and the army poised to leap forward at the sound of Warren’s guns. Instead there was only silence. In due course a courier reached Meade’s headquarters with a dispatch from General Warren. It announced that he had canceled the attack on his own initiative—the Confederates had reinforced the position to the point that an assault would be fruitless.

“We tried to take it all philosophically,” wrote Theodore Lyman of Meade’s staff, “but it was hard, very hard.” Seething, Meade rode to Warrens command post and there ensued a tense, earnest conversation. Finally Meade nodded, and the army pulled back. He had to close the campaign empty-handed. Colonel Lyman was reminded of the old nursery rhyme: “The King of France went up the hill with forty thousand men; / The King of France came down the hill and ne’er went up again.” While Meade came to accept that an attack in the changed circumstances would indeed have been hopeless, he found Warren’s arbitrary, unilateral decision unsettling. Might better the corps commander have left so momentous a decision to the general commanding?²

Gouverneur Warren neither looked nor acted the part of a warrior general. He was slender and slight of build, and his dark complexion, piercing black eyes, and long straight black hair gave him, people thought, a little of the appearance of an Indian. In manner, however, he was more the fussy Yankee schoolmaster, cautious, fidgety over details, often mean-spirited with subordinates, insistent on doing everything himself so that it would be done properly. In this he was very much an echo of General McClellan, whom he admired extravagantly. Certainly Warren was a thoroughly professional soldier and more than brave enough under fire; he could and did command from the front line when he deemed it necessary. But his real interest was in the science of command. Warren believed that leading a corps gave him discretion and leeway in carrying out his duties—which often enough he performed with the smugness of the righteous. It developed that not everyone would be tolerant of either his manner or his philosophy of command—particularly not U. S. Grant.³

Preparing for the spring campaign of 1864, Meade put the Mine Run experience behind him in reorganizing the army’s high command. He gave Warren the Fifth Corps, alongside the veterans Hancock (Second) and Sedgwick (Sixth). Looking over Meade’s shoulder, Grant nodded in approval of Warren’s promotion. Yet Warren’s conduct in the opening battle of the campaign, in the Wilderness, triggered second thoughts. Ordered to the attack, he (and his generals) found many grounds for delay in putting the Fifth Corps into action. In retrospect, their impulse to go slowly and to wait for proper support was probably the better course in this chaotic battle, but in the heat of the moment both Meade and Grant grew testy and impatient over the delays. “We are waiting for you,” Meade told Warren grimly. With that, Warren attacked and was sharply repulsed.⁴

As the two armies rushed together into a deadly embrace at Spotsylvania Court House, Gouverneur Warren’s tenure as corps commander very nearly came to an end. His slowness, his caution, his questioning—indeed his challenging—of orders got on everyone’s nerves. It was during the initial frantic race toward Spotsylvania that he had his first brush with Phil Sheridan. In this Warren was more or less an innocent victim, caught in the middle of a feud between Sheridan and Meade. But Sheridan, with his short fuze and his long memory, would not forget this encounter with the Fifth Corps and its commander.

Sheridan had brought with him the reputation of a head-down fighter when he came east that spring to take command of the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry corps. As an infantry general his commands had been in the thick of the fight on virtually every western battlefield. At Chattanooga he personally led his division in the spectacular, triumphant charge right up the face of Missionary Ridge, all under the observant eye of General Grant. Little Phil—so his soldiers christened him—was a bantam-sized Irishman, black-haired, black-eyed, bullet-headed. His command of profanity was extensive and his gentlemanly qualities were few. He was a skilled battlefield tactician who always led from the front, and he had scorn for any general who did it any other way. “I have never in my life taken a command into battle,” Sheridan once said, “and had the slightest desire to come out alive unless I won.”

From the first, Sheridan and Meade had clashed over the proper use of the cavalry in this campaign, and after the race for Spotsylvania ended ignominiously in a massive nighttime tangle of horsemen and foot soldiers, the two generals went at it toe to toe. Sheridan’s language throughout, said an observer, “was highly spiced and conspicuously italicized with expletives,” but when it came to temper, few were a match for George Meade. Their argument focused on which had had the right of way, infantry or cavalry, and in this instance the infantry happened to be Gouverneur Warren’s Fifth Corps. At one point in his tirade, noted Colonel Lyman, Sheridan “went on to say that he could see nothing to oppose the advance of the 5th Corps; that the behavior of the infantry was disgraceful, etc., etc.”⁵

In the desperate struggle for the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania on May 12, Warren appeared to headquarters to be too slow putting in a supporting attack, and then not driving it home. The Rebels were too strongly posted to be moved, Warren insisted repeatedly; the tactics of attack were all wrong. “Warren seems reluctant to assault,” an angry General Meade explained to Grant, and he added, “I have ordered him at all hazards to do so.” If Meade’s patience with his Fifth Corps commander was wearing thin, Grant’s had worn through. His dispatch to Meade in reply was curt: “If Warren fails to attack promptly, send Humphreys to command his corps, and relieve him.”⁶

In the end, as at Mine Run, Meade acknowledged that the enemy’s position before Warren was indeed too strong—a fact demonstrated forcibly enough when the delayed Fifth Corps assault was repelled—and he decided not to relieve his general. Still, he said sharply, Warren had “no right to delay executing his orders under any circumstances. . . .” This was a “serious embarrassment,” but he hoped in future Warren would “overcome the difficulty.”

At the heart of the matter was a grim reality: General Lee seemed able to frustrate every Union move in the campaign. Everywhere they turned, it seemed, the Yankee troops encountered Rebels in good number manning sturdy field fortifications. A corps commander like Gouverneur Warren, facing this reality on the battle line day after day, could see no merit to orders from a distant headquarters to launch yet another frontal assault. Meade, and more importantly, Grant, believed that only if their orders were carried out instantaneously and forcefully, before the enemy was set and dug in, could they achieve the breakthrough they sought. Warren’s manner of ignoring or questioning his orders, and his cautious, time-consuming, McClellan-like preparations were bound to generate friction with his two superiors. Even before the Bloody Angle, Meade had confessed to Colonel Lyman how bitterly disappointed he was becoming with these habits: “I told Warren today that he lost his nerve, at which he professed to be very indignant.”⁷

As the Potomac army pressed on toward Richmond, it did not appear that General Warren was progressing at overcoming his difficulty. In the approach to Cold Harbor, Grant believed Warren did not move quickly enough to take advantage of an opportunity to catch some of Lee’s forces outside their ever-present entrenchments, and “his chagrin was extreme” at the missed chance.

