The year 1864 dawned amid high hopes in the North. The victories of the preceding six months made final triumph seem within reach before another new year dawned. In Grant, Lincoln had finally found the general he felt confident could see the conflict through, and the northern people shared their president’s confident expectations for quick and decisive battlefield victories as soon as the drying of the South’s dirt roads made it possible to open the campaigning season again that spring. With Grant in mind, Congress recreated the rank of lieutenant general, which previously only George Washington had held (Winfield Scott had ranked as a brevet, or honorary, lieutenant general). After satisfying himself that Grant had no ambitions for the 1864 presidential election, Lincoln nominated him for the rank, and Congress promptly gave its approval. Grant was now the highest-ranking Union general, and Lincoln formally appointed him as general in chief of all the Union armies. President, Congress, and public eagerly awaited the coming of spring and Grant’s devastating new campaign.
Surprisingly, Confederates also looked with confidence to the resumption of active campaigning in the spring of 1864 despite the string of defeats with which they had finished out the year 1863. This curious state of mind sprang in part from their own residual belief in their inherent superiority to northerners and in part from focusing on a number of Confederate victories in minor battles during the winter and early spring of 1864. Rebels could point with pride to their side’s dramatic, if strategically relatively insignificant victories over secondary Union expeditions or garrisons at places like Olustee, Florida; Sabine Pass, on the Texas–Louisiana line; Fort Pillow, Tennessee; or Mansfield, Louisiana. Confederate forces had also held on to Charleston, South Carolina, including a battered but still defiant Fort Sumter, despite the Union’s joint army–navy expedition to take it, including several ironclad warships and several thousand ground troops. These victories all put together did not equal half the strategic importance of a single Vicksburg or even a single Chickamauga, but they sustained white southerners in the sublime confidence that they were bound to win the war in the end.
Adding to Confederate optimism was the fact that Lincoln was up for reelection in the fall of 1864. There was never any question of postponing or canceling the election. The northern voters were going to have the chance, in the middle of a war for the nation’s survival, to express—and enforce—their opinion as to whether that war should continue. If, as seemed likely, a “peace Democrat” won the Democratic presidential nomination, the election might well become a referendum on the war. If the Confederate armies could thwart Union plans for 1864 and exact heavy punishment in doing so, the northern electorate might become demoralized enough to choose a candidate who would give up the war and accept Confederate independence. As events were to prove, both Union and Confederacy entered the fourth year of the war with far more optimism than was warranted.
The war was changing. The fight at Fort Pillow, in which Confederate cavalry raiders under the command of the unorthodox but highly successful Nathan Bedford Forrest captured a minor Union garrison on the Mississippi River, also marked a disturbing trend toward more violence in the war. Almost nothing enraged white southerners more than the presence of tens of thousands of newly freed African Americans in the ranks of the Union armies. Since the first black soldiers had donned the blue a year before, Confederates had voiced many threats, both formal and informal, of what they would do to black soldiers and their Union officers. President Davis himself had decreed that captured black soldiers would be treated not as prisoners of war but as recovered slaves, and their white officers, if captured, would be turned over to state authorities for disposition under the laws governing the incitement of slave rebellion—an offense punishable by death. Lower-ranking Confederates, from brigadier down to private, penned in letters and diaries and shared with each other their more straightforward threat to take no black prisoners at all. Their attitudes are revealing about the racial motivations of Confederate soldiers.
The case of Fort Pillow became an early example of the fulfillment of these threats. There attacking Confederate troops killed black Union soldiers as they attempted to surrender and killed some who apparently had successfully surrendered a few minutes before. It was one of the most famous but far from the only case of such behavior on the part of Confederate troops, who went almost mad with rage at the sight of black men in blue uniforms bearing arms against their former masters. This new element of brutality raised the overall level of violence in the war, as black and sometimes white Union troops learned of the Confederate massacres and sometimes carried out small-scale, unauthorized retaliation, especially in the heat of battle.
Confederate policy toward black Union soldiers added to the horrors of war in another way. Since official Confederate policy regarded captured black soldiers not as prisoners of war but rather as slaves to be returned to bondage, the Confederacy refused to exchange such captured blacks. Union authorities, particularly Grant, believed themselves obligated to protect the rights of every man wearing the uniform of the United States. They therefore maintained that no exchanges could take place unless both black and white soldiers were released without discrimination. On top of this, the parole system was already in bad shape after the Confederacy had returned to the ranks, without exchange, the paroled prisoners of Pemberton’s army surrendered at Vicksburg.
By the beginning of heavy fighting in the spring of 1864, parole and exchange had ceased completely. As prisoners were taken, they went into prisoner-of-war camps that had been designed for far smaller numbers of men and a system that had never foreseen such a massive prison population. The Confederacy had difficulty feeding its own troops, and the prisoners penned up by the tens of thousands in open stockades like that at Millen, Georgia, or the infamous Andersonville prison in the same state had a much lower priority. Camping in one place for an extended period, whether prisoners or not, was statistically the most dangerous thing Civil War soldiers did since the stationary camp promoted the spread of the war’s most efficient killers, disease germs. In the prison pens of the South, disease raged among populations weakened by malnutrition, adding to the horrors of the last year of the war. The only war crimes trial arising from the Civil War ended in the hanging of Andersonville commandant Major Henry Wirz.
Aside from the increasing brutality of the war due to Confederate reaction to black soldiers and the resulting breakdown of the exchange system, the conflict had a momentum of its own in moving toward increasing destructiveness. Each side would show itself in 1864 and 1865 even more willing to destroy the property of enemy civilians than had been the case the year before, as the citizens of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and Columbia, South Carolina, along with many others, were to experience. Guerrilla warfare was another aspect of the conflict that tended to increase its violence and decrease restraint. As Confederate fortunes waned and more of the South came under Union control, guerrilla activity increased. The guerrillas hid among the civilian population and drew their sustenance from it, thus making it a target of Union retaliation. Guerrillas were also more likely to ignore the laws and customs of war, as when Confederate guerrilla leader William Quantrill and his men massacred the male population of the Unionist Kansas town of Lawrence. By the final weeks of the war, guerrillas and even regular Confederate cavalry harassing Sherman’s advance through the Carolinas were routinely murdering Union soldiers who fell into their hands.
