As billows upon billows roll,
On victory victory breaks;
Ere yet seven days from Richmond’s fall
And crowing triumph wakes
The loud joy-gun, whose thunders run
By sea-shore, streams, and lakes.
The hope and great event agree
In the sword that Grant received from Lee.
HERMAN MELVILLE, 1865
“The Surrender at Appomattox”
IN DECEMBER 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, General George Patton broke contact with the enemy to his front, wheeled 90 degrees north, and took the Third Army on a forced march parallel to the line of battle to extricate the 101st Airborne at Bastogne. It was a perilous maneuver and an incredible tactical achievement,1 and it in no way diminishes Patton’s accomplishment to say that it pales alongside Grant’s withdrawal from Cold Harbor and his crossing of the James in June 1864.
The week after his costly assault Grant laid plans and made ready. As at Vicksburg he kept his plans to himself. Various staff officers were assigned discreet tasks and engineers were kept busy, but no one, not even Meade, was told initially what was in store. The Chickahominy was bridged and the roads through the swampy bottoms were improved and corduroyed—all of which could have suggested that Grant planned another sidle to his left. A flotilla of ferryboats was assembled well out of sight on the lower James, and the navy assumed a position upstream to guard against rebel raiders, but that too could have been considered routine. An out-of-the-way crossing point thirty miles downriver was selected but no work was undertaken to improve it. Grant ordered the government’s pontoons moved up from Fortress Monroe and a large supply of bridging lumber laid in but this also could have been interpreted as preparatory to a move against Richmond along the Chickahominy.2 To further mask his intention, Grant ordered Sheridan to take two cavalry divisions and ride west, destroying the Virginia Central Railroad as he went. That, he assumed, would draw the Confederate cavalry in pursuit and deprive Lee of his eyes and ears. So well were Grant’s plans concealed that on June 12 when he gave the order to move, the Confederate army was still tightly buttoned up in its Cold Harbor entrenchments girding for another Union onslaught.
Under cover of darkness, Baldy Smith’s 18th Corps slipped away first, marching eastward to White House Landing on the Pamunkey, where ships were waiting to rush the troops down the York and up the James to rejoin Butler at Bermuda Hundred. Smith’s corps was familiar with the terrain on the south side of the James and Grant wanted it in position first. As Smith’s men moved out, the Union cavalry division not with Sheridan crossed the Chickahominy in a feint toward Richmond that would mask Grant’s move from rebel scouts. Warren’s 5th Corps followed behind the cavalry to add heft to the maneuver and also to protect the exposed Union flank if Lee should not be taken in. Burnside’s 9th Corps, which had the longest distance to march, moved next, and then at midnight, with the Confederate line still quiet, Hancock and Wright pulled back. Not until dawn the next morning did rebel troops discover that the long Union trench line in front of Cold Harbor was empty. Grant was gone. The Army of the Potomac—115,000 men—had marched away so quietly that Confederate pickets had not observed its departure.
For the first time since Grant crossed the Rapidan, the two armies had lost contact. Lee responded as best he could. With his cavalry off chasing Sheridan, however, he had no way of fixing the Union army’s location. It was possible that Grant might be crossing the James. But the most immediate threat was to Richmond, eight miles away, and the most likely scenario was that Grant was making another of his patented sidles to the left and would descend on the capital as McClellan had done, in the stretch of land south of the Chickahominy. Uncertain where Grant was, Lee decided to meet the most immediate threat. He threw the Army of Northern Virginia across the Chickahominy to cover the approaches to Richmond. Overnight the situation had changed abruptly. Grant was dealing a new hand. In a tactical sense, whether he was on the north side of the James or the south side made little difference. Several weeks earlier Lee had said to Jubal Early: “We must destroy this army of Grant’s before it gets to the James River. If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.”3
For Grant, the march to the James went like clockwork. The Union advance guard reached Wilcox Landing in the late afternoon of June 13, coming down to it past the plantation once owned by ex-president John Tyler. The next day Hancock’s corps, which Grant wanted to cross first, began boarding ferries that shuttled all night to put the troops on the south side by dawn of the 15th. While Hancock crossed, engineers commenced construction of the pontoon bridge Grant ordered: thirteen feet wide, 2,100 feet in length, and, for stability, tied to a small fleet of oceangoing schooners anchored upstream. Work on the bridge began at 9 A.M. on June 14 and was finished by eleven o’clock that night. When finished this was the longest pontoon bridge in military history.