During the first thrust at Petersburg following the crossing of the James, it was Meade’s turn to be chagrined. Warren (along with several fellow generals, to be sure) fumbled away the chance to seize the momentarily undefended Petersburg defenses. On June 18, for example, a critical Fifth Corps attack scheduled for noon did not commence until late afternoon, giving the enemy time to reinforce and hold a new line. The consequence, said Meade, was “a serious misfortune,” and he determined to sack Warren right then. His patience was exhausted, he explained to Grant; there was a “defect” in General Warren that he would not or could not correct—“he cannot execute an order without modifying it. . . . Such a defect strikes at the root of all military subordination, and it is entirely out of the question that I can command this army if each corps commander is to exercise a similar independence of action.” Although Meade in a carefully reasoned letter formally requested Grant “to relieve from duty with the Army, Maj. Genl. G. K. Warren,” he must have thought better of it after he cooled down; it was not at all clear whom to put in Warren’s place. The army was hurting for capable generals. It was reported to Washington that “Grant thinks the difficulty between Meade and Warren has been settled without the extreme remedy which Meade proposed last week.”⁸

For his part, Warren had become discouraged and almost demoralized by the murderous casualties and what he regarded as the senseless frontal assaults of the campaign. “For thirty days now,” he confessed to Colonel Lyman, “it has been one funeral procession past me; and it is too much!” He had little respect for Grant, who, he was sure, was far more responsible than Meade for the army’s trials. “The popular idea of General Grant is, I believe, very wrong . . . ,” Warren told his wife from the trenches at Petersburg. “To sit unconcerned on a log, away from the battlefield, whittling—to be a man on horseback or smoking a cigar—seems to exhaust the admiration of the country; and if this is really just, then Nero fiddling over burning Rome is sublime.”⁹

Warren had his good days and his bad days during the protracted siege of Petersburg. Even on the good days, General Grant remained a critic. Leading a successful raid against the Weldon Railroad in August 1864, Warren reported that he had beaten back a Confederate counterattack. “Whipped it easily,” he announced pridefully. Grant’s comment was tart: “it seems to me that when the enemy comes out of his works and attacks and is repulsed he ought to be followed vigorously to the last minute with every man.”¹⁰

By spring 1865, as Grant massed forces for the new campaign, Gouverneur Warren ranked as the Potomac army’s senior corps commander, having survived both the battlefields and his detractors in high places. John Sedgwick was gone, killed at Spotsylvania. Win Hancock was gone too, assigned to a departmental command. Horatio Wright had replaced Sedgwick in command of the Sixth Corps, and Andrew Humphreys now led the Second. John Parke succeeded Ambrose Burnside as head of the Ninth Corps. E.O.C. Ord had the Army of the James.

As he worked out his plans for what no doubt would be the climax of the war, General-in-Chief Grant quietly took to himself the direct management of at least the opening of the operation. Consequently, although Warren could not know it, his fate, should he have a role in the movement, rested not in Meade’s hands but in Grants. At that moment, just what was the general-in-chief’s view of the commander of the Fifth Corps? More than once in the past year’s campaigning, Grant had explicitly taken note of Warrens deliberateness of movement and of his reluctance to engage the enemy on other than his own terms. At Spotsylvania he had given Meade leave to replace Warren right in the midst of the fighting. At Petersburg he surely would have confirmed Meade in a decision to sack the Fifth Corps commander.

Although written with the benefit of hindsight, Grant’s opinion of Warren as expressed in his Memoirs contains elements that are on the record well before the events of Five Forks on April 1, 1865. After praising Warren as a man of fine intelligence, great earnestness, and quick perceptions, Grant entered his disclaimer: “But I had before discovered a defect which was beyond his control, that was very prejudicial to his usefulness. . . . He could see every danger at a glance before he had encountered it. He would not only make preparations to meet the danger which might occur, but he would inform his commanding officer what others should do while he was executing his move.” In a postwar interview, Grant was more explicit. When given an order, he said of General Warren, “instead of obeying—and know that the power which was guiding him would guide the others—he would hesitate and inquire and want to debate.” When events put Gouverneur Warren at the Five Forks crossroads on April 1, then, it would seem that his fate there was foreordained.¹¹

As Grant first perceived the operation that would reach a climax at Five Forks, it was to be primarily a show for Phil Sheridan and his cavalry corps. After his string of victories in the Shenandoah Valley, Sheridan had returned to the Petersburg front, the Northern press proclaimed, the newest hero of the war. It was said that he genuinely liked a fight, and was primed for one. Grant obliged him. As soon as the campaigning season arrived, Sheridan and his troopers were to embark on a massive raid beyond the western flank of the Confederates’ Petersburg entrenchments so as to sever Lee’s last rail lifelines, the South Side and Richmond & Danville railroads. That accomplished, Sheridan might return as he had come, or ride on to join Sherman’s army, then in North Carolina confronting the remnants of Joe Johnston’s Confederate forces.

Soon enough, however, Sheridan’s orders would be rewritten—at least in part at the urging of Sheridan himself, who expressed no interest in leaving center stage just before the final curtain. Sheridan’s new and even more significant objective was to turn Lee’s western flank and knock him loose from his Petersburg lines—and the infantry of the Fifth Corps was to supply the muscle for it. “I feel now like ending the matter if it is possible to do so . . . ,” Grant told the cavalry commander.¹²

Starting the night of Monday, March 27, the Federals began shifting forces for an advance westward from their Petersburg entrenchments. Sheridan’s cavalry corps, 9,000 strong, swung off south and west through open country toward Dinwiddie Court House. From that point the first of Sheridan’s original objectives, the South Side Railroad, was distant nine miles to the northwest—by way of Five Forks. Five Forks was simply an open space in the woods where roads from five directions came together, which fact alone made it of considerable military importance. It was also considerably important, just then, because it was a good four miles beyond the most westerly of General Lee’s defenses. If Yankees in force seized Five Forks, Lee’s right flank would be turned.