Leaders on both sides knew that the coming campaigns would require the largest armies they could possibly raise. For the Confederacy this simply meant continued enforcement of its conscription law, which included the indefinite extension of every serving Confederate soldier’s term of service. On the Union side it was more complicated. The system of raising new troops continued, with local recruiting quotas and the threat of conscription to follow if districts did not make their quotas. The special problem for the Union was that it was still committed to honoring its contracts with the soldiers who in the spring and summer of 1861 had enlisted for three-year terms. Those men’s terms would expire during the campaigning season of 1864, and they made up nearly half the Union army and were among its best and most experienced troops. The Union could not afford to lose all or even most of them, but neither Lincoln nor Congress would ever have approved the Confederate expedient of simply extending all terms for the duration of the war.
The only solution was to persuade the veterans, who could no longer have any illusions about what war and soldiering meant, to reenlist voluntarily. For that purpose, the government offered a number of inducements. Any man who reenlisted received a four-hundred-dollar bounty in addition to whatever bounty his home state and town were offering for recruits at the time. He would also receive a thirty-day furlough as well as an extra chevron on his uniform sleeve, marking him as a “veteran volunteer.” If a specified percentage of a given regiment reenlisted, that regiment could keep its organization and its regimental number. That last provision added group solidarity as a motivating factor and also supplied an additional motivation for officers to encourage their men to reenlist since only through the survival of the regiment could the officers keep their commissions.
Ultimately a very high percentage of veterans in the Union’s western armies—the Army of the Tennessee, the Army of the Cumberland, and the Army of the Ohio, clustered near Chattanooga under Sherman’s command— chose to reenlist. Among these seasoned and confident western soldiers, reenlistment rates approached 100 percent, a testimony to the Union fighting man’s devotion to see the Union preserved and slavery abolished. By this time, Union soldiers clearly understood that preserving the Union and ending slavery were one and the same. Yet, while many may have enlisted in 1861 bent on nothing but preserving the Union, those reenlisting in 1863 and 1864 knew that they were fighting for the cause of emancipation.
Within the Army of the Potomac, where soldiers had experienced a procession of dismal commanders and much less success, reenlistments ran about half that rate. New levies, often composed of the worst offscourings of the slums and dockyards, would have to make up the difference within the Union’s fighting force in Virginia.
When Grant assumed overall command of the Union armies, Sherman urged him to maintain his headquarters in the western theater, correctly pointing out that that region had been and would continue to be the scene of the war’s really decisive fighting. Grant, however, was far more politically astute than Sherman would ever be, and he recognized that politics required him to go east and pitch his headquarters tent with the Army of the Potomac. Northern public opinion expected it, counting on Grant to be the man who would finally whip Lee, and only by staying in Virginia could Grant neutralize political pressures on the operation of the Army of the Potomac, pressures that would, if left unchecked, allow Lee to use the politicians’ fears for Washington to disrupt Union arrangements—as the wily Confederate had done before.
Grant thus would accompany the Army of the Potomac, which would remain under Meade’s command, somewhat to that general’s own surprise. As Grant explained to Meade before the campaign started, his army’s objective was to be Lee’s army—not Richmond or any other strategic location. “Wherever Lee goes, you will go also.” In Grant’s reckoning, once Lee’s army was destroyed, he could have all the strategic locations he wanted. Yet the Army of the Potomac would march toward Richmond nevertheless not because the city itself was Grant’s chief objective but in order to force Lee to stand and fight. In Grant’s scheme of things, Richmond was to serve the purpose of an anvil. The Army of the Potomac would be the hammer that would pound Lee’s army.
But Grant’s plan for the spring and summer of 1864 called for much more than just another On-to-Richmond campaign. While the Army of the Potomac advanced to hammer Lee against Richmond, two smaller Union armies would threaten the Rebel capital simultaneously from both east and west, forcing Lee to divide his attention and possibly his army. To the northwest of Richmond, Grant’s orders called for General Franz Sigel to lead a new Army of the Shenandoah up the valley of that name, threatening the breadbasket of Virginia and potentially its direct line of communications with the trans-Appalachian states. At the same time, Grant wanted General Benjamin Butler to lead his Army of the James up the river of that name to approach Richmond from the east, posing an immanent threat to that city both directly and by threatening its rail connections to the Deep South through the town of Petersburg, twenty-five miles to the south.
Nor were Grant’s plans for success in 1864 limited to the narrow and perennially deadlocked fringe of the continent between the Appalachians and the Atlantic. West of the mountains lay Grant’s old command, the Military Division of the Mississippi, now under Sherman. Grant’s most trusted lieutenant was to lead the combined armies of the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Ohio, one hundred thousand strong, in a campaign across north Georgia from Dalton toward Atlanta with the assigned goal of hammering the Confederacy’s Army of Tennessee in the same way Meade, under Grant’s direct supervision, would be pounding the Army of Northern Virginia. As in Virginia, Grant planned for the trans-Appalachian theater a secondary campaign that could distract and weaken the Confederate army there while Sherman went in for the kill. General Nathaniel P. Banks, commanding the Department of the Gulf, was to lead his army, including two corps of Grant’s old Vicksburg veterans, in a drive to capture the Confederacy’s last major Gulf Coast port at Mobile, Alabama. When Grant explained to Lincoln his plans for the coming summer’s campaign, the president grasped the concept at once and summed it up in one of his colorful midwestern expressions: “Those not skinning can hold a leg.”
