Upon the Altar of the Nation (59 page)

In the field after the battles around Spotsylvania Court House, Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Lyman observed the curious fraternization taking place between the warring armies:

Herein lies the central paradox of the Civil War: the soldiers’ awe at the scale of conflict and destruction eventually transcended personal “spite”; in the very act of annihilating one another, they recovered the fact that they really were Americans all.

The destructions wrought in 1864 were unique and pivotal in the Civil War. As the spring campaigns raged, prospects of death displaced romantic love as the soldier’s central obsession. On May 22, Private William Willoughby wrote: “The Rebs now hold the R. Road from Petersburg to Richmond. We have been here 16 days and we have had 12 or 13 days hard fighting. Almost a constant roar of Cannon and rattle of Musketry and it is astonishing to me how a man escapes alive.” Whatever the fears, Willoughby resigned himself to a Providence that none could foretell: “I submit to the will of God. Let him do as seemeth him good.”

While duty and Providence justified the war, they did not steel Willoughby in the face of battle. In responding to a letter from his wife, Willoughby wrote:

John Emerson Anderson had no doubt what he was fighting for. This he defined simply: “Patriotism as I understand it, is, to be willing to sacrifice something to promote any good cause for our common country. It is not in words, that great things are accomplished but in deeds, and in actions . . . continue to pray Mother for our common cause and I have the best assurance that you will not pray in vain.” Of the justice of his cause, Anderson had no doubts. Emancipation had rendered it a “holy war,” so that Union soldiers who were killed in action were nothing less than “martyrs” who died that slavery might end:

Many went so far as to draw analogies between the soldiers’ deaths and the atoning work of Christ on the cross. In the North, at a funeral for James T. Stebbins and Myron E. Stowell, the pastor cried out: “We must be ready to give up our sons, brothers, friends—if we cannot go ourselves—to hardships, sufferings, dangers and death if need be, for the preservation of our government and the Freedom of the nation. We should lay them, willing sacrifices, upon the altar!”
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By 1864 the language of martyrdom and sacrificial altars was instinctual and, through sheer repetition, forming a national consensus and literally incarnating a powerful new religion of patriotism. After rehearsing the lives of Albany’s “martyrs” who died for their nation, Pastor Rufus Clark closed: “A republic for which such sacrifices have been made, and upon whose altar such noble and precious lives have been laid, must live, must triumph over all its foes, and shine with new splendor in the ages yet to come.” In all seriousness, one minister consoled grieving parents with the words that their son “laid himself cheerfully upon the altar, and gloried to be there.”
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Of course soldiers did not cheerfully do any such thing. But interestingly, many did not wish to lay their enemies on the altar either. Unlike American armies trained after World War II—programmed to instinctively shoot to kill—many soldiers, though patriots and nonpacifists, could not bring themselves to kill another human being in the heat of battle.
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This understandably concerned commanders, but not as much as did the deserters or “skulkers” who were also part of every battle. They were the ones who would feign injury or illness or effect labors to save wounded comrades—anything that would take them behind the lines.

This could prove to be devastating. Soldiers had to know they could count on their comrades. To ensure this, the commanders instituted the ultimate penalty for desertion. On both sides, soldiers who deserted their comrades in time of battle were put to death by execution. Lieutenant Colonel Lyman observed how in the recent battles “stragglers have committed great outrages” in the cause of victory. Worried that Lincoln might later manumit the sentences, Lyman was in favor of hanging deserters on the spot in full view of their advancing comrades. Desertions continued, he believed, because of “the uncertainty of the death penalty through the false merciful policy of the President. It came to be a notorious thing that no one could be executed but poor friendless wretches, who had none to intercede for them ... there was no certainty in punishment, and certainty is the essence of all punishment.”
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On this score, Lee was similar to Lincoln. He lacked the stomach to execute Confederate deserters. In practice, this meant officers would rely not on civil process to punish deserters and stragglers but on the point of their own swords in the back of the offenders.

 

Sporadic skirmishing continued for several days after Spotsylvania, but neither general itched for an immediate replay of “the game.” The most significant engagement took place on May 11 at Yellow Tavern, Virginia, just six miles north of Richmond. There Philip Sheridan clashed with Lee’s flamboyant cavalry officer Jeb Stuart. Both generals shared a fearlessness in battle that energized their soldiers. When Sheridan’s twelve thousand troops met up with Stuart’s five thousand cavalrymen, Sheridan assumed the offensive. He was repeatedly beaten back until Brigadier General George A. Custer’s brigade broke through the line. In the process, the charismatic Stuart was felled by an unmounted Michigan cavalryman and died the following day in Richmond. Again the capital city was devastated.

