CHAPTER NINETEEN

Heavens Hung in Black

FROM THE TIME Grant’s men filed across the Rapidan, he assumed Ben Butler and his Army of the James would synchronize their actions with him, pushing up the James River, seizing territory south of Richmond, and wrecking critical railroads. Butler fielded a force of thirty thousand men, supplemented by five ironclads and seventeen gunboats. Unfortunately, he moved slowly, exhibited undue caution, and flubbed his chance for a lightning strike, permitting his opponent to rush reinforcements up from the Carolinas. Confederates had seeded the James River with hundreds of torpedoes, making progress treacherous. Both Richmond and Petersburg were insufficiently manned by troops and, had Butler acted with dispatch, he might have snared the Confederate capital while Lee was distracted farther north. Some historians believe Butler’s failure to capitalize on this unmatched opportunity may have prolonged the war by nearly a year.

By mid-May, Grant’s grand strategy, featuring simultaneous movements of his far-flung armies, appeared poised to reap huge rewards. His forward motion against Lee was temporarily arrested by endless rain, making Virginia’s roads impassable. But en route to Atlanta, Sherman ousted Johnston from Dalton, Georgia; Sheridan smashed up major railroads serving Richmond; and Butler captured the outer defenses of Fort Darling, below Richmond. Then General Beauregard, exploiting Butler’s laxity, defeated him decisively at Drewry’s Bluff, driving him back down the river to a thin neck of land formed by the confluence of the James and Appomattox Rivers. In a bold stroke, Beauregard laid trenches across the land strip until Butler’s army at Bermuda Hundred was, in Grant’s acerbic image, “as completely shut off from further operations directly against Richmond as if it had been in a bottle strongly corked.”1 Later on, Grant regretted such harsh language against Butler, but his plan to trap Lee between his army and Butler’s or starve his supply lines had been rudely upended. So neatly had Beauregard neutralized Butler that he could release several thousand soldiers to beef up Lee’s army. Grant wearily told Halleck that Butler’s army had failed to ruin the railroad running south of Richmond: “Under these circumstances I think it advisable to have all of it here except enough to keep a foothold at City Point.”2 A British soldier fighting with the Army of the James delivered this blunt assessment of Beast Butler: “There is no confidence felt in the beast at all.”3

Around this time, another keystone of Grant’s overarching design seemed to crumble. To curry favor with German Americans, Lincoln had appointed Franz Sigel as a brigadier general early in the war. Born in Germany, trained as a military officer, the versatile Sigel had worked as a journalist, teacher, and politician. A striking-looking man with high cheekbones and a fierce gaze, he was dedicated to the Union cause but destitute of military talent. Grant had dispatched him to the Shenandoah Valley with 6,500 men to harry Lee’s supply base at Staunton. Instead, on May 15 at the battle of New Market, a smaller Confederate force under John C. Breckinridge trounced Sigel, aided by 250 cadets from the nearby Virginia Military Institute, sounding the death knell for Sigel’s military career. “If you expect anything from him you will be mistaken,” Halleck told Grant. “He will do nothing but run. He never did anything else. The Secty of War proposes to put Genl [David] Hunter in his place.”4 Grant heartily endorsed the move, which soon occurred.

The northern mood began to sour again and Noah Brooks speculated that the populace, “like a spoiled child,” craved instant success, not a maddening deadlock.5 If inspired by Grant’s pluck, citizens were dismayed by the interminable casualty rolls. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote on May 16, “These nearly two weeks have contained all of fatigue & horror that war can furnish.”6 Grant knew he didn’t enjoy the option of inaction. By the night of the sixteenth, with roads rapidly drying, he gave the signal for another round of dawn fighting at Spotsylvania. While he and Lee had absorbed reinforcements, Lee was strengthened by combat veterans while Grant had to deal with raw troops. If he was still beguiled by the notion of luring Lee to fight in the open, on the morning of May 18 Lee did not oblige, staying put behind his defenses as Grant attacked. The advancing Union infantry was raked by such blistering musket and artillery fire that by midmorning Grant called off the attack. All his maneuvering had come to naught, and he decided to abandon Spotsylvania.

The failure to ram through the Confederate line with frontal assaults inspired second-guessing and soul-searching on Grant’s staff. Cyrus Comstock had been the supreme advocate of a fighting style he called “Smash ’em up! Smash ’em up!” Rawlins was so disgusted by this blunt approach, said James H. Wilson, that he “grew pale, and his form became almost convulsed with anger,” as he inveighed against a strategy that was “the murderous policy of military incompetents.”7 Despite unstinting faith in Grant, Lincoln was agitated by the lengthy lists of dead soldiers. House Speaker Schuyler Colfax discovered him pacing his office, “his long arms behind his back, his dark features contracted still more with gloom.” The distraught president let loose a terrible cri de coeur: “Why do we suffer reverses after reverses! Could we have avoided this terrible, bloody war! . . . Is it ever to end!”8

On May 19, in a rare offensive thrust against Grant, Lee unloaded a surprise attack in the late afternoon, which turned bloody for both sides. As usual, Grant perceived opportunity where others saw blind terror, instructing Porter to “ride to the point of attack . . . and urge upon the commanders . . . not only to check the advance of the enemy, but to take the offensive and destroy them if possible.”9 By nightfall, Confederate troops were driven back in what proved Lee’s last offensive attack; henceforth he would exploit the advantages of fixed defensive positions. One feature of that sanguinary day has received insufficient attention: the bravery of black soldiers under Brigadier General Edward Ferrero. “It was the first time at the East when colored troops had been engaged in any important battle,” wrote Badeau, “and the display of soldierly qualities obtained a frank acknowledgment from both troops and commanders, not all of whom had before been willing to look upon negroes as comrades.”10

Unbowed, Grant decreed a secret midnight march south by his left flank, ordering Hancock “to get as far towards Richmond on the line of the Fredericksburg railroad, as he can make, fighting the enemy in whatever force he may find him.”11 For Grant, the important thing was the constant, inexorable push southward. Finding his progress delayed by slow-moving artillery, he shipped back one hundred pieces to Washington. He played a cat-and-mouse game with Lee, even pretending to commit an error that might tempt his rival to pounce. He deliberately kept Hancock’s corps apart from the rest, dangling it as isolated bait that Lee might want to come out and snatch, but the stratagem didn’t work.

