Authors: David Goldfield
Grant marched forward toward Richmond. Lee dashed along with him to keep his army between the Federals and the capital. He entrenched his forces at Cold Harbor, so named because the local tavern offered cold drinks but no hot meals. The crossroads lay near the site of the Seven Days' Battles two years earlier. By now, the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac knew that entrenchments would not deter their general. Many pinned their names and addresses to the back of their tunics so burial parties could identify them and notify their families. If Grant's army smashed through Lee's fortifications, Richmond loomed just eight miles away. On June 3, at four thirty in the morning, Grant threw his troops at Lee. The result was catastrophic. The Federals lost seven thousand men in less than thirty minutes. If ever a Civil War battle proved the futility of charging over open ground before entrenched soldiers firing rifled weapons, this was the place. The Confederates suffered fifteen hundred casualties.
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From the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, Grant had lost fifty-two thousand men, 41 percent of his army, or almost the size of Lee's army. Lee did not escape the slaughter. His total losses for the month amounted to twenty thousand men, or 32 percent of his force. Grant knew he would receive replacements; Lee could not cover his casualties. The Army of the Potomac continued to move forward. An astonished Rebel soldier remarked of Grant, “We have met a man this time, who either does not know when he is whipped, or who cares not if he loses his whole Army.”
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Grant simply refused to accept defeat. Blocked from Richmond from the north, he swung south to attack Petersburg, twenty-five miles below the Confederate capital, and where three of the four rail lines serving the capital converged. Lincoln endorsed the move in a dispatch to Grant, though the mounting casualties disturbed him. He hoped Grant “may find a way that the effort shall not be desparate [
sic
] in the sense of great loss of life.”
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General P. G. T. Beauregard protected Petersburg with only four thousand men but held off an assault by forty-eight thousand federal troops on June 16, proving again the value of trenches in overcoming superior numbers of an attacking enemy. Lee's force quickly joined Beauregard, increasing the Rebel army to forty-one thousand men. Grant's army, though, was exhausted, and some troops mutinied against the order to launch yet another assault against entrenched Confederates. The Federals attacked Petersburg four times, the last on June 18, with a listless and uncoordinated performance that one might expect from a tired and demoralized army. Private Frank Wilkeson described the mood of the troops sent forward on these futile charges. “The soldiers were thoroughly discouraged. They had no heart for the assault. It was evident that they had determined not to fight staunchly, not to attempt to accomplish the impossible.⦠The infantry was sent to the slaughter, and the Confederates promptly killed a sufficient number of them to satisfy our generals that the works could not be taken by assaults delivered by exhausted and discouraged troops.”
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Grant dug trenches and settled into a siege that would last almost until the end of the war the following year. After six weeks of fighting, Grant had lost sixty-five thousand men. The Confederates suffered thirty-five thousand casualties. Grant had hoped to destroy Lee's army in open field combat but had not counted on the Confederates' strategy of fighting a defensive war from entrenchments. A war of attrition prolonged the conflict, which was Lee's only realistic hope: that northern public opinion would rebel against the war as too costly and force a peace.
The unrelieved fighting left both sides precious little time to bury their dead. Grant rejected Lee's request for a forty-eight-hour truce to attend to the corpses after Cold Harbor, offering a twenty-four-hour pause instead. The Union general explained, “Lee was on his knees begging for time to bury his dead. But in this cruel war the business of generals is with the living.” A long line of ambulances from the battlefields of Virginia wended its way through the streets of Washington. Walt Whitman was at his post at the Armory Hospital in the city, where soldiers were dying at the rate of one every hour. President Lincoln, spotting the procession of ambulances, exclaimed, “Look yonder at those poor fellows. I cannot bear it. This suffering this loss of life is dreadful.”
