The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (87 page)

This could not continue, nor did it. Before sunset Meade wired Grant that he believed nothing more could be accomplished here today. “Our men are tired,” he informed his chief, “and the attacks have not been made with the vigor and force which characterized our fighting in the Wilderness; if they had been,” he added, “I think we should have been more successful.” Grant — who had maintained a curious hands-off attitude throughout the southside contest, even as he watched his well-laid plan being frustrated by inept staff work and the bone-deep disconsolation of the troops — invoked no ifs and leveled no reproaches. Declaring that he was “perfectly satisfied that all has been done that could be done,” he agreed that the time had come to call a halt. “Now we will rest the men,” he said, “and use the spade for their protection until a new vein can be struck.”

A new vein might be struck, in time, but not by the old army, which had suffered a further subtraction of 11,386 killed, wounded, or captured from its ranks since it crossed the James. That brought the grand total of Grant’s losses, including Butler’s, to nearly 75,000 men — more than Lee and Beauregard had had in both their armies at the start of the campaign. Of these, a precisely tabulated 66,315 were from the five corps under Meade (including Smith’s, such time as it was with him) and that was only part of the basis for the statement by its historian, William Swinton, that at this juncture “the Army of the Potomac, shaken in its structure, its valor quenched in blood, and thousands of its ablest officers killed and wounded, was the Army of the Potomac no more.”

Much the same thing could be said of the army in the Petersburg intrenchments. Though its valor was by no means “quenched,” it was no longer the Army of Northern Virginia in the old aggressive sense, ready to lash out at the first glimpse of a chance to strike an unwary adversary; nor would it see again that part of the Old Dominion where its proudest victories had been won and from which it took its name. When Lee arrived that morning, hard on the heels of one corps and a few hours in advance of the other, Beauregard was in such a state of elation (“He was at last where I had, for the past three days, so anxiously hoped to see him,” the Creole later wrote) that he proposed an all-out attack on the Union flank and rear, as soon as A. P. Hill came up. Lee rejected the notion out of hand, in the conviction that his troops were far too weary for any such exertion and that Hill’s corps would be needed to extend the present line westward to cover the two remaining railroads, the Weldon and the Southside, upon which Richmond — and perhaps, for that matter, the Confederacy itself — depended for survival.
He did not add, as he might have done, that he foresaw the need for conserving, not expending in futile counterstrokes, the life of every soldier he could muster if he was to maintain, through the months ahead, the stalemate he had achieved at the price of his old mobility. “We must destroy this army of Grant’s before he gets to James River,” he had told Early three weeks ago, in the course of the shift from the Totopotomoy. “If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.” It was not that yet; Richmond was not under direct pressure, north of the James, and Petersburg was no more than semi-beleaguered; but that too, he knew, was only a “question of time.”

Grant agreed, knowing that the length of time in question would depend on the rate of his success in reaching around Lee’s right for control of the two railroads in his rear. First, though, there was the need for making the hastily occupied Federal line secure against dislodgment. The following day, June 19, was a Sunday (it was also the summer solstice;
Kearsarge
and
Alabama
were engaged off Cherbourg, firing at each other across the narrowing circles they described in the choppy waters of the Channel, and Sherman was maneuvering, down in Georgia, for ground from which to launch his Kennesaw assault); Meade’s troops kept busy constructing bombproofs and hauling up heavy guns and mortars that would make life edgy, not only for the grayback soldiers just across the way, but also for the civilians in Petersburg, whose downtown streets were so little distance away that the blue gun crews could hear its public clocks strike the hours when all but the pickets of both armies were rolled in blankets. Grant had it in mind, however, to try one more sudden lunge — a two-corps strike beyond the Jerusalem Plank Road — before settling down to “gradual approaches.”

