The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (86 page)

Lee already knew this last. What he did not know, because Beauregard did not know it to pass it along to him, was that Burnside had been in front of Petersburg since midmorning (in fact, his was the corps responsible for such limited gains as the Federals made today) and that Warren was arriving even then, bringing the blue total to more than 75,000, with still another 25,000 on the way. Wilson, who had
served Grant well in Sheridan’s absence with the other two mounted divisions, was riding hard through the twilight from Windmill Point, and Wright would finish crossing the pontoon bridge by midnight with the final elements of Meade’s army. Beauregard, whose strength had been raised in the course of the day to just over 14,000 by the arrival of Johnson from Bermuda Hundred and Ransom and Gracie from Richmond, might find the odds he had faced yesterday and today stretched unbearably tomorrow, despite the various oversights and hitches that had disrupted the Union effort south of the James for the past two days.

In all that time, hamstrung by conflicting orders and inadequate maps — and rendered cautious, moreover, by remembrance of Cold Harbor, fought two weeks ago tomorrow — the attackers had not managed to bring their preponderance of numbers to bear in a single concerted assault on the cracked and creaking Dimmock Line. Yet Grant, for one, was not inclined to be critical at this juncture. As he prepared for bed tonight in his tent at City Point, where he had transferred his headquarters the day before, he said with a smile, sitting half undressed on the edge of his cot: “I think it is pretty well, to get across a great river and come up here and attack Lee in the rear before he is ready for us.”

So he said, and so it was; “pretty well,” indeed. But June 17, even though all of Meade’s army was over the James before it dawned and had been committed to some kind of action before it ended, turned out to be little different. Today, as yesterday, the pressure built numerically beyond what should have been the rebel breaking point — better than 80,000 opposed by fewer than 15,000 — yet was never brought decisively to bear. From the outset, things again went wrong: beginning with Warren, who came up the previous night. Instructed to extend the left beyond the Jerusalem Plank Road for a sunrise attack up that well-defined thoroughfare, he encountered skirmishers on the approach march and turned astride the Norfolk Railroad to drive them back, thus missing a chance (which neither he nor his superiors knew existed) to strike beyond the occupied portion of the Dimmock Line. If this had not happened, if Warren had brushed the skirmishers aside and continued his march as instructed, Beauregard later said, “I would have been compelled to evacuate Petersburg without much resistance.” As it was, the conflict here at the south end of the line amounted to little more than an all-day long-range demonstration.

Northward along the center, where Burnside’s and Hancock’s corps were posted, the fighting was a good deal bloodier, although not much more productive in the end. One of Burnside’s divisions started things off by seizing a critical hill, yet could not exploit the advantage because he failed to alert his other two divisions to move up quickly in support. The Confederates had time to shore up their crumbling defenses, both here and just to the north where Hancock’s three divisions were
lying idle; Hancock having been obliged by his reopened wound to turn the command over to Birney — a good man, but no Hancock — they too had failed to get the word, with the result that they were about as much out of things as were Wright’s three divisions, one of which was used to bolster the fought-out Smith, inactive on the right, while the other two were sent in response to Butler’s urgent plea for reinforcements to keep Lee from driving him back into the bottle he had popped out of yesterday. Wright went, but failed to arrive in time to do anything more than join the Bermuda Hundred soldiers in captivity. By midafternoon, Pickett and Field had retaken the Howlett Line from end to end; Butler was recorked, this time for good, and still more troops were reported to be on the march from Lee’s position east of Richmond.

If they got there, if Petersburg was heavily reinforced, the Army of the Potomac would simply have exchanged one stalemate for another, twice the distance from the rebel capital and on the far side of a major river. There still was time to avoid this, however. None of Lee’s veterans was yet across the Appomattox, and most of them were still beyond the James. With the railroad severed at Walthall Junction, even the closest were unlikely to reach the field by first light tomorrow; which left plenty of time for delivering the coördinated attack the Federals had been trying for all along, without success.