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The northern press, with an assist from War Department censors, had translated Grant's persistent forward movements into triumphs, exclaiming that the general had “won a great victory,” that the Army of the Potomac “again is victorious,” and that Grant had forced Lee “to retreat step by step to the very confines of Richmond.” The usually staid
New York Times
blared, “GLORIOUS NEWS ⦠IMMENSE REBEL LOSSES.” Horace Greeley's
New York Tribune
was even more declarative. “Lee's Army as an effective force has practically ceased to exist,” he wrote, and “LIBERTYâUNIONâPEACE” were moments away. Then the casualty lists appeared, hospital beds filled up, and letters from exhausted and troubled soldiers arrived at homes throughout the North, and the mood shifted. Murmurs about Grant's profligate use of troops turned into demands for his removal. “The fumbling butcher,” they called him. The Democratic press called Grant's campaign “a national humiliation.” The massive casualties and meager results repulsed even staunch Republicans. “The immense slaughter of our brave men chills and sickens us all,” wrote Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. Perhaps this was the beginning of the shift in northern public opinion that Confederates had hoped for.
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The two months of uninterrupted battle had a significant impact on the soldiers of both sides. They were unaccustomed to the new tempo of the war. Though casualty figures listed only the dead and wounded, an unknown number of men had succumbed to the stress in other ways. A report from the front in July 1864 suggested that the problem was fairly widespread, at least among Union soldiers. “The unexampled campaign of sixty continuous days, the excitement, exhaustion, hard work and loss of sleep broke down great numbers of men who had received no wounds in battle. Some who began the campaign with zealous and eager bravery, ended it with nervous and feverish apprehension of danger in the ascendancy.”
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Though Grant had failed to destroy Lee's army, he prevented the Confederates from sending reinforcements south to support Joseph E. Johnston's troops in their battle for Georgia. William T. Sherman's hundred-thousand-man army moved against Johnston on May 7, three days after Grant's army crossed the Rapidan in Virginia. Sherman would not hurl his army directly at Johnston. He would, rather, outmaneuver it and take Atlanta, the prized rail junction, without huge casualties. The city had become a manufacturing center, the main connecting point between the Confederate forces in the East and West, and a nexus for the distribution of food and supplies to the armies. Neither would Johnston confront Sherman; rather he would snipe, stall, and frustrate the Union's advance to the city. Johnston traded territory to conserve his army and protract the war. He would not be lured into a war of attrition.
Sherman and Johnston danced through northwest Georgia, the latter attempting to lure the former into a deadly frontal assault while the former sashayed around the Confederate army. Johnston fell back and established a line, invariably on a hill or some other defensible position, and the process repeated itself, with Sherman covering much more territory sideways than forward and Johnston keeping his smaller army of sixty-two thousand men intact and harassing the Federals at every opportunity. President Davis wondered why his general would not stand and fight, and Confederate officials called Johnston “the Great Retreater,” but the dance continued. Frustration also mounted in Washington. At this pace, Sherman would be in Atlanta in another year or so.
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Sherman broke first. Whether it was the frustration over Johnston's maneuvers, mounting criticism in the North, or his confidence in his men, Sherman violated his own rule of avoiding direct assaults. Johnston's Confederates were entrenched on Kennesaw Mountain near Marietta in an almost impregnable position. Sherman's attack, launched in 110-degree heat, was futile and costly, losing 2,000 men to 440 for the Rebels. For the first time, however, the residents of Atlanta could hear the sound of battle. Kennesaw was only twenty-two miles away.
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The dance resumed, both armies marching in a fog of dust. By mid-July Sherman's army could see the spires of Atlanta quivering through the haze of heat. Johnston set up defensive positions on the outskirts of the city. It had taken Sherman seventy-four days to advance one hundred miles. Johnston had almost the same number of men as he had at the outset of the campaign. Jefferson Davis, however, had seen enough. One more retreat by Johnston and Atlanta would be flying the Stars and Stripes. Johnston's maneuvers had harassed the enemy and preserved his army, but at some point he had to fight. On July 17, Davis relieved Johnston of his command and appointed General John Bell Hood of Texas to lead the Army of Tennessee. Lee's assessment of the change: “We may lose Atlanta and the army too.”
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By mid-July, Grant's grand plan was stalled. The Army of the Potomac squatted in damp trenches before Petersburg, much reduced in size since the early spring and unlikely to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia anytime soon. Sherman camped on the Chattahoochee seven miles outside Atlanta with both the city and his opposing army very much intact. In the midst of a growing malaise in the North, Confederate General Jubal Early launched a series of cavalry raids that, while strategically inconsequential, served as a metaphor for Union ineffectiveness.
