Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Cabot refused to allow his men to fire. But after forty-five minutes, the crowd began slamming its collective weight against the arsenal doors, and Cabot had no choice but to order one of the 6-pounder howitzers his artillerymen had brought with them loaded with a double charge of canister. At eight-fifteen the door gave way before the mob, and Cabot gave the order to fire. The gun blast blew the mob back into the street, and within a few minutes they had scattered out of sight. Eight people were dead, four of them small children.

  The mob was not done, however. Bloodied and desperate, the crowd regrouped around the corner and broke into whatever gun shops they could find for weapons. Robertson James, a second lieutenant in the 54th Massachusetts, barricaded himself with a dozen other soldiers on the upper floor of Read’s Gun Shop; below, the mob was “hunting down any man in certain localities… wearing the uniform of our army.” As James recalled, black soldiers’ lives “were not worth five minutes purchase.” As they worked their way down the line of shops that led toward old Faneuil Hall, the rioters were headed off by a squad of policemen, two companies of militia, a company of mounted dragoons with drawn sabers, and the mayor of Boston with the Riot Act in his hand. The shiver of sabers in the red summer sunset cowed them, and the mob gradually broke up and faded into the oncoming dusk. By 11:00 PM, Boston was quiet again.6

  With that, it became apparent even to the most blue-dyed Yankee and the most radical Republican that Richmond was not the only city in 1863 that was beginning to stagger under the weight of the war’s burdens. No city in America was more identified with abolitionism than Boston; no governor had pressed more quickly or more tirelessly to move emancipation and abolition to the front of the war agenda than Governor John Andrew. But the people in the streets of Boston had not been prepared for the costs that a war to emancipate African American slaves would impose on them. They had certainly not bargained for the war to turn into a nightmare that requisitioned their sons, brothers, and fathers by force, then sent them off to be slaughtered either to no apparent purpose or in the name of a purpose linked with black freedom. The temper of the war was failing in the North in 1863; emancipation and abolition were all well and good, but they would mean nothing if not secured by Union military victory. And if the war could not be won, and soon, perhaps it might be better to admit that it could never be won at all.

  IF IT TAKES ALL SUMMER

  Grant’s victory at Chattanooga in November 1863 brought the Federal armies only one-third of the way between their old base in Kentucky and the Confederacy’s Atlantic and Gulf coastlines. Now that Grant had complete power over all the western Federal armies, he might choose to push southward directly to Atlanta and complete the disruption of the Confederacy’s western rail links, or he might shift his line of operations to aim at Mobile, Alabama, which would close one of the Confederacy’s last remaining ports and, in the process, roll over the Confederacy’s vital foundries and arsenals in northern Alabama.

  His first inclination was to strike for Mobile. In August Grant wrote to Charles Dana in the War Department, “I am very anxious to take Mobile while I think it can be done,” and four months later, he told General in Chief Halleck that he wanted “to move by way of New Orleans and Pascagoula on Mobile. …” A move on Atlanta was a logistical impossibility right now, Grant explained to Halleck; instead he proposed to leave only a garrison strong enough to secure Chattanooga, then move the old Army of the Cumberland via steamboat down to New Orleans for the campaign against Mobile “and with the balance of the army make a campaign into the interior of Alabama, and possibly Georgia.” This plan might have the additional bonus of forcing “Lee to abandon Virginia and North Carolina” to protect Georgia. In any case, the government should give up looking to capture Richmond and concentrate its attention on the West instead. Grant was now convinced that the campaigns in Virginia were really only so much tactical boxing, and that the only way to strike a truly decisive blow at the Confederacy was to slash away at its strategic intestines in Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas.7

  Halleck replied in January to Grant’s Mobile proposal, cautiously authorizing Grant to proceed—but with the crippling requirement that all of Tennessee first be securely in Union hands. What was more, “I have never considered Richmond as the necessary objective point of the Army of the Potomac,” Halleck added in February. For him, the real question of the war was how best to defeat Lee’s army. If Grant were permitted to concentrate Union forces in the West, then “all the forces which Lee can collect will be moved north, and the popular sentiment will compel the Government to bring back the army… to defend Washington, Baltimore, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia.”

