Never Call Retreat (54 page)

It took much less than forty-eight hours, and the demonstration was conclusive: Lee intended to fight as far "this side of Richmond" as he could possibly manage it. His army moved at noon on May 4, with Ewell going east along the Orange Turnpike and Hill marching on the Plank Road two or three miles to the south. Longstreet had much farther to go, and it would be close to forty-eight hours before he could come up into line with the others, but Lee refused to wait. He wanted to strike this Federal army while it was entangled in the Wilderness, with its inadequate roads and almost impenetrable thickets. Grant's advantage in numbers would count for less here, his superiority in artillery would be nullified because there were few places where guns could be used, and the 4000 wagons that moved with his army would be a cumbersome handicap. So the armies rapidly drew closer, the Federals going south and the Confederates moving east.

Collision point was reached promptly on May 5. The advancing Confederates met Yankee skirmishers on both the Turnpike and the Plank Road, drove them away, and brought on an expanding fight whose battle lines grew longer and longer until they ran beyond vision in the trackless woods. Lee had told Ewell he wanted to bring the enemy to battle as soon as possible, and he had his wish. By noon his two corps were fighting what seemed to be most of Meade's army, and now Lee wanted to wait for Longstreet before he made this fight any bigger. But the Wilderness battle was hard to control. The Federals had been flanked, but by mid-afternoon they were forcing the fighting and the Confederates could only hold on, dig in and take advantage of the fact that in this woodland the odds were all in favor of the defense.
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Grant's men were learning what Sherman's men learned in similar country around Dallas and New Hope Church— that it was almost impossible for any attack to succeed in a tangle like this. Warren and Sedgwick sent their brigades in against Hill and Ewell, and late in the day Hancock got some of his men into action, and the disjointed Federal lines were driving westward, trying to sweep the Confederates away by sheer force of numbers; but in woods like these men fought blindfolded, and a historian of the Army of the Potomac said that this was one of the strangest battles ever fought—"a battle which no man could see." Hancock said that men who tried to make a charge could not tell where their enemies were until they ran full tilt into them, and generals knew where the battle lines were only by listening to the roar of musketry—which was not much of a guide because it was everywhere, unbroken, always getting louder, a wall of sound that seemed to trap the battle smoke and turn the forest twilight into a choking fog full of unseen dangers. One Confederate infantryman reported that although everybody was fighting at close quarters, men hardly ever saw their enemies. The smoke was too heavy and the saplings and underbrush were too dense; one could only crouch and shoot at spurts of flame in the twilight. Men lost all sense of direction. At times whole divisions went astray, ran into flanking fire and were broken up before they knew what had hit them. Gaps in opposing lines went unexploited because nobody saw them; contrariwise, advancing reinforcements sometimes lost their way and fetched up behind units that needed no help. Toward evening the dead leaves and dry branches took fire, and there were spreading pools of flame running along hillsides and into ravines, trapping helpless wounded men and burning them alive. On most battlefields, the wounded tried to be stoical, and suffered in silence; here they kept screaming for help, and their cries echoed through the night. It was hard for men in either army to rescue them, for anyone who stood up and moved about in the firing zone was likely to get shot.
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Next day, May 6, was a series of climaxes muffled by fire and darkness. Hill's corps, badly mauled in the first day's fighting, was hit at dawn by Hancock's corps; wavered, fell back, and came to the verge of destruction. Just in time the head of Longstreet's corps arrived, reaching a little clearing where Lee himself was trying to restore his battle line.

Altogether, a legendary moment. Lee rode hat in hand to greet these stout fighting men, who had been on the march since midnight: found the famous Texas brigade, once Hood's, and tried to lead it against the Yankees in person. The Texans refused to budge unless he stayed behind, and their cry of "Lee to the rear!" sounded across the clearing above the clatter of musketry. Lee submitted, at last, and the Texans swept past him, struck the Federal advance and broke it, giving Hill's men a chance to rally. Burly Longstreet rode to the front, found an opening on the left of Hancock's line, sent troops there in a swift flanking attack, and compelled Hancock's entire line to beat a panicky retreat which was all the worse because most of the men who fled could see no enemies and knew only that something up in front had gone wrong.

