The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (35 page)

Hancock had his hands full where he was, holding Longstreet west of the Brock Road, immediately north and south of the plank road intersection. For better than five hours now, advancing and retreating, the fighting had been as heavy as any he had ever seen, and so too had his casualties and the expenditure of ammunition. Drummer boys were pressed into unfamiliar service as stretcher bearers, and when they got to the rear with their anguished burdens, the stretchers were loaded with boxes of cartridges for the return to the firing line, so that, as one reporter wrote, “the struggle shall not cease for want of ball and powder.” Involved as he was in the direction of all this, blinded by thickets and appealed to simultaneously from the left and right — Barlow was convinced that he was about to be hit by Pickett, and Wadsworth’s division, adjacent to the unmanned gap across the army’s center, had just come apart at the seams — Hancock was apparently too busy to notice that the contraction of his front in the vicinity of the crossroad, resulting from his losses and the withdrawal
of four brigades to meet the reported dangers on the far left and the right, had widened to about a mile the brush-choked interval between the main body and Barlow’s outpost position down the road. Consequently, though he was reasonably well protected against a flank attack by Pickett, who wasn’t there, he was not protected at all from one by Longstreet, who was. His immediate left — as Gordon was saying of Sedgwick’s right, four miles away — was wide open to either a turning movement or an end-on strike.

Then came the lull, a half-hour breathing space. Hancock spent it shoring up his line against an expected renewal of Longstreet’s frontal effort to drive him back from the vital crossroad. Atop the knoll in the Lacy meadow, Grant, with a hole in his center and both flanks in the air, continued to whittle. Then, around 11 o’clock, the storm broke. Within minutes of the opening shots, according to Meade’s chief of staff, the uproar of the rebel attack “approached the sublime.”

“Longstreet, always grand in battle, never shone as he did here,” a First Corps artillerist said of the general in his conduct of this morning’s fighting on the right. Within three hours of his arrival he introduced tactics into a battle which, up to then, had been little more than a twenty-hour slugging match, with first one side then the other surging forward through the brush, only to fall back when momentum was lost and the enemy took his turn at going over to the offensive. All attacks had been frontal except for chance encounters, when some confused unit — a regiment or a brigade or, as in Wadsworth’s case, a division — got turned around, usually in the course of an advance through blinding thickets, and exposed a naked flank to being torn. Now Old Peter, who was always at his calmest when the conflict roared its loudest, undertook to serve a Federal corps, reinforced to a strength of seven divisions, in that same tearing fashion.

Lee had ordered the army’s chief engineer, Major General Martin L. Smith, to report to Longstreet at about the time the Federals began to yield the ground they had won from Hill. Sent out to reconnoiter the Union left, Smith — a forty-four-year-old New-York-born West Pointer whose most distinguished service to his adopted country up to now had been at Vicksburg, where he not only laid out and supervised the construction of its hilly defenses, but also commanded one of the divisions that manned them under siege — returned at 10 o’clock to report that he had found Hancock’s flank wide open to attack from within the mile-wide gap that yawned between his main body and Barlow’s outpost. Moreover, an unfinished and unmapped railroad, work on which had been abandoned when the war began, afforded an ideal covered approach to that vulnerable point; troops could be massed in the brush-screened cut, just where the roadbed made a turn southeast, perpendicular to the unguarded flank a briery quarter mile away.
Old Peter’s eyes lighted up at the news, but he was no more inclined to be precipitate here than he had been at Second Manassas when a similar opportunity arose. He summoned his young chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel G. Moxley Sorrel, instructed him to take charge of a force made up of three brigades, one from each of the three divisions at hand, and conduct them to the designated point for the attack. Knowing how likely such maneuvers were to become disorganized under the influence of exuberance, he stressed the need for careful preparation. “Form a good line,” he told him, “and then move, your right pushed forward and turning as much as possible to the left.” Characteristically, before sending him on his way, he added in true First Corps style: “Hit hard when you start, but don’t start until you have everything ready.”