  Halleck’s hesitation was not the only wet blanket on Grant’s plans. In January, much to Grant’s annoyance, Nathaniel P. Banks, the Federal military commander in Louisiana, took a joint army-navy expedition up the Red River into the upcountry of Louisiana and eastern Texas. Banks’s expedition was a political move rather than a military one. Both Lincoln and Banks wanted to consolidate the hold of the newly reconstructed government in occupied Louisiana over the rest of the state (and its valuable cotton) and perhaps send a useful message to the French in Mexico about Federal intentions for Texas. “In regard to General Banks’ campaign… it was undertaken less for military reasons than as a matter of State policy,” Halleck explained to Grant. “It was… connected with our foreign relations, and especially with France and Mexico, that our troops should occupy and hold at least a portion of Texas.” All the same, it drained away men and supplies Grant had been counting on for his Mobile campaign. Just as he had done after Corinth and after Vicksburg, Grant was forced to sit on his triumphs.8

  Grant did not sit still for long in Tennessee, any more than he had in Mississippi the year before. In December 1863, Congress proposed to reward Grant for the Chattanooga victory by reviving the rank of lieutenant general, a grade filled only once before in the history of the United States Army, by George Washington. The bill passed the Senate on February 24, 1864, and Halleck then wired Grant to come to Washington to receive the commission. 9

  The promotion to lieutenant general did two things for Grant. First, it immediately made him senior in rank to Halleck, who remained only a major general, and effectively booted Grant up to general in chief of the Federal armies. Halleck, with uncommon graciousness, stepped aside as general in chief to make way for Grant and assumed the new post of chief of staff to Secretary of War Stanton (a function he had actually been exercising since July 1862). Second, the promotion brought Grant east to meet with Lincoln and Stanton on March 8, and two days later the new lieutenant general rode out to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac to meet George Gordon Meade and take the measure of the eastern army.10

  Grant had heard rumors ever since the preceding summer that Lincoln wanted to drop Meade from command of the Army of the Potomac, chiefly because of Meade’s failure to follow and destroy Lee after Gettysburg, and the corollary of these rumors was that Lincoln meant to bring Grant east as Meade’s replacement. Knowing what a political cockpit the Army of the Potomac was, Grant had no desire whatever to offer himself as the next target for East Coast military intrigue. In the same letter in August 1863 in which he had broached the Mobile plan to Charles Dana, Grant laboriously thanked Dana “for your timely intercession in saving me from going to the Army of the Potomac. Whilst I would disobey no order I should beg very hard to be excused before accepting that command.” Even after his appointment as general in chief, Grant seems to have been determined to keep his headquarters in the west, and proceed with his plans to give the Army of the Potomac the shorter end of the strategic stick.11

  In spite of himself, Grant was impressed with Meade and the army, and the War Department and various Republican congressional nabobs pressed on Grant the fact that Congress had bestowed the grade of lieutenant general on Grant principally in the hopes that he would lead the Army of the Potomac into battle against Lee in a showdown of tactical wits. “Unless t
his army of foes is defeated and broken, and our Capitol relieved of its fierce frowns,” argued Grant’s own chief of staff, John A. Rawlins, “we cannot hope that the recognition of the rebel government will be much longer postponed by European governments.” 12 By the time Grant returned to Nashville, he had decided to move his headquarters east and take up general tactical command of the eastern theater. He also revised his plans for operations in Virginia to include yet another overland campaign across the Rappahannock for the Army of the Potomac in order to confront Lee and bring the Army of Northern Virginia to battle.