Warning orders went out Monday to Wright, whose three divisions would be reunited by bringing the detached two from Bermuda Hundred, and to Birney, whose corps would pull back out of line for the westward march, and on Tuesday, June 21, the movement got under way. Simultaneously, while still waiting for Sheridan to return from his failure to link up with Hunter near the Blue Ridge, Wilson, reinforced by Kautz, was sent on a wide-ranging strike at both the Petersburg & Weldon and the Southside railroads, with instructions to rip up sizeable stretches of both before returning. Grant had settled down at his City Point headquarters that afternoon to await the outcome of this double effort by half of Meade’s infantry and all of the cavalry on hand, when “there appeared very suddenly before us,” a staff colonel wrote his wife, “a long, lank-looking personage, dressed all in black and looking very much like a boss undertaker.”

It was Lincoln. After sending his “I begin to see it” telegram to Grant on the 15th, he had gone up to Philadelphia for his speech next
day at the Sanitary Fair; after which he returned to Washington, fidgeted through another three days while the Petersburg struggle mounted to climax, and finally, this morning, boarded a steamer for a cruise down the Potomac and a first-hand look at the war up the James. “I just thought I would jump aboard a boat and come down and see you,” he said, after shaking hands all round. “I don’t expect I can do any good, and in fact I’m afraid I may do harm, but I’ll just put myself under your orders and if you find me doing anything wrong just send me right away.”

Grant replied, not altogether jokingly, that he would do that, and the group settled down for talk. By way of reassurance as to the outcome of the campaign, which now had entered a new phase — one that opened with his army twice as far from the rebel capital as it had been the week before — the general took occasion to remark that his present course was certain to lead to victory. “You will never hear of me farther from Richmond than now, till I have taken it,” he declared. “I am just as sure of going into Richmond as I am of any future event. It may take a long summer day, as they say in the rebel papers, but I will do it.”

Lincoln was glad to hear that; but he had been watching the casualty lists, along with the public reaction they provoked. “I cannot pretend to advise,” he said, somewhat hesitantly, “but I do sincerely hope that all may be accomplished with as little bloodshed as possible.”

Aside from this, which was as close to an admonition as he came, he kept the conversation light. “The old fellow remained with us till the next day, and told stories all the time,” the staff colonel informed his wife, adding: “On the whole he behaved very well.”

One feature of the holiday was a horseback visit to Hincks’s division, where news of Lincoln’s coming gathered around him a throng of black soldiers (“grinning from ear to ear,” the staffer wrote, “and displaying an amount of ivory terrible to behold”) anxious for a chance to touch the Great Emancipator or his horse in passing. Tears in his eyes, he took off his hat in salute to them, and his voice broke when he thanked them for their cheers. This done, he rode back to City Point for the night, then reboarded the steamer next morning for an extension of his trip upriver to pay a courtesy call on Ben Butler, whose views on politics were as helpful, in their way, as were Grant’s on army matters. He returned to Washington overnight, refreshed in spirit and apparently reinforced in the determination he had expressed a week ago at the Sanitary Fair: “We accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when that object is attained. Under God, I hope it never will until that time.”

Helpful though the two-day outing was for Lincoln, by way of providing relaxation and lifting his morale, the events of that brief span around Petersburg had an altogether different effect on Grant, or at
any rate on the troops involved in his intended probe around Lee’s right. After moving up, as ordered, on the night of June 21, Wright and Birney (Hancock was still incapacitated, sloughing fragments of bone from the reopened wound in his thigh) lost contact as they advanced next morning through the woods just west of the Jerusalem Plank Road, under instructions to extend the Federal left to the Weldon Railroad. Suddenly, without warning, both were struck from within the gap created by their loss of contact. Lee had unleashed A. P. Hill, who attacked with his old fire and savagery, using one division to hold Wright’s three in check while mauling Birney’s three with the other two. The result was not only a repulse; it was also a humiliation. Though his loss in killed and wounded was comparatively light, no fewer than 1700 of Birney’s men — including those in a six-gun battery of field artillery, who then stood by and watched their former weapons being used against their former comrades — surrendered rather than risk their lives in what he called “this most unfortunate and disgraceful affair.” Hardest hit of all was Gibbon’s division, which had crossed the Rapidan seven weeks ago with 6799 men and had suffered, including heavy reinforcements, a total of 7970 casualties, forty of them regimental commanders. Such losses, Gibbon declared in his formal report, “show why it is that troops, which at the commencement of the campaign were equal to almost any undertaking, became toward the end of it unfit for almost any.”

