by Bruce Catton
They held the line. At dusk Sheridan tried a counterattack, ordering Custer to make a mounted charge on a line of Rebel infantry. A man who saw him giving Custer his orders remembered Sheridan’s emphasis: “You understand? I want you to give it to them!” Custer nodded, and he drove his squadrons forward—to a muddy anticlimax. The field across which the men tried to charge was so soupy with wet clay and rain water that the horses immediately bogged down, the charge came to nothing, and at last it was dark, with the Federals holding the town and the Confederates facing them just out of musket range.19
It looked like trouble, for these venturesome Confederates had more men than Sheridan had and they were well behind the left end of the main Union line. But Sheridan saw it as opportunity; it was Pickett’s force and not his that was in trouble, the Rebels were isolated and they could be cut off, and if the business were handled right none of them should ever get back to Lee’s army. Off through the night to Grant went Sheridan’s couriers with the message: Let me have the old VI Corps once more and I can really smash things.
The VI Corps Sheridan could not have, because it was too far off and with the roads as they were it would take two days to get it to him. Warren and the V Corps were available, however, no more than half a dozen miles away, and late that evening Warren was ordered to get his men over to Dinwiddie at top speed. Sheridan was told that they would show up at dawn, and they would be coming in from the northeast, behind Pickett’s flank. Warren had much more infantry than Pickett had, and Sheridan had much more cavalry. Between the two of them they might be able to destroy his entire force.20 Lee was so pinched for manpower that a loss of such dimensions would practically bankrupt him.
So Sheridan put his men into bivouac and waited impatiently for the morning. It was a restless night, since every square foot of open space behind the line was jammed with led horses and their grouchy caretakers, and it was an all-night job to get all of these straightened out so that the squadrons could be mounted next day if necessary. Trains of pack mules came up, bringing forage and rations, and the ambulances had got through—that work on the roads had been effective—and lanterns twinkled in the damp groves as stretcher parties went through, gathering up the wounded men.21
It was the last day of March 1865, and the Army of the Potomac had just nine more days of campaigning ahead of it.
3. The Soldiers Saw Daylight
Major General Gouverneur Kemble Warren and his V Army Corps had been having a bad day. The corps had been in position, wet and uncomfortable, a little west of Hatcher’s Run, presumably a trifle south of the extreme right flank of Lee’s main line, and during the morning—while Devin’s troopers were meeting Rebel infantry in front of Five Forks and were beginning their difficult withdrawal to Dinwiddie Court House—Warren sent one division forward to make a reconnaissance and find out just where the Rebels might be.
By ill chance this division began to advance just when Lee ordered a force of his own to move forward and pick a fight with the Yankees in order to protect the move which Pickett was making a few miles farther west. This force caught the Federal infantry division off guard and piled into it with savage vigor, and the Federals were driven back in disorder. In their retreat they ran through the bivouac of the second of Warren’s three infantry divisions, and these troops were all gathered around smoky campfires trying to dry their clothing and their blankets, no one having alerted them to the fact that there might be action. So this second division was routed, too, and Warren had to send in his third division and call for help from the II Corps, over on his right, in order to restore the situation.
By evening he had won back the ground that had been lost, but his men had had a hard all-day fight, with painful losses; and now, just as they were collecting their wounded and trying to get snug for the night, there came these orders to make a forced march over to join Sheridan.1
It was a foul night to move troops. It was so dark, as one soldier said, that it was literally impossible to see a hand before one’s face. The rain had stopped, but the roads were deep with mud, every little creek had overflowed, and there was a completely unfordable stream flowing straight across the principal highway that the troops had to use. Warren’s engineers tore down a house and used the timbers to build a bridge, but construction work at midnight with everybody exhausted was slow work.
