The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (42 page)

But that was later. A more immediate consequence of the rout was that Upton’s breakthrough went for nothing, not only because he was left without support, but also because the defenders now were free to concentrate all their attention and strength on healing the breach. This they were quick to do, obliging Upton to fight his way out of the rebel lines with much of the fervor and urgency he had displayed while fighting his way in. Darkness, gathering fast after sundown, was a help in the disengagement; all twelve regiments made it
back to their own lines, having suffered about one thousand casualties. That was also about the number they inflicted, mostly in the form of prisoners taken in the initial rush and escorted into the Federal lines before the counterattack obliged their captors to follow in their wake. Far on the right, Hancock’s attack, deferred till sunset, was repulsed at about the same time, as decisively as Warren’s had been earlier, and Burnside continued his pointless vigil on the left. Night came down as the fighting ended. Men sat around campfires and discussed the events of the day, which provoked much blame of Mott and praise for Upton. Across the way, notes faint in the distance and filtered through the trees, a Confederate band lent an eerie touch to the scene by playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” but this was offset to some extent, or anyhow balanced, when a Union band responded with the “Dead March” from
Saul
.

One of Upton’s warmest admirers was the general-in-chief, who rewarded him with a battlefield promotion — subject, of course, to Washington approval — “for gallant and meritorious services.” Much encouraged by the young colonel’s tactical contribution, which he saw as the key to Lee’s undoing if the maneuver could be repeated on a larger scale and properly supported, Grant was in high spirits. A headquarters orderly saw him talking to Meade about the prospect that night with unaccustomed animation, puffing rapidly on a cigar. “A brigade today,” he was saying; “we’ll try a corps tomorrow.”

Thinking it over he realized however that tomorrow would be too soon. One trouble with today’s attack was that it had been launched with not enough daylight left for its full exploitation; dawn would be a much better time in that regard, and the preceding darkness would help to conceal the massing of large bodies of troops within charging distance of the rebel works. So Grant, having ruled out tomorrow, decided that the assault would be delivered at first light on the following day, May 12 — which would also give him plenty of time for briefing all commanders, high and low, and an unhurried movement of units, large and small, into their designated jump-off areas. Given the method, the tactical execution was fairly obvious. Hancock would be shifted from the far right to the center, where he would be in charge of the main effort, and he would make it with his whole corps, against the very point that Mott had failed to hit today, the apex of the “angle,” the military theory being that the tip of a salient was hard to defend because fire from the lines slanting back from that forward point could not converge on a force advancing from dead ahead. It was true, this theory had not applied too well on that same ground today; Mott had been wrecked before he got within reach of the objective. But Hancock’s assault would be delivered Upton-style, without pauses for alignment or for firing, and if it worked as well for him as it had worked for Upton, his men would be up to the enemy works, and
maybe over them, before the defenders had time to offer much resistance. Moreover this attack, unlike the one today, would be heavily supported. Burnside, off on the left, would move up close tomorrow night and launch a simultaneous assault next morning against the salient’s eastern face, while Wright and Warren kept up the pressure on the right and the far right. Further details could be worked out next day, when the formal order was drawn up. In any case, after Upton’s demonstration late today, a Tuesday, Grant had little doubt that Lee’s defenses would be breached on Thursday and that careful planning would see to it that the breach was enlarged to victory proportions. He went to bed in a better frame of mind than he had done on any of the other five nights since May 4, when his army completed its crossing of the Rapidan unopposed.

