Never Call Retreat (55 page)

For that matter it was a perfectly good place for Grant to fight, if Grant sought nothing more than the war of attrition which is sometimes written down as the basis of his strategy. A good deal of attrition had already taken place at Spotsylvania, and there could be as much more as anybody needed; the armies were locked together, and the remorseless, two-men-for-one kind of killing such a program demanded could take place there as well as anywhere else. Actually, Grant wanted something different. He wanted precisely what Lee hoped to deny him—to get close to Richmond, attacking the geographical rear of the Army of Northern Virginia, pinning that army in a tight circle on the James River so that it must either counterattack against long odds or submit to a siege that would deprive it of all mobility. With the Butler-Sigel moves canceled he could not hope to do this by continuing to fight within fifteen miles of the Rapidan crossings. So he re-cast his plans in the middle of the campaign and on the night of May 20 he began to move again.

His army was large and Lee's army touched it everywhere, and to move it was a ponderous business. Bit by bit, Grant shifted strength to his left, heading southeast again as he had done after the Wilderness, trying to establish himself beyond and behind the Confederate right. Once again, Lee understood the move and shifted to meet it. The armies were never wholly out of contact, there were incessant stabbing fights between cavalry and infantry patrols, and after three days the armies faced each other once more at the crossings of the North Anna River, twenty miles from Spotsylvania. Lee got there first and chose his ground here with care, and after several days of unrewarding fighting Grant shifted again, moving once more by his left, the armies striking sparks as they brushed against each other. They got below the Pamunkey River, and as May came to an end they confronted each other along Totopotomoy Creek, eighteen miles below the North Anna battlefield and hardly ten miles northeast of Richmond. Here again they sparred and struck at one another, looking for openings and finding none; then the Federals side-slipped once more, bringing up on June 1 at the desolate crossroads of Cold Harbor, out on the fringe of the Gaines' Mill field where Lee's men and McClellan's had fought so desperately two years earlier.

By now the armies were running out of space. They had covered more than fifty miles in the unmanageable, rolling series of battles that began in the Wilderness, and now they could roll no farther. Beyond the Federal left at Cold Harbor was the Chickahominy River, a swampy barrier to additional maneuvering; behind Lee's army was Richmond itself, less than a day's march away. Now battle line faced battle line, with tangled abatis to protect the hastily dug trenches, and with field guns sited to cover all of the approaches. Grant had summoned W. F. Smith's corps from its bottled-up idleness at Bermuda Hundred to help in the assault, and Lee had his entire strength in line, with virtually no reserves. When the fighting began it would be head-on because there was no other way to fight here.

The armies had reached this spot after unending fighting and appalling losses; yet in the week just before this battle the high command on each side was hopeful. Grant told Halleck that Lee's army "is really whipped" and would not fight outside of entrenchments; Meade assured his wife that "we undoubtedly have the morale over them," and G. K. Warren wrote that "the Rebs are getting dispirited" and predicted that "they would fall back if they had any place to go to." At the same time, Lee wrote Mr. Davis that Grant's army "has been very much shaken" and said that the spirit of his own army was never better; "I fear no injury to it from any retrograde move that may be dictated by sound military policy." In the same vein, Colonel Venable of Lee's staff wrote that the Federals were "dispirited by the bloody repulse of repeated attacks on our lines." Actually, there is little to show that the rank and file on either side was discouraged. The average soldier remained ready to try to do whatever he was ordered to do, although every man would doubtless have agreed with a remark made by one of Lee's veterans: "There has never been such fighting, I reckon, in the history of war."
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Late on the afternoon of June 1 Federal infantry attacked at Cold Harbor, won minor successes, and led Grant to feel that a hard blow at daylight on June 2 might break the line. The idea was good, in a way, because the Confederates at Cold Harbor were not ready to meet an all-out attack; unhappily, the Federals were not ready to make one. Massing the troops took much longer than had been anticipated, twenty-four hours were lost, the big assault could not be made until June 3, and when it was made a storm of Confederate rifle fire tore the Federal columns and inflicted a resounding defeat—the most unrelieved and tragically costly one the Army of the Potomac had suffered since it crossed the Rapidan. The assault was made by three army corps—Hancock's, Smith's, and Sedgwick's old VI Corps, now led by Horatio G. Wright. Wright's men took some out-works but were pinned down by rifle fire before they could make an effective penetration, and they had to give up after suffering severe losses. Hancock attacked with two divisions and Smith with one, and these three divisions were wrecked. Altogether, the Federals lost close to 7000 men in less than an hour. Even Burnside's hopeless attack on the stone wall at Fredericksburg had not been more brutally smashed.
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Here was final proof of the truth that had been emerging for the past month: the rifle and the trench now dominated the battlefield, so that good field works adequately manned by determined men could not be taken at any price. (Fifty years later, in the First World War, European generals would have to learn this lesson all over again.) As Thomas had said at Kennesaw Mountain, an army fighting thus could literally use itself up. For a week after the battle, both sides perfected their defenses, and the armies faced each other along miles of intricate entrenchments, enduring agonies of heat and thirst and weariness, and daily losses from fitful bombardments and unending sniper fire; and General Grant had to make new plans.