Warren had received conflicting orders about the routes he was to take, so that there was a good deal of wearing countermarching for some units, and there was much confusion about maps and place names. Also, at the time he got his marching orders Warren’s skirmish Une was in contact with the enemy, and he felt that he should use much caution in getting his men away. Some regiments started on time but most of them did not, nothing that could conceivably go wrong went right, and by five in the morning—the hour at which it had been hoped that the whole corps would be taking position at Dinwiddie Court House—two of his divisions were just beginning to move.2
Sheridan was furious. He met the head of the infantry column in a gray dawn as the men came splashing up to the rendezvous, and he demanded of the brigadier commanding: “Where’s Warren?” The brigadier explained that Warren was back with the rear of the column, and Sheridan growled: “That’s where I expected to find him. What’s he doing there?” The officer tried to explain that Warren was trying to make sure that his men could break contact with the Confederates without drawing an attack, but Sheridan was not appeased. Later, when Warren arrived, the two generals were seen tramping up and down by the roadside, Sheridan dark and tense, stamping angrily in the mud, Warren pale and tight-lipped, apparently trying to control himself.3
Wherever the fault lay, the early-morning attack that had been planned could not be made. It was noon before the V Corps was assembled, and by that time the Confederates were gone. During the night Pickett had got wind of the Yankee move, and around daybreak he took his entire force back to the breastworks at Five Forks.
These works ran for a mile or more along the edge of the White Oak Road, and they faced toward the south. At their eastern end, for flank protection, the line made nearly a right-angle turn and ran north for a few hundred yards. With his men in and behind these works, and cavalry patrolling both flanks, Pickett seems to have taken it for granted that he was safe from assault for the rest of the day. With a few other ranking officers he retired to a campfire some distance in the rear to enjoy the pleasures of a shad bake.
As far as Sheridan was concerned, however, Pickett was in as much danger as he had been in before. There was still a wide gap between his force and the rest of Lee’s army, with only the thinnest chain of cavalry vedettes to maintain contact, and in that gap Sheridan could see a dazzling opportunity. He had his cavalry maintaining pressure along Pickett’s front, and he had a whole mounted division waiting in reserve, ready to go slashing in around the Confederate right at the proper time. If, while the cavalry held the Southerners’ attention, he could drive 16,000 good infantrymen into the open gap and bring their entire weight to bear on Pickett’s left flank, just where the Rebel breastworks angled back toward the north, the war would be a good deal nearer its close by nightfall.
The 16,000 good infantrymen were at hand, and a comparatively short walk would put them into position. They were dog-tired. They had fought all of the day before, and they had spent practically all of the night and morning on the march, and while Sheridan and Warren discussed battle plans they were catching forty winks in some fields near a little country church. When Warren at last came over to move them up to the jump-off line they were sluggish, and getting them formed was slow work, and it seemed to Sheridan—watching the afternoon sun get lower in the sky, and reflecting that the whole situation might be very different by tomorrow morning—that Warren was not doing much to make things go faster.4 But the men would fight well when the time came, because they considered themselves a crack outfit and they had a great tradition.
The V Corps was one of the famous units of the whole Federal Army.
Fitz-John Porter had commanded it, and it had been McClellan’s favorite corps, and in general orders he had held it up as a model for the other corps to emulate, which caused jealousies that had not entirely worn away even yet. (It caused War Department suspicions, too, and promotion for higher officers in this corps was harder to get, it was said, than in the rest of the Army of the Potomac.) The corps had been built around a famous division of Regulars, and in the beginning all of its ranking officers had been Regulars, mostly of the stiff, old-army, knock-’em-dead variety. Its discipline tended to be severe, there was strict observance of military formalities, and the Regular Army flavor endured, even though many of the old officers and all of the Regular battalions had disappeared.5
This was the corps which Sheridan now was preparing to use as his striking force. When Grant first sent the corps out to operate on Lee’s flank, he did two curious things. He detached it from Meade’s command and put it entirely under Sheridan, promising to do the same with the II Corps if Sheridan needed it—which was a bit odd, considering that Sheridan was simply the cavalry commander, while Meade commanded the Army of the Potomac—and he specifically authorized Sheridan to relieve Warren of his command, if it seemed necessary, and to put someone else in his place.6
Grant’s subsequent explanation of these acts was brief and vague, but what he was actually trying to do was to find a solution for the old, baffling command problem that had beset the Army of the Potomac from its earliest days.
