The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (84 page)

Warned from all sides that his adversary was “bold even to rashness, and courageous in the extreme,” Sherman took the precaution of advising his unit commanders to keep their troops “always prepared for battle in any shape.”

Not that he regretted the predicted shift in rebel tactics. His casualties would undoubtedly mount, but there was plenty of room for taking up the slack that was evident from a comparison of Union losses, east and west. In the eleven weeks of his campaign against Johnston and Atlanta, he had lost fewer men than Meade had lost in the two-day Wilderness battle that opened his drive on Lee and Richmond. Besides, as Sherman saw it, the heavier the casualties were — provided, of course, that they could be kept in ratio, Federal and Confederate — the sooner the fighting would end with him in occupation of his goal. That was what he meant, in part, when he wrote home the following week: “I confess I was pleased at the change.”

II

War Is Cruelty …

EASTWARD, WITH LEE AT LAST OUT-FOXED, the blue tide ran swift and steady, apparently inexorable as it surged toward the gates of the capital close in his rear. But then, at the full, the outlying Richmond bulwarks held; Beauregard, as he had been wont to do from the outset — first at Sumter, three years back, then again two years ago at Corinth, and once more last year in Charleston harbor — made the most of still another “finest hour” by holding Petersburg against the longest odds ever faced by a major commander on either side in this lengthening, long-odds war.

Grant’s crossing of James River went like clockwork, and the clock itself was enormous. Preceded in the withdrawal by Baldy Smith, whose corps took ship at White House Landing on June 13 for the roundabout journey to rejoin Butler at Bermuda Hundred, Hancock reached Wilcox Landing by noon of the following day, completing a thirty-mile hike from Cold Harbor to the north bank of the James, and began at once the ferrying operation that would put his corps on Windmill Point, across the way, by dawn of June 15. While he crossed, the engineers got to work on the pontoon bridge, two miles downriver, by which the other three corps of the Army of the Potomac were to march in order to reinforce Smith and Hancock in their convergence on Petersburg, the rail hub whose loss, combined with the loss of the Virginia Central — Hunter and Sheridan were presumed to be moving down that critical Shendandoah Valley supply line even now — would mean that Richmond’s defenders, north as well as south of the James, would have to abandon the city for lack of subsistence, or else choose between starvation and surrender. In high spirits at the prospect, Grant was delighted to recover the mobility that had characterized the opening of the final phase of his Vicksburg campaign, which the current operation so much resembled. Now as then, he was crossing a river miles downstream from his objective in order to sever its lines of supply and come upon it from the rear. Whether it crumpled under a sudden assault,
as he intended, or crumbled under a siege, which he hoped to avoid, the result would be the same; Richmond was doomed, if he could only achieve here in Virginia the concert of action he had enjoyed last year in Mississippi.

By way of ensuring that this would obtain, he did not tarry long on the north bank of the James, which he reached on the morning of June 14 to find the head of Hancock’s column arriving and the engineers already hard at work corduroying approaches to the bridge the pontoniers would presently throw across the nearly half-mile width of river to Windmill Point. Instead, wanting to make certain that Butler understood his part in the double-pronged maneuver, Grant got aboard a steamer for a fast ride up to Bermuda Hundred and a conference with the cock-eyed general. Butler not only understood; he was putting the final touches to the preliminary details, laying a pontoon bridge near Broadway Landing, where Smith would cross the Appomattox tonight for a quick descent on Petersburg next morning, and preparing to sink five stone-laden vessels in the channel of the James at Trent’s Reach, within cannon range of his bottled-up right, to block the descent below that point of rebel gunboats which might otherwise make a suicidal attempt to disrupt the main crossing, some thirty winding miles downstream. Satisfied that no hitch was likely to develop in this direction, either from neglect or misconception, Grant prepared to return to Wilcox Landing for a follow-up meeting with Meade, but before he left he got off a wire to Halleck, who had opposed the movement from the outset in the belief that the scattered segments of both armies, Meade’s and Butler’s, would be exposed to piecemeal destruction by Lee while it was in progress. “Our forces will commence crossing the James today,” Grant informed him. “The enemy show no signs yet of having brought troops to the south side of Richmond. I will have Petersburg secured, if possible, before they get there in much force. Our movement from Cold Harbor to the James River has been made with great celerity and so far without loss or accident.”