The great nineteenth-century Prussian general Helmut von Moltke once quipped that no plan survives contact with the enemy but is said to have added that luck is the residue of good planning. So it turned out for Grant in 1864, but not before a number of disappointments altered his plan and made his task more difficult. Banks, Butler, and Sigel were the purest of political generals, chosen by Lincoln at the outset of the war not so much because he thought they could win victories—though he hoped they might—as because he believed he needed to secure the support of their constituencies. Those constituencies were northeastern Republicans, northeastern Democrats, and German immigrants, respectively.
Hitherto in the war each of these three political generals had given ample evidence of his military incompetence, but Grant, always sensitive to Lincoln’s political needs, chose to try to work with them. He hoped that Sigel would finally make good use of his prewar training in the Prussian army to wage a successful campaign that would at least neutralize the Shenandoah Valley, but the hapless German general blundered to defeat there in the May 15 Battle of New Market, at which the corps of cadets of the Virginia Military Institute fought as a battalion in the victorious Confederate army commanded by former U.S. vice president and 1860 southern Democratic presidential candidate John C. Breckinridge.
Butler’s failure was even more disappointing because his campaign had offered so much more potential. The approach from the east via the James River had always been the best way to get an army to the vicinity of Richmond. Even McClellan, obtuse as he could be, had seen that much, although he had missed the political and strategic problems that could beset a Union general who made that route his main approach to the Rebel capital. Grant hoped that with Sigel taking the Shenandoah Valley away from Confederate strategists and Meade, under Grant’s direct supervision, keeping Lee busy, Butler could strike a blow at the seat of both the rebellious government and Confederate supplies in Virginia that would at least hamstring Lee in the midst of his fight to the death against the Army of the Potomac. Grant also hoped that Butler might turn out to be the kind of politician in uniform that he had encountered in the western theater with his Army of the Tennessee, where Democratic politician John A. Logan and Republican politician Frank Blair were competent and hard-hitting military commanders, and, just in case Butler lacked military expertise, Grant made sure his two top subordinates, Tenth Corps commander Quincy Gillmore and Eighteenth Corps commander William F. Smith, were highly regarded professionals to whom Grant hoped Butler would leave much of the direction of the operation.
Each of Grant’s hopes for the James River Campaign was dashed in succession. Butler seemed to see the campaign as his ticket to military glory and insisted on being a hands-on commander. In that role he performed as ineptly as top brass on both sides had every reason to fear from their political generals by this stage of the war, and Gillmore and Smith were no help with their hesitant, confused, and conflicting counsels.
After throwing a serious scare into the Confederate government by approaching an almost defenseless Richmond and then threatening what would have been an equally devastating blow against Petersburg, Butler hesitated long enough to allow the Rebels to pull together a scratch force scarcely more than half the size of his own thirty-thousand-man Army of the James. This force was under the command of Pierre G. T. Beauregard, recently transferred to Virginia after successfully defending Charleston, South Carolina. Beauregard attacked Butler’s army and drove it back into a peninsula called Bermuda Hundred, formed by the confluence of the Appomattox and James rivers. Butler was safe there, only a few miles from Richmond and its vital southern rail connection, and his army could receive its supplies via the river, but the Confederates were able to build a relatively short line of fortifications across the neck of Bermuda Hundred and keep Butler bottled up there, where his army had no chance for further offensive operations and posed relatively little threat to the Confederacy.
In the western theater Grant’s plan to get his subordinate generals either to skin or to hold a leg, as Lincoln put it, met with even more complete failure. Early that spring, before Grant became general in chief, Banks, with the approval of Lincoln and Halleck, had taken his army up the Red River into the heart of Louisiana. The authorities in Washington hoped Banks’s expedition would present the French emperor Napoleon III with the sobering prospect of an impending Union presence in Texas and thus prompt him to curtail his current expansionist adventure in Mexico, where French troops were working on establishing a puppet regime. The Union government also hoped that Banks would be able to liberate large amounts of cotton, for lack of which the textile mills of the Northeast faced the prospect of idleness.
As it turned out, cotton was the only thing the expedition gained. After a slow progress up the Red, Banks blundered to defeat at the Battle of Mansfield and then retreated back down the river, nearly losing Porter’s gunboat fleet to falling water levels as the Confederates diverted much of the river’s flow for that purpose. A resourceful army officer with experience moving felled logs down Wisconsin streams designed wing dams that raised the river’s depth in the channel enough to allow the valuable ironclads to escape, but by the time Banks returned to the Mississippi it was too late to launch a campaign against Mobile or to return the corps of Sherman’s army that he had borrowed. Grant and Sherman were not impressed, and neither, presumably, was Napoleon III.
The failures of the political generals left Grant and Sherman to carry out the spring offensive with the Union’s two major armies without the help of the peripheral operations Grant had planned. Fortunately Grant and Sherman enjoyed a warm rapport and complete and well-founded trust in each other. Sherman later wrote to Grant describing his confidence during this campaign, “I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place, you would come, if alive.”1
On May 4, 1864, both Sherman’s army group in Georgia and Meade’s Army of the Potomac marched out of their camps, Grant accompanying the latter. The two campaigns that began that day took different shapes both because of the differing approaches of Grant and Sherman and because of the differing personalities of their opponents. Lee, combative as ever, met Meade’s army almost immediately. Grant had hoped to push rapidly through the tangled second-growth thickets of the Wilderness before making contact, but Lee met him there on May 5, not far from where the wily Rebel and Stonewall Jackson had humbled Hooker the year before. Jackson was not in the Wilderness this May, however, and neither was Hooker.