Lee was managing to track Sheridan’s cavalry force, and as he had done so often in the year past, he promptly surmised his opponent’s intent. He shifted his cavalry to the right flank to hold Five Forks, and determined to reinforce the troopers with the infantry of George Pickett’s division. In so doing, he would be removing a sizable segment of the Army of Northern Virginia—some 5,500 cavalry and 5,000 infantry—from the protection of his formidable entrenchments. Thus one of Grant’s goals was achieved without a shot being fired. Lee had no real choice in the matter. If he was to escape Petersburg with his army to join Joe Johnston in North Carolina—an inevitable course and probably a forlorn hope—his western flank must be secured. Lee’s orders to Pickett were uncompromising: “Hold Five Forks at all hazards.”¹³

As Grant’s scheme was originally conceived, the role of the Federal infantry was merely to be a supporting one—not to attack but to fix the enemy in his lines in order to secure a free hand for Sheridan’s cavalry. To do so, Warren’s Fifth Corps, holding the left, was to sidestep farther to the left. Humphreys’s Second Corps, next in line, would make a matching shift westward. To fill the resulting gap in the lines, a good part of Ord’s Army of the James was marched all the way around from the right. These movements took the better part of two days. By nightfall on Wednesday, March 29, Sheridan and his troopers had reached Dinwiddie Court House, six miles south of Five Forks, after a slow and muddy march, and the whole operation was turned toward a new objective.

Thinking now a great deal more ambitiously of “ending the matter,” General Grant canceled Sheridan’s orders “to cut loose and go after the enemy’s [rail]roads. . . .” Instead, in the morning he was to “push round the enemy if you can and get into his right rear.” In a second dispatch, Grant further significantly enlarged Sheridan’s mission: If in the latest circumstances the cavalryman believed there was a fair chance of turning the enemy’s right, Grant said he would “detach the Fifth Corps, and place the whole under your command for the operation.”¹⁴

By prior arrangement, Sheridan was receiving all his orders directly from the general-in-chief rather than through Meade’s Army of the Potomac headquarters. Grant was very much aware of the hard feelings between Meade and Sheridan, and, in any case, for this crucial operation he seems to have wanted to be sure the general leading it was unfettered and unlimited, a risk-taking aggressor after his own heart. In these March days, with final victory at last within his sights, General Grant was haunted by the fear that Lee might yet elude his grasp and escape to join forces with Joe Johnston in North Carolina and prolong the conflict. All too often during the past year, Grant had seen the Potomac army’s high command come up short in critical moments—and this could be the most critical moment of all. Furthermore, in these fast-changing circumstances it appeared that at some point General Meade’s control of the Fifth Corps infantry might be forfeited to the cavalry commander, who in his turn reported only to the general-in-chief.¹⁵

During these opening days, the Federals’ command structure for the Five Forks operation was a particularly awkward one. Sheridan and the cavalry dealt back and forth only with Grant. Warren and the Fifth Corps reported only to Meade. Warren’s movements, and any dealings Warren had with Sheridan, were by Meade’s orders, and for this operation Meade was acting under Grant’s tactical as well as his strategic direction. Throughout, Grant and Meade maintained separate headquarters several miles apart, between which the working of the telegraph was sometimes erratic. This unwieldy system would remain in force right up until the last day’s clash at Five Forks, and the virtually inevitable misunderstandings it generated would have their effect on events.

This was rough country to have to fight or march in, made all the worse when it began to rain late that Wednesday. The landscape was all lowlands, uniformly flat, with expanses of dripping second-growth woodland, tangled underbrush, and swamps and marshes, with few openings and with its streams and runs rapidly overflowing under pressure of the steady rainfall. The roads swam with mud. Veterans compared it to the Wilderness of benighted memory.

At Dinwiddie Court House on the twenty-ninth, Sheridan’s troopers skirmished with no more than an enemy cavalry picket, but to the east that afternoon Fifth Corps infantry ran into a considerably brisker fight, one described by General Warren as “a sanguinary encounter.” Warren’s orders put his lead division, under Charles Griffin, advancing up the Quaker Road toward its junction with the Boydton Plank Road to feel out the western end of the Confederates’ fortified line. Two Rebel brigades came out aggressively to meet this incursion, for the Boydton Plank Road was an important supply route for Lee’s army.

At the point of Griffin’s advance was the brigade led by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, one of the heroes of Gettysburg whom General Warren had found to defend Little Round Top. Chamberlain had a stiff fight on his hands until the Yankee guns and reinforcements sent in by Griffin finally pushed the enemy back into his entrenchments. Each side lost something under 400 men, but the day’s honors went to Warren. He had drawn out a sharp reaction from the Rebels, forced them to withdraw to their trenches, and now held one of their supply routes. That evening a note reached him from Meade’s headquarters: “The major-general commanding directs me to congratulate you and Major-General Griffin upon your success to-day.” For Gouverneur Warren this dispatch must have acted as a palliative, for during the day’s march headquarters had prodded him to irritation for supposedly misunderstanding an order. Warren’s corps artillerist, Charles Wainwright, said of his chief, “The devil within him seemed to be stirring all day.”¹⁶

Wednesday’s rain became Thursday’s deluge. The countryside was a quagmire. The army’s chief quartermaster termed it the worst day for moving wagon trains in his experience. Grant thought it “impossible for us to do much until it dries up a little,” and he told Sheridan to picket Dinwiddie Court House and bring the rest of his troopers back to where they could regroup and obtain forage. Phil Sheridan was not ready to give up the advance so easily, and he rode back to Grant’s headquarters to argue his case. To the staff there on his arrival he was all animation and enthusiasm. “I tell you, I’m ready to strike out to-morrow and go to smashing things!” he announced. He continued in the same vein in conversation with the general-in-chief and was apparently persuasive. “We will go on,” Sheridan remembered Grant saying.

With that settled, Sheridan raised the matter of his infantry support. He wanted Horatio Wright’s Sixth Corps, which had served him well through the Shenandoah Valley campaign. That would not be possible, Grant explained. Wright was posted back at the center of the lines opposite Petersburg, and it would require too much time and too much shifting to bring him up in time. The Fifth Corps was right at hand, a half-dozen miles to Sheridan’s right, and was the logical choice for the operation. The two generals, in their respective memoirs, said nothing more of their conversation during this momentous conference, but once the subject of the Fifth Corps was raised, surely they discussed its commander—and surely Grant must have reminded Sheridan of what to watch out for when dealing with Gouverneur Warren.¹⁷

In the drenching rain on March 30 the two sides consolidated their positions and readied themselves to fight. Three brigades of Pickett’s Virginians, along with two supporting brigades from Bushrod Johnson’s division, dug in around the Five Forks crossroads, with the troopers under Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of the commanding general, taking station in advance to feel out Sheridan at Dinwiddie Court House. This mixed force of infantry and cavalry was operating in isolation, four miles to the west of Lee’s main entrenchments. In those entrenchments, forming the Confederate right, Dick Anderson’s corps confronted Warren’s Fifth Corps.

