The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (170 page)

Heavy rain had been falling with scarcely a let-up since the night before, and it continued through the final day of March, hampering last-minute preparations for the departure that evening of Mrs Davis, made urgent by the threat to the Danville line. Guns boomed daylong east of Richmond, mixed with peals of thunder; Grant no doubt was feeling the works in that direction, as well as elsewhere along the nearly forty random miles of their extent, for evidence that Lee had weakened them to confront the movement around his right. Soon after dark an overloaded carriage set out from the White House for the railroad station, bearing Mrs Davis and her sister Margaret Howell, the four children and their nurse, a young midshipman assigned as escort, and Burton Harrison, the President’s secretary, who was to help them get settled in Charlotte, then rejoin his chief — wherever he might be by then. They arrived well before leaving time, 8 o’clock, and boarded a passenger coach which, though dilapidated and “long a stranger to paint,” was the best the Confederacy could provide for its First Lady at this late stage of its existence. She looked with dismay at the lumpy seats, with threadbare plush the color of dried blood, and made the children as comfortable as she could; Billy, three, and the baby Pie were stretched out asleep by the time their father arrived to see them off. He sat talking earnestly with his wife, ten-year-old Maggie clinging to him all the while and eight-year-old Jeff trying hard to keep from crying. When the whistle blew, an hour and a half past schedule, he rose, kissed the children, embraced Varina, and turned to go, still with an appearance of great calm, though he came close to giving way to his emotion when Maggie persisted in clinging to him, sobbing, and Little Jeff begged tearfully to remain with him in Richmond. “He thought he was looking his last upon us,” Mrs Davis later wrote.

There was a further wait on the station platform; he walked up and down it, talking with Harrison until 10 o’clock, when the train gave a sudden lurch that left the secretary barely time to leap aboard. Davis stood and watched the tail light fade and vanish, then rode back to the big empty-seeming house at Clay and 12th streets, there to await word from Lee that he too must leave the city.

All the evidence was that it would not be long, and next morning — All Fools Day — a message from the general-in-chief served notice that the time was shorter than he or anyone else had known. Pickett’s advance the day before, supported by Fitz Lee’s troopers, had driven the startled Federals back on Dinwiddie by sunset, but there they rallied, pumping lead from their rapid-fire carbines, and Pickett felt obliged to pull back in the rainy predawn darkness, leaving the situation much as it had been when he set out from Five Forks yesterday morning. Sheridan still held Dinwiddie, cutting the Stony Creek supply line, and had followed up Pickett’s withdrawal so closely as to deny him use of the critical White Oak Road leading east to Hatcher’s Run. Supported as it was by at least two corps of infantry, Lee told Davis, this movement of Grant’s “seriously threatens our position and diminishes our ability to maintain our present lines in front of Richmond and Petersburg.… I fear he can cut both the South Side and the Danville railroads, being far superior to us in cavalry. This in my opinion obliges us to prepare for the necessity of evacuating our position on James River at once, and also to consider the best means of accomplishing it, and our future course.”

*  *  *

“Grant has the bear by the hind leg while Sherman takes off the hide,” Lincoln had told a White House caller some weeks back, explaining the situation as it then obtained. But now the holder-skinner roles were to be reversed, and Sheridan — much to his delight — was the catalytic agent injected by Grant to bring the change about. At Dinwiddie on the 29th, just as the rain began to patter on the roof of the tavern where he had set up for the night, he received a dispatch that sent his spirits fairly soaring. “I feel now like ending the matter, if it is possible to do so, before going back,” his chief informed him. “In the morning, push around the enemy, if you can, and get onto his right rear. The movements of the enemy’s cavalry may, of course, modify your action, [but] we will all act together as one army until it is seen what can be done.”