For the next few days, energized by sunny weather, Grant and his army headed toward the railroad junction at Hanovertown, marching through prosperous, open countryside with elegant houses flanked by abundant fields of grain and tobacco. The prosperous air was misleading, for the region had been drained of life, abandoned by able-bodied men and left to the care of women, the old, and the infirm. As happened after the Wilderness fighting, Grant’s dearest hope was to cover twenty-five miles fast enough to overtake Lee and insert his army between the Army of Northern Virginia and Richmond. Again aided by interior lines, the agile, alert Lee beat Grant to the North Anna River on May 22, digging in on its south bank. Never short of confidence vis-à-vis Grant, he predicted to his staff surgeon, “If I can get one more pull at him, I will defeat him.”12 Clearly Grant faced a far more self-assured rival than he had ever confronted before and one who seldom made mistakes.

During his race south, Grant lingered at Guiney’s Station, throwing up tents on the ground of a country estate. When he paid his respects to the lady of the house, she told him that, by an extraordinary coincidence, Stonewall Jackson had died there two years earlier. Striking the conciliatory note he would sound at Appomattox, Grant complimented Jackson as a man and soldier. “I can understand fully the admiration your people have for him.”13 The woman sobbed in describing Jackson’s last hour and Grant posted sentries around the house to shield it from harm. As courtly as any southern gentleman, he didn’t force his way into the house but sat outside on the verandah.

Grant was no less courteous to his men. One Massachusetts regiment was marching down a railroad line when they spotted Grant sitting on a flatcar, devouring a ham bone. They let loose a cheer that he only acknowledged with a friendly wave of the bone before gnawing it again. As ever, Grant refused to parade his superior rank, and his skillful handling of people, no less than his military acumen, accounted for much of his success. As Charles Francis Adams Jr. wrote, “Grant had this army as firmly in hand as ever he had that of the Southwest. He has effected this simply by the exercise of tact and good taste.”14

Having crossed the North Anna River first, Lee had established a strong position with troops who had recently opposed Butler and Sigel but were no longer needed against them. As Grant’s men began to ford the river on May 23, they were “violently attacked,” he informed Halleck, “but handsomely repulsed the assault without much loss to us.”15 The North Anna was a wide river with high bluffs and shallow enough that soldiers walked across in waist-high water. Grant’s engineers also threw down pontoons and seized a wooden bridge with such electrifying speed that retreating Confederates jumped into the water, many drowning. That night, Lee’s army dug fresh trenches and hardened their positions, and these fortifications again functioned as the great equalizer against superior numbers.

On May 24, Grant found his forces arrayed in a perilous configuration. The left and right wings of his army had crossed the North Anna, but with Burnside, in the center, having failed to do so, he feared Lee might pick off one wing of his divided army at will. In beautiful, summery weather, Grant’s men spent the day finding new places to traverse the river. At this critical juncture, Lee was stretched out on a cot, laid low by intestinal problems as he meditated a knockout blow against Grant. His subordinates failed to capitalize on the opportunity presented by Grant’s fragmented army. Lee grasped the danger of allowing Grant to press him back against the gates of Richmond. “We must strike them a blow,” he told his commanders in frustration. “We must never let them pass us again.”16 Temporarily Lee retired Traveller and moved by ambulance for several days.

Spent from punishing night marches, battle smoke, sleep deprivation, and never-ending skirmishes, Grant’s soldiers were dazed by the strain of the Overland Campaign. The cumulative pressures overwhelmed many, and Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said that “many a man has gone crazy since this campaign began from the terrible pressure on mind & body.”17 “The men in the ranks did not look as they did when they entered the Wilderness,” another soldier recalled. “Their uniforms were now torn, ragged, and stained with mud; the men had grown thin and haggard. The experience of those twenty days seemed to have added twenty years to their age.”18 Despite this outward change, Grant had wrought a profound alteration in the soldiers’ psyche, making them believe in themselves. “This army has learned to believe that it is sure of victory,” Dana told Stanton. “Even our officers have ceased to regard Lee as an invincible military genius.”19 The soldiers knew their movements weren’t haphazard but integral parts of a well-thought-out plan. If anything, Grant seemed dangerously overconfident, telling Halleck, “Lee’s Army is really whipped . . . I feel that our success over Lee’s Army is already insured.”20

Leavening the somber mood for Grant was the welcome return of a tanned, healthy-looking Sheridan after his memorable cavalry raid. With the exuberant, vivid gestures of a stage actor, he described for Grant the many clashes he had experienced. Darkly dramatic one moment, he burst into gales of laughter the next. The popular Sheridan had drawn off so many Confederate cavalry to cope with his raiders that the four thousand wagons of Grant’s supply train had passed virtually unscathed.

The next day, Grant’s men probed Lee’s lines, finding them well defended and bristling with sharpened timbers. Grant despaired of breaching this barricade and again moved his army south, scuttling to the left, a move that kept his supply lines open by water. Lee knew his inability to inflict heavy damage on Grant’s army meant a steady creep southward of the two armies toward Richmond, a move ultimately cataclysmic to the Confederacy. Grant’s men tore up railroad tracks that supported Lee’s army, heating and twisting crossties into crazy shapes to render them useless. Grant was greeted warmly by his soldiers, who were relieved he hadn’t launched them in a suicidal rush against Lee’s defenses on the North Anna. Grant’s force was boosted by forty thousand reinforcements, replenishing men he lost, while the ten thousand Lee received didn’t compensate for his losses.