That his mood was still the same on Wednesday, hopeful and determined, was demonstrated shortly after breakfast by his response to a request from a distinguished visitor, U. S. Representative Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois, that he give him some word of encouragement to take back to Washington with him. Grant’s congressional guardian angel from the outset of the war, Washburne had spent the past week at headquarters, where, incongruous in somber civilian broadcloth amid the panoply of the staff, he had been something of a puzzle to the troops; they could not figure who or what he was, until a wit explained that the general, with his usual concern for the eventualities, had brought his private undertaker along on the campaign. Now that he was returning to his duties at the capital, the congressman told Grant as they stood outside the latter’s tent to say goodbye, it might be a good idea to relieve the anxiety of the President and the Secretary of War by sending them some word on the progress of the fighting here in Virginia. “I know they would be greatly gratified,” Washburne said, “if I could carry a message from you giving what encouragement you can as to the situation.” Grant looked doubtful. He was aware that anything of the kind would be released to the public, and he did not want to be hurt, as others before him had been hurt, by the boomerang effect of overoptimistic statements. Pleased though he was with his progress so far, he replied, he knew that the road ahead was a long one and he was therefore “anxious not to say anything just now that might hold out false hopes to the people.” He hesitated, then added: “However, I will write a letter to Halleck, as I generally communicate through him, giving the general situation, and you can take it with you.” He stepped inside the tent, sat down at his field desk, and after heading a sheet of paper, “Near Spottsylvania C. H., May 11, 1864 — 8.30 a.m.,” scribbled a couple of hundred words, puffing away at his cigar as he wrote. “We have now ended our sixth day of very hard fighting,” he informed Halleck. “The result up to this time is much in our favor. But our losses have been heavy, as well as those of the enemy.… I am now
sending back to Belle Plain all my wagons for a fresh supply of provisions and ammunition, and purpose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.… I am satisfied the enemy are very shaky, and are only kept up to the mark by the greatest exertions on the part of their officers and by keeping them intrenched in every position they take.”

When he finished he had a clerk make a fair copy, which he then signed and folded and gave to Washburne, along with a farewell handshake, before returning to work on his plans for tomorrow’s dawn assault. Staff officers read the retained draft of the letter, one afterwards recalled, without finding in it anything unusual or “epigrammatic” until a few days later, when the New York papers reached camp with excerpts from it splashed across their front pages in large headlines — particularly a phrase or sentence which someone, either the copyist here or another at the far end, polished up a bit: “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” That caught the attention of the editors, and through them the public, with a force unequaled by anything Grant had said or written since the Unconditional Surrender note at Donelson, more than two years ago. “I propose to move immediately upon your works” had passed into history as a watchword signifying Federal determination to press for total victory over the forces in rebellion, and so too, now, did “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”

Grant’s assessment of the Confederates as “very shaky” indicated that he had not really believed it would take “all summer” to settle the issue at hand that Wednesday morning, north of Spotsylvania. By midafternoon — coincident with a sudden change in the weather, brought on by a light drizzle of rain that dropped the temperature from the unseasonable high it had been holding for the past few days — the field order for tomorrow’s attack was being distributed to the commanders of all four corps. Already in close proximity to the enemy along their respective portions of the line, Warren and Wright would remain more or less where they were, and Burnside had only a limited adjustment to make. It was otherwise with Hancock, who had to shift three of his divisions into position with the fourth, Mott’s, which by now, although considerably diminished and dejected, had been reassembled just in rear of the area where it had begun its ill-fated advance the day before. The division he had left beyond the Po when he returned with the other two, in accordance with orders from Meade, had also recrossed the river after a clash with a rebel force Lee sent over from his right, and in this rear-guard action the division had had to leave behind a gun that, in the haste of the withdrawal, got wedged so tightly between two trees that it could not be freed. Hancock took this hard, the more so because it was the only piece of artillery the II Corps had ever lost in battle, and he was determined to get full revenge tomorrow.