Time and again the Army of the Potomac had missed a victory because someone did not move quite fast enough, or failed to put all of his weight into a blow, or came into action other than precisely as he was expected to do. This had happened before Grant became general in chief and it had happened since then, and the fact that Warren had been involved in a few such incidents was not especially important. What Grant was really shooting at was the sluggishness and caution that were forever cropping out, at some critical moment, somewhere in the army’s chain of command. With the decisive moment of the war coming up Grant was going to have no more of that. Instinctively, he was turning to Sheridan, Sheridan the driver—giving him as much of the army as he needed and in effect telling him to take it and be tough with it.
Sheridan was the man for it. As Warren’s brigades struggled into position Sheridan was everywhere, needling the laggards, pricking the general officers on, sending his staff galloping from end to end of the line. He rounded up the cavalry bands, which had made music on the firing line the evening before, and he put them on horseback with orders to go into action along with the fighting men when the advance sounded. It was four o’clock by now, and there would not be a great deal more daylight, and at last the infantry began to move. Sheridan spurred away to send the cavalry forward too. There was the peal of many bugles and then a great crash of musketry, and thousands of men broke into a cheer, and the battle was on.
A skirmisher trotting forward a few hundred yards ahead of the V Corps turned once to look back, and he saw what neither he nor any of his mates had seen in a dreary year of wilderness fighting and trench warfare, and he remembered it as the most stirring thing he had ever looked upon in all of his life. There they were, coming up behind him as if all of the power of a nation had been put into one disciplined mass—the fighting men of the V Corps, walking forward in battle lines that were a mile wide and many ranks deep, sunlight glinting on thousands of bright muskets, flags snapping in the breeze, brigade fronts taut with parade-ground Regular Army precision, everybody keeping step, tramping forward into battle to the sound of gunfire and distant music. To see this, wrote the skirmisher, was to see and to know “the grandeur and the sublimity of war.” 7
It was grand and inspiring—and, unfortunately, there was a hitch in it.
Warren was sending his men in with two divisions abreast and a third division following in support, and by some mischance he was hitting the White Oak Road far to the east of the place where he was supposed to hit it. Instead of coming in on the knuckle of Pickett’s line, he was coming in on nothing at all. His men were marching resolutely toward the north and the battle was going on somewhere to the west, out of their sight and reach.
The left division in the first line was commanded by General Ayres, a hard-bitten survivor of the original old-army set of officers, and the left of his division brushed against the left flank of Pickett’s force and came under a sharp fire. Ayres spun the whole division around, brigade by brigade, making almost a 90-degree turn to the left—hot enough work it was, too, with Rebel infantry and cavalry firing steadily and the ground all broken—and as he turned the rest of the corps lost contact with him. The division that had been advancing beside him was led by General Crawford, who fell a good deal short of being one of the most skillful soldiers in the army, and Crawford kept marching to the north, getting farther away from the battle every minute. Most of the third division followed Crawford, Ayres’s men were for the moment so entangled in their maneuver that they could not do much fighting—and, in sum, instead of crunching in on the Rebel flank with overpowering force, the V Corps was hardly doing more than give it a brisk nudge.8
A confusing long-range fire, heavy enough to hurt, kept coming in from the left, and smoke fog was drifting through woods and fields. Warren had gone riding frantically on to try to find Crawford and set him straight, and entire brigades had lost touch with their corps and division commanders. One of these, presently, got into action, led by one of the most remarkable soldiers in the army, the hawk-nosed theologian turned general, Joshua Chamberlain of Maine.
