Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  The horrors of this day, added to those of Spotsylvania, created something of a Cold Harbor syndrome in the Army of the Potomac. Men in the ranks had learned what European armies on the Western Front a half-century later would have to learn all over again about trench warfare. "The men feel at present a great horror and dread of attacking

  27. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 36, pt. 3, p. 206.

  28. Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 159.

  29. Porter, Campaigning with Grant, 179; George Meade, Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, 2 vols. (New York, 1913), II, 201.

  earthworks again," was how one officer put it.30 So Grant devised a new three-part plan to cut Lee's supply lines and flank him out of his trenches. He ordered the army in the Shenandoah Valley, now led by David Hunter, to renew Sigel's aborted effort to move up the Valley (southward) and destroy its railroads, cross the Blue Ridge to smash the Confederate supply depot at Lynchburg, and continue east toward Richmond, wrecking the railroads and the James River Canal. At the same time Sheridan was to take two cavalry divisions westward on a raid to lay waste the same railroads from the other end and link up with Hunter midway for a grand climax of demolition before rejoining the Army of the Potomac somewhere south of Richmond. While all this was going on, Grant planned to disengage from Cold Harbor, march swiftly to cross the James, seize Petersburg with its hub of railroads linking Richmond to the South, and force Lee into the open.

  Federal units carried out handsomely the first step in each part of this intricate plan. But thereafter the vigorous Confederate responses plus failures of nerve by subordinate Union commanders brought all three efforts to a halt. Out in the Valley, Hunter's 15,000 men constituted his first field command since he had been wounded at Bull Run in 1861. His main distinction in the war stemmed from his abortive attempt in 1862 to abolish slavery along the south Atlantic coast and to raise the first black regiment there. He was eager to achieve a military success. On June 5 at Piedmont, Virginia—halfway between Harrison-burg and Staunton—his men got him off on the right foot by overrunning a smaller rebel force, killing its commander, and capturing more than a thousand prisoners. Hunter moved on through Staunton to Lexington, home of the Virginia Military Institute.

  Along the way his soldiers destroyed a good deal more than military property. Many of them had spent the war fighting guerrillas in western Virginia. The foremost of such enemies was John Singleton Mosby. A diminutive but fearless man who a decade earlier had been expelled from the University of Virginia and jailed for shooting a fellow student, Mosby studied law in prison, received a pardon from the governor, and became a lawyer. After serving as a cavalry scout for Jeb Stuart, Mosby raised a guerrilla company under the Partisan Ranger Act of April 1862. His fame spread with such exploits as the capture of a northern general in bed ten miles from Washington in March 1863. Never totaling more than 800 men, Mosby's partisans operated in squads of twenty to eighty

  30. Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 159.

  and attacked Union outposts, wagon trains, and stragglers with such fury and efficiency that whole counties in northern Virginia became known as Mosby's Confederacy. No Union supplies could move in this area except under heavy guard.

  Southerners lionized Mosby's partisans and numerous other guerrilla bands in Virginia for their boldness and dash. Northern soldiers expressed a different view. To one bitter bluecoat, Mosby's raiders were " 'honest farmers' who have taken the oath of allegiance [to the Union] a few times" and then

  arm[ed] themselves with anything that comes handy—pistols, sabres, carbines, shotguns, etc. and being mounted and in citizen clothes proceed to lay in wait for some poor devil of a blue jacket. If they can catch a few after berries, without arms, their valor shines—they take 'em and kill them on the spot. . . . But if a body of troops come upon them they plunge into a piece of woods, hide their arms, and "dig" for some house. . . . The gallant Chevalier of Southern Maidens, Mosby, continues to dash out on sutlers, where he can find them unguarded or broken down, and he generally takes them without loss of a man. Now and then an ambulance or two, full of sick men, is taken by him without loss.31