From the beginning he had hoped to strike Lee's vulnerable rear along the James River. He could not roll to the left here, because he had run out of space, and yet if he could not somehow get past Lee's flank his whole campaign was a failure and the Confederacy was substantially nearer to independence. Two possibilities were open, and he undertook to use both of them at once.

For one thing, he would try again to break Lee's important supply line to the Shenandoah Valley. Sigel had failed ignominiously, but his troops had been pulled together and entrusted to Major General David Hunter, strengthened by a solid body of infantry under Brigadier General George Crook that had come eastward from the West Virginia mountains. Early in June Hunter was moving up the Shenandoah Valley, defeating Confederate forces that tried to stop him and showing a marked talent for burning homes and spreading destruction and bitterness among the civil population as he advanced. Now Hunter was striking toward Lynchburg: Grant concluded to send Sheridan off, with two divisions of cavalry, to join Hunter and destroy the line of the Virginia General Railroad some distance west of Richmond, and Sheridan started on June 7.

Simultaneously, Grant would take a leaf from the book written at Vicksburg: break off contact with Lee entirely, move fast, get his army clear over to the other side of the James and strike directly into the rear area before Lee knew what was happening. This would be a move unlike any Grant had tried in Virginia—harder and riskier, with disaster as penalty for failure—but there was no other good card to play. Grant played it; and while Sheridan's troopers set out for Charlottesville, Warren's V Corps left the trenches, crossed the Chickahominy by the old Long Bridge Road, and took position on the edge of White Oak Swamp, for all the world as if the Federal army planned to march on Richmond between the Chickahominy and the James.
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The risk of course was that when Lee's army was left to itself its commander had a way of doing unexpected things, and one of Grant's prime responsibilities from the day the campaign began had been to grip that army so tightly that it could not move off on an offensive of its own. So far he had done this, at substantial cost; now he was letting go, and the armies were moving out of contact. Yet the risk was smaller than it seemed. Lee was restricted, not because Grant's army was immediately in front of him but because Richmond was immediately behind him. Maneuvers that might have been possible fifty miles north were impossible here. At all costs Lee had to wait and counter whatever move his opponent might be making now.

The thrust was made deftly. The Federals left Cold Harbor on the night of June 12, and next morning the long chain of trenches was empty. The Yankee army had gone off the map, and while Confederate patrols located Warren's corps, and reported that Smith's corps had gone back to the Pamunkey and embarked on transports, it was hard to tell what this meant. Lee could only shift his army down below the Chickahominy to await developments; meanwhile, the Federal army went all the way to the James, where monitors cruised back and forth to protect the engineers who were laying a long pontoon bridge. Then Warren's corps withdrew, all the road crossings were held by Federal cavalry, and Lee was in the dark. To make matters much worse, the threat posed by General Hunter became so grave that Lee had to detach troops to meet it—8000 men, or thereabouts, under General Early, sent off at a time when Lee needed every man he could get. A few days earlier Lee had told Secretary Seddon: "If we can defeat Grant here the valley can easily be recovered, but if we cannot defeat Grant I am afraid we will be unable to hold the valley."
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It was more than the valley that was in danger now, however. If Hunter took Lynchburg, came east and joined Sheridan the pressure on the capital and on Lee's army would be overwhelming.