Striding along in fine, clear weather, the Army of the Potomac tramped across streams and swamps as it penetrated to Hanovertown, seventeen miles from the Confederate capital. Richmond’s citizens felt cornered as they eyed Grant’s approaching movement and listened for artillery fire that might portend Armageddon for their city. Once again Lee was girding to meet Grant as a heated cavalry clash engaged the two armies. By the night of May 29, Grant’s army had inched forward to Totopotomoy Creek, nine miles northeast of Richmond, where the Army of Northern Virginia stood aligned for battle.

At this point, Lee experienced something akin to panic. “We must destroy this army of Grant’s before he gets to James River,” he confided to a commander. “If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.”21 Gradually Lee’s army drifted south toward a place called Cold Harbor, where he hoped to intercept Grant if he made a sudden run for the James River. The name was derived from English roadside inns that advertised overnight stays without hot meals. True to this tradition, a tavern occupied the village crossroads. It was clear that this strategic spot, the nexus of five converging roads, would become a flashpoint in any looming fight.

On May 31, in a desperate cavalry conflict, Sheridan defeated the rebels near Cold Harbor and Grant advised him to hold the place at all hazards. Lee’s army had taken up positions north of the Chickahominy River. Grant wanted to herd his foes south of the river, while ravaging Richmond’s northern railroad links and preventing Lee from sending men to curb Hunter’s raids in the Shenandoah Valley. Riding beside Rawlins to Cold Harbor, Grant suffered one of his few recorded losses of temper when he spied a teamster flogging his horses. With his exquisite sensitivity for animals, Grant spurred his bay horse Egypt toward the perpetrator, shaking a clenched fist at him. “What does this conduct mean, you scoundrel?” Grant yelled. “Take this man in charge, and have him tied up to a tree for six hours as a punishment for his brutality.”22

There was now an expectant sense that here, eight miles northeast of Richmond, a climactic battle was about to unfold and Grant’s army might bulldoze its way through Lee’s line and thunder straight into the outskirts of town. “A few days will solve the question of Richmond,” Rawlins prophesied, “and whether a long siege, or a sharp decisive battle is to terminate it.”23 Soon after dawn on June 1, Lee’s army administered a four-hour drubbing to Sheridan, who held out until Horatio Wright’s corps arrived around 9 a.m. Late in the afternoon, Grant made successful forays against the rebels, who tried multiple times that night to recapture lost ground. Although the fighting had been savage that day, with the Union killed and wounded numbering two thousand, some tactical gains had been achieved. As Badeau observed, “The ground won, on the 1st of June, was of the highest consequence to the national army; it cost two thousand men in killed and wounded, but it secured the roads to the James, and almost out-flanked Lee.”24

As his army dealt with pitiless heat and choking dust—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said he was “nearly dropping from my saddle with fatigue”—Grant revolved battle plans in his mind.25 Charles Francis Adams Jr. described him “thinking very hard and looking abstracted, pulling his beard, whittling and smoking.”26 Lee fought on home turf, having bested McClellan on the peninsula two years earlier, while for Grant the swampy terrain of ravines and thickets was terra incognita. When Grant’s brother Orvil arrived in camp, he brought along a friend, F. M. Pixley, who offered a portrait of Grant’s smoldering intensity.

At the evening mess table I met Gen. Grant, and after a very hasty meal, I watched him for an hour as he sat by the camp fire. He is a small man, with a square resolute thinking face. He sat silent among the gentlemen of his staff, and my first impression was that he was moody, dull and unsocial. I afterwards found him pleasant, genial and agreeable. He keeps his own counsel, padlocks his mouth, while his countenance in battle or repose . . . indicates nothing—that is gives no expression of his feelings and no evidence of his intentions. He smokes almost constantly, and . . . has a habit of whittling with a small knife. He cuts a small stick into small chips, making nothing . . . There is no glitter or parade about him. To me he seems but an earnest business man.27

On the night of June 1, Grant pondered his next move. The northern public wanted bold action, not excuses. Keen to steal a jump on the enemy, Grant had two corps at Cold Harbor and a third expected at daybreak on the morrow. Lee had not had time to prepare elaborate defenses. Quick, decisive action, Grant thought, might produce a dramatic breakthrough to Richmond, routing the Confederate government. The alternative was to shuffle farther south, below the James River, in the neighborhood of Petersburg, and link up with Butler’s army. Grant feared, however, that the northern public might quarrel with any delay as reminiscent of George McClellan’s failed strategy. Writing to Julia at 9 p.m., Grant sounded shaken and uncertain, not like himself. He informed her the rebels were “making a desperate fight” and that he wouldn’t see her and the children until the campaign had ended. He concluded on an atypically bleak note: “With the night booming of Artillery and musketry I do not feel much like writing you so you must excuse a short letter this time.”28

On June 2, the weather was sweltering. Grant and his staff were quartered near Bethesda Church, and its pews were taken outside to provide seating for them before torrential rains drove them indoors. The idyllic scene gave scant warning of the disaster ahead. Grant had hoped for a dawn attack against Lee, but then put it off twice because of delayed troop movements, wrangling commanders, and hungry men exhausted from nocturnal marches. Grant wanted to make one last effort to flush Lee from behind miles of trenches and log parapets, forcing him into the open. In retrospect, it would seem a fool’s errand. At Cold Harbor, Lee inhabited swampy terrain that played to his strong suit, his men crouching behind gullies and thickets that interposed natural barriers. The enforced delay in Grant’s offensive enabled Lee’s men to perfect a labyrinth of trenches that would defy any forward movement by the Army of the Potomac. These defensive advantages more than offset the federal edge of 109,000 men versus 59,000 Confederates. To maximize his chances, Lee even stripped men from field hospitals.