Now, abruptly, the obstacles to a decisive offensive in the Wilderness began to work for the Federals. Longstreet tried to press the advantage his men had won, but the Confederates could see no farther into the smoky woods than the Yankees could see. Two of Longstreet's units moved at right angles to each other, collided, opened fire—and Longstreet was critically wounded, Brigadier General Micah Jenkins was killed, and the assault fell into a confusion that gave Hancock ample time to rally his men behind log breastworks a mile or so to the rear. When the Confederate counterattack at last was renewed the men had to advance through what amounted almost to a forest fire, and the Federals drove them back.

At the close of the day opportunity opened, briefly, at the other end of the Confederate line, on Ewell's front, where it was found that Sedgwick's right flank was exposed. John B. Gordon's brigade struck this flank in the twilight, drove it back, captured several hundred prisoners, and then met stiffening resistance that could not be overcome before night ended the fighting. After the war Gordon argued that if his attack had been ordered earlier the whole Federal right would have been crumpled and Grant would have been soundly defeated. Perhaps the lost chance looked larger than life-size, as the years passed, and perhaps the whole episode was simply one more proof that in this woodland fighting the brightest opportunities could go unseen until it was too late; whatever the truth of it, the two-day battle ended at last, the armies grimly facing each other at close range on a field fearfully littered with dead and wounded. Casualty lists had been prodigious. The Federals had lost more than 17,000 men, of whom more than 2200 had been killed outright; Lee's losses had been smaller but bore about the same relation to the numbers engaged; neither side had won anything worth mentioning.
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One thing was clear: Grant and Lee did not make war in the style of Sherman and Johnston, sparring cautiously and looking for openings. They simply looked for each other, and as soon as they found each other they began to fight. Neither man had yet met anyone like the other. Trying to go around his opponent's flank, Grant got nothing but a head-on engagement out of it, and his army received a tactical setback nearly as severe as the one Hooker got at Chancellorsville; yet the Chancellorsville pattern did not repeat itself and the setback lost its meaning—if Grant was not Sherman he was not Hooker, either. Having seized the initiative, Lee could not hold it because the Federals had both the will and the power to make him fight a continuous battle in which he could do no more than follow their lead. On the evening of May 7, after a day in which the tired armies faced each other across a dull smolder of skirmish-line firing, Grant put his men on the road and moved off in the night—not back toward the river crossings, but on toward the southeast, heading for the crossroads of Spotsylvania Courthouse, beyond Lee's right

Lee recognized the move as soon as it began, and countered it with great skill, getting infantry down to the crossroads barely ahead of the Federals and turning this blow at his flank into another head-on engagement. Both armies swarmed up to the firing line, and the battlefield expanded as it had done in the Wilderness, spreading out across farms and woodlots, division after division coming into action on each side under directives which amounted to little more than the stern imperative: Find the enemy as soon as you can and fight him where you find him. There was no subtlety in this battle, and no let-up either. It went on and on, day after day, for almost two weeks, the whole ponderous engagement revolving slowly, like a clumsy hurricane, as the Federals tried in vain to force their way past Lee's right. Among the many Federals who died in this fighting was one irreplaceable: Major General John Sedgwick, commander of the VI Corps, killed on May 9.

It was hard for anyone to tell what was happening. In Washington, Secretary Stanton reflected that at least this fight was not going as previous fights had gone. Before, he said, "the enemy's strength has always been most felt in his first blows"; here Lee's first blows had been heavy but they had failed, instead of retreating Grant was continuing to advance, and perhaps complete success was in sight. Grant believed that the result of the Wilderness fight was "decidedly in our favor," but he confessed that it had been "impossible to inflict the heavy blow on Lee's army I had hoped"; significantly he added that the exact route he would follow to reach the James River was "not yet definitely marked out." Lee told Mr. Davis that every Federal attack had been repelled and that his own army was still on the front and flank of its opponent, and he closed stoutly: "With the blessing of God I trust we shall be able to prevent Gen. Grant from reaching Richmond."
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There was reason for Lee's assurance. He had proved that the Federal host could neither slip past him nor overpower him; whatever happened, there was not going to be the helter-skelter "race for Richmond" which Grant had looked forward to when he marched toward Spotsylvania.
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Yet Lee was paying a high price for this. He was accepting the defensive. His genius was for the dazzling maneuver that could cancel the weight of numbers and give his own army the initiative, and this continuous all-out fighting gave that genius insufficient scope. He had compelled McClellan and Pope and Hooker to give up their own plans and fight defensively to escape destruction, but the most he could say now was that he believed he could keep Grant from getting to Richmond. He could interfere with Grant's plans, but he could not impose plans of his own.