Before the war Chamberlain had done nothing more militant than teach courses in natural and revealed religion, and later on in romance languages, at Bowdoin College. In 1862 he had been given a two-year leave of absence to study in Europe. Instead of going to Europe he had joined the army, and in a short time he showed up at Gettysburg as colonel of the 20th Maine Infantry, winning the Congressional Medal of Honor for his defense of Little Round Top. Since then he had been several times wounded—he had an arm in a sling today, as a matter of fact, from a wound received twenty-four hours earlier in the fight near Hatcher’s Run—and he had twice won brevet promotions for bravery under fire. It was occurring to him now that since bullets were coming from the left there must be Confederates over that way, so he took his brigade over to do something about it.
Beyond a gully, Chamberlain could at last see a Confederate line of battle. He got his brigade into line, took it down into the little ravine, came out on the far side, and headed for the enemy. The fire was hot, now—and here, in the thickest of it, came Sheridan, riding up at top speed as always, his mounted color-bearer riding behind him. Sheridan pulled up facing Chamberlain, his dark face glowing.
“By God, that’s what I want to see! General officers at the front!” cried Sheridan. He asked where Warren and the rest of the corps might be, and Chamberlain gestured toward the north, trying to explain what had happened. Sheridan interrupted, saying that Chamberlain was to take command of everybody he saw in the immediate vicinity and press the attack—and then Sheridan rode off fast, looking for Warren and the missing infantry,9
All along the breastworks on the White Oak Road dismounted Yankee cavalrymen were attacking—looking, as a man who watched them said, with their tightly fitting uniforms, natty jackets, and short carbines, as if they had been especially designed for crawling through knotholes. Many of the carbines were repeaters, and at close range the troopers had terrific fire power, and a deafening racket went up from the narrow aisle in the woods. Around the angle Ayres’s division and Chamberlain’s brigade and fragments of other commands were still in some confusion, but they were beginning to get it straightened out now, and they were hitting the Confederates from flank and rear. Far to the north, the troops that had gone off at a tangent were at last being wheeled around so that they could cut across the Confederates’ rear.10
Sheridan was all over the field. When a skirmish line met a severe fire, wavered, and seemed re
ady to fall back, up came Sheridan at a gallop, shouting to the men: “Come on—go at ’em—move on with a clean jump or you’ll not catch one of ’em! They’re all getting ready to run now, and if you don’t get on to them in five minutes they’ll every one get away from you!” An infantryman at his side was struck in the throat and fell, blood flowing as if his jugular vein had been cut. “You’re not hurt a bit!” cried Sheridan. “Pick up your gun, man, and move right on!” The soldier looked up at him, then obediently took his musket, got to his feet, and staggered forward—to drop dead after half a dozen steps. Chamberlain came up to Sheridan once and begged him not to expose himself on the front line, promising that the rest of them would press the attack. Sheridan tossed his head with a grin which, Chamberlain felt, “seemed to say that he didn’t care much for himself, or perhaps for me,” and promised to go to the rear—and then dashed off to a sector where the fire was even hotter.
Finally the line was formed as Sheridan wanted it. In a boggy woodland, heavy smoke clouding the last of the sunlight, Sheridan looked down the shifting mass of soldiers, turned in the saddle, and called: “Where’s my battle flag?” Up came his color-bearer. Sheridan took the flag from him, raised it high over his head, and went trotting along the front. The line surged forward and got up to the Rebel works, Sheridan put his horse over the breastworks, and the infantry went over in a riot of yelling jubilant men—and the Rebel flank was broken once and for all, and the men of the V Corps fought their way down the length of Pickett’s battle line taking prisoners by the score and the hundred.11
By this time Warren had Crawford’s errant division far around to the Rebel rear, rounding up fugitives and cutting off the line of retreat, and Warren sent his chief of staff over to tell Sheridan about it. This officer found Sheridan on the battlefield and trotted up proudly. But the great fury of battle was on Sheridan. Warren’s corps had been late getting to Dinwiddie and it had been late getting into position at Five Forks, and when it attacked two thirds of it had gone astray and Warren had gone with it; Sheridan did not in the least care whether the reasons for all of this were good or bad, and he did not want to receive any more reports from General Warren.