  Union soldiers were not likely to treat with kid gloves any guerrillas they caught or the civilian population among whom—in Mao Tse-tung's phrase—the partisans swam like fish in the sea. During Hunter's advance up the Valley, guerrillas swarmed over his supply wagons. The farther from his base he marched, the more vulnerable became his communications. For a month after May 20 only one wagon train got through. Getting angrier as they grew hungrier, Hunter's men foraged savagely from civilians and burned what they did not take. By the time they reached Lexington on June 12 the soldiers were in a foul mood. Looting escalated to terrorizing of citizens; destruction of military property escalated to the burning of V.M.I, and the home of the current governor—who had recently called on civilians to take up arms as guerrillas. Justifying their behavior, one Union soldier wrote: "Many of the women look sad and do much weeping over the destruction that is going

  31. Letters from a soldier of the 122nd New York in the Syracuse Daily Journal, Aug. 10, 1863, Sept. 19, 1864, quoted in David B. Swinfen, Ruggles Regiment: The 122nd New York Volunteers in the American Civil War (Hanover, N.H., 1982), 91.

  on. We feel that the South brought on the war and the State of Virginia is paying dear for her part."32

  Short of ammunition because none could get through, Hunter left Lexington in flames and moved on toward Lynchburg. Lee regarded this threat to his rear as most serious. To meet it he sent Jubal Early with Jackson's old corps back to the vicinity of their great achievements two years earlier. Though reduced by casualties to 10,000 men, Early's veterans brought Confederate strength at Lynchburg equal to Hunter's 15,000. Hunter tapped at the Lynchburg defenses on June 17–18, learned of Early's arrival, pondered his shortage of ammunition, and decided to retreat. And he did so westward, into West Virginia, rather than risk a movement back down the Valley with guerrillas on his flanks and Early in his rear. This path of retreat left the Valley open to the Confederates. Believing that Early would draw more strength away from Grant by staying there than by returning to the Richmond front, Lee authorized him to emulate Jackson by using the Valley as an avenue to threaten Maryland and Washington. Hunter spent the rest of the war rationalizing his decision to retreat into West Virginia, but he soon lost his command as well as his reputation.

  Sheridan's raid fared only slightly better than Hunter's expedition. Lee sent 5,000 of his cavalry to head off Sheridan's 7,000. The rebel horsemen were now commanded by Wade Hampton, a South Carolina planter reputed to be the richest man in the South, who had already been wounded three times in this war. Catching up with the Federals sixty miles northwest of Richmond, the gray troopers slugged it out with Sheridan's men for two days near Trevilian Station on June 11–12. With casualties of 20 percent on each side, this was the bloodiest cavalry action of the war. On the Union side a Michigan brigade commanded by George Armstrong Custer did the hardest fighting. Sheridan managed to keep the graybacks at bay while he tore up the railroad, but he abandoned the plan to link up with Hunter, and the southerners soon repaired the railroad.

  While all this was going on, the whole Army of the Potomac withdrew from Cold Harbor on the night of June 12–13. While one corps went around to the James by water, the other four marched overland, screened by the one cavalry division that Sheridan had left behind. So smoothly was the operation carried out, with feints toward Richmond

  32. Virgil Carrington Jones, Gray Ghosts and Rebel Raiders, 2 vols. (Mockingird Books ed., Atlanta, 1973), II, 73.

  to confuse Lee, that the Confederate commander remained puzzled for several days about Grant's intentions. Meanwhile Union engineers built perhaps the longest pontoon bridge in military history, 2,100 feet, anchored to hold against strong tidal currents and a four-foot tidal rise and fall. Bluecoats began crossing the James on June 14 and next day two corps approached Petersburg, which was held by Beauregard with a scratch fo
rce of 2,500. Grant had borrowed a leaf from his Vicksburg campaign and gotten in the enemy's rear before his opponent realized what was happening.