Nobody underestimated the perils awaiting the Union army the next morning. As in many Civil War battles, fatalistic soldiers penned their names and addresses on snippets of paper, fastened to the backs of their coats, in case their corpses had to be identified. Grant believed that bloody warfare since the Wilderness had debilitated Confederate morale, making him willing to risk a colossal gamble, a frontal assault that would pierce a hole in Lee’s line. He would throw three corps under Hancock, Wright, and William F. “Baldy” Smith against Lee’s right, hoping to destroy that portion of the enemy army and blast an opening to Richmond. He bet big on a climactic battle that would obliterate Lee’s army and end the war. He may also have hoped a resounding victory would secure the coming election for Lincoln. Finally, he may have feared that if fighting lasted into summer, hot weather and disease would decimate his army.

At 4:30 on the misty morning of June 3, sixty thousand Union soldiers dashed toward the center and right of the long Confederate line, braving a hail of musket fire and artillery that rained thickly down upon them. Some federal units had transient success, taking the first line of rifle pits and prisoners, but these bright spots were soon dwarfed by calamitous losses. Thwarted by marshy land, brush, and woods, the ill-fated charge ran straight into a many-layered defense system that was impenetrable. One journalist evoked the “intricate, zig-zagged lines within lines, lines protecting flanks of lines, lines built to enfilade opposite lines . . . works within works and works without works.”29 Not a single Confederate soldier needed to venture outside these well-protected shelters. Meanwhile, Union soldiers, crashing through smoke and flame, proved easy prey for Confederate marksmen who mowed them down in dreadful numbers, turning the battlefield into a charnel house. The air grew dark with rifle bullets, shells, solid shot, and rolling smoke. “It seemed more like a volcanic blast than a battle,” one soldier said, “and was just about as destructive.”30 So murderous was the Cold Harbor gunfire that Union soldiers dropped to the ground, using dead bodies of fallen comrades as defensive sandbags. The bulk of the fighting had ended by 7:30 a.m. At eleven that morning, Grant rode out from his rear position to confer directly with his commanders. After listening to their gloomy reports, he suspended further operations a little after noon. His army had paid a fearful price for the misguided assault, losing 7,000 men, mostly in the first hour, against 1,500 casualties for Lee. In the lacerating verdict of the Confederate general Evander Law, Cold Harbor was “not war but murder.”31 One of Lee’s staff officers sneered at Grant’s costly error, calling Cold Harbor “perhaps the easiest victory ever granted to Confederate arms by the folly of Federal commanders.”32

There was plenty of blame to go around Union headquarters. Lee had been more meticulous in preparation and thorough in reconnaissance than Grant, who had issued vague orders to Meade. Grant and Meade had neglected to scrutinize the territory with sufficient care and badly coordinated the movements of squabbling corps commanders. Grant had left the execution to Meade, leading the latter to criticize him tartly for “honoring the field with his presence only about one hour in the middle of the day,” he grumbled to his wife.33 Meade sounded a still more cynical note about Grant: “I think Grant has had his eyes opened and is willing to admit now that Virginia and Lee’s army is not Tennessee and Bragg’s army.”34

It took time for Grant to fathom the full scale of the disaster. When he wired Halleck at 2 p.m., from a place he called “Coal Harbor,” he gave no hint of the calamity. “Our loss was not severe nor do I suppose the Enemy to have lost heavily.”35 On the same day, writing to Stanton, Dana conveyed no sense of an infamous defeat with atrocious casualties, estimating the Union dead and wounded at only three thousand.36 That day Rawlins insisted to his wife that Cold Harbor had been an “indecisive” battle with equal losses on both sides.37 Still, by day’s end, many Union commanders grasped that they had lost four or five bluecoats to every gray uniform. As Grant eventually admitted, with extreme understatement, it was the one attack during the Overland Campaign that “did not inflict upon the enemy losses to compensate for our own loss.”38

In time, Cold Harbor became a byword for senseless slaughter, a club with which Grant was beaten by opponents. It became the theme of every tirade contending that he was a filthy butcher. Lee, who refused to crow about his victory, was genuinely perplexed as to what had provoked Grant into this supreme blunder. “I do not know what General Grant meant by his attack this morning,” he told a staff officer. “It was too heavy for a feint, yet I hardly think he expected to break through here.”39

In his Memoirs, Grant expressed special remorse for what had happened: “I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made.”40 But he didn’t describe the scene in any detail. In his antiseptic description of columns sent into battle, the casual reader derives no sense of the harrowing fighting. The manuscript of his Memoirs shows that Grant inserted the famous passage on Cold Harbor as an afterthought. It is written on paper of a darker color with a note Grant appended to his secretary: “Put this in after Cold Harbor. About the time the Army reached the James River probably would be best.”41 The belated incorporation suggests it took courage for Grant to include this blunt indictment of himself. In later years, he admitted that Cold Harbor was the one battle “that I would not fight over again under the circumstances.”42 If Grant’s confidence made him an inspirational leader, it could also expose him to catastrophic mistakes engendered by overconfidence.

Some who saw Grant after Cold Harbor sensed a deep sadness. William Wrenshall Smith encountered him returning from the battle and depicted him as “much depressed. He dismounted and took a seat on the stone. What is the situation, I asked? Bad—very bad, he replied.”43 Samuel Beckwith noticed that after Cold Harbor Grant’s face developed “a careworn expression that indicated sleepless nights and wearisome days.” When he delivered a message to the general’s tent, he found him sunk in thought. After absorbing the telegram, Grant sighed. “Beckwith,” he said, “the hardest part of this General business is the responsibility for the loss of one’s men. I can see no other way out of it, however; we’ve got to keep at them. But it is hard, very hard, to see all these brave fellows killed and wounded. It means aching hearts back home.”44

As the nation meditated the death toll at Cold Harbor, the wounded lay squirming in misery on the battlefield next to the bloated, decomposing corpses of deceased comrades. In some places, according to Horace Porter, the ground was carpeted with fallen soldiers wedged so tightly together over thirty- or forty-yard areas that the revolting stench of mortality hung heavy in the blazing heat.45 Since the slain and injured lay within easy range of snipers on either side, they couldn’t be removed until a truce was declared, but this was held up by an unfortunate tussle over military protocol.

