Never Call Retreat (66 page)

Unable to increase Lee's resources, the Confederate government had at least increased his authority. After a long wrangle with Congress, Mr. Davis early in February named Lee general-in-chief of all Confederate armies. About all Lee was able to do with this new authority was bring Joe Johnston back into service; on February 22 he put Johnston in over-all command of Confederate forces in the Carolinas, hoping desperately that the jaunty little Game-Cock could somehow rally enough strength to beat Sherman before Schofield reached Goldsboro. Somewhat reluctantly, Johnston accepted. He explained later that "we could have no other object, in continuing the war, than to obtain fair terms of peace; for the Southern cause must have appeared hopeless then to all intelligent and dispassionate Southern men." He found that he could muster about 17,000 infantry and 6000 cavalry, counting the fragments that were coming in from Hood's army; even without Schofield, Sherman commanded 60,000 veterans. Johnston told Lee: "I can do no more than annoy him."
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Obviously, Richmond could not be held much longer. Lee could beat off any frontal assault, because the long defensive works were all but completely invulnerable; months earlier Grant had told Meade that under existing conditions of warfare "fortifications come near holding themselves without troops," and estimated that with plenty of artillery, and one infantryman to every six feet of trenches, "either party could hold their lines against a direct attack of the other." But a direct attack was not what the Confederates had to fear now, and Lee explained the problem in a note to Johnston. If he held his lines the Federals could cut the railroads, and Richmond would soon be starved into surrender; if he moved out to protect the railroads he must evacuate his trenches, and Richmond would fall at once. The only chance was to abandon everything, march down to join forces with Johnston somewhere in North Carolina, defeat Sherman with the united armies, and then turn to meet Grant. It was an extremely thin chance—considered soberly, it was next to no chance at all—but it would at least keep the armies alive for a time, and Lee told Mr. Davis that nothing else mattered now: "The greatest calamity that can befall us is the destruction of our armies. If they can be maintained we may recover from our reverses, but if lost we have no resource."
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It was easier to plan the move than to make it. Grant's left was solidly posted, miles southwest of Petersburg, and it probably would be impossible to slip past it for the march to North Carolina. The only hope was that a quick, hard blow at the Federal right might compel Grant to shorten his lines. It was of course useless to suppose that Grant's host could actually be driven off in defeat, after the old Chancellorsville pattern, but if he could be made to pull in his left the Army of Northern Virginia might have the room and time to make its escape. The problem of supplies for a moving army had been temporarily solved. Mr. Davis had at last removed the incompetent commissary general, Colonel Northrop, replacing him with General I. M. St. John, and this officer had been energetically piling up a surplus of meat and bread and forage from areas where Northrop had been able to find nothing. For a short time—time enough, probably, to fight one battle and make one long march— the army could have plenty to eat. And so, for the last time in the war, Lee ordered an attack.

He entrusted the attack to General Gordon and he gave him about half of the army. Gordon made a careful study and elected to strike at Fort Stedman, due east of Petersburg, a run-down box of a fort which a Federal engineer called "one of the weakest and most ill-constructed works of the line." A mile or two behind it was the military railroad that ran out from the Federal base at City Point to supply the long Federal line, and if this could be broken the whole Federal left would have to withdraw. Gordon made his plans, massed his troops, took the defense by surprise, and in the shadowed half-light of early morning on March 25 made his assault. His men swarmed across the picket lines, captured Fort Stedman, occupied several hundred yards of trenches on either side, drove on toward the Federal rear— and then ran into trouble. The Federals drew a new line, all of the artillery in the world seemed to be hammering at the assailants, there were hard counterattacks by fresh troops, the Federal left was wholly unshaken, and before the morning was half gone it was clear that the attack had failed. Lee ordered the survivors back into the Confederate lines; they returned, with a loss of 4000 men. A Virginia lieutenant, captured in the front wave of the assault, realized how badly his army had been overmatched when, on his way to the Federal rear, he saw that the Yankees were having a review, back of the combat zone, with General Grant and President Lincoln himself looking at parading troops "seemingly not in the least concerned and as if nothing had happened."
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Now the next move was up to Grant, and it was not long in coming. The day before Gordon attacked, in fact, Grant had issued his orders. He would build up a powerful force of infantry on his extreme left, somewhere in the neighborhood of Dinwiddie Courthouse, and he would put Sheridan's cavalry there as well, and as soon as the wretched unpaved roads were dry enough he would strike hard at Lee's right flank. If all went well he could break the flank, curl in behind the Confederate army and win everything in one swoop; if this failed he could at least send Sheridan ranging far into the rear, to cut the last railroads and then perhaps to ride on down cross-country and join Sherman, and if Lee thinned his skimpy lines in front of Petersburg to meet this threat Grant would attack his trenches regardless of their fabulous strength. Even if nothing worked as planned, this ought to pin Lee in position and keep him from going down to North Carolina. The big move was set for March 29.
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First, however, there was a top-level conference, held in the cabin of the steamer
River Queen,
which was tied up at City Point. This was the Presidential steamer, the floating White House where Abraham Lincoln was living for a few days while he escaped the plague of office-seekers in Washington and visited with General Grant. Strictly speaking, it was not really necessary for Mr. Lincoln to be here at all; Grant could be relied on to press the war to a conclusion without further prompting from the President. Apparently, with everything coming to a final climax, Mr. Lincoln just could not stay away.