Sorrel assembled the three brigades, headed by Brigadier Generals William Wofford, G. T. Anderson, and William Mahone, respectively from Kershaw’s, Field’s, and Richard Anderson’s divisions, and just as he was about to move out, Colonel John M. Stone of Heth’s division, in position on Longstreet’s left, requested permission to add the weight of his Mississippi brigade to the blow about to be struck. Hill and Heth were willing, and that made four brigades from as many divisions, a pair each from two corps, not one of them under a professional soldier and all in charge of a young staff officer who never before had commanded troops in action. Sorrel was a former bank clerk, twenty-six years old, intensely ambitious and strikingly handsome, a Georgian like his chief, though of French not Dutch extraction. As he set out, leading this force of about 5000 into the railway cut, then eastward through its leafy tunnel to the bend where they would mass for the attack, he knew that his great hour had come and he was determined to make the most of it, for his own and his country’s sake. Old Peter, who had a great affection for him dating back to First Manassas, watched him disappear in the woods, then settled back to wait for the uproar that would signal the launching of the flank assault. He kept his remaining eleven brigades in position astride the plank road, maintaining frontal contact and preparing to increase the pressure when the time came. Already he was planning a larger turning movement to follow the one about to start. Once Hancock’s line had been rolled up, the fronts of the other two Confederate corps would be uncovered in rapid sequence; Hill’s two divisions would join the grand left wheel, and Ewell’s three would drive straight ahead, cutting the Federals off from the fords by which they had crossed the Rapidan. Obliged to fall back on Fredericksburg, Grant’s army would be cut to pieces, train and all, as it jammed the narrow Wilderness trails and scattered in the brush. Anticipation made the wait seem long, though in fact it was quite brief. At 11 o’clock, within half an hour of his setting out, Sorrel’s attack exploded on the Union left and began to roll northward, clattering
across the right front of the Confederate position. Longstreet ordered his main body forward simultaneously to exploit and enlarge the panic already evident in the enemy ranks.

The end-on blow was as successful as even Sorrel had dared to hope it would be. Struck without preamble by a horde of rapid-firing rebels who came screaming through what up to then had been a curtain of peaceful green, the first blue unit — a brigade that had just been withdrawn from the line to catch its breath while the lull was on — disintegrated on contact, its members taking off in all directions to escape the sudden onslaught, and though others reacted differently, having at least had a semblance of warning that something horrendous was headed in their direction from the left, the result was much the same in the end, as unit after unit, finding itself under simultaneous fire from the front and flank, sought to achieve a similar deliverance from fury. Consternation in such cases was followed by a strangely deliberate acceptance of the military facts of life, the difference being that they reacted, not as individuals, but as a group seeking safety in numbers. A man from one of Gibbon’s brigades reported that the first he knew of a flank attack was when he saw troops from Mott’s division, on his left, trudging rearward in a body. At first, so deliberate was their step, so oddly sullen their expression, he could not make out what was happening. “[They] did not seem to me demoralized in manner,” he declared, “nor did they present the appearance of soldiers moving under orders, but rather of a throng of armed men returning dissatisfied from a muster.” The best explanation another observer could give was that “a large number of troops were about to leave the service,” and apparently they were doing all they could to leave it alive. One thing at least was clear to a staff officer who watched them slogging rearward, oblivious to pleas and threats alike. “They had fought all they meant to fight for the present,” he said, “and there was an end to it.” Hancock himself put it simplest, in a statement years later to Longstreet: “You rolled me up like a wet blanket.”