Most men stranded in the open were Union soldiers. Hence, on June 5, Grant suggested to Lee that “unarmed men bearing litters” be allowed to gather the dead and wounded during a cease-fire, and he declared his readiness to abide by any method suggested by Lee.46 The next day, Lee quibbled over technicalities, suggesting these casualties should only be removed under a flag of truce—by which Grant would have to admit tacitly defeat at Cold Harbor. He seemed intent on teaching a lesson to Grant, who promised his stretcher bearers would carry “a white flag and not to attempt to go beyond where we have dead or wounded.”47 Sticking to military etiquette, Lee insisted upon a flag of truce instead of men waving white flags. Finally, at 7 p.m. on June 6, Lee agreed that Grant could send out orderlies to collect soldiers between 8 and 10 p.m. This message didn’t reach Grant’s headquarters until the allotted time had expired, leaving dead men rotting on the blood-soaked soil. The next morning, Grant regretted to Lee “that all my efforts for alleviating the sufferings of wounded men, left upon the Battle-field have been rendered nugatory.”48 By the time relief crews scoured the field on the night of June 7, all but two wounded soldiers had died as the generals bickered; another 432 men brought into Union lines were already dead. Historians sympathetic to Lee blame Grant in this affair, arguing that his ruffled pride could not accept the flag of truce proffered by Lee. Grant, for his part, blamed Lee’s rigidity for the needless loss of life.

Cold Harbor culminated a four-week campaign distinguished by a savagery unseen in the war. Since May 4, the furious crescendo of fighting had produced appalling casualties: sixty-five thousand for the Union side versus thirty-five thousand for Confederates. Though his losses approached the size of Lee’s entire army, Grant had inflicted comparable losses on Lee, equivalent to 40 percent of the Army of Northern Virginia. J. F. C. Fuller, the British military historian, and Bruce Catton have pointed out that Cold Harbor did a disservice to Grant’s reputation since his armies tended to lose a smaller percentage of their men in battle than those commanded by Lee and most other Civil War generals. No statistical evidence buttresses the charge that Grant was needlessly careless with lives. For all the hand-wringing over Cold Harbor, it was no more disastrous an assault than that conducted by George Pickett under Lee’s auspices at Gettysburg, although the death toll was then somewhat lower.49

Grant never apologized for the carnage, nor did he find his failure particularly surprising. He had to force Lee into the open, while the latter hid behind breastworks and rifle trenches. Lee “had the advantage of being on the defensive . . . and I had to attack and attack, but every blow I struck weakened him, and when at last he was forced into Richmond it was a far different army from that which menaced Washington and invaded Maryland and Pennsylvania. It was no longer an invading army.”50 Grant was resigned that this method would exact a huge tally in lost lives. “Fighting, hard knocks, only could accomplish the work.”51

All the bloodshed made it easy to miss the significance of Grant’s accomplishment. By steadily pushing Lee eighty miles south, he had robbed him of mobility and prevented him from assuming the offensive. Grant now controlled the direction of the contest, and, if he lost individual battles, he was winning the war. After Cold Harbor, his fighting spirit remained unquenchable and he insisted that “success was only a question of time.”52 He was rankled by charges that, during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, McClellan took the same army by boat from northern Virginia down to Chesapeake Bay without incurring the grievous losses of the Overland Campaign. His rebuttal was terse: “I captured Lee’s army; McClellan didn’t.”53 By moving overland, Grant had shielded Washington from harm; had he gone by water, he would have been forced to leave behind ample forces to protect the capital. He cited the irreplaceable losses Lee suffered and the slow, inexorable grinding down of his army. He also took pride in the campaign as a logistical feat in which he moved a train of four thousand wagons “over narrow roads and through a densely wooded country.”54

It was harrowing to see so many soldiers maimed, disfigured, and killed, and Gouverneur Warren undoubtedly spoke for many when he exclaimed, “For thirty days it has been one funeral procession past me, and it has been too much!”55 Emory Upton recoiled in horror at Cold Harbor. “I am disgusted with the generalship displayed,” he told his sister. “Our men have, in many cases, been foolishly and wantonly slaughtered.”56 The palpable dismay reached right into Lincoln’s cabinet. Secretary of the Navy Welles shuddered that Grant had paved the road from Washington to Richmond “with the skulls of Union soldiers.”57 Even northern politicians advocating a more muscular military style blanched at Cold Harbor. “For god’s sake try and arrange [peace] with the South,” former congressman Martin Conway warned Lincoln, “on any basis short of their resumption of federal power on the cornerstone of slavery.”58 The opposition press feasted on Cold Harbor’s casualties. “What is the difference between a butcher and a general?” a Copperhead editorial inquired. “A Butcher kills animals for food. A general kills men to gratify the ambition or malice of politicians and scoundrels.”59 After Cold Harbor, Grant could never cast off the butcher epithet, a mortifying burden for this plain, decent man. “They call me a butcher,” he mused after the war, “but do you know I sometimes could hardly bring myself to give an order of battle? When I contemplated the death and misery that were sure to follow, I stood appalled.”60

In the aftermath of the campaign, Lincoln faced almost unendurable pressure to stanch the bloodshed. He watched in despair as sick and wounded soldiers from Cold Harbor turned Washington into a vast infirmary, overrun with amputees and embalming establishments. Death was omnipresent in the capital. Mourning “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country,” Horace Greeley told Lincoln he feared “the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.”61 One particularly vitriolic critic of Grant resided in the White House. “He is a butcher,” Mary Lincoln said of Grant, “and is not fit to be at the head of an army.”62 One evening, as he viewed ambulances transporting wounded soldiers, the president observed sadly, “Look yonder at those poor fellows. I cannot bear it. This suffering, this loss of life is dreadful.”63 To deal with the legions of dead, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs proposed the creation of a national military cemetery, surrounding the former Lee mansion at Arlington, and Stanton approved the measure the same day.