  Grant knew that he was taking considerable risks in coming east. For one thing, he was a westerner and a stranger with surprisingly little personal grandeur or charisma about him. “Grant is a man of a good deal of rough dignity; rather taciturn; quick and decided in speech,” observed Theodore Lyman as he studied the new commander. “He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.” It took easterners such as Lyman some time to get used to a general who had no interest in fine reviews and hip-hiphoorah. “Grant… paid us a visit yesterday,” George Washington Whitman wrote to his mother on April 14, 1864. “There was no grand Review as is generally the case, but the Regiments just fell in line and Grant rode along and looked at them and then went on about his business.” A civilian friend of one of Grant’s staff officers was amazed that “there is no glitter or parade about him. To me he seems but an earnest business man.”13

  Grant was also aware that, as a westerner, he was likely to be resented as an interloper by the Army of the Potomac. “The enlisted men thoroughly discussed Grant’s military capacity,” Frank Wilkeson remembered. “Magazines, illustrated papers, and newspapers, which contained accounts of his military achievements, were sent for, and eagerly and attentively read.” Most of the veterans were skeptical. “Old soldiers, who had seen many military reputations—reputations which had been made in subordinate commands or in distant regions occupied by inferior Confederate troops—melt before the battle-fire of the Army of Northern Virginia, and expose the incapacity of our generals, shrugged their shoulders carelessly. …” Wilkeson, who would be going into his first campaign under Grant, discovered that “Grant’s name aroused no enthusiasm. The Army of the Potomac had passed the enthusiastic stage. …”14

  Grant anticipated that skepticism, and he even toyed with the idea of bringing McClellan back into the Army of the Potomac at some level to rally the jaded army. He also wisely retained Meade as titular commander of the Army of the Potomac (even though Grant himself would travel with the army and give all the orders that mattered). In some cases, though, Grant was facing problems that political savvy had no way of addressing. This particular army was largely composed of three-year volunteers, and in the spring and summer of 1864, many of those enlistments were due to expire. The constant defeats the army had suffered had slowly undermined the veterans’ enthusiasm for another term of service, and only about half of the Army of the Potomac’s veterans would be persuaded to reenlist. Unless he could win some kind of smashing victory soon, Grant was liable to see a large part of the Army of the Potomac legally desert him.15

  Staggering as these problems were, Grant managed to stay on his guard about letting the Army of the Potomac eat up all his attention and resources. He still believed that the really decisive blows that would win the war were going to have to land somewhere outside the old battlefields north of Richmond. To that end, Grant also provided for three other simultaneous offensives to begin in the West and below Richmond. Intended to help realize much of the original plan Grant had proposed to Halleck, those three offensives would depend largely on the men designated to lead them. First and foremost, there was William Tecumseh Sherman. Grant proposed to combine George Thomas and the Army of the Cumberland with Grant’s old Army of the Tennessee from the Vicksburg campaign and put them both under the command of Sherman. At the same time as Grant’s overland campaign would open in Virginia, Sherman would advance south toward Atlanta with a view toward taking the city by the end of the summer.

  In addition to Sherman, Grant also looked to Nathaniel Banks for help. Banks was supposed to finish his Red River expedition in time to launch a combined army-navy operation against Mobile in tandem with Grant and Sherman’s advances. With Sherman occupying the rebel Army of Tennessee, there would be little at hand to defend Mobile, and when the port fell into his hands, Banks could then move his men north through Alabama without serious opposition, wrecking Selma in his path, and then turn east and meet Sherman at Atlanta.

  Lastly, Grant was looking for help from Major General Benjamin F. Butler, the Massachusetts politician who had outraged New Orleans and made the “contrabands” the beginning of a new Federal policy on slavery in 1861. Butler was to take command of two Federal army corps (about 33,000 men) and deposit them on the old James River peninsula, below Richmond. While Grant and the Army of the Potomac would clinch Lee in battle along the Rappahannock line, Butler and his men could slip past the thin Confederate defenses on the James and capture Richmond or at least cut Richmond’s rail communications with the rest of the South. Lincoln aptly summed up the plan in one phrase: “Those not skinning can hold a leg.”16