Instead of pulling back on first contact with the enemy as Hooker had done the year before, Grant drove straight at Lee. Intense fighting raged in the thickets the rest of that day, and the next morning, May 6, Grant launched a renewed attack that crumbled Lee’s line and threatened to break the Army of Northern Virginia in two. As Lee personally attempted to rally his troops and all seemed lost, two fresh Confederate divisions arrived on the battlefield: Longstreet’s troops, which had missed the first day’s fighting while marching up from their camps some distance from the rest of the army. At the head of Longstreet’s column was the hard-hitting Texas Brigade. As the Texans formed a line of battle in preparation for launching a counterattack, Lee in desperation rode his horse into position to lead the charge. Appalled, the Texans began shouting, “Lee to the rear!” and, crowding around his horse, finally turned its head and led it to the rear. Officers and men promised the general they would drive the Yankees back if only he would retire to a place of relative safety. Reluctantly, Lee did so. The Texans, joined by the rest of Longstreet’s corps, were as good as their word and halted the Union offensive after hours of bloody fighting.
On the other side of the lines, Grant had to contend not only with Lee and his army but also with the bad habits and defeatist attitudes ingrained in the Army of the Potomac since its inception under McClellan. Toward mid-morning that day a distraught general rushed up to Grant’s headquarters group exclaiming that he had seen all this before and knew just what Lee was going to do next, with the implication that it would mean disaster for the Army of the Potomac. Grant had heard enough of this sort of talk. “Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do,” he barked. “Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault and land in our rear and on both our flanks at the same time.” He sent the general back to his command with the admonition not to spend so much time thinking about what Lee was going to do to them but instead to start thinking about what they were going to do to Lee.2
In fact, later that day Lee did launch successive attacks against both of Grant’s flanks. Each scored some limited local success, but after falling back a short distance the experienced Federals halted their Confederate pursuers and established firm new defensive positions. The thickets that had aided the Rebels by masking their movements proved a hazard as well. As Longstreet that afternoon attempted to regroup his command in order to follow up the initial success of his attack on one of the Union flanks, some of his own troops, hearing the headquarters group approaching through the dense underbrush, fired blindly, giving Longstreet a severe neck wound and killing or wounding several of his key subordinates. Lee’s most experienced corps commander would be out of action for months.
Meanwhile Grant, true to his word, wasted little time worrying about Lee’s efforts and slugged away at the Army of Northern Virginia with attacks of his own. By the end of the second day’s fighting, the result of this clash between the war’s two most successful commanders was a draw, though the Union, with the larger number of troops it had in the Wilderness, had suffered correspondingly more casualties. Grant could afford this. Lee could not, but Grant had no intention of winning the war by attrition by pushing both armies into the meat grinder of battle until his was the only one left. As Grant’s Vicksburg campaign clearly demonstrated, the tenacious Union general favored maneuver over human erosion. Nevertheless, if that was the only advantage he could gain from the Battle of the Wilderness, as it came to be called, he would grimly take it and keep moving on.
Rather than keep feeding the meat grinder in the tangled forests of the Wilderness, Grant decided to slide eastward around Lee’s right flank and seize the crossroads hamlet of Spotsylvania Court House, which would put him between Lee and Richmond. If the move succeeded, Lee would have to fight the more powerful Army of the Potomac at a severe disadvantage. Grant put his army in motion on the evening of May 7.
For the private soldiers in the Army of the Potomac, with their extremely close-up perspective on the battle they had just fought, the combat of the past two days did not seem all that much different from that of Chancellorsville or any of the other bloody and indecisive defeats the army had suffered at Lee’s hands during the past two years. As the column marched away from the positions it had held in the still-smoking Wilderness, the men remained uncertain as to whether they had won or lost and whether their march was an advance or a retreat. The answer came when the head of the column approached a crossroads where it had to turn either north or south. As the lead regiment reached the crossroad, its officers turned it south, away from the Potomac and retreat and toward Richmond and an ultimate victory that many of the marching men would not live to see. Despite the prospect of another immanent bloody meeting with Lee’s army, the men of the Army of the Potomac waved their caps and cheered at the realization that they had fought a battle and were still advancing.
The private soldiers of the Army of the Potomac had never been the problem; under McClellan, Burnside, Pope, or Hooker they had always been ready for hard fighting. But that night’s march demonstrated that the army’s command and staff still made it the clumsy instrument McClellan had forged in the camps around Washington in the fall of 1861. Two and a half years of futility had reinforced the cautious, deliberate habits of the officers who maneuvered the army. As an organization it had never developed the quick, supple efficiency of Grant’s old Army of the Tennessee. In the case of the present movement from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania, the cavalry that was supposed to lead the march somehow did not arrive in time, and the supporting infantry was slow in coming up.
As always, Lee was quick to make his opponents pay for such sloppy performances. With the aid of excellent intelligence from his chief of cavalry, Jeb Stuart, the Confederate commander correctly anticipated Grant’s target and quickly put his own troops on the march. The Army of Northern Virginia moved with the speed Grant had come to expect from his own troops out west but was frustrated to find he could not obtain from the Army of the Potomac. The result was that by the time blue-clad troops arrived in force in the vicinity of Spotsylvania Court House, they found solid Rebel lines blocking their path.
The Rebels had entrenched, as both Union and Confederate troops were by this stage of the war quick to do both here in Virginia and down in Georgia. Any place a unit of infantry halted for more than a couple of hours, the troops dug trenches and felled trees to make obstructions (abatis, as they were called in the military parlance of the time) out of their tops and added their trunks to their breastworks. The practice had begun in relatively isolated cases in late 1862 and had spread throughout 1863. By 1864 it was virtually universal. Breastworks multiplied the already heavy advantage of the defender. A well-dug-in defending force could now be reasonably confident of repulsing several times its number of attackers and inflicting ghastly casualties while doing so, a fact that did much to shape the conduct of the 1864 campaigns in both Virginia and Georgia.