Despite the carnage, Lincoln never wavered in support of Grant or doubted his strategy. Two weeks after Cold Harbor, at a Philadelphia banquet, a gaunt, hollow-cheeked Lincoln quoted Shakespeare, telling listeners it could fairly be said “the heavens are hung in black.”64 Nevertheless, he refused to withdraw his belief in Grant. “I have never been in the habit of making predictions in regard to the war, but I am almost tempted to make one . . . If I were to hazard it, it is this: That Grant is this evening . . . in a position from whence he will never be dislodged until Richmond is taken.”65

Enough people shared Lincoln’s high regard for Grant that when Republicans—now called the National Union Party to garner more political support—convened their convention in Baltimore on June 7–8, Missouri’s delegation cast its twenty-two votes for Grant. Before the final vote was announced, delegates switched their votes to Lincoln to make his nomination unanimous. Grant discouraged such political jockeying and tried to dispel the idea that he yearned for office. “I am not a candidate for any office,” he quipped, “but I would like to be mayor of Galena long enough to fix the sidewalks, especially the one reaching my house.”66 Grant’s apolitical stance surely endeared him to Lincoln. When entertained by a brass band after his renomination, the president gave him an unqualified endorsement: “What we want, still more than Baltimore conventions or presidential elections, is success under General Grant.”67 To strengthen Union sentiment in the border states and among War Democrats, the convention picked Andrew Johnson, the Democratic military governor of Tennessee, as its vice presidential nominee, a choice fertile with consequences for Grant’s political future.

Everyone knew the presidential race would pivot on battlefield events. Grant, Sherman, and their fellow Union generals had to convince skeptical voters that Lincoln should be reelected and that the current military strategy would succeed. The Democrats, slated to gather in August, planned to nominate someone on a platform of a negotiated peace acceptable to the South. Scattered voices feared Grant would be that Democratic nominee and cater to the Copperhead vote. Grant had no such plans. The Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill made a prediction to Elihu Washburne that proved startlingly accurate, saying if Grant remained lieutenant general and did not run, he would retain Republican Party loyalty “and four years hence will be their candidate and President for eight years. Nothing more certain.”68

Before Grant left Cold Harbor, Mathew Brady, or someone in his studio, took a classic photo of the lieutenant general at his headquarters. Wearing rumpled, baggy pants and an unbuttoned coat, he stands with one arm resting against a pine tree, the other fist poised akimbo at his waist. His hat is pushed back slightly on his head while one foot is thrust forward. The contracted brow reflects the grim intensity of the Overland Campaign. It is an unusually candid shot of Grant, who seems a touch restless and unsettled, while still presenting the tough Grant the world knew: flinty and undeterred by setbacks. Although the photo was taken a little more than a week after Cold Harbor, he hardly looks defeated.

At this juncture, Grant executed a stunning volte-face in strategy. As shown by his prewar business speculations, he loved to gamble. He knew Lee would never emerge from his fortifications and that further frontal assaults would generate a suicidal rate of casualties, leaving him no choice but to adopt the slower course of a siege. It would be less romantic work, for which he was temperamentally unsuited, but it struck no less terror into Lee, who knew he couldn’t survive a siege indefinitely. Grant had driven Lee into a box from which he could not escape easily as he defended Richmond and Petersburg.

Grant worried Lee might swoop down on Butler and the Army of the James before he could rescue them. For that reason, he elected to make a swift, secret movement to his left, taking his 115,000 men to a point south of the James River. There he would hook up with Butler’s forces and be supplied by water. Grant had envisioned this from the beginning. If he could seize the vital railroad junction of Petersburg, twenty miles below Richmond, he could sever southern railroads that sustained Lee’s army. With the surrounding countryside stripped bare of supplies, Lee depended heavily on produce sent by rail. As the hub for five railroads, Petersburg was the crucial portal for Richmond. If Petersburg fell, Richmond and Lee’s army fell, and the war would hasten to a speedy conclusion. For that reason, before moving his army south, Grant sent cavalry west under Sheridan to wreck the Virginia Central Railroad, eliminating that supply source for Lee. To complete his isolation, Grant ordered David Hunter’s force in the Shenandoah Valley to disable the James River Canal, another wellspring nourishing the Confederate army.

By June 12, the weather had turned cool and windy. That night, after dark, Grant began to march his army toward the James. Staff officers noticed the tense way Grant relit cigars constantly and reacted with monosyllables. “Yes, yes,” or “Go on—go on.”69 On this splendid night full of moonlight, the tramp of feet lifted swirling dust that soon obscured the stars. By the next morning, in a logistical masterpiece, the Army of the Potomac had vacated the Cold Harbor trenches. Lee was completely fooled by the exodus and thunderstruck to discover that Grant’s entire army of 115,000 men had vanished in the night. While he had a hunch that Grant would swerve toward the James River, he could not be certain. To confound Lee further, Grant ordered some units to conduct diversionary feints toward Richmond.