“Onto,” Grant said, not
into
Lee’s rear: meaning that the strike at the two railroads had become incidental to his main purpose, which was to crush the rebel army where it stood. “My hope was that Sheridan would be able to carry Five Forks, get on the enemy’s right flank and rear, and force them to weaken their center to protect their right so that an assault in the center might be successfully made.” That was how he put it later; Warren and Humphreys would support the cavalry effort west of Hatcher’s Run, and Wright was to lunge at Petersburg on signal, supported on the left and right by Ord and Parke, while Weitzel maintained pressure on Richmond’s defenses beyond the James, partly to hold Longstreet in position, but also to be ready to move in when
the breakthrough came, beyond the Appomattox. Glad to find his superior following through on what he had told him in private, three days back — “I mean to end the business here” — Sheridan briefed his subordinates on their share in the operation. All during the conference, however, rain drummed hard and harder on the tavern roof; daylight showed a world in flood, with no sign of a let-up; roads were practically bottomless, preventing the movement of supplies, and the rain continued to fall in sheets, converting meadows into ponds. To make things worse, a bogged observer noted, “the soil was a mixture of clay and sand, partaking in some places of the nature of quicksand.” Grant could testify to this, his headquarters beside the Vaughan Road being one such place. Formerly a cornfield, it now resembled a slough, with effects at once comic and grim on men and mounts, coming and going or even trying to stand still. “Sometimes a horse or mule would be standing apparently on firm ground,” he later wrote, “when all at once one foot would sink, and as he commenced scrambling to catch himself, all his feet would sink and he would have to be drawn by hand out of the quicksands so common in that part of Virginia.”

Veterans wagged their heads, remembering Burnside’s Mud March, and some declared the situation was no worse than might have been expected, what with all the glib predictions that Bobby Lee was about to be outfoxed. They had heard that kind of talk before, with results that varied only in the extent of their discomfort when the smoke cleared. “Four years of war, while it made the men brave and valorous,” a Pennsylvania private would point out, “had entirely cured them
of imagining that each campaign would be the last.” Still they were not dispirited; soggy crackers and soaked blankets often went with soldiering, especially on occasions like the present; “When are the gunboats coming up?” they called to one another as they slogged along the spongy roads or stood about in fields too wet for sitting.

Sheridan, on the other hand, fumed and fretted. He had scouting parties working northward out of Dinwiddie in accordance with his orders, but he feared the arrival of a dispatch changing those orders because of the weather. Sure enough, just such a message came from Grant around midmorning. “The heavy rain of today will make it impossible for you to do much until it dries up a little, or we get roads around our rear repaired.” His suggestion was that Sheridan “leave what cavalry you deem necessary to protect the left” and return with the rest to a station on the military railroad, where he could draw rations and grain for his troopers and their mounts. Or, better yet: “Could not your cavalry go back by the way of Stony Creek Depot and destroy or capture the store of supplies there?”

Go back! Sheridan frowned as he read the words, then set out instead for Grant’s command post, seven miles northeast, to argue for all he was worth against postponement of the forward movement. Hoping to save time — “a stumpy, quadrangular little man,” a subsequent acquaintance was to say, “with a forehead of no promise and hair so short that it looks like a coat of black paint” — he rode a long-legged Kentucky pacer, much admired for its mile-eating gait. But the going was slow on the mud-slick roads, pelted by unrelenting rain, and slower still around midday when he turned off the Vaughan Road, a mile beyond Gravelly Run, and urged his mount across the drowned headquarters cornfield. “Instead of striking a pacing gait now,” a staffer noted, “[the horse] was at every step driving its legs knee-deep into the quicksand with the regularity of a pile driver.” Grant was in conference just then, but Little Phil, “water dripping from every angle of his face and clothes,” launched forthwith into his protest to such listeners as were handy. Give him his head, he said, and Lee would be whipped in short order. How about forage? someone asked; to his disdain. “Forage?” he snorted. “I’ll get all the forage I want. I’ll haul it out if I have to set every man in the command to corduroying roads, and corduroy every mile of them from the railroad to Dinwiddie. I tell you I’m ready to strike out tomorrow and go to smashing things!”

Such enthusiasm was contagious. Twenty minutes alone with the general-in-chief, once he was free, resulted in agreement that the cavalry would “press the movement against the enemy with all vigor.” Ord, Wright, and Parke were to remain on the alert for the signal to assault the rebel works in their front, and Sheridan would not only have the diversionary support of Humphreys and Warren, he would
also be given direct command of the latter’s corps at any time he requested it, thereby assuring full coöperation despite any difference of opinion that might arise. “Let me know, as early in the morning as you can, your judgment of the matter,” Grant told him in parting, “and I will make the necessary orders.” Elated, the bandy-legged Ohioan remounted and set out to rejoin his troopers around Dinwiddie, waving goodbye to the admiring group of staffers who came out into the still-driving rain to see him off, most of them as happy as he was over his success in getting their chief to cancel the postponement.