Wilson, after a heartening beginning, fared even worse than the infantry in the end. Reinforced by Kautz to a strength of about 5000 horsemen and twelve guns, he struck and wrecked a section of the Weldon Railroad above Reams Station, nine miles south of Petersburg, then plunged on to administer the same treatment to the Southside and the Richmond & Danville, which crossed at Burkeville, fifty miles to the west. Near the Staunton River, eighty miles southwest of Petersburg, with close to sixty miles of track ripped up on the three roads, he turned and started back for his own lines, having been informed that they would have been extended by then to the Petersburg & Weldon. On the way there, he was harried by ever-increasing numbers of gray cavalry, and when he approached Reams Station he found it held, not by Wright or Birney, who he had been told would be there, but by A. P. Hill. Moreover, the mounted rebels, pressing him by now from all directions, turned out to be members of Hampton’s other two divisions, returned ahead of Sheridan from the fight at Trevilian Station. Outnumbered and all but surrounded, Wilson set fire to his wagons, spiked his artillery, and fled southward in considerable disorder to the Nottoway River, which he succeeded in putting between him and his pursuers for a getaway east and north. He had accomplished most of what he was sent out to do, but at a cruel cost, including 1500 of his
troopers killed or captured, his entire train burned, and all twelve of his guns abandoned.

Grant had the news of these two near fiascos to absorb, and simultaneously there came word of still a third, one hundred air-line miles to the west, potentially far graver than anything that had happened close at hand. Wright and Birney at least had extended the Federal left beyond the Jerusalem Road, and Wilson and Kautz had played at least temporary havoc with no less than three of Lee’s critical rail supply lines. But David Hunter, aside from his easy victory two weeks ago at Piedmont and a good deal of incidental burning of civilian property since, accomplished little more, in the end, than the creation of just such a military vacuum as Lee specialized in filling.

Descending on Lynchburg late in the day, June 17, Hunter found Breckinridge drawn up to meet him with less than half as many troops. He paused overnight, preparing to stage another Piedmont in the morning, only to find, when it broke, that Jubal Early had arrived by rail from Charlottesville to even the odds with three veteran divisions: whereupon Hunter (for lack of ammunition, he later explained) went over to the defensive and fell back that night, under cover of darkness, to the shelter of the Blue Ridge. Early came on after him, and Hunter decided that, under the circumstances, his best course would be to return to West Virginia without delay. For three days Early pursued him, with small profit, then gave it up and on June 22 — while A. P. Hill was mauling Birney, south of Petersburg — marched for Staunton and the head of the Shenandoah Valley, that classic route for Confederate invasion which Lee had used so effectively in the past to play on Halleck’s and Lincoln’s fears.

These last were likely to be enlarged just now, and not without cause. With Hunter removed from all tactical calculations, nothing blue stood between Early and the Potomac, and with the capital defenses stripped of their garrisons to provide reinforcements and replacements for Meade, little remained with which to contest a gray advance from the Potomac into Washington itself. Lincoln had come up the James this week for a first-hand look at the war, but now it began to appear that he needed only to have waited a few days in the White House for the war to come to him.

So much was possible; Halleck’s worst fears as to the consequences of the southside shift for the failed assault might now be proved only too valid. But Grant was not given to intensive speculation on possible future disasters; he preferred to meet them when they came, having long since discovered that few of them ever did. Instead, in writing to Old Brains on June 23 he stressed his need for still more soldiers, as a way of forestalling requests (or, in Lincoln’s case, orders) for detachments northward from those he had on hand. “The siege of Richmond
bids fair to be tedious,” he informed him, “and in consequence of the very extended lines we must have, a much larger force will be necessary than would be required in ordinary sieges against the same force that now opposes us.” Two days later, in passing along the news that Hunter was indeed in full retreat, he added that Sheridan had at last returned, though with his horses too worn down to be of any help to Wilson, who was fighting his way back east against lengthening odds. “I shall try to give the army a few days’ rest, which they now stand much in need of,” Grant concluded, rather blandly.