The answer came next morning, not from Old Brains, who was not to be dissuaded from taking counsel of his fears, but from the highest authority of all:

By that time Smith was over the Appomattox and moving directly on Petersburg, whose outer defenses lay within six miles of Broadway Landing. He had 16,000 men in his three infantry divisions, including one that joined him from City Point at daybreak — a Negro outfit under Brigadier General Edward Hincks, which had been left behind when the rest of the corps shifted northside for a share in the Cold Harbor
nightmare — plus Kautz’s 2400 wide-ranging troopers, over toward the City Point Railroad, where they covered the exposed southeast flank of the column on the march. Four miles from the river, after receiving long-range shots from rebel vedettes who scampered when threatened, the marchers came upon a fast-firing section of artillery posted atop an outlying hill with butternut infantry in support. Hincks, on the left, sent his unblooded soldiers forward at a run. One gun got away, but they took the other, along with its crew, and staged a jubilation around the captured piece, elated at having made the most of a chance to discredit the doubts that had denied them a role in the heavy fighting two weeks ago. Baldy too was delighted, despite the delay, as he got the celebrants back into column, left and right, and resumed the march; for this was the route by which he believed Petersburg could have been taken in the first place, back in early May, and he had said as much, repeatedly though without avail, to Butler at the time. Another mile down the road, however, he came upon a sobering view, spirit-chilling despite the noonday heat, and called a halt for study and deployment.

What he saw, dead ahead down the tracks of the railroad, might well have given anyone pause, let alone a man who had just returned from playing a leading role in Grant’s (and Lee’s) Cold Harbor demonstration of what could happen to troops, whatever their numerical advantage, who delivered a hair-trigger all-out attack on a prepared position, however scantly it might be defended. Moreover, this one had been under construction and improvement not for two days, as had been the
case beyond the Chickahominy, but for nearly two years, ever since August 1862, when Richmond’s defenders learned that McClellan had wanted to make just such a southside thrust, as a sequel to
his
Peninsular “change of base,” only to be overruled by Halleck, who had favored the maneuver no more then, when he had the veto, than he did now that he lacked any final say-so in the matter. Called the “Dimmock Line” for Captain Charles H. Dimmock, the engineer who laid them out, the Petersburg fortifications were ten miles in length, a half oval tied at its ends to the Appomattox above and below the town, and contained in all some 55 redans, square forts bristling with batteries and connected by six-foot breastworks, twenty feet thick at the base and rimmed by a continuous ditch, another six feet deep and fifteen wide. In front of this dusty moat, trees had been felled, their branches sharpened and interlaced to discourage attackers, and on beyond a line of rifle pits for skirmishers, who could fall back through narrow gaps in the abatis, the ground had been cleared for half a mile to afford the defenders an unobstructed field of fire that would have to be crossed, naked to whatever lead might fly, by whatever moved against them. Confronting the eastward bulge of this bristly, hard-shelled oval, Smith gulped and then got down to figuring how to crack it. First there was reconnoitering to be done; a risky business, and he did much of it himself, drawing sniper fire whenever he ventured out of the woods in which he concealed his three divisions while he searched for some apparently nonexistent weak point to assault.

Despite a superfluity of guns frowning from all those embrasures, there seemed to be a scarcity of infantry in the connecting works. Accordingly, he decided to try for a breakthrough with a succession of reinforced skirmish lines, strong enough to overwhelm the defenders when they came to grips, yet not so thickly massed as to suffer unbearable losses in the course of their naked advance across the slashings. All this took time, however. It was past 4 o’clock when Smith wound up his reconnaissance and completed the formulation of his plan. Aware that the defenders were in telegraphic contact with Richmond, from which reinforcements could be rushed by rail — the track distance was only twenty-three miles — he set 5 o’clock as the jump-off hour for a coördinated attack by elements from all three divisions, with every piece of Federal artillery firing its fastest to keep the heads of the defenders down while his troops were making their half-mile sprint from the woods, where they now were masked, to the long slow curve of breastworks in their front.