Meanwhile, Grant’s main army crossed the Chickahominy River and reached the formidable James River barrier. Grant needed to take his massive army across a waterway two thousand feet wide and eighty-four feet deep. To Julia, he described the operation as “one of the most perilous movements ever executed by a large army” since it involved “crossing two rivers over which the enemy has bridges and railroads whilst we have bridges to improvise.” Ever the optimist, he shook off the settled gloom of Cold Harbor. “I am in excellent health and feel no doubt about holding the enemy in much greater alarm than I ever felt in my life.”70

On the morning of June 14, Grant’s engineers began to span the majestic James with a pontoon bridge measuring 2,100 feet in length and 13 feet in width, making it the longest such bridge in military annals. It was anybody’s guess whether such a lengthy bridge, buoyed by 101 floats, could withstand tidal currents or gusts sweeping inland from Chesapeake Bay. Miraculously, the entire bridge was completed shortly after midnight. The next day, his hands joined behind his back, Grant gazed silently from a bluff on the river’s north side as cavalry and artillery trains moved rapidly across the river. “He wore no sword or other outward trapping except his buttons and plain shoulder straps,” one soldier had observed a day earlier. “His pants were tucked inside of a pair of long dusty boots and his whole attire looked dirty & travel stained.”71

Grant officiated at one of the war’s most stirring spectacles. On this cloudless day, brilliant sunshine sparkled off the water, gun barrels, and cannon trundling across the bridge. To the crisp beat of marching bands, troops stepped briskly onto ferry boats that plied the river at a dizzying pace. Nearby gunboats kept a watchful eye on any threatening enemy movements. Before the operation was over, an enormous herd of cattle swam across the river. From the capital, Lincoln applauded Grant, telegraphing at 7 a.m. on June 15: “I begin to see it. You will succeed—God bless you all!”72 By around midnight the next day, the last remnants of Grant’s army had crossed the river. Incredibly, Lee still had no idea Grant’s army had slipped across the James in an operation so stupendous even one Confederate general dubbed it “the most brilliant stroke in all the campaigns of the war.”73

On the day the pontoon bridge was laid down, Grant and Rawlins traveled by steamer up the James to Bermuda Hundred to consult with Ben Butler. As a general, Butler hadn’t covered himself with glory, but as a noted Democratic politician, he was too useful for Lincoln to scrap. Grant found Butler covering the Appomattox River with another amphibious bridge to carry his men on a raid into Petersburg, only six miles away. Grant hoped to take Petersburg before Lee was alerted to his whereabouts.

On the evening of June 15, Baldy Smith and Winfield Scott Hancock achieved startling success when they overran the outer defensive rim of northeast Petersburg, seizing rifle pits, artillery, and several hundred prisoners. General Beauregard fielded a meager force to defend the town. Had Smith marched straight into the defenseless city, he might have scored a radical breakthrough and altered the war’s course. Grant always believed that with such a move, “Lee would have at once been obliged to abandon Richmond.”74 Instead Smith tarried, spent the night in the same spot, then allowed his men a leisurely breakfast the next morning. He felt poorly, while Hancock was still ailing from an old Gettysburg wound. As Beauregard later reflected, “Petersburg at that hour was clearly at the mercy of the Federal commander, who had all but captured it.”75 The instant Lee learned of the attack by telegraph, he began loading troops onto railroad cars and sped them to the imperiled city. By June 16, rebel reinforcements filtered into Petersburg and soon reclaimed trenches taken by federal forces.

That day, Grant toured captured areas and was impressed by the strength of the Petersburg citadel, with its thick earthworks, deep moats, sharpened tree branches, and tangled telegraph wires. That night Union forces resumed their attacks, fighting in moonglow, but the main opportunity had already been squandered and only sporadic gains were recorded. Perhaps distracted by the James River crossing, Grant was not as deeply engaged at Petersburg as he should have been. True to his hardheaded style, he launched recurring attacks against the enemy, but lost more than twelve thousand men in four days without prying open Confederate defenses.

At noon on June 18, Meade ventured a last attempt to marshal his men against Petersburg’s earthworks, but it miscarried. The haggard men had tired of blunt operations against the enemy and balked at more punishment. As the artillerist Charles Wainwright complained, “The attack this afternoon was a fiasco of the worst kind. I trust it will be the last attempt at this most absurd way of attacking entrenchments by a general advance in line . . . even the stupidest private now knows that it cannot succeed.”76 As the day progressed, Lee and his army appeared in full force, rendering further Union efforts futile.

Coming on the heels of Cold Harbor, the dismal failure at Petersburg disheartened Grant’s soldiers. “Why have these lives been sacrificed?” Charles Francis Adams Jr. wondered. “Grant has pushed his Army to the extreme limit of human endurance.”77 Recognizing his men’s exhaustion, Grant bowed to their human limitations: “We will rest the men and use the spade for their protection until a new vein has been struck.”78 The Army of the Potomac had sacrificed sixty-five thousand men killed, wounded, or missing since crossing the Rapidan on May 4, far exceeding anything experienced in the past. Averse to more frontal assaults, Grant now changed the war’s character in Virginia, setting his men to work with pick and ax to construct defenses as expansive as those that guarded Petersburg. Whenever Grant extended his lines, Lee would have to match him and vice versa. The two would be locked into a partial siege of the city, a deadly stalemate that would test the nerves of both commanders. Grant would try to deny Lee’s army freedom to strike and maneuver, guaranteeing bloody warfare at close range.

Grant established his headquarters on a high bluff over the James at the boat landing known as City Point, which soon evolved into the nucleus of the war effort. He selected the spot because it marked the crossroads of the James and Appomattox Rivers; provided easy water routes to Washington; sat at the eastern terminus of an important railway line; and stood ten miles northeast of Petersburg and twenty miles southeast of Richmond, enabling him to strike either city. Everybody commented on the spot’s scenic beauty and the panoramic vista of river traffic. Within a year, the sleepy village would be transformed into one of the world’s busiest ports. Grant attributed much of the logistical wizardry to Rufus Ingalls: “Through his supervision the Army of the Potomac has been supplied in a manner no army in the world has ever been supplied before.”79 Not only did City Point wharves teem with ships, but it had barracks, a hospital, railroad yards, fields of tents, bakeries, and a post office. Grant erected a signal tower 175 feet high, and Fred remembered mounting it with his father “to look upon the spires of Petersburg and Richmond.”80