As he went about his business that day, General Warren was in some perplexity. The operational orders from Grant, filtered with delays through Meade’s headquarters, were at times conflicting about what he was supposed to do, and exactly where Sheridan was taking position on his left, and whether or not he was to be in contact with the cavalry. He reported in detail the difficulties he faced as he made his cautious deployment against the enemy’s main line in front of him. At 4 o’clock that afternoon, exercising the prerogative of a corps commander, Warren decided to offer something positive of his own. Between where the Confederate entrenchments ended and Five Forks ran the White Oak Road, and Warren suggested that next morning he advance his corps to block that road, thus cutting the link between the two Confederate forces. Headquarters approved. However, at no time did Grant take Warren into his confidence concerning the revised scheme he and Sheridan were then working out for the Fifth Corps.¹⁸

Meanwhile, Sheridan was reporting that prisoners taken in skirmishing that day were identified as coming from Pickett’s division; now it was clear that the enemy had infantry in force as well as cavalry in front of him. To Sheridan this spelled opportunity. The Confederates in some numbers had come out from behind their entrenchments. “I believe I could, with the Sixth Corps, turn the enemy’s left [at Five Forks] or break through his lines,” he told Grant, then added dismissively, “but I would not like the Fifth Corps to make such an attempt.” Grant repeated that the Sixth Corps before Petersburg was posted too far away “for the operation by our left.” Then, reflecting his own distrust of Warren, the general-in-chief offered Sheridan the more easily managed exchange of Humphreys’s Second Corps for Warren’s Fifth. The two corps, already mobilized for the operation, need only change places. At this point, however, Robert E. Lee stepped in, and events overtook any further discussion of Grant’s intriguing proposal.¹⁹

Friday, March 31, would witness a decided check to Grant’s and Sheridan’s ambitions. Once again, as he had done so often before, General Lee set about breaking up a Federal offensive by seizing at least the local initiative. He rode out from Petersburg to supervise his spoiling attack in person. Sheridan and Warren, when they pushed forward on the thirty-first, would run into more than they had bargained for.

Warren’s preparations for blocking White Oak Road were being rather leisurely carried out that morning. At the point of his proposed advance was the division of Romeyn Ayres. Although an earlier warning from Grant for Warren “to watch closely on his left flank” was lost in the command tangle at Meade’s headquarters, Warren had been specifically ordered to reinforce Ayres and put him on guard, “as the enemy may attack him at daylight.” Warren’s second division, intended for that reinforcement and commanded by Samuel Crawford, was not yet posted close enough nor deployed for effective support. Warrens third division, under Charles Griffin, was three-quarters of a mile behind Crawford. While Ayres went forward to feel out the enemy positions, Warren found it “necessary” to remain at his headquarters a mile or so in the rear to deal with dispatches from army headquarters. What General Warren anticipated that morning was a slowly developing reconnaissance in force, moving his supporting troops forward in stages if needed. What he did not anticipate—or at least what he was not prepared for—was a surprise attack by the enemy.²⁰

General Lee had managed to marshal four brigades to meet this Federal threat. He saw the enemy coming at him with its left carelessly “in the air,” and as Ayres’s troops approached the White Oak Road, yelling men in butternut came running straight at them out of the woods on their flank. Ayres’s three brigades were each hit in turn, and one after another they broke and headed for the rear. Crawford’s division of three brigades, unprepared for this sudden onrush of fugitives (General Crawford, wrote one of his men sarcastically, “was, as usual, unready”), collapsed in confusion and was borne back by the tide. “They broke and ran,” a Virginian recalled, “we at their heels yelling like devils, and burning powder for all we were worth.”

The crash of musketry brought General Warren galloping to the scene. His first act was to send off an aide to ask Humphreys’s Second Corps on his right for help. Then he attempted to rally his routed troops by seizing the colors of one of the fleeing regiments and calling on them to stand against the enemy. This Sheridan-like gesture had some effect, but a final halt came only after the two beaten divisions rallied alongside Griffin’s men, who were holding a firm defensive position behind flooded Gravelly Run.²¹

From that secure base and with Humphreys’s support Warren organized a cautious countermove. This went slowly until General Lee, lacking any reinforcing troops, ordered a withdrawal from the advanced positions his men had gained. Reaching White Oak Road, Warren with his careful engineer’s eye made a personal reconnaissance of the Rebel entrenchments. “The examination showed me that the enemy’s defenses were as complete and as well located as any I had ever been opposed to,” he observed in his report. By late afternoon the Fifth Corps was content to be astride White Oak Road to the west of these entrenchments, which move it was believed would inhibit any effort by Anderson’s corps to support Pickett at Five Forks. This after all was the original intent of Warren’s March 31 advance, achieved finally at a cost of more than 1,800 casualties. Lee lost something less than half that number.

When the shooting stopped, General Warren, “white with rage” (as a war correspondent put it), rode up to Samuel Crawford, one of the routed divisional commanders, and without preamble “called him every vile name at his command.” This abuse was delivered in the presence of dozens of officers and men while the humiliated Crawford sat his horse as “stolid as a block of marble.” The corps artillerist, Charles Wainwright, termed such “awful fits of passion” as this a virtual disease with Warren. In this instance its effect on General Crawford was soon to become apparent.²²

General Grant cast a cold eye on the conduct of events that day, and Warren earned yet another black mark in the general-in-chief’s book of command. If it was true that Warren had checked the enemy, Grant asked Meade, “what is to prevent him from pitching in with his whole corps and attacking before giving him time to intrench or return in good order to his old intrenchments? I do not understand why Warren permitted his corps to be fought in detail. When Ayres was pushed forward he should have sent other troops to their support.”