Just now, though, he had his hands full getting his troops into
position for the attack at first light, which the almanac said would come at 4 a.m. The march began at dusk, along a narrow road soon churned to mud by a pelting rain that seemed to be getting harder by the hour. It was midnight before the head of the column reached the jump-off area and the four divisions, three of them wet and cold from their rainy march, started forming in the dripping woods. This too was a difficult business, for more reasons than the unpleasantness of the weather or the loss of sleep and lack of food. Here on reconnaissance earlier that day, unable to see far or clearly through the steely curtain of rain, Hancock had tried to get Mott’s disheartened men to drive the enemy pickets back so he could get a look at the objective; but little or nothing came of the attempt — they had too vivid a memory of what those 22 guns up there had done to them the day before — with the result that his examination of the apex of the “angle,” along with most of the intervening ground across which he would charge, had practically been limited to what he could learn from the map. And so it was tonight, in the rain and darkness. The best Hancock could do was give his division commanders a compass bearing, derived from the map by drawing a line connecting a house in their rear with a house in the approximate center of the rebel salient, and tell them to move in that direction when they received his order to advance.

Four o’clock came, but not daylight; the almanac had not taken the rain or fog into account. Finally at 4.30, though there still was scarcely a glimmer of light from what the compass showed to be the east, word came for the lead division to go forward, followed closely by the other three.

Fearing the worst as they stumbled forward through fog so dense that it held back the dawn, Hancock and his soldiers were in better luck than they had any way of knowing. For one thing, those 22 guns assigned to defend the apex of the salient up ahead, which they expected to start roaring at any moment, tearing their close-packed ranks with shot and shell within seconds of hearing a picket give the alarm, were by no means the threat they had been two days ago, when they all but demolished one of these four divisions attempting this same thing on this same ground. They were in fact no threat at all. They were not there. They had been withdrawn the night before, as the result of an overdue error by Lee, whose intelligence machinery, after a week of smooth if not uncanny functioning, had finally slipped a cog.

Reports of activity beyond the Union lines had been coming in from various sources all the previous afternoon. A lookout perched in the belfry of a Spotsylvania church, which commanded a view of the roads in rear of the enemy left, informed headquarters of what seemed to be a large-scale withdrawal in that direction, and this was confirmed between 4 and 5 o’clock by two messages from Lee’s cavalryman son,
whose division — left behind by Stuart when he took out after Sheridan, two days ago, with three of his six brigades — was probing for information in that direction. Heavy trains were in motion for Fredericksburg, young Lee declared, and Federal wounded were being taken across the Rappahannock in large numbers to Belle Plain, eight miles beyond on the Potomac. “There is evidently a general move going on,” he notified his father. Here as in the Wilderness, the southern commander was alert to the danger of having his opponent steal a march on him, and here as there he was prepared to react on the basis of information less than conclusive or even substantial. Such activity in Grant’s left rear could mean that, having found the Spotsylvania confrontation unprofitable and restrictive, he had one of two strategic shifts in mind: 1) a limited retreat to Fredericksburg, where he would consolidate his forces and better cover his supply line for a subsequent advance by land or water, or 2) another swing around the Confederate right, to interpose his army between Lee and Richmond. From Lee’s point of view, though a similar endeavor had failed four days ago, the latter was the more dangerous maneuver, one that he simply could not afford to have succeed. In this case, however, he believed from the evidence that what Grant was about to attempt was a withdrawal to the Rappahannock line, and he wanted to prevent this — or, more strictly speaking, take advantage of it — almost as much as he did the other. In conversation with two of his generals about an hour before sundown he told why.

It began as a discussion of Grant’s worth as a tactician. Lee was visiting Harry Heth’s headquarters, on the far right near the courthouse, as was A. P. Hill, up and about but still not well enough to return to duty, when a staff officer happened to remark that, in slaughtering his troops by assaulting earthworks, the Union commander was little better than a butcher. Lee did not agree. “I think General Grant has managed his affairs remarkably well up to the present time,” he said quietly. Then he turned to Heth and told him what he had come for. “My opinion is the enemy are preparing to retreat tonight to Fredericksburg. I wish you to have everything in readiness to pull out at a moment’s notice, but do not disturb your artillery till you commence moving. We must attack those people if they retreat.”