Grant brought the Army of the Potomac up against Lee’s extensive Spotsylvania breastworks and struck at them to make sure the Rebels were truly present in strength. They were, as the Union soldiers paid the price in casualties to find out. The frustration was bitter at Grant’s headquarters and those of the Army of the Potomac. Meade blamed the Army of the Potomac’s new cavalry commander, Philip Sheridan, whom Grant had snatched from a division command in the Army of the Cumberland and brought with him to put some drive and fire into the eastern army’s horse soldiers. Sheridan said it was Meade’s fault for hamstringing his command and detaching much of its strength with assignments like shepherding supply wagons. Turn him loose with all his cavalry, he said, and he would whip Jeb Stuart. Both Meade and Sheridan were known for their irascibility, and the interview was a stormy one. The seething Army of the Potomac commander referred the matter to Grant, complaining of Sheridan’s preposterous boast that he could whip the legendary Stuart. To Meade’s surprise and disgust, Grant responded wryly, “Did Sheridan say that? Well, he generally knows what he is talking about. Let him start right out and do it.”3
So on May 9 Sheridan took his ten thousand troopers and set out southward, directly toward Richmond, marching in a column that sometimes stretched as long as thirteen miles. Among his goals were tearing up the railroad behind Lee and threatening Richmond, but both of these were for the purpose of accomplishing the expedition’s chief goal: gaining a showdown with Jeb Stuart and whipping him. That showdown came two days later, six miles outside of Richmond, near a derelict inn called Yellow Tavern. Stuart met Sheridan with 4,500 men, and a four-hour battle ensued. When it was over, Sheridan’s squadrons had succeeded in brushing past the Confederate horsemen who had tried to block them, but, more importantly, Stuart had taken a .44-caliber pistol bullet in the abdomen and died the next day. Sheridan wisely chose not to challenge the stoutly built Richmond fortifications, even lightly manned as they were. Instead he rode to Butler’s nearby lines at Bermuda Hundred to rest and resupply his command before riding back to rejoin Grant on May 24. The raid had deprived Grant of cavalry scouting for two weeks but deprived Lee permanently of the services of Stuart, perhaps the best scouting cavalry commander of the war and already a legend throughout the South.
Meanwhile back at Spotsylvania Court House, Grant continued to probe for weaknesses in Lee’s position. During the course of May 10, units of the Army of the Potomac made local assaults on several sectors of Lee’s heavily entrenched lines. Most were dismal failures, but one showed promise. A young colonel named Emory Upton believed he knew how to defeat the ubiquitous entrenchments. Arranging twelve picked regiments one behind the other, he had them charge full speed toward the Confederate breastworks without pausing to fire. As he hoped, this overwhelmed the defenders of a narrow section of entrenchments, and his attacking column broke through. The assault ultimately failed, however, because of the difficulty of exploiting a breakthrough once made.
Grant was intrigued by Upton’s effort. The sector the colonel’s column had struck looked particularly vulnerable, a protruding bulge, or salient, in the Confederate line that the soldiers had nicknamed the Mule Shoe because of its shape. It allowed a large concentration of Confederate cannon there to get a crossfire on Union troops approaching either end of Lee’s line, but it was itself vulnerable to direct attack, especially if that attack converged from all sides of the salient. That was exactly what Grant planned to do, using Upton’s tactics with a whole corps instead of a mere twelve regiments. The army spent May 11 in preparation.
The attack went in as scheduled in the predawn hours of May 12. For once Lee had guessed wrong about what an opponent would do next. Thinking that the quiet on the eleventh portended a Union withdrawal, perhaps in preparation for another lunge to the east, Lee had begun to pull his army back in preparation to sidle east himself to counter Grant’s presumed next move. The first step was pulling the cannon back out of the Mule Shoe. Their crews had just limbered up and pulled out of their emplacements when Grant’s massive assault sent the twenty thousand men of the Army of the Potomac’s Second Corps storming over the breastworks, capturing four thousand defenders; their division commander, Major General Richard Johnson; and the cannon, whose crews did not have time to unlimber again and fire.
As with Upton’s attack two days before but now on a much larger scale, the assaulting force struggled to overcome the disorganization generated by its successful advance. While its officers strove to untangle its ranks and get it moving forward again, Lee rushed Major General John B. Gordon’s division into the Mule Shoe to plug the hole in his line. Once again in desperation Lee moved into position to lead the charge personally, but his troops would have none of it, again shouting, “Lee to the rear,” as the Texans had done six days before and refusing to advance until he had drawn back to safer ground.
With their army commander out of the way, Gordon’s men surged forward and struck the disorganized Yankees of the Second Corps, driving them back to the breastworks. Determined to hold the gains they had made, the Federals pushed back, and a frenzied hand-to-hand struggle raged across the breastworks, Federals on one side, Confederates on the other, the two lines standing within arm’s reach of each other, shooting, bayoneting, and clubbing with a ferocity that seemed scarcely human. As both sides pressed reinforcements to the embattled section of parapet, the battle raged on for hour after hour. Tens of thousands of rifle bullets hissing past their intended targets mowed down the foliage just behind the lines and whittled through the bolls of trees a foot thick, while enough of the bullets found their marks to pile bodies two or three deep or more for scores of yards on either side of the breastworks. Near the center of the disputed barricade, the breastworks made a sharp corner, and that feature gave its name to this particular part of the Battle of Spotsylvania, which would thereafter be remembered as the Bloody Angle.
Almost incredibly, the fighting around the Bloody Angle continued throughout the daylight hours of May 12 and then through most of that night, amid pouring rain, until by 3:00 a.m., May 13, Lee’s troops had completed a new line of breastworks across the base of the Mule Shoe, sealing off the sector for which the Federals had fought for almost twenty-four hours. The Confederate survivors of the fight at the Bloody Angle then fell back to the new line, leaving Grant’s troops in possession of the Mule Shoe, now a smoking, steaming wasteland of churned mud, shredded foliage, and thousands of corpses, some of them almost trampled into the mud.
The result was far from what Grant had intended. Hitherto in the war his generalship had been reminiscent of a swordsman who had defeated his opponents by lightning rapier thrusts. Now the weapon in his hand, the Army of the Potomac, seemed less like a precision sword than a heavy club. There was no denying these eastern soldiers would fight with ferocity and die with sublime courage, but the army’s staff and command echelons never seemed to get the knack of Grant’s style of warfare. The result was the drawn-out Battle of Spotsylvania with its appalling casualties.