At an earlier day, Colonel Lyman of Meade’s staff had remarked of General Warren that he “is not up to a corps command. . . . He cannot spread himself over three divisions. He cannot do it, and the result is partial and ill-concerted and dilatory movements.” That analysis was made when Warren was still new to corps command, yet it might just as well have been applied to the fight that day for the White Oak Road. Gouverneur Warren, it appeared, had grown little as a commander during his year in charge of the Fifth army corps. Thus, at least, was General Grant’s conclusion.²³

That Friday Sheridan’s cavalry corps came in for similar rough handling. With his infantry and Fitz Lee’s cavalry, Pickett delivered a spoiling attack of his own. On each of the several roads leading from Dinwiddie to Five Forks, Sheridan’s troopers were knocked back with driving force. Three of the Federal brigades had to scramble away well to the eastward to avoid being cut off. Against infantry the Yankee troopers had to fight dismounted, and in so doing they were at an immediate disadvantage. With every fourth man serving as a horse holder, their effective combat strength was promptly reduced 25 percent. In addition, having to get down off their mounts to do their fighting was not the usual thing for hone soldiers, and in general they did not stand up to foot soldiering quite as well as Pickett’s tough veterans. “Scattered all over the fields before us are our men, now rapidly falling back,” wrote a Yankee trooper coming up to reinforce a wavering line, “. . . & our Officers call to them to help to hold the enemy but not a man of them stops.”²⁴

Sheridan pushed every man he could find, including the regimental bands, into a last-ditch defensive line covering Dinwiddie Court House and let it be known that they were going back just that far and no farther. Brandishing his starred headquarters pennant, he galloped from one end of the battle line to the other, seeing and being seen, rallying everyone to his duty. No one in Union blue was better at this sort of thing than Phil Sheridan, and at dark, narrowly, the line held.

Afterward Sheridan told Colonel Horace Porter of Grant’s staff, who was with him as an observer, that this had been one of the liveliest days in his experience. Go back to General Grant, Little Phil told Porter, and tell him off the record that it was the enemy’s force, not his, that was in the real danger: “It is cut off from Lee’s army, and not a man in it should ever be allowed to get back to Lee.” At last the Rebel infantry was out from behind its fortifications, “and this is our chance to attack it.” In his on-the-record dispatch to the general-in-chief, Sheridan reported the fighting on his front that day, and remarked in closing, “This force is too strong for us.” But, he added, “I will hold on to Dinwiddie Court House until I am compelled to leave.” That blunt assessment galvanized Grant into immediate action to rescue an operation seemingly gone sour.²⁵

At 9 o’clock that night, acting on Grant’s order, Meade directed Warren to pull back “at once” from his front on the White Oak Road and send one of his divisions to report to Sheridan at Dinwiddie. Then, at 10:15, Meade multiplied his demands: Warren was ordered with the balance of the Fifth Corps to march west promptly to strike the flank and rear of Pickett’s force threatening the cavalry. In approving this new move, Grant wanted Meade to urge Warren “not to stop for anything.” Half an hour after authorizing the sending of the entire Fifth Corps to rescue the cavalry, Grant notified Sheridan of these actions. “You will assume command of the whole force sent to operate with you,” Grant told him. Then the general-in-chief promised—rashly, as it turned out—that these reinforcements “should reach you by 12 to-night.”²⁶

Later, during the long-running debate over Warrens sacking, much would be made of Grant’s telling Sheridan that the Fifth Corps would be with him by midnight on March 31. At the time, however, there was no debate; it was obvious to anyone on the scene who read the dispatch that Grant had been misinformed about the situation. Nothing in Sheridan’s actions that night suggests that he actually thought the Fifth Corps could pull up stakes where it was on the White Oak Road and march six miles on atrocious roads through the darkness to Dinwiddie in an hour and a half or so. (It is a puzzle why Grant might have thought so.) Sheridan’s one communication that he sent directly to Warren, written at 3:00 A.M. on April 1, made no complaint about the Fifth Corps’ not yet being at his side, and instead discussed his plans for action at dawn “if the enemy remain.”²⁷

In any event, whether or not Sheridan yet realized it, he was already rescued from his plight—and, ironically, by Gouverneur Warren. Before anyone at headquarters ordered it, Warren had taken it upon himself to send supporting troops to the embattled cavalry. In late afternoon on the thirty-first he ordered one of his brigades to march to the sound of guns off to the west, where he deduced, from the way the sound was receding, that Sheridan’s troopers were being pushed back. It was the arrival of this brigade of Yankee infantry on his flank that determined Pickett to give up his offensive and, in the small hours of the morning, to pull back to Five Forks.²⁸

The fact of the matter is that General Warren did about as well as anyone could have that night in moving the three divisions of the Fifth Corps to Sheridan’s position. He had to act on contradictory orders. Unavoidable difficulties on the march were numerous, including the need to bridge flooding Gravelly Run. The head of the column reached Dinwiddie by daybreak on April 1. In the lead was Joshua Chamberlain’s brigade, and Chamberlain went forward to Sheridan to report. Returning his salute, Sheridan asked, “Where is Warren?” in a tone that Chamberlain thought was more challenge than question. “He is at the rear of the column, Sir,” he replied. “That is where I expected to find him,” Sheridan muttered. “What is he doing there?” Chamberlain tried to explain that the general had to personally disengage his last division from yesterday’s battlefield, and he felt relief when he was dismissed to attend to his brigade.²⁹

Sheridan’s tone accurately reflected his disposition that morning, which was sore-headed. He was still very much embarrassed by the sharp reverse his cavalry had suffered the day before. Now the enemy forces had slipped away from his front, and he would have to follow them to some new and probably fortified position at Five Forks. Although Grant had put a full infantry corps under his command, it was not the corps—and not the corps commander—that Sheridan had wanted. Under these circumstances, what General Warren did next was (in retrospect, at least) the worst possible thing he could have done. What he did next was nothing at all.