Happily, near sunset, at least a portion of the army recovered a measure of its old élan. Burnside and Birney, suddenly meshing gears, surged forward to seize another mile of works along the enemy center, together with a dozen guns and about 500 prisoners. A savage counterattack (by Gracie’s brigade, it later developed, though at the time the force had seemed considerably larger) forestalled any rapid enlargement of the breakthrough, either in width or depth. Dusk deepened into darkness, and though the moon, only two nights short of the full, soon came out to flood the landscape with its golden light, Meade — like Smith before him, two dusks ago — declined to follow through by continuing the advance. Instead, he issued orders for a mass assault to be launched all along the line at the first wink of dawn.

Beauregard said afterwards that at this point, with his center pierced and Petersburg once more up for grabs, it seemed to him that “the last hour of the Confederacy had arrived.” In fact, he had been expecting
his patched-up line to crack all day, and he had begun at noon the laying out of a new defensive position, the better part of a mile in rear of the present one, to fall back on when the time came. He had no engineers, and indeed no reserves of any kind for digging; all he could do was mark the proposed line with white stakes, easily seen at night, and hope the old intrenchments would hold long enough for darkness to cover the withdrawal of his soldiers, who would do the digging when they got there. The old works, or what was left of them, did hold; or anyhow they nearly did, and Gracie’s desperate counterattack delayed a farther blue advance until nightfall stopped the fighting. Old Bory ordered campfires lighted all along the front and sentinels posted well forward; then at midnight, behind this curtain of light and the fitful spatter of picket fire, the rest of his weary men fell back through the moon-drenched gloom to the site of their new line, which they then began to dig, using bayonets and tin cans for tools and getting what little sleep they could between shifts.

At 12.40 a.m. their commander got off his final dispatch of the day to Lee. “All quiet at present. I expect renewal of attack in morning. My troops are becoming much exhausted. Without immediate and strong reinforcements results may be unfavorable. Prisoners report Grant on the field with his whole army.”

Lee now had a definite statement, the first in five days, not only that Meade’s army was no longer in his front, but also that it was in Beauregard’s, and he reacted accordingly. In point of fact, he had begun to act on this premise in response to a dispatch written six hours earlier, in which the southside commander informed him that increasing pressure along his “already much extended lines” would compel him to retire to a shorter line, midway between his original works and the vital rail hub in his rear. “This I shall hold as long as practicable,” he added, “but without reinforcements I may have to evacuate the city very shortly.” Petersburg’s fate was Richmond’s; Lee moved, as he had done two nights ago when the Creole stripped the Howlett Line, to forestall disaster — or anyhow to be in a better position to forestall it — by ordering Anderson’s third division to proceed to Bermuda Neck and A. P. Hill to cross the James at Chaffin’s Bluff and await instructions for a march in either direction, back north or farther south down the Petersburg Turnpike, depending on developments.

So much he had done already, and now that Beauregard’s 12.40 message was at hand, stating flatly that Grant was “on the field with his whole army,” he followed through by telling Anderson to send his third division on to Petersburg at once and follow with the second. A. P. Hill would go as well, leaving one of his three divisions north of the Appomattox in case Richmond came under attack. This last seemed highly unlikely, however; for a report came in, about this time, that cavalry had ridden down the Peninsula the previous afternoon, as
far as Wilcox Landing, and found that all four of Meade’s corps had crossed to Windmill Point in the course of the past three days. Beauregard’s information, gathered from prisoners, thus was confirmed beyond all doubt. It was now past 3.30 in the morning, June 18; Lee’s whole army, except for one division left holding the Howlett Line against Butler — and of course Early, who made contact with Hunter at Lynchburg that same day — would be on the march for Petersburg within the hour.

Two staff officers arrived just then from beyond the Appomattox, sent by their chief to lend verbal weight to his written pleas for help. “Unless reinforcements are sent before forty-eight hours,” one of them told Lee he had heard Old Bory declare, “God Almighty alone can save Petersburg and Richmond.” Normally, Lee did not approve of such talk; it seemed to him tinged with irreverence. But this was no normal time. “I hope God Almighty will,” he said.