Grant probed hard at Lee’s lines on May 18, and Lee returned the favor the following day. Each learned at some cost that the other was still holding his entrenched lines in more than ample force to slaughter any number of attackers. Grant was reluctant to continue the sort of massive bludgeoning match the campaign had become and still hoped to win a decisive battle rather than grind his foe down by attrition. Accordingly, on the night of May 20, Grant put his army in motion, once again swinging to the southeast in hopes of turning Lee and forcing the Army of Northern Virginia into a stand-up fight in open country.
Once again Lee reacted quickly, putting his own army on the march the following day and on May 22 took up and entrenched a strong position behind the North Anna River, once again blocking Grant’s advance but twenty-five miles closer to Richmond. The Army of the Potomac arrived the next day, and two of its corps reached the southern bank of the North Anna River, one near Jericho Mill and the other ten miles or so downstream near Chesterfield Bridge. Moderate fighting flared on both fronts. On the twenty-fourth, however, the Army of the Potomac’s center found the river strongly defended near Ox Ford and was unable to force a crossing.
In response to the successful Union crossings on the twenty-third, Lee had arranged his army in a sprawling, upside-down V with only the point and a brief segment of the western leg touching the river near Ox Ford. This left the Army of the Potomac in three separated segments—one south of the river on the upstream side of Lee’s entrenchments, another south of the river on the downstream side of Lee’s entrenchments, and the third north of the river in the middle. River crossings by pontoon bridge made large troop movements between these segments difficult. In theory, Lee, who had recently received nine thousand reinforcements comprised of troops released by the failure of Butler’s and Sigel’s offensives, could mass his forces against either end of Grant’s line with a heavy local advantage in numbers, while Grant would have difficulty reinforcing or withdrawing those isolated corps.
During the Civil War, such theoretical advantages rarely translated to reality, and the North Anna was no exception. Lee was sick in his tent, and of his experienced corps commanders, Hill was also sick, Longstreet was still out of action with his Wilderness wound, and Ewell was breaking down under the stress of the preceding three weeks of campaigning. Hill and Ewell were still on duty but functioning very poorly. From his cot, Lee was unable to give sufficient direction to Longstreet’s less experienced replacement to carry out such a mass attack. Whether such an assault would truly have been decisive is doubtful. Such efforts almost never were, and had the attackers found the Federals entrenched, as was likely, the advance would likely have been short and bloody.
After weighing his options, Grant decided to swing his army to the left yet again. His lead units stepped off just after nightfall on May 26. This time Grant’s target was the crossroads of Cold Harbor, another twenty-five miles or so to the south-southeast of the North Anna battlefield and only about ten from Richmond, on the Gaines’ Mill battlefield, where McClellan and Lee had fought the third of the Seven Days’ Battles almost two years before. Yet again, Lee detected Grant’s move and countered by retreating to meet him. Union and Confederate cavalry sparred with each other repeatedly as they screened and scouted in front of their armies and reached Cold Harbor on the last day of May. The rival horsemen struggled for control of the crossroads, fighting dismounted as cavalry almost always did in this war when combat grew severe. Each side looked eagerly for the arrival of its supporting infantry, the arm of the service that did most of the heavy fighting.
The Confederate foot soldiers were first on the scene, but when on the morning of June 1 the lead division of gray-clad infantry made its bid to drive off the Union cavalry, its attacks were piecemeal and poorly coordinated. The Union troopers, fighting not only dismounted but also entrenched, stood them off until the blue-clad infantry could come up and take over, securing a stalemate around Cold Harbor. By this point in the campaign, although a steady stream of reinforcements hurried on by Richmond had replaced almost all of the troops Lee had lost since fighting had opened in the Wilderness almost four weeks before, the Army of Northern Virginia had nevertheless lost a good deal of its offensive edge, largely because of the attrition among its experienced leaders, from regiment and brigade commanders all the way up to generals commanding corps. Henceforth when Lee tried to take the initiative, he would find his army almost as clumsy a weapon as Grant had found the Army of the Potomac from the campaign’s outset.
Grant sensed the diminished offensive power of Lee’s army and also noticed that even when the Army of the Potomac had occupied a vulnerable position straddling the North Anna, with a corps isolated on either flank, the Confederates had not attacked. He drew the conclusion that the opposing army was on its last legs. “Lee’s army is really whipped. The prisoners we now take show it, and the actions of his Army show it unmistakably. A battle with them outside of entrenchments cannot be had.”4
With that thought in mind he ordered a quick attack on the evening of June 1, but the commanders of the Union assault divisions had had little time to reconnoiter the enemy’s position or to arrange their own troops. The result was failure. Much as he had at Vicksburg in late May the year before when a similar quick attempt to take advantage of momentum and storm the city had failed, Grant ordered thorough preparation and a full-scale assault. While Grant’s subordinates made their preparations, Lee’s engineers laid out and his soldiers constructed the most elaborate line of fortifications yet seen in Virginia. Meade, to whom Grant had entrusted the task of preparing and reconnoitering for the attack, did not see to it that his subordinates made adequate reconnaissance of the intricate new defenses.
When the time for the big push came at 4:30 a.m., June 3, many Union soldiers were grimly pessimistic about their chances. The army did not yet use dog tags, and whether a casualty’s family would ever be notified of his death usually depended on whether comrades of his own company—and thus usually from his own hometown—found his body and wrote to his loved ones. Now in the faint hope that some other kind soul might perform that last kindness for them, many of the soldiers wrote their names and home addresses on slips of paper and then pinned those slips to the backs of their uniform jackets.