Warren reached Dinwiddie Court House with the last of his Fifth Corps divisions at 8 o’clock that morning. There he found a dispatch from Meade’s headquarters telling him that as soon as he joined forces with Sheridan “you will be under his orders and will report to him.” Warren would write, at a later date, that this order to serve under Phil Sheridan “gave me much satisfaction at the time of its receipt.” That may be doubted. On that April 1 morning, with a battle clearly in the offing, it was three hours before Warren made any effort to see Sheridan, nor did he send a staff man to announce his arrival and the arrival of his corps. “Were Warren a mind-reader,” remarked General Chamberlain, “he would have known it was a time to put on a warmer manner towards Sheridan.” As it was, Warren’s failure to report as ordered to his new chief in timely fashion bordered on insubordination; certainly it reflected a sulky resentment of his new, less exalted station.³⁰

When finally Warren did report, at 11:00 A.M., he met a decidedly chilly welcome. “I made the remark to General Sheridan,” Warren later testified, “that we had had rather a field day of it since yesterday morning. He said to me, ‘Do you call that a field day?” I saw by the tone of his remark that he was not very well pleased with what I had said.” Warren rather lamely explained that he meant only that General Lee “had given us about as lively a time as I had had in my experience.” Sore-headed Sheridan obviously did not want to be reminded of that painful fact, and, said Warren, “we ceased conversation.” The tardy, frosty encounter surely contributed to Sheridan’s forming opinion of what he afterward described as his new subordinate’s “manner” on this day of battle.³¹

Sheridan had spent most of the morning supervising the cavalry’s follow-up of the enemy withdrawal toward Five Forks and pondering his course. At noon, in the midst of this study, he was visited by Lieutenant Colonel Orville Babcock, of Grant’s headquarters. The message Babcock delivered to him was verbal and an eye opener: “General Grant directs me to say to you, that if in your judgment the Fifth Corps would do better under one of the division commanders, you are authorized to relieve General Warren, and order him to report to General Grant, at headquarters.”³²

This startling message, which, in the event, sealed Gouverneur Warrens fate, was the result of a sudden but nonetheless calculated decision on Grant’s part—a decision triggered by a misunderstanding.

That morning, Grants headquarters had sent Captain E. R. Warner to the Fifth Corps camp, rather than to Meade, to collect a status report. When during the night General Warren had left camp to shepherd the last of his divisions for delivery to Sheridan, he told his adjutant, Colonel Frederick Locke, that since Locke was not needed for the movement, he should stay behind and catch up on his sleep so as to be fresh for the day’s duties. Reaching the Fifth Corps camp, Captain Warner woke up Locke to find out the exact whereabouts of the troops. When he had last seen them, said Locke, they were halted at the bridge being built over Gravelly Run. What the half-awake Locke neglected to explain, or perhaps what Warner failed to understand, was that this was very old news—2:00 A.M. news, to be exact. When Captain Warner subsequently delivered his report at Grant’s headquarters at 10 o’clock that morning, Warren had already been at Dinwiddie, along with all of his troops, for two hours.

Warner’s false report acted on General Grant like the last straw. Here was what ought to be perhaps the final battle of the war, with the fighting seemingly in crisis, and (once again) corps commander Warren was lagging back and not getting his troops up to the front. Once before Grant had wanted to relieve Warren for this same offense and had allowed Meade to talk him out of it. Captain Warner heard Grant say that he “was sorry now that he had not done it—had not relieved him.” U. S. Grant was not one to make the same mistake twice, nor was he one to think twice about the correction. He called over Colonel Babcock, just then preparing to leave for Five Forks, and told him to tell Sheridan to relieve Warren if he judged the Fifth Corps would “do better” under another commander.³³

This supposed transgression was not by itself grounds enough for Grant to relieve Warren of his corps command. But to Grant it was more than enough for him to invite Phil Sheridan to find the grounds—or the excuse. “At all events,” wrote a Fifth Corps staff man who witnessed these happenings, “General Grant knew that General Sheridan was not a person who could be intrusted with such a weapon and not use it.”³⁴

It might seem, at that noon hour on April 1, that events were conspiring against Gouverneur Warren. His checkered record as a corps commander had just been brought up in the general-in-chief’s mind by a transgression he had not in fact committed. Already, perceiving himself demoted in the midst of the campaign, he had managed with his sulks to grate on the nerves of his new chief. And now that new chief had in his hands the means to sack him, and certainly the will to do so, if it should come to that. Still, to come to that was going to require a further fateful event or two.

At 1:00 P.M. Sheridan summoned Warren to bring up the Fifth Corps and to outline to him the plan of attack. The cavalry, Sheridan said, had sighted an east-west line of Confederate field fortifications along White Oak Road, centered on the Five Forks intersection. It was thickly manned by infantry and defended with artillery. Although hindsight would develop a detailed knowledge of this line on Sheridan’s part, in truth he understood comparatively little about it when he presented Warren with his orders: The Rebels were in line of battle directly ahead; the cavalry would feint on the left; the Fifth Corps would attack on the right to turn the enemy’s works; the assault was to be in full corps strength. “We talked that over until I understood it, I think,” Warren recalled, “and he was convinced that I understood him.”

One of Sheridan’s staff directed Warren to mass his troops for the assault astride the Gravelly Run Church Road, which by report led directly to the enemy’s targeted eastern flank. The staff man would later testify that he had made no actual reconnaissance of the enemy position; all he was told to do was to find a place to post the Fifth Corps for the attack which was concealed from the Rebels’ sight. The three divisions were at rest some two and a half miles from the assembly point, and Warren sent a staff officer to bring them up. “He went off as fast as any man could go down that road,” Warren remembered.³⁵

While he waited for his troops, Warren the careful engineer sat down under a tree to make a little sketch of the planned attack. If the general scheme was Sheridan’s, the specifics were left for him to work out. Warren seems to have assumed, in his newly subordinate role, that this planning function was the limit of his commander’s discretion, and he did not reconnoiter the position he was to attack, nor did he order it done. His sketch showed the Confederate line, as he understood it, ending on the east in a slight bend at the junction of the White Oak and Gravelly Run Church roads. He placed Ayres’s division on the left, to strike near the end of the works to fix the Rebels in place. On the right was Crawford’s division, aimed squarely at the point where the line ended behind White Oak Road. Griffin was in rear of Crawford, to exploit the effect of his assault. Warren directed that when the battle line reached White Oak Road, “it will swing round to the left” to turn the position. As soon as the infantry engaged, Sheridan’s cavalry would push forward against the rest of the Rebel works. Warren showed the sketch to Sheridan for his approval—“I understood that I was forming exactly as he wanted me,” Warren recalled—then had copies made for his division and brigade commanders.³⁶

It was an excellent plan, with but one failing—the Confederate battle line was not where it was thought to be. Instead of ending where the Gravelly Run Church Road intersected the White Oak Road, the line ended nearly a half mile short, or west, of that point. Furthermore, instead of terminating in a slight bend, the line actually turned sharply back at a right angle, forming a defensive “return” some 150 yards in length. As a consequence, when the Federal battle line emerged as planned into the open to reach the White Oak Road, it would be marching not toward the enemy’s works but right past them and straight on into empty space. Responsibility for this planning blunder would never be admitted or even acknowledged. Certainly the fault was not Gouverneur Warren’s, yet the effect of it would ruin him.