  But the denouement was different from Vicksburg, because Grant's corps commanders failed him here and because Beauregard and Lee were not Pemberton and Johnston. The first Union troops to reach Petersburg were the 18th Corps, which Grant had borrowed from Butler two weeks earlier for the Cold Harbor assault. Their commander was William F. "Baldy" Smith, who had quarreled with Butler and had not distinguished himself in this theater. With a chance to retrieve his reputation, Smith became cautious as he approached Petersburg and surveyed the formidable defensive line: ten miles of twenty-foot thick breastworks and trenches fronted by fifteen-foot ditches and linking fifty-five artillery redans bristling with cannon. Having seen at Cold Harbor what happened-to soldiers attacking much less imposing works, Smith paused, not realizing that Beauregard had only a handful of men to hold them. The Union forces finally went forward near sundown and easily captured more than a mile of line and sixteen guns. One of Smith's three divisions was composed of black troops who tasted here their first combat and performed well. As a bright moon lighted the captured trenches, Smith took counsel of rumors that reinforcements from Lee had arrived and failed to push on. "Petersburg at that hour," wrote Beauregard after the war, "was clearly at the mercy of the Federal commander, who had all but captured it."33

  More such missed opportunities crowded the next three days. On the night of June 15–16, Beauregard's survivors desperately entrenched a new line while two rebel divisions from north of the James came to bolster it. Next day another two Union corps arrived and in late afternoon 48,000 bluecoats seized more of Beauregard's lines but did not achieve a breakthrough. By June 17, Lee recognized that Grant was bringing almost his whole army south of the James. Although the Union

  33. P. G. T. Beauregard, "Four Days of Battle at Petersburg," Battles and Leaders, IV, 541.

  forces that day missed a chance to turn the Confederate right, their disjointed attacks did force Beauregard to pull his whole line back at night almost to the outskirts of Petersburg while proclaiming, melodramatically, that "the last hour of the Confederacy had arrived."34 At dawn on June 18 some 70,000 Federals stumbled forward but overran nothing but empty trenches. By the time they got into position again for an attack on the new rebel line, Lee with most of his troops had arrived to defend it.

  The Cold Harbor syndrome inhibited Union soldiers from pressing home their assaults. Corps commanders executed orders sluggishly, waiting in Alphonse-Gaston fashion for other units on their left or right to move, so nobody moved at all. General Meade's famous temper snapped on the afternoon of June 18. "What additional orders to attack you require I cannot imagine," he railed at one hapless commander by field telegraph. To another: "Finding it impossible to effect cooperation by appointing an hour for attack, I have sent an order to each corps commander to attack at all hazards and without reference to each other."35 But men who had survived previous assaults on trenches were not eager to try it again. In one 2nd Corps brigade, veterans wriggled forward under cover but refused to get up and charge across bullet-swept open ground. Next to them one of the converted heavy artillery regiments, the 1st Maine, prepared to sweep ahead in 1861 picture-book style. "Lie down, you damn fools," called the veterans. "You can't take them forts!" But the heavies went in anyway and were shot to pieces, losing 632 of 850 men in this one action. Meade finally called off the futile assaults because "our men are tired and the attacks have not been made with the vigor and force which characterized our fighting in the Wilderness; if they had been, I think we should have been more successful." Grant concurred: "We will rest the men and use the spade for their protection until a new vein has been struck."36

  Thus ended a seven-week campaign of movement and battle whose brutal intensity was unmatched in the war. Little wonder that the Army of the Potomac did not fight at Petersburg with "the vigor and force" it had shown in the Wilderness—it was no longer the same army. Many of its best and bravest had been killed or wounded; thousands of others,

  34. Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 196.

  35. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 40, pt. 2, pp. 179, 205.

  36. Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 198, 199; O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 40, pt. 2, pp. 156–57.

  their enlistments expired or about to expire, had left the war or were unwilling to risk their lives during the few days before leaving. Some 65,000 northern boys were killed, wounded, or missing since May 4. This figure amounted to three-fifths of the total number of combat casualties suffered by the Army of the Potomac during the previous three years. No army could take such punishment and retain its fighting edge. "For thirty days it has been one funeral procession past me," cried General Gouverneur K. Warren, commanding the 5th Corps, "and it has been too much!"37