The origin of Early's quixotic campaign lay in Union attempts to seize the valuable farmlands of the Valley of Virginia in the spring of 1864. The campaign was part of Grant's grand plan. Union control of the valley would eliminate a vital source of food for the Confederacy and would end guerrilla operations in the region, freeing up troops for Grant's operations against Lee. The Federals failed but caused considerable property damage, motivating Early to cross the Potomac River and boldly advance on Washington with ten thousand men on July 9. Along the way, he marched into Frederick, Maryland, and imposed a $200,000 levy on city officials, an expeditious if unorthodox means of replenishing the depleted Confederate treasury. As Early advanced on Washington's suburbs, General Halleck called up every soldier in the city, including invalids, to defend against the expected attack. Early swept through Silver Spring as the president left his White House sanctuary for nearby Fort Stevens to get a better view of the action. He stood on a parapet, his trademark stovepipe hat making an inviting target for Rebel snipers. Naturally, he drew enemy fire. When a bullet wounded the man standing next to the president, Lincoln's alarmed military escort, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., cried out, “Get down, you damn fool, before you get shot!”
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The Federals fortified Washington sufficiently to deter Early from an assault, but the Confederate general was not through. Early returned to the valley and then headed north into Maryland and Pennsylvania. He rode into Chambersburg on July 30 and threatened to burn the town to ashes unless its residents paid a ransom of $500,000 in currency or $100,000 in gold. The citizens could not raise such a sum, and Early set fire to the town, justifying it as retaliation for federal depredations in the valley. “It was a most disagreeable duty to inflict such damage upon those citizens,” he wrote later, “but I deemed it an imperative necessity to show the people of the Federal States that war has two sides.” Confederate soldiers looted and robbed citizens and left three hundred families homeless. Miraculously, no citizen was killed in the conflagration. The only casualty was a Confederate officer who lingered too long in the town enjoying the contraband he had looted from a liquor store. Incensed townspeople shot him dead and buried him outside of town only up to his shoulders, so that birds and varmints could feast on his head. That Early could operate with relative impunity so close to the federal capital and destroy a northern town dealt another blow to the administration, already reeling from the bloody stalemates in Virginia and Georgia.
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Sherman would cite Chambersburg as a justification for his army's harsh treatment of Georgians during his march through that state later in the year, explaining, “The Rebels were notoriously more cruel than our men.” While both armies pledged to minimize the impact of war on civilians, much of that restraint had dissipated by the third year of the war. Since most of the battles occurred in the South, southern civilians suffered considerably more than their counterparts in the North.
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The month of July ended appropriately for the Union in a spectacular fiasco at Petersburg. The 48th Pennsylvania regiment, composed mainly of coal miners familiar with explosives, concocted a plan to build a tunnel under Confederate entrenchments, plant eight thousand pounds of black powder, and blow the Army of Northern Virginia sky high. Just before dawn on July 30, a thunderous explosion occurred underneath one of the Rebel lines, sending men and cannon hurtling high in the air like leaves on a windy fall day. The blast created a large crater, 170 feet long, 30 feet deep, and about 70 feet wide. Poorly led Union soldiers stood gaping at the hole in amazement for four hours before entering and advancing toward the enemy rather than skirting the crater's rim. Confederate units, stunned at first, surrounded and charged the hole and picked off the Federals before Union officers sounded the retreat. The Federals lost four thousand men that morning, while the Rebels counted fifteen hundred casualties.
The peace movement intensified in the North, just as Lee had hoped. The huge losses sustained by Union armies since the early spring necessitated another draft. The cries of “Stop the War!” came from an expected quarter, the so-called Copperheads or Peace Democrats residing mainly in the southern-leaning areas of the Lower Midwest. But they also emanated from Republicans who, party leader Thurlow Weed of New York asserted, were “wild for peace.” In early July, Republican editor Horace Greeley informed Lincoln that Confederate agents in Canada had contacted him, with the approval of President Davis, to serve as Lincoln's intermediary to negotiate a peace settlement. Greeley pleaded with the president, “Our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country longs for peaceâshudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.” Here was an opportunity to end the carnage, Greeley insisted.
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