Had he been in hearty partnership with Sheridan that day, General Warren would likely have fed and rested his men upon arrival at Dinwiddie and then ordered them under arms, ready to march to the front on the instant. In the event, however, it took the usual time to call them together from their campfires and form them up and set them on the march. Their passage was over a single narrow muddy road, blocked by the cavalry’s usual detritus, forage wagons and held horses. Warren matter-of-factly explained to an increasingly impatient Phil Sheridan that he could not be ready to attack before 4 o’clock that afternoon.

What seems to have bothered Sheridan the most during that tense Saturday afternoon was Warren’s “manner.” In his official report he hardly bothered to disguise his contempt: “General Warren did not exert himself to get up his corps as rapidly as he might have done, and his manner gave me the impression that he wished the sun to go down before dispositions for the attack could be completed.” That could be read as a questioning of Warren’s personal courage—and Warren would so read it.³⁷

Joshua Chamberlain thought the trouble between the two men on April 1 was simply a clash of personalities. “General Warren’s temperament is such that he, instead of showing excitement, generally shows an intense concentration in what I call important movements,” Chamberlain said, “and those who do not know him might take it to be apathy when it is deep, concentrated thought and purpose.” Sheridan of course did not know Warren. For his part, Warren took it as his primary duty in those hours to focus intently and coolly on the plan for battle, trusting his staff to bring up the troops with all due speed. As a Fifth Corps veteran put it, “He did not ride around swearing and cursing at a fearful rate.” The three hours required to mobilize for the attack was a reflection of how the Army of the Potomac usually did these things. It was not Phil Sheridan’s way, and he might better have set the whole operation in motion earlier in the day. In any case, by the time the fighting finally opened, his temper toward General Warren was perilously near the boiling point.³⁸

George Pickett had five brigades of infantry and ten guns in his battle line, with cavalry guarding the flanks. He was outnumbered by perhaps two to one, but his greater problem was his open flanks, especially his left, four miles distant from the main Confederate entrenchments. Pickett himself and Fitz Lee, his cavalry commander, spent much of the day (and much of the battle) at a shad bake some distance behind their lines. They assumed that the Federals on their front that day were primarily cavalry, of which they had no great fear. Their absence generated a great deal of later criticism, but in the end it probably did not have much effect on the battle’s outcome.

It was a few minutes after 4:00 P.M. when the Fifth Corps infantrymen stepped off to the attack. It was intended that Ayres’s division on the left strike the enemy line first, near its eastern end, and Sheridan and Warren rode with it. Straight across White Oak Road strode the Yankee infantry—and found nothing to attack. Suddenly, from off to the left, Ayres’s flank companies came under sharp fire from an enemy battle line. As was always the case with surprise flanking fire, there was some confusion and wavering in the ranks, but soon enough the veteran Romeyn Ayres took charge and changed front abruptly to the left and drove straight against their tormentors.

Meanwhile, on the right, Crawford’s division, intended for the main assault against the end point of the Rebel line, kept on advancing straight ahead into empty space. An ever-widening gap opened between Ayres and Crawford. Warren reacted instinctively. One part of his assault was going awry; he would tend to it himself. Off he galloped after the errant Crawford, leaving the rest of his corps to shift for itself. This would be the final event, in the sequence of events, that sealed Warren’s fate.

Samuel Crawford, it was said, was militarily narrow-minded, “obeying orders in a certain literal fashion that saved him the censure of superiors.” The attack might not be working out as it had been planned, but that was not for General Crawford to be concerned about. He would just keep going straight ahead until someone told him differently. In addition, Crawford had not forgotten the humiliation of Warren’s public dressing-down the day before, and he was not going to do anything on his own initiative that might stir things up again.

Marching behind Crawford, Charles Griffin saw the flank fire open on Ayres, saw Ayres change front sharply to his left, saw the gap opening between the two lead divisions. His division was supposed to be in support of Crawford, but here was Ayres doing the only fighting to be seen—and Ayres looking as if he could use the support. Riding up to him, Griffin asked what had happened. “Nothing new,” came Ayres’s reply. “The same old stray; Crawford has gone off and left me to fight alone.” Griffin made a wheel left and went in to join the battle. One of Griffin’s brigadiers, Joshua Chamberlain, came upon Phil Sheridan right on the battle line as he was putting his brigade into action. “By God, that’s what I want to see!” Sheridan yelled to him over the din. “General officers at the front!”

As Ayres and Griffin got more of their commands into the fight, the pressure on the North Carolinians defending the line of the return that formed Pickett’s left became overwhelming. The line began breaking apart, and then the Federals swept over it. Sheridan himself spurred his horse right over the breastworks to show the way. “We have a record to make, before that sun goes down, that will make hell tremble!” he called to the troops with him in the charge. “I want you there!”³⁹

Meanwhile, off to the north and east, Warren could not immediately locate General Crawford to redirect his straying division. The first of Crawford’s brigades that he came upon he dragged off toward the sound of the firing, told the brigadier to stay there to form the pivot for the division’s change of direction, and rode off to corral the other two brigades. In his absence, one of Sheridan’s staff found the waiting brigade and ordered it straight into the battle. This left the others of Crawford’s command, as they came up, wondering what to do next. At last Warren managed to get all of Crawford’s troops into action, at one point personally leading them over the barricades just as Sheridan had done, and in the act having his horse shot under him. The angle at which Crawford’s belated troops struck the enemy turned out to be fortuitous—they drove right into the rear of the reeling defenders and accelerated the rout.

Warren sent his aide, Colonel Locke, to Sheridan to report the glad news—he was in the enemy’s rear, cutting off his retreat, taking many prisoners. Sheridan, flushed with the victory at the return that he had just seen and helped lead, turned on the messenger. “By God, sir, tell General Warren he wasn’t in the fight!” he raged at the thunderstruck Locke. “Must I tell General Warren that, sir?” Locke asked. “I would not like to take a verbal message like that to General Warren. May I take it down in writing?” Sheridan was unyielding: “Take it down, sir; tell him, by God, he was not at the front!” Soon thereafter, coming on Griffin, Sheridan told him he was now commander of the Fifth Corps.