  Grant was less forthcoming about his reservations concerning the overland path across the Rapidan and the Rappahannock that Halleck and Lincoln insisted had to be taken en route to the climactic battle they wanted fought with Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. McClellan’s temptation to play at politics had tainted with halfheartedness the idea of using the navy’s command of the Chesapeake waterways to outflank the Confederates, push up the James River, and besiege Richmond. Surprisingly, that was exactly what Lee dreaded the most. “I considered the problem in every possible phase,” Lee told one of his division commanders in 1863, and unless he could carry the war onto Northern soil and make the North pay the price the South was paying, then taking a defensive stance would only end with him being pushed back into a siege of Richmond, and a siege—as the sieges of Sevastopol and Kars had shown during the Crimean War—had only one end in modern warfare, that of surrender. Nothing about the results of the Gettysburg campaign had changed Lee’s mind. “We must destroy this army of Grant’s before he gets to the James River,” Lee told Jubal Early. “If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.” This was also what Grant was convinced would be the inevitable outcome of affairs in the east, for the simple reason that armies had become too big to defeat in a single, cataclysmic battle, and too dependent on railroads and cities as supply centers to survive in the field if those cities were locked up and captured. His intention, Grant wrote, was to “beat Lee’s army north of Richmond if possible.” But no amount of beating was liable to put the Army of Northern Virginia permanently out of commission; at least, none so far had done that. Instead, Grant mused, “after destroying his lines of communication north of the James River,” it would be better to “transfer the army to the south side and besiege Lee in Richmond or follow him south if he should retreat.”17

  Almost from the first, things began to go wrong with Grant’s big strategic picture. For one thing, Banks’s expedition up the Red River turned into an unpleasant little fiasco that tied up those forces (along with 10,000 of Sherman’s men who had been sent to reinforce him) until the end of May. By that time, Banks would have been a month late just starting for Mobile, and in fact, he never even got going at all, and spent the rest of the war in New Orleans. Sherman would have to take Atlanta himself, and without any helpful distractions at Mobile by Banks. Meanwhile, Butler and his “Army of the James” made a brave landing below Richmond on the James peninsula on May 5, 1864. Butler actually got within five miles of Richmond on May 11, only to be turned back by a desperate Confederate defense at Drewry’s Bluff on May 16. Butler withdrew back to the James River and entrenched himself in the Bermuda Hundred, a small area largely surrounded by a bend in the James. There the Confedera
tes sealed off his small army, like a “bottle tightly corked.”

  Grant’s biggest problem was presented by Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. Grant did not simply propose to throw himself at Lee, and like Hooker a year before, he chose not to try to force a crossing of the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg. Instead, the Army of the Potomac, with Meade and Grant, 3,500 wagons, 29,000 horses, 20,000 mules, and 120,000 men, again turned wide to the west, splashed across the Rapidan River on May 4, and plunged at once into the eerie gloom of the Wilderness. Despite the apparently irresistible juggernaut of his numbers, Grant had only about 65,000–70,000 veterans; the rest were unseasoned troops scraped from hither and yon (conscripts, replacements, the heavy artillery regiments of the Washington defenses; even Ambrose Burnside made a reappearance from Ohio with his old 9th Corps). Grant had to hope that he could move through the Wilderness fast enough to force Lee to fall back upon Richmond. “It was a good day’s work in such a country for so large an army with its artillery and fighting trains to march twenty miles, crossing a river on five bridges of its own building, without a single mishap, interruption or delay,” wrote Andrew A. Humphreys, Meade’s chief of staff. All the same, nightfall found the lead elements of the Army of the Potomac no more than halfway along the narrow rutted roads of the Wilderness, and the army was forced to stop and wait for daylight.18

  This presented precisely the sort of opportunity Lee prayed for, since the tangled and unfamiliar terrain of the Wilderness would eliminate the Federal advantages in numbers and artillery and allow the Army of Northern Virginia an even chance in a fight. And that spring, Lee needed all the help the Virginia terrain could give. Three weeks before Grant crossed the Rapidan, Lee warned Jefferson Davis, “I cannot see how we can operate with our present supplies. … There is nothing to be had in this section for man or animals.” (No exaggeration, this: after three years of war, the countryside “seemed almost uninhabited and not even the bark of a dog or sound of a bird broke the dreary silence.”) Lee’s health was so poor that he admitted to his son Custis in April, “I feel a marked change in my strength… and am less competent for duty than ever.” 19