Originally the crossroads at Spotsylvania seemed important because it lay behind Lee's right flank. As the armies moved that ceased to be true, but the crossroads still drew the fighting: to possess it, or to destroy each other, or perhaps just to explore the grim potentials of modern war, the armies struggled and pounded each other, day after day, all about a vast semicircle west and north and east of the road center. The fighting taught certain lessons, at a remarkably high price. In the Wilderness it showed the futility of trying to win a significant victory in an untracked forest; at Spotsylvania it proved that trench warfare was even more constrictive—with both sides well dug in, a breakthrough meant little because the defenders could repair the break faster than the attackers could exploit it, and the only sure result would be an immense loss of life under conditions more than ordinarily abominable. If there could be a climax to a battle of this kind it came on May 12, in a heavy rainstorm, when Grant and Meade ordered a frontal assault on a bulging crescent of Confederate trenches and brought on one of the most terrible fights of the entire war—a close-range struggle in the mud that began before dawn and lasted until nearly midnight, the worst of it centering about a little angle in a trench line remembered ever afterward as the
bloody
angle. Here Hancock's corps broke Lee's line, capturing an infantry division and twenty guns, and by the old standards the Federals had won the day—except that actually they had won no more than a pen-f of prisoners and a quarter section of splintered groves and pastures, crisscrossed by rifle pits where dead bodies had been trampled out of sight in the mud. Next day the fighting went on as if nothing had happened, except that for a time the tempo was rather subdued.

Before the bloody angle offensive, Grant had told Halleck that he intended to "fight it out on this line if it takes all summer," and this blunt vow greatly pleased Northern patriots—few of whom noticed that in little more than a week Grant abandoned "this line" entirely and went off to find another one. In effect, he had said that he would make Lee fight here until the end came, but this abruptly ceased to be a good idea because the things that should have happened far in Lee's rear, which would have made this a ruinous fight for the Confederacy, did not happen.
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Butler and Sigel had failed, one man bottled up, the other driven off, both men utterly thwarted: hollow men, punctured by their betters. Even Phil Sheridan had done less than was expected. Sheridan had been given the Army of the Potomac cavalry, on the ground that he was enough of a driver to get some effective work out of it, and on May 9 he had ridden off with 10,000 troopers to threaten Richmond, which was supposed to be under attack by Butler. Stuart met him and fought him, two days later, at Yellow Tavern; Stuart himself was mortally wounded and his cavalry was beaten, but the Richmond defenses were too strong to penetrate, Butler's people were nowhere in sight, and Sheridan could do no more than ride down the peninsula to refit under protection of Federal gunboats. He had made a spectacular raid and he had ended the career of one of the Confederacy's most famous soldiers, but he had not shaken Lee's grip on Spotsylvania.

Because of these failures—most especially, because of Butler's failure—Spotsylvania was no longer an impossible place for Lee to make an extended stand. Grant's promise to fight here if the fight lasted all summer was based on the expectation—fully justified, at the time he voiced the promise—that the subsidiary offensives on the Shenandoah and the James would compel Lee to use part of his inadequate resources to defend his rear. Overnight, these offensives had evaporated; instead of having to look out for his rear, Lee was drawing new strength from it—the reinforcements Richmond sent him, once Butler and Sigel had been disposed of, made up for the total he had lost in the Wilderness. Lee wanted to keep Grant away from Richmond, and after the middle of May Spotsylvania was a perfectly good place for him to do it.