As the Confederacy mourned its heroic general, Sheridan rejoined Grant and prepared for the next assault. Despite the exhaustion of both armies, Grant and Lee understood that they could not stand still. If Grant was not to retreat—which he certainly was not—then he must resume the battle, or Lee would hit him first. Likewise, if Lee was to avoid open contact or costly offensive assaults, he would have to remain far enough ahead of Grant’s omnivorous army to entrench strongly and nullify his inferior numbers, which grew more diminished by the day.

From the start of the campaign, Grant had hoped to close Lee in a vice between Meade’s Army of the Potomac and Butler’s Army of the James, which presumably was coming from the south to get into position around Petersburg. But the incompetent General Butler had his hands full with Confederate General Beauregard. Worse, he was hamstrung by his own timidity and indecisiveness. Through a series of disastrous moves that even an amateur map reader could have avoided, Butler managed to hem himself into his own trenches between the James and Appomattox rivers. Incredulous, General Beauregard took his small army into entrenched lines that sealed Butler off, rendering his thirty-thousand-man army, in Grant’s words, “in a bottle strongly corked.”
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Now on his own, Grant once again confronted an experienced and determined foe. In the last week of May, he began moving on Richmond, knowing Lee would have to follow.

The two armies next dug in with entrenchments and abatis in the tightly confined fields around the intersections at Cold Harbor. The site was near Gaines’ Mill field where, two years earlier, Lee had defeated McClellan. But much had changed in two years. Gaines’ Mill offered only picket fences for cover. At Cold Harbor, Lee could forge a battle line with tangled abatis and field guns supporting entrenched positions. The line extended from Bethesda Church on the Mechanicsville Turnpike south along Bethesda Church Road to the Chickahominy River below Cold Harbor and Gaines’ Mill.

Lee left no reserves behind and no option for retreat. With local knowledge, skilled engineers, and veteran soldiers, his entrenchments were cunningly designed to provide maximum defensive support as well as fields of fire that would take advantage of ravines and tree lines to create murderous crossfire from which no escape, forward or backward, would be possible. Nature and logistics together were impregnable. Amazingly, neither side appeared to be discouraged or demoralized.

If Grant and Meade were confident in their superior numbers and willing to put the men to the task, the troops were less certain. Having already borne bloody battles for a month straight, a sort of mad fatalism permeated their conversations and actions. In an unusual gesture, many soldiers wrote out their names and addresses on slips of paper and pinned them to their hats or shirts so that kin could be notified of the fact that “June 3. Cold Harbor. I was killed.”
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For Charles Washburn of the Thirteenth New Hampshire, the work of music continued in or out of battle, rain or shine. The bands usually played in the morning as marches began, and one or two pieces again in the evening after supper. Funerals were also fit for music and became increasingly common. To Washburn, a funeral dirge represented “the most beautiful and affecting music ever written.” Grant was about to provide him with all the beauty he could desire.

Although Grant (who would assume formal responsibility) has often been solely credited for the assault about to happen, he actually shared the decision with Meade. For some time, Meade had been concerned that Grant was getting all the attention for commanding what was, in fact, his Army of the Potomac. In a gesture of reconciliation, Grant had ceded operational control to Meade, who bragged openly: “I had complete and entire command on the field all day.” He would later rue his words of dismissive pride.
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At 4:30 a.m. the tragically brief and criminally expensive assault began. The worst destruction hit Union Brigadier General John H. Martindale, whose division had to pass through a ravine that was murderously swathed by criss-crossing lines of fire. The first line approached the Twentieth South Carolina, where the rebels waited patiently, sighting their targets. The Yankees never had a chance as the first line “reeled and attempted to fly the field, but were met by the next column, which halted the retreating troops with the bayonet, butts of guns, and officer’s sword.” As rebel soldiers fired methodically and relentlessly from their impregnable entrenchments, Union soldiers funneled like pigs into a slaughter pen. They had no choice but to press on, pushed forward as they were by their own men.

The next line fared no better, “rear rank pushing forward the first rank, only to be swept away like chaff.” Rebel soldiers laughed and joked as they poured lead into the hapless Yankees. The carnage was total.