Still, a day had been lost to mud and indecision. And so, as it developed, was another — the last in March — not so much because of the weather, though rain continued to pelt the roads and sodden fields, as because of a double-pronged attack by Lee, who went over to the offensive in an attempt to disconcert the combinations moving against him west of Hatcher’s Run. True to his word, Sheridan put Custer’s whole division to work that morning, corduroying the Dinwiddie supply routes, while Devin probed northwest up the road to Five Forks, reinforced by a brigade from the third division, formerly Gregg’s but now under George Crook; Gregg had resigned in February, exhausted or disheartened by a winter spent on the Petersburg front, and Crook was exchanged, one month after his capture up in Maryland, in time to take Gregg’s place on the eve of the present maneuver, covering Dinwiddie today with his two remaining brigades while the other moved out with Devin for a share in what turned out to be a retreat in the face of heavy odds.

Approaching Five Forks around noon Devin encountered Pickett, who had been instructed by Lee to move out with his nearly 12,000 infantry and cavalry in order to beat the advancing Federals to the punch; which he did, emptying more than 400 U.S. saddles in the process. Outnumbered almost three to one, Devin had all he could do to make it back to Dinwiddie by sunset, still under heavy pressure. Crook’s and Custer’s troopers, called up and thrown dismounted into line alongside Devin’s, managed to stop the graybacks in plain view of Sheridan’s headquarters. Night came down, and with it came word of a similar repulse suffered by Warren across the way. Advancing in the direction of Lee’s right, which he had been told to “feel,” the New Yorker’s corps was badly strung out on the muddy byroads, various units marking time while others ran heavy-footed to catch up; Brigadier General Romeyn Ayres’ division, struck a sudden blow by a butternut host that came screaming out of the dripping woods ahead, took off rearward in such haste that Crawford’s, next in line and with no chance to brace for the shock, was also overrun. The attack was delivered by veterans from Bushrod Johnson’s division — all that remained of Anderson’s improvised corps — reinforced by others brought over from A. P. Hill beyond the run, and was directed by Lee
himself, who had no way of knowing that this would be his and the Army of Northern Virginia’s last. In any case, the drive did not falter until it reached Griffin’s division, posted in reserve, and even then was only contained with help from Humphreys, whose corps was advancing in better order on the right. After sundown, the attackers — some 5000 in all, of whom about 800 had fallen or been captured — withdrew to their works apparently satisfied with the infliction of just over 1400 casualties on Warren and just under 400 on Humphreys, both of whom testified that the call had been a close one, indicative of the need for caution while groping for contact with the rebel flank.

Sheridan did not agree. Nettled, but no more daunted by Devin’s repulse than he was by Warren’s, he was convinced that what had been learned from these two encounters far outweighed the loss of 2700 men on the Union left, today and yesterday. After all there still were some 50,000 blue-clad veterans west of Hatcher’s Run, mounted and afoot, and he believed in using them all-out, with emphasis on getting the job done, rather than on caution. Lee had scarcely that many troops in his whole command, from White Oak Swamp to Five Forks, and if Little Phil had his way tonight the old fox would have a good many less before the sun went down tomorrow. What he had in mind was Pickett’s detachment. Its movement against him today, while tactically successful, had increased its isolation and thereby exposed it to destruction, if only the right kind of pressure could be brought to bear. Even before sundown, with the issue still apparently in doubt, he said as much to a staff colonel sent over by Grant, who expressed alarm at finding Devin’s troopers thrown back on the outskirts of Dinwiddie, skirmishing hotly within carbine range of the headquarters tavern. “This force is in more danger than I am,” Sheridan told him. “If I am cut off from the Army of the Potomac, it is cut off from Lee’s army, and not a man in it should ever be allowed to get back to Lee. We at last have drawn the enemy’s infantry out of its fortifications, and this is our chance to attack it.”