Initially Grant worked from a hospital tent atop the bluff, shaded by old trees, before moving to the middle of a humble row of log cabins. Stationed outside his door to ward off assassins was Ely Parker, a revolver at his side. Security was compromised by a plague of sightseers who descended as Grant became a local tourist attraction. Visitors reached him by mounting a long wooden staircase rising from the steamboat landing. This more fixed abode would allow Julia to spend a goodly portion of the summer with Grant, restoring a modicum of normality to their lives. On two occasions she went off to Burlington, New Jersey, to arrange schooling for their children, but she was otherwise able to provide emotional sustenance for her husband. That spring she had stayed with Colonel Dent in St. Louis as she grew accustomed to life without slaves. “Our colored people had all left,” she recalled, “but their places were readily filled by German and French men and women, who were most excellent substitutes . . . We had a great deal of company, and then it was we missed the old family servants.”81 However brief the time allotted to family matters, Grant followed his children’s affairs closely. The day after Cold Harbor, he wrote to eight-year-old Nellie, encouraging her study of German and hoping Fred would learn French to ease his way into West Point.

The northern public, having withstood multiple disappointments, was skittish about what was to come. Hoping to assess the state of Grant’s army, Abraham Lincoln, clad in black, arrived with his son Tad at City Point on June 21. He had seldom strayed far from the White House during the war. With its sorrowful gaze, Lincoln’s face registered inner emotion and was the opposite of Grant’s poker face. Nevertheless, the two men enjoyed a fine rapport and Lincoln was warmly deferential toward Grant. When they met at the wharf, Porter remembered, “the President came down from the upper deck . . . and reaching out his long, angular arm, he wrung General Grant’s hand vigorously, and held it in his for some time, while he uttered in rapid words his congratulations” for what Grant had done since their last meeting.82 With a light touch, Lincoln conveyed that he came to learn, not to lecture. “I don’t expect I can do any good, and in fact I’m afraid I may do harm, but I’ll just put myself under your orders and if you find me doing anything wrong just send me right away.”83 Grant cheerfully agreed.

When they sat down for lunch, Lincoln told of the rough journey aboard his steamer, confessed to having been seasick, and complained of an upset stomach. “Try a glass of champagne, Mr. President,” an officer said. “That is always a certain cure for seasickness.” Lincoln’s face crinkled with humor. “No, my friend,” he replied. “I have seen too many fellows seasick ashore from drinking that very stuff.”84 Lincoln’s witty retort provoked laughter. Aware of Grant’s reputation for drinking, he had gracefully sidestepped the issue. After lunch, when Grant suggested the president might want to ride out to see Union troops at Petersburg, Lincoln cottoned to the idea. “Why, yes; I had fully intended to go out and take a look at the brave fellows who have fought their way down to Petersburg in this wonderful campaign, and I am ready to start at any time.”85

Grant asked Lincoln to borrow his large bay horse Cincinnati, while he rode the small black pony Jeff Davis. Still attired in black, Lincoln wore his trademark headgear, a tall silk hat, which was promptly knocked off by a tree branch as they galloped along. The weather was so dry the president was coated with dust when they reached the Union line. “As he had no straps,” wrote Porter, the president’s “trousers gradually worked up above his ankles, and gave him the appearance of a country farmer riding into town wearing his Sunday clothes.”86 Lincoln’s unexpected presence created a sensation among the soldiers, who cheered him lustily as he arrived to lilting band music. He had now drawn near enough to Petersburg to see church steeples in the distance. No mean politician himself, Grant suggested that Lincoln might want to see the black troops who had behaved gallantly during Baldy Smith’s recent raid on Petersburg. “Oh, yes,” Lincoln replied. “I want to take a look at those boys . . . I was opposed on nearly every side when I first favored the raising of colored regiments; but they have proved their efficiency, and I am glad they have kept pace with the white troops in the recent assaults.”87

When Lincoln reached the camp of black soldiers, he witnessed a scene of overpowering emotion. The men who lined up two deep on each side of the road laughed, cried, and cheered, sending up hosannas for their beloved liberator. “They crowded about him and fondled his horse; some of them kissed his hands,” wrote Porter, “while others ran off crying in triumph to their comrades that they had touched his clothes.”88 Badeau told Edwin Booth that the black troops “had never seemed so to realize the reality of their freedom as when they saw this incarnation or representative of it.”89 Lincoln peeled off layers of emotional reserve. Tears stood in his eyes as he bowed to the black soldiers, and his voice broke as he thanked them for their rapturous reception.90

That evening, Lincoln sat outside Grant’s tent and unwound from the tensions of war, regaling Grant and his staff with humorous anecdotes, employing laughter to relieve the gloom that so often enveloped him. According to Porter, he “sat on a low camp-chair, and wound his legs around each other as if in an effort to get them out of the way, and with his long arms he accompanied what he said with all sorts of odd gestures.”91 Lincoln ate at a common table with the officers and fraternized informally with them in the same egalitarian spirit as Grant. After his frustrated dealings with a parade of intractable generals, Lincoln relaxed in Grant’s amiable company and capable hands.

The next morning, Lincoln steamed up the James River for a meeting with General Butler and Admiral Samuel Phillips Lee and was shown places the Union army had seized. “When Grant once gets possession of a place,” Lincoln commented approvingly, “he holds on to it as if he had inherited it.”92 The tour abounded in dreadful sights. “The weather was hot and the roads dusty beyond anything you can imagine,” Badeau wrote; “dead horses filled the air with their stench, crowds of wagons and mules choked the way, and I was glad enough when the trip was over, for all the horror!!”93 By the time Lincoln returned to Washington the next day, he and Grant “both felt that their acquaintance had already ripened into a genuine friendship,” said Porter.94 The sunburned Lincoln had benefited from the change of scenery, and when he got back to Washington, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles declared the trip had “done him good, physically, and strengthened him mentally.”95 Grant had lifted his morale and Lincoln enjoyed repeating his parting words: “You will never hear of me farther from Richmond than [I am] now, till I have taken it . . . It may take a long summer day, but I will go in.”96