The conference was highly informal—a long chat, rather than a council of war—and it brought together three men who had worked closely as a team but who had never before sat down together: President Lincoln, General Grant, and a lean, red-haired soldier who had made a hurried trip up from North Carolina, General Sherman. Sherman's army had at last reached Goldsboro and had been joined by Schofield, and while the troops drew new uniforms and fresh supplies Sherman had gone to the seacoast and had taken a fast steamer to this anchorage on the James River, drawn by the same magnet that had pulled the President. During four years of war, Abraham Lincoln had talked with many generals. This was probably the first time that he had talked with two in whom he had unlimited confidence and to whom he could speak his mind without reservation.

When Grant first came east, a year earlier, Mr. Lincoln found that he had not before seen a general quite like him. Now he was seeing another one who was unique; Sherman, grim, hard, full of proud talk about his ruthless "bummers" —he liked to say that his army was "dirty, ragged and saucy," stained by the smoke of many fires—confident that if Grant held Lee in Petersburg a little longer his own inexorable advance could come up and stamp out the last of secession. The President was happy to have the military situation explained, but he insisted that Sherman ought to get back to his army: in his absence something might go wrong. Sherman assured him that Schofield was perfectly competent to handle things, and said that his army could take care of itself no matter what happened, but the President was slightly uneasy, and brought the matter up several times. He also hoped that the war could be ended without another big battle, and over and over he asked: '"Must more blood be shed?" The generals believed there must be at least one more big fight. As Sherman explained later: "We had to presume that General Lee was a real general, that he must see that Johnston alone was no barrier to my progress . . . that he would not await the inevitable conclusion but would make one more desperate effort." With this the President had to be content. He seemed relieved when Sherman said he would start back to North Carolina as soon as the conference ended; Admiral Porter had a fast steamer, all fueled, waiting for him.

Before he left, Sherman asked what was going to happen after the Confederate armies surrendered, and he learned more than the peace commissioners had learned, or had tried to learn, in the famous meeting at Hampton Roads.