When the attack went in, many units did not press it home with much vigor. Especially in the sectors that had experienced repulse on the evening of June 1, troops went to ground before reaching the prime killing range of the Confederate rifles. Elsewhere along the front, the Federals pushed forward doggedly. In the Second Corps sector they even scored a brief local success, taking a few of the advanced Confederate trenches before Rebel artillery and counterattacking Rebel infantry drove them out. The end result was the same, and when the firing slowed down and the smoke cleared somewhat, it was obvious that the Army of the Potomac had made no dent in Lee’s lines. Grant ordered a halt shortly after noon. The attack had cost the Army of the Potomac somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 men. For the rest of his life, he regretted having ordered the June 3 assault, as he did the May 22, 1863, assault at Vicksburg, but as Lee too had learned from hard experience, sometimes the only way to know that a major assault would not work was to try one.
Action along the front settled down to desultory sniping and artillery bombardment. On June 5 Grant sent Lee a note by flag of truce suggesting an informal two-hour truce to recover the dead and wounded from between the lines. Lee’s reply insisted that the truce be a formal one, which would, in the military etiquette of the time, amount to a tacit admission by Grant that Lee had defeated him in a major battle—a small propaganda coup and a point of pride for the Confederate general. Grant was naturally reluctant to gratify his enemy in this way or do anything else that might hurt Union morale in what was already becoming a difficult campaign season, with its heavy casualties and lack of the immediate dramatic success that many had unreasonably expected. Yet after some further exchange of stiff notes, he finally concluded that there was no other way to help his wounded men. The formal truce took place on June 7, by which time it was already too late for most of the wounded lying between the lines. Union morale continued to erode both inside the Army of the Potomac and on the home front, where some were already beginning to criticize Grant, little more than a month into his first major campaign as general in chief.
Grant could see clearly that although the Army of Northern Virginia might have lost some of its previous operational verve on the offensive, it was more than ready and able to fight defensively behind breastworks, and Lee had it firmly positioned so that that was all it needed to do in order to fulfill its primary mission of protecting Richmond. Grant had reached a tight corner from which no further left-handed turning movements could bring the Army of the Potomac closer to the Confederate capital so as to threaten it and force Lee to fight on terms other than his own. After several days’ consideration, Grant determined to undertake a bigger and bolder turning movement than any he had yet made in Virginia. It would not take the Army of the Potomac closer to Richmond but farther away, but in doing so it would pose a still greater threat to the Confederate capital.
Grant’s plan was to break contact with Lee’s army and swing to the left again, cross the James River, and march against the town of Petersburg, Virginia. Located on the Appomattox River about thirty miles south of Richmond, Petersburg was the railroad hub on which depended the food supplies both of Richmond and of Lee’s army. There the Weldon Railroad, coming up from the south, joined the Southside Railroad, angling in from the southwest, and their combined freight rode a single set of rails the final thirty miles north to Richmond. If Grant could take Petersburg, Lee would have to give up Richmond. The movement began on the night of June 12 and ran smoothly. Grant’s army crossed the James River on a 2,100-foot pontoon bridge Union engineers had built. Lee suspected nothing, and his army remained in its entrenchments around Cold Harbor.
The Confederate general too had been thinking during the week that had followed the doomed Union assaults. Despite his army having fared better in the fighting at Cold Harbor, Lee was grim about the long-term prospects. “We must stop this army of Grant’s before he gets to the James River,” he told his subordinate General Jubal Early. “If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere matter of time.”
To stop Grant, Lee decided to try a method that had worked against other Union commanders in 1862. He dispatched Early, now in command of the Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia in place of Ewell, to march west and enter the Shenandoah Valley. The valley was a natural advantage for the Confederacy. A Confederate army in the valley could relatively easily screen its movements from normal Union cavalry reconnaissance by holding the limited number of passes over the Blue Ridge, on the valley’s eastern edge, and as long as that army was in the valley it could draw its rations from the well-stocked granaries and smokehouses of that rich farming country. The valley slanted from southwest to northeast, so that a Confederate army that marched all the way to its northern end would emerge ninety miles northwest of Washington, well positioned to threaten Baltimore, Harrisburg, or the national capital. Lee hoped that Early’s foray might draw troops away from Grant’s army and put political pressure on Washington to sue for peace.
In 1862 Stonewall Jackson’s operations in the Shenandoah Valley had created alarm in Washington and baited Lincoln into diverting troops from McClellan when that general had been approaching Richmond over the same ground where Grant’s troops had attacked during the first week of June. Lee hoped that Early could launch a raid that would accomplish at least as much. Besides that, Union General David Hunter was operating with a small force in the Shenandoah Valley, and Lee hoped Early would be able to put a stop to that.
While Early’s troops marched west, Grant’s marched south. His leading elements reached Petersburg on June 15 to find the city defended by only very scant Confederate forces, part of the small command under Beauregard that had been holding Butler bottled up in Bermuda Hundred. The Union troops swarmed over the fortifications ringing Petersburg, but as the outnumbered Confederates desperately tried to form another line and dig in even closer to the town, the commander of the leading Union corps, afraid he might have misunderstood his orders, halted his troops. Beauregard used every hour’s delay to bring up more troops and entrench those he had. By the next day, Grant and Meade were on the scene and ordered renewed attacks, but the Army of the Potomac was worn out and bled white by the past six weeks of fighting. Its troops did not attack with the same drive and eélan they had shown in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania. Despite a continued heavy Union preponderance in numbers, a series of poorly coordinated, halfhearted assaults over the following three days failed to break through the growing numbers of Confederate defenders and their increasingly stout second line of fortifications.
Since the Federals had first appeared in front of Petersburg, Beauregard had sent one urgent message to Lee after another, apprising him of the situation and begging him to send troops. Lee had remained steadfastly incredulous. So skillful had been Grant’s departure from Cold Harbor and march south that although Lee had been expecting Grant to move against the James River and knew that the Army of the Potomac was not present at Cold Harbor, he still could not believe that the Federals had already reached and crossed the James and were threatening Petersburg. The truth finally began to dawn on him during the night of the seventeenth to the eighteenth of June, and before daylight he dispatched two divisions to reinforce Beauregard. Even with these additional troops, Beauregard faced long odds at Petersburg, but the tenacity of his troops, the enormous advantages of the entrenched defensive, and the sluggishness and lack of aggressiveness by the battle-weary Army of the Potomac combined to prevent a Union capture of the vital rail junction.