For the first time since the crossing of the James, Meade’s army gave him on schedule all he asked for. In line before dawn, the troops went forward before sunrise, under orders to take the Confederate works “at all costs.” They took them, in fact, at practically no cost at all; for they were deserted, covered only by a handful of pickets who got off a shot or two, then scampered rearward or surrendered.

The result was about as disruptive to the attackers, however, as if they had met the stiffest kind of resistance. First, there was the confusion of calling a halt in the abandoned trenches, which had to be occupied for defense against a tricky counterstroke, and then there followed the testy business of groping about to locate the vanished rebels. All this took time. It was midmorning before they found them, nearly a mile to the west, and presently they had cause to wish they hadn’t. Beauregard had established a new and shorter line, due south from the Appomattox to a connection with the old works beyond the Jerusalem Plank Road, and was dug in all along it, guns clustered thicker than ever. A noon assault, spearheaded by Birney, was bloodily repulsed: so bloodily and decisively, indeed, that old-timers among the survivors — who had encountered this kind of fire only too often throughout six weeks of crablike sidling from the Rapidan to the Chickahominy — sent back word that Old Bory had been reinforced: by Lee.

It was true. Anderson’s lead division had arrived at 7.30 and the second marched in two hours later, followed at 11 o’clock by Lee himself, who rode out to confer with Beauregard, now second-in-command, his lonely ordeal ended. As fast as the lean, dusty marchers came up they were put into line alongside the nearly fought-out defenders, some of whom tried to raise a feeble cheer of welcome, while others wept from exhaustion at the sudden release from tension. They were pleased to
hear that A. P. Hill would also be up by nightfall to reduce the all-but-unbearable odds to the accustomed two-to-one, but as far as they were concerned the situation was stabilized already; they had considered their line unbreakable from the time the first of the First Corps veterans arrived to slide their rifles across the newly dug earth of the parapets and sight down them in the direction from which the Yankees would have to come when they attacked.

Across the way, the men who would be expected to do the coming flatly agreed. Remembering one Cold Harbor, they saw here the makings of another, and they wanted no part of it. The result, after the costly noon repulse, was a breakdown of the command system, so complete that Meade got hopping mad and retired, in effect, from any further participation in the effort. “I find it useless to appoint an hour to effect coöperation.… What additional orders to attack you require I cannot imagine,” he complained in a message sent to all corps commanders. His solution, if it could be called such, was for them “to attack at all hazards and without reference to each other.”

Under these circumstances, the army was spared another Cold Harbor only because its members, for the most part, declined to obey such orders as would have brought on a restaging of that fiasco. Hancock’s troops had come up in high spirits, three days ago; “We knew that we had outmarched Lee’s veterans and that our reward was at hand,” one would recall. These expectations had died since then, however, along with a great many of the men who shared them. “Are you going to charge those works?” a cannoneer asked as a column of infantry passed his battery, headed for the front, and was told by a foot soldier: “No, we are not going to charge. We are going to run toward the Confederate earthworks and then we are going to run back. We have had enough of assaulting earthworks.”

As the afternoon wore on, many declined to do even that much. Around 4 o’clock, for example, Birney massed a brigade for an all-out attack on the rebel center. He formed the troops in four lines, the front two made up of half a dozen veteran units, the rear two of a pair of outsized heavy-artillery regiments, 1st Massachusetts and 1st Maine. All four lines were under instructions to remain prone until the order came to rise and charge; but when it was given, the men in the front ranks continued to hug the ground, paying no attention to the shouts and exhortations of their saber-waving officers. They looked back and saw that the rear-rank heavies had risen and were preparing to go forward. “Lay down, you damn fools! You can’t take them works!” they cried over their shoulders. For all their greenness, the Bay State troops knew sound advice when they heard it. They lay back down. But the Maine men were rugged. They stepped through and over the prone ranks of veterans and moved at the double against the enemy intrenchments, which broke into flame at their approach. None of them made
it up to the clattering rebel line, and few of them made it back to their own. Of the 850 who went forward, 632 fell in less than half an hour. That was just over 74 percent, the severest loss suffered in a single engagement by any Union regiment in the whole course of the war.