The President wanted an easy peace, with no hangings and no reprisals: a real peace in which the shattered country could grow together again. He hinted broadly that he would be very well pleased if—"unbeknownst to me"—Jefferson Davis somehow managed to escape from the country, going to some foreign land where no scheme of vengeance could ever reach him. He hoped to see the disarmed Confederate soldiers going back to their homes, picking up the threads of life as peaceful citizens of a reunited nation, he looked for early re-establishment of civil government in the Southern states, and he made such an impression on Sherman that the general wrote afterward: "I know I left his presence with the conviction that he had in his mind, or that his cabinet had, some plan of settlement, ready for application the moment Lee and Johnston were defeated."
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The conference ended, Sherman went back to his army, Grant's troops began to move—and President Lincoln stayed where he was, to watch and to wait and to let his presence exert whatever influence it might have. He consulted Secretary Stanton by telegraph and was urged to remain with Grant: THERE IS IN FACT NOTHING TO BE DONE HERE BUT PETTY PRIVATE ENDS THAT YOU SHOULD NOT BE ANNOYED WITH. A PAUSE BY THE ARMY NOW WOULD DO HARM; BUT IF YOU ARE ON THE GROUND THERE WILL BE NO PAUSE.
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There was no pause. By the evening of March 29 Grant had 50,000 men massed on his extreme left, behind a stream called Hatcher's Run. Sheridan was a few miles to the southwest at Dinwiddie Courthouse, with 10,000 cavalry; and General Lee, getting wind of all of this, drew on his last reserves to post General Pickett with 11,000 men at the crossroads of Five Forks, half a dozen miles beyond the Confederate right and an equal distance north of Sheridan. Pickett's instructions were clear: "Hold Five Forks at all hazards." To Mr. Davis, Lee reported that Grant's move "seriously threatens our position and diminishes our ability to maintain our present line." It was necessary, he said, to prepare at once for a retreat from the James River.
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The case was clear. Except for the line to Richmond, the Confederacy now controlled only one railroad out of Petersburg, the South Side line that ran west to the Tennessee border. Fifty miles out, at the junction town of Burkeville, this line crossed the Richmond & Danville, Richmond's one remaining link with the South. Any supplies Lee's army or the capital itself got had to come by these railroads; if Lee wanted to go to North Carolina his only good course was to follow the South Side line to Burkeville and then turn south. If the Federals broke the South Side line, Lee could neither stay in Petersburg nor join Johnston: he could only make a desperate retreat westward, hoping against hope that some Federal error would enable him to slip south and keep his army alive. As Lee told Pickett, this railroad had to be held
at all hazards.

There was a brief respite. Beginning on the night of March 29 there were thirty-six hours of heavy rain, putting every creek over its banks and turning roads and fields into quagmires. Then, at last, on March 31, the skies cleared and the Federals began to move, Sheridan edging up toward Five Forks while Grant's left-flank force, the V Corps under General Warren, attacked Lee's right. Neither move went well that day. Pickett struck Sheridan and drove him back to Dinwiddie; Warren's attack failed, and until late in the afternoon he could do no more than hold his ground. Nevertheless, the Federal advantage was so great that minor reverses did not matter. Grant ordered Warren to move over and join Sheridan, and told Sheridan to take this infantry and his cavalry and go up to Five Forks and defeat Pickett. Other troops would side-slip to the left, to keep up the pressure along Hatcher's Run; meanwhile, everybody else would be alert, ready to assault Lee's center if there were any signs that he was weakening his entrenched line to reinforce his right.

April 1 was another day when things went wrong, and good generals in each army lost reputation because of it. To begin with, the orders Warren received were confusing, the obstacles in his way were worse than the high command supposed, and instead of reaching Sheridan at dawn he did not get his men to the scene until mid-afternoon. Sheridan met him in a fury of impatience, and when the infantry advance—made, at last, late in the day, with cavalry moving forward on the left—was slightly misdirected, and two of Warren's divisions lunged off into an area where there were no foes to fight, Sheridan removed Warren from command, sending him back to City Point in disgrace and turning his corps over to the senior division commander, General Charles Griffin. It was hard going for the soldier who had been the hero of Gettysburg, but there was no help for it. The President was at headquarters, Grant was insistent on fast action, and this was the day when nobody was allowed to stumble.

Pickett's fate was even more dismal. He put his men in light field works at Five Forks, and then—assuming that the Yankees would not attack today—he went to the rear with the cavalry leaders, Fitzhugh Lee and Thomas Rosser, to enjoy a pleasant shad bake. When Sheridan's attack finally came, Pickett did not even know that the battle had started (some acoustical quirk apparently kept the sound of the firing from reaching him) and by the time he got the news his line had been completely broken. Sheridan took 5000 prisoners, the survivors went streaming off beyond rallying, and Lee's last chance to keep the Federals away from the South Side railroad was gone beyond recall. Pickett's men unquestionably would have been beaten, even if Pickett had been present, because Sheridan's advantage was overwhelming, but Lee was unforgiving. It had been no day to go to a fish fry; a bad day, altogether, for Gettysburg heroes.
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