With the rest of Lee’s army rapidly filing into the new inner line of Petersburg fortifications and removing all further prospect of taking the place by storm, Grant settled down for a quasi siege of the city and its northern neighbor Richmond. He could not cut off the flow of food into the two cities, but he could press his entrenchments ever closer to the Confederate defenses, pounding them day after day with siege artillery and constantly stretching his lines westward around the south side of Petersburg to threaten the two rail lines that had now become the last lifelines of the Confederate capital. Grant had wanted to avoid such a siege because it would be long and trying on Union morale. Lee had hoped to avoid a siege because he knew that in military terms its only possible outcome would be his defeat—provided that Union morale and political will remained steadfast.
Meanwhile out in the Shenandoah Valley, Hunter’s troops had been living off the land and causing consternation and outrage among the populace by acting as if they were in enemy territory in the midst of a hostile civilian population. On June 11, Hunter ordered the Virginia Military Institute burned as well as the house of former Virginia governor John Letcher, who had issued a proclamation calling on civilians to wage a guerrilla war against Hunter’s forces. By June 18, as Hunter approached Lynchburg, Early was on hand with his corps. Reinforced by the remnant Confederate forces that had been operating in the valley, Early’s command was strong enough to convince Hunter to withdraw. The Union general retreated with his force into the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, leaving the Shenandoah Valley wide open for Early.
Early marched his command down the Shenandoah Valley and on July 5 began crossing the Potomac into Maryland. The next day, as the tail end of his column was completing its crossing of the river, Early’s vanguard took Hagerstown, Maryland, and demanded that the municipality pay twenty thousand dollars or be burned. The townsmen paid up. In Washington, seventy-five miles to the southeast, consternation reigned, as officials made hurried preparations to defend the city. Since Grant had pulled nearly all of the garrisons out of the forts around the national capital to reinforce the Army of the Potomac, the city was vulnerable. Halleck’s frequent telegrams had kept Grant apprised of the situation, and the latter now decided he would have to detach troops from the Army of the Potomac to meet the threat. One division of the Sixth Corps pulled out of its trenches around Petersburg; marched down to the James River landing at City Point, Virginia, where Grant had recently established his main staging base and forward supply depot; and from there went by steamboat to Baltimore.
On July 9 Early’s men marched into Frederick, Maryland, scarcely fifty miles from the capital, where they demanded and received the sum of two hundred thousand dollars to leave the city standing. About ten miles southeast of Frederick, the road to Washington crossed the little Monocacy River. On the far bank of the Monocacy waited a force of just under six thousand Federals, inexperienced militia stiffened by the Sixth Corps division Grant had first dispatched north. The force along the Monocacy was under the command of Major General Lew Wallace, who had disappointed Grant at Shiloh and would later go on, while serving as governor of the New Mexico Territory after the war, to write a novel titled Ben Hur. On this day Wallace had the unenviable task of delaying Early’s march. He did not know whether the Confederate general’s target was Washington or Baltimore, but he had to stall him long enough for reinforcements to reach those cities. At the Battle of the Monocacy he accomplished just that, delaying Early for most of a day, although his militia was routed and his more experienced troops had to make a fighting retreat.
On July 11 Early’s troops swarmed into the suburbs of Washington. In Silver Spring, Maryland, they burned the house of U.S. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair. Pressing on, they arrived within range of the Washington fortifications, where they skirmished for several hours. By this time the defenses were manned no longer by government clerks and soldiers in the final stages of recovery from wounds or sickness but rather by the sturdy veterans of the Sixth Corps, the two remaining divisions of which Grant had dispatched from City Point as the reports from Washington had grown more dire.
Early’s troops could accomplish nothing against powerfully built fortifications, strongly held by experienced soldiers, and so after exchanging fire for several hours, they retreated, though not before Lincoln himself had visited a frontline fort and observed the fighting. The president showed great curiosity and perhaps a desire to share at least a small taste of the experience of battle into which it had been his duty to send so many men. According to one account, a junior officer a short distance down the line, not recognizing the tall man in civilian suit and stovepipe hat placidly gazing over the top of the parapet, had shouted, “Get down, you fool.” Lincoln seemed to smile quietly to himself and, after a final look at the battlefield, stepped down to a place of greater safety.
Early’s small army marched west again, back toward the Shenandoah Valley. Early detached a force to stop by the south-central Pennsylvania town of Chambersburg and demand a ransom of one hundred thousand dollars in gold or five hundred thousand dollars in U.S. currency. When the unfortunate townsmen, who had been plundered by Lee’s army the year before, could not come up with the money, the Confederate officer commanding the detachment had much of the town burned. Confederate troops also went out of their way to find the house of Republican newspaper editor Alexander McClure, on the north side of town, away from the other fires, and burn it too.
As Early’s army had marched away from Washington, the Confederate general had profanely boasted to one of his officers that he thought he had badly frightened Lincoln, whose head and stovepipe hat above the Union parapet none of the Confederates seems to have recognized. In that much Early was clearly mistaken. The chief purpose of the raid that had taken the Rebels within sight of Washington had been to create within the Union government and high command sufficient alarm to force Grant to break off the siege of Richmond and Petersburg and hurry the Army of the Potomac back toward its namesake river to save the national capital. Lincoln had sufficient confidence in Grant to leave military matters largely, if not quite entirely, in that general’s capable hands, and Grant did not scare easily. He had detached just enough troops to guarantee the security of Washington and in just enough time to get there. It would still be necessary to find a way to deal with Early, who hovered annoyingly with his army in the lower (northern) Shenandoah Valley, but the siege of Petersburg and Richmond ground on unabated.