Elation on the Confederate side was correspondingly great, and it too was a sort of mass reaction. Here, the cheering troops perceived as soon as the flank attack began to roll, was another Chancellorsville in the making. Moreover, they were aware of the highly encouraging difference that, instead of launching their turning movement with a scant two hours of daylight left for its exploitation, as Jackson’s men had done, they now had a substantial eight or nine such hours: enough, surely, to complete the destruction already under way. Not that they wasted time, simply because so much of it was available; Sorrel had carried out his orders with speed and precision. Wofford and Mahone were abreast in front, respectively on the left and right, supported by G. T. Anderson and Stone, whose added pressure shattered what little resistance was encountered or by-passed in the course of the advance.
Within less than an hour they had driven northward all the way to the plank road; some of Wofford’s Georgians, in fact, plunged eagerly across it, intent on the chase, though Mahone’s Virginians called a halt at that point, in accordance with instructions. When Sorrel rode up he found the plank road unobstructed all the way to its intersection with the Brock Road, where the displaced and rattled Federals were taking shelter behind the breastworks Hancock had had them build the day before. From the opposite direction he saw Longstreet and his staff riding toward him on the plank road, accompanied by several unit commanders to whom the burly lieutenant general was apparently giving directions for the follow-up assault. They made up a sizeable cavalcade, and Sorrel could see from their manner, their gestures and expressions as they rode, that they shared the exuberance he was feeling at the success of his first experience as a leader of men in battle.

Their high spirits were voiced by Brigadier General Micah Jenkins, the twenty-eight-year-old commander of a brigade in Field’s division, who had just been informed that his troops would play a major role in the follow-up attack. “I am happy,” the young South Carolina aristocrat told Longstreet, excited by the prospect of enlarging the gains already made. “I have felt despair for the cause for some months, but now I am relieved, and feel assured that we will put the enemy back across the Rapidan before night.” When Sorrel came up Jenkins embraced and congratulated him warmly. “We will smash them now,” he said.

Old Peter thought so, too. Engineer Smith had returned from a second reconnaissance of the Union left to report that a second turning movement, designed to flank the rallying bluecoats out of their breastworks along the Brock Road, was altogether as feasible as the first. Just then, however, as the cavalcade continued its ride east to within musket range of the Brock Road intersection, there was a sudden spatter of fire from the woods to the right front; some of Mahone’s men were shooting at some of Wofford’s, having mistaken them for Federals when they came hurrying back across the plank road to take their proper place in line. Aggressive as always, Longstreet whirled his horse in that direction, apparently intending to stop the undisciplined firing. Others followed his example — including Joe Kershaw, who had ridden forward to confer with Wofford on the condition of his detached brigade — and were met by a heavier volley from the Virginians in the woods. Four men were hit: a courier and a staff captain, both of whom were killed instantly, Micah Jenkins, who died a few hours later with a bullet in his brain, and Longstreet. “Friends! They are
friends!”
Kershaw shouted in a voice that rang above the clatter and the groans, and almost at once Mahone’s veterans ceased firing and hurried out of the woods to express their regret for what had happened.

By then solicitous hands were helping the wounded lieutenant general to dismount. Hit solidly by a bullet that passed through the base of his neck and lodged in his right shoulder, he had been lifted straight up by the impact and had come down hard, his right arm hanging useless, though he managed to stay in the saddle, bleeding heavily, until his companions were there to ease him to the ground, the upper part of his body propped against the trunk of a roadside tree. Exultation turned to dismay as word spread rapidly through the Wilderness that Old Peter had been hit. All down the line, men’s thoughts were more than ever of Chancellorsville, but with the bitter irony of remembering that Jackson too had been shot by his own soldiers, less than four miles up the road through these same woods, at the climax of a successful flank attack. As for Longstreet, his thoughts were neither on the past nor on the present, despite his pain. His concern was for the immediate future, the follow-up assault that would complete his victory. Field being the ranking division commander present in the corps, Longstreet blew the bloody foam from his mouth to say to Sorrel: “Tell General Field to take command, and move forward with the whole force and gain the Brock Road.” Soon his staff physician was there to tend his wounds, and when Lee arrived he told him, in such detail as his shaken vocal cords allowed, of his plan for turning the Federals out of their new position. By now a stretcher had been brought. He was lifted onto it, his hat placed over his face to shield his eyes, and carried back down the plank road to a waiting ambulance. On the way, when he heard troops by the roadside saying, “He is dead. They are only telling us he is wounded,” he raised his hat from his face with his usable hand. The answering cheers, he declared long afterward, served to ease his pain somewhat on the jolting rearward journey.