Grant's plan worked perfectly up to the point where it was about to win the war. Then it did not work at all. For one thing, Grant left altogether too much to his lieutenants; for another, some of them did not measure up properly. In addition, it was easier to deceive Lee for a few days than to beat him permanently; and for a climax David Hunter was no match for Jubal Early.

But it did begin well. On June 15 Grant was squarely in Lee's rear. He was south of the James and Lee was north of it, and a column of 15,000 Federals led by Baldy Smith was marching up to Petersburg, the railroad center whose fall would mean the fall of Richmond. Beauregard, defending Petersburg, had 9000 men, but 7000 of them were holding the lines at Bermuda Hundred, keeping the cork in the bottle that held Ben Butler. To meet Smith, Beauregard had hardly more than 2000 men, including cavalry and home guards, and that evening Smith broke the Petersburg line and the road into the little city was wide open. Beauregard testified after the war that "Petersburg at that hour was clearly at the mercy of the Federal commander, who had all but captured it,"
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but Smith served Grant now as he had served Butler a few weeks earlier; he saw risks rather than opportunity, went on the defensive, and made no further advance. By noon of the next day, June 16, three Federal army corps were present—Smith's, Hancock's, and Burnside's, a total of more than 50,000 men—and Beauregard was forced to withdraw the force that had been watching Butler (taking the cork out of the bottle, at last) and bring it down for a last-ditch defense of Petersburg.

By all the odds, Grant's troops should have won a shattering victory, but they did not. Butler could do nothing with his own opportunity, and by the time he was ready to try something Pickett's division had come down and reoccupied the empty Confederate lines at Bermuda Hundred. The 50,000 Yankees at Petersburg somehow did not attack until evening, and Beauregard was just able to throw them back. Next day, June 17, most of Meade's army was on hand and most of Lee's was not, but the Federal assault was miserably co-ordinated and although it finally broke the Confederate line Beauregard managed to draw a new line and hold it until darkness ended the fighting. On June 18 Meade's command arrangements seemed to come apart altogether, and the blow he wanted to strike was halting, disjointed, and ineffective; Lee's army reached the scene, the Federal offensive ground to a standstill, and by the end of the day Petersburg was wholly secure, Lee was on hand and in charge, and Grant had concluded that it was time to give up frontal assaults and resort to siege warfare.

The stroke that had taken the Federal army across the James, brilliantly begun, ended in fumbling futility. When the leading elements of the army most needed skillful and aggressive leadership they were left to themselves. Grant unfortunately devoted himself largely to rear-area operations during this expedition, and while that ordinarily was proper enough for a commander-in-chief it did assume that competent lieutenants up front knew what to do and would do it quickly; but Butler did nothing, Smith failed abjectly, and Meade himself put on the weakest performance he made in all the war.
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To round out the picture, Early defeated Hunter at Lynchburg on June 18 and drove him off in full retreat, Sheridan fought an inconclusive battle with Wade Hampton's cavalry at Trevilian Station, near Gordonsville, and withdrew after failing to do any substantial harm to the Virginia Central Railroad, and the dire threat to Lee's line of supplies was ended.

So the campaign that began on the Rapidan on May 4 ended, six weeks later, in the trenches around Petersburg. In those weeks the Federals had lost between 60,000 and 70,000 men, Lee's army was still undefeated, and it seemed —in the North, and also in the South—that Grant's massive campaign had been wasted effort. On the one side there was profound discouragement and on the other there was extravagant hope, and each condition took shape so quickly that men were bewildered. Appraising what had taken place in the light of what had been anticipated, men could not at once understand that the war in Virginia had permanently changed: that the two armies had gone south of the James River under circumstances which meant that they would stay there, intimately embraced, until the war ended. Never again would either of these armies see the area for which it was named—Northern Virginia, the Potomac River. Although Lee's army was safe enough, in Petersburg, it could not get out. Never again would it take the offensive, threatening to win the war by sheer aggressive brilliance. Already it was under dominance: it was pinned down, and it could only fight for time. As one Confederate general remarked, afterward: "However bold we might be, however desperately we might fight, we were sure in the end to be worn out. It was only a question of a few months, more or less."
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