A quickly scrawled order went off to Warren, relieving him and ordering him to report to Grant’s headquarters. It was handed to Warren just as he was adding up the Fifth Corps’ abundant spoils of victory. The fact of the victory, paradoxically, seemed only to stiffen Sheridan’s resolve, and thus he would tell the stunned Warren, “I don’t reconsider my decisions. Obey the order!”⁴⁰

And the victory was as complete as any in the annals of the Army of the Potomac. The key junction of Five Forks was securely in Federal hands, Lee’s western flank was turned, the way was opened to seize his South Side rail lifeline. Pickett’s division was wrecked, with more than 500 dead and wounded and some 2,500 captured. Federal casualties came to 830, three-quarters of them infantry. The victory belonged to Warren’s Fifth Corps. Grant responded promptly. “I have ordered an immediate assault along the lines,” he announced to his staff. General Lee telegraphed President Davis, “I think it is absolutely necessary that we should abandon our position to-night.”⁴¹

Sheridan’s sacking of Gouverneur Warren was soon relegated to hardly more than a footnote in the overwhelming news of the subsequent race toward Appomattox and the ending of the war. Warren, as was his right under the Articles of War, applied for a court of inquiry, but Grant put him off with the excuse that assembling a court and witnesses was “impossible at this time.” General Meade, concluding that an injustice had been done, reminded Grant a few days after Appomattox that a permanent head of the Fifth Corps was needed. “Should you be disposed to reassign General Warren I shall make no objection,” Meade said diplomatically. Nothing came of this, for it surely would have required at least tacit acceptance by Sheridan. George Armstrong Custer, who had served some time under Sheridan, remarked of the Warren case that Phil Sheridan “was the kind of man to never take anything back,” even if “ever so wrong.”⁴²

Grant remained determined to shut off any sort of inquiry into the matter, and so long as he was general-in-chief and then president he rebuffed all Warren’s efforts for a hearing. It was only under President Hayes, Grant’s successor, that a court of inquiry was finally convened, fourteen years after the fact, in 1879. Public interest in the case was whetted by the reversal, earlier that year, of the 1863 court-martial conviction of Fitz John Porter. Perhaps, thought Warren’s supporters, the climate was right for visiting justice on onetime Army of the Potomac generals.⁴³

The Warren court of inquiry—the military equivalent of a civilian grand jury—would drag on for almost two years, with the testimony and documents filling two large volumes. Its star witnesses included Warren (now reverted to lieutenant colonel in the regular army), Sheridan (now a lieutenant general), and Grant (now an ex-president), plus a number of prominent ex-Confederate officers. Sheridan’s right to sack Warren was not at issue, but only his reasons for doing so.

As it happened, the Warren court of inquiry would never hear Sheridan’s true rationale for doing what he did on that April Saturday fourteen years before. Phil Sheridan did what he did, of course, because his superior, General-in-Chief Grant, had lost all confidence in Gouverneur Warren. Grant made sure Sheridan understood that fact, then invited him to replace Warren at the first sign of weakness. On April 1, after Warren’s cool, aloof manner had served to prime him, Sheridan ignited in the heat of the battle and sacked Warren because he “wasn’t in the fight” at his side in the one small segment of the battleground that he, Sheridan, witnessed.

The officers of the Warren court, tightly restricted to investigating only the events of March 31-April 1, examined four “imputations” derived from Sheridan’s and Grant’s official reports: (1) that Warren did not move properly or with his whole force to seize White Oak Road on March 31; (2) that he was slow, on the night of March 31, to bring his forces from White Oak Road to Dinwiddie to reinforce Sheridan; (3) that on April 1 he did not exert himself bringing up his troops and (said Sheridan) “gave me the impression that he wished the sun to go down before dispositions for the attack could be completed”; and (4) that at Five Forks he did not exert himself to inspire his troops when “portions of his line gave way.”⁴⁴

These were not reasons but only excuses that Sheridan cobbled together after the fact, and the court would devote week after week to debating minute-by-minute arcane detail. In the end it issued a narrow report derived from narrow issues. Warren was found not negligent in the White Oak Road fighting on March 31, although he ought to have moved faster and been at the front earlier. The court said it “was not practicable” for the Fifth Corps to have reached Dinwiddie by midnight on the thirty-first, although Warren ought to have reached there sooner than he did. He was not guilty of unnecessary delay in bringing his corps to the front on April 1, nor did he demonstrate that day any “such wish” for delay. Finally, no fault was found when Warren, acting in his role as corps commander on April 1, went off to redirect Crawfords division into the battle. While the court did not come right out and say so, it was obvious that there had been nothing in Warren’s conduct at Five Forks to justify removing him from the command of the Fifth Corps.

The closest public statement of the real truth behind the Warren case came during Grant’s testimony. Asked why he had given Sheridan leave to sack Warren, Grant answered, “I knew of his previous conduct. I was apprehensive that he might fail General Sheridan at the critical moment.” Although not permitted by the court to bring up anything specific about that previous conduct, Grant went on to elaborate: “I wanted orders promptly obeyed . . . ; where officers undertook to think for themselves and consider that the officer who had issued the order did not understand the circumstances and had not considered the work to be done, it tended to failure and delay.” And that he did not like, asked Warren’s counsel. “And that I did not like,” Grant agreed. “And that land of conduct led to the removal of one officer.” While this last would be stricken from the court-of-inquiry record, to the thoughtful listener it must have echoed loud and clear.⁴⁵

The Warren court completed deliberations and forwarded its findings to the War Department on November 8, 1881. There the report remained, held in confidence by Secretary of War Robert T. Lincoln for more than a year. It appears that Lincoln was accommodating his father’s two famous war-winning generals, sparing them any embarrassment over their wartime mistreatment of Warren. Then, on August 8, 1882, Gouverneur Warren died, from complications of diabetes. “I die a disgraced soldier” were his last words. Some three months later Secretary Lincoln directed that the record of the Warren court of inquiry be published.⁴⁶

The sacking of Gouverneur Warren, on April 1, 1865, was beyond any doubt a grave injustice. However, perhaps had the same fate been visited upon one or two of the Army of the Potomac’s less-than-stellar corps commanders back in 1862 or 1863, to serve as an indelible lesson to that army’s high command, a kind of rough justice might have been the result. As it was, General Warren became a martyr to no cause at all.