  Could the northern people absorb such losses and continue to support the war? Financial markets were pessimistic; gold shot up to the ruinous height of 230. A Union general home on sick leave found "great discouragement over the North, great reluctance to recruiting, strong disposition for peace."38 Democrats began denouncing Grant as a "butcher," a "bull-headed Suvarov" who was sacrificing the flower of American manhood to the malign god of abolition. "Patriotism is played out," proclaimed a Democratic newspaper. "Each hour is but sinking us deeper into bankruptcy and desolation." Even Benjamin Butler's wife wondered "what is all this struggling and fighting for? This ruin and death to thousands of families? . . . What advancement of mankind to compensate for the present horrible calamities?"39

  Lincoln tried to answer such anguished queries in a speech to a fund-raising fair of the Sanitary Commission in Philadelphia on June 16. He conceded that this "terrible war" had "carried mourning to almost every home, until it can almost be said that 'the heavens are hung in black.' " To the universal question, "when is the war to end?" Lincoln replied: "We accepted this war for [the] worthy object . . . of restoring the national authority over the whole national domain . . . and the war will end when that object is attained. Under God, I hope it never will until that time. [Great Cheering] . . . General Grant is reported to have said, I am going through on this line if it takes all summer. [Cheers] . . . I say we are going through on this line if it takes three years more.

  37. George R. Agassiz, ed., Meade's Headquarters, 1863–1865; Letters of Colonel Theodore Lyman (Boston, 1922), 147.

  38. John H. Martindale to Benjamin Butler, Aug. 5, 1864, in Jesse A. Marshall, ed., Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War, 5 vols. (Norwood, Mass., 1917), V, 5.

  39. Frank L. Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago, 1960), 233; Mrs. Sarah Butler to Benjamin Butler, June 19, 1864, in Marshall, ed., Correspondence of Benjamin Butler, IV, 418.

  [Cheers]" This Spartan call for a fight to the finish must have offered cold comfort to many listeners, despite the cheers.40

  In his speech Lincoln praised Grant for having gained "a position from whence he will never be dislodged until Richmond is taken." And indeed, despite its horrendous losses the Army of the Potomac had inflicted a similar percentage of casualties (at least 35,000) on Lee's smaller army, had driven them south eighty miles, cut part of Lee's communications with the rest of the South, pinned him down in defense of Richmond and Petersburg, and smothered the famed mobility of the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee recognized the importance of these enemy achievements. At the end of May he had told Jubal Early: "We must destroy this army of Grant's before it gets to the James River. If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time."41

  II

  In the long run, to be sure, Lee and the South could not withstand a siege. But in the short run—three or four months—time was on the Confederacy's side, for the northern presidential election was approaching. In Georgia as well as Virginia the rebels were holding out for time. At the end of June, Joe Johnston and Atlanta still stood against Sherman despite
an eighty-mile penetration by the Yankees in Georgia to match their advance in Virginia.

  While Grant and Lee sought to destroy or cripple each other's army, Sherman and Johnston engaged in a war of maneuver seeking an advantage that neither found. While Grant continually moved around Lee's right after hard fighting, Sherman continually moved around Johnston's left without as much fighting. Differences in terrain as well as in the personalities of commanders determined these contrasting strategies. Unlike Lee, whom necessity compelled to adopt a defensive strategy, Johnston by temperament preferred the defensive. He seemed to share with his prewar friend George McClellan a reluctance to commit troops to all-out combat; perhaps for that reason Johnston was idolized by his men as McClellan had been. In Virginia in 1862, Johnston had retreated from Manassas without a battle and from Yorktown almost to Richmond with little fighting. In Mississippi he never did come to grips

  40. CWL, VII, 394–95

  41. Ibid., 396; Foote, Civil War, III, 442.

  with Grant at Vicksburg. This unwillingness to fight until everything was just right may have been rooted in Johnston's character. A wartime story made the rounds about an antebellum visit by Johnston to a plantation for duck hunting. Though he had a reputation as a crack shot, he never pulled the trigger. "The bird flew too high or too low—the dogs were too far or too near—things never did suit exactly. He was . . . afraid to miss and risk his fine reputation."42 In the spring of 1864 Jefferson Davis prodded Johnston to make some move against Sherman before Sherman attacked him. But Johnston preferred to wait in his prepared defenses until Sherman came so close that he could not miss.