Had Lee been willing to contemplate surrender, the last two years of the war need not have been fought, but he was no more able to do that than he could transform himself into the kind of military-political leader that the South needed to overcome its supply and manpower problems. He would not seek or accept dictatorial powers—he was too much of an American for that—and he would not give up his faith in victory, however unlikely it came to seem.
It is symptomatic of the lack of leadership in the Confederacy that President Davis and his major commanders had different ideas about the direction of the Federal attack in the spring, and the best way to prepare for it. General Beauregard wanted to concentrate all the Confederate forces available (a total of about 210,000) against “one decisive point,” rather than risk a series of defeats in detail. He suggested an attack in the direction of Knoxville, Tennessee. Lee saw the wisdom of this (he usually admired Beauregard’s strategic sense), and foresaw the Federal attack through Georgia, but he was unwilling to take command there himself, or to further weaken the Confederate force in northern Virginia. Longstreet at first suggested moving Confederate forces back to the east for another assault against Washington, then changed his mind and recommended concentrating the army in an attempt to recover Tennessee and Kentucky. Lee, possibly persuaded by Longstreet, thought that recovering “Mississippi and Tennessee . . . would do more to relieve the country and inspire our people than the mere capture of Washington.” In the end nothing much came of all this but the transfer back to Lee of Longstreet and his men. The Confederacy remained, despite its loss of territory, too big to be defended by an army of 210,000 men; at the same time its leaders were unable to decide on the right point at which to aim a single, concentrated, decisive attack that would shake public confidence in the North hard enough to bring about a negotiated peace. The old military adage, “When in doubt, do nothing,” was in this case fatal to the Confederates, rather than wise; it left the armies in the West too weak to prevent a gradual collapse, and Lee’s army too weak to attempt to capture Washington (even had that been a good idea) or in the end to hold on to Richmond.
Lee had spent much of the winter thinking about what Grant would do, finally deciding that he would try to take Richmond, like McClellan, Burnside, and Hooker before him. This was an error on Lee’s part. Grant had no interest in Richmond; his aim was to wear down Lee’s army, and he guessed correctly that Lee would be forced to defend Richmond, and that this would tie him down to a defensive strategy and prevent him from putting his genius for maneuver to use.
At first Lee planned what amounted to a repetition of 1862 and 1863—an advance into the Shenandoah Valley so as to make Grant think he would attack Washington, after which “a great battle would take place on the Rapidan.” But Lee was wrong. From his childhood on, Grant always chose to take the shortest and most direct route between two points, and had a marked aversion to retracing his steps. He did not have Lee’s skill at maneuver, nor Lee’s taste for it; he preferred to plow forward with all his strength, pushing obstacles out of his way.
Lee did not want to wait to be attacked—it was not in his nature. He planned to “give battle” to Grant as soon as possible, foreseeing that Grant would probably cross the Rapidan and advance through the Wilderness, crossing it close to the old battleground of Chancellorsville, with the aim of turning Lee’s right and separating him from Richmond.
Having won his greatest victory in this dark, dismal forest, Lee was confident that he could defeat Grant here, as he had defeated Hooker. But Lee woefully underestimated Grant’s forces—Grant had 119,000 men to Lee’s 64,000.*
“The Battle of the Wilderness”
Neither general was well positioned for the battle. Lee’s army was spread out too widely to the south and west of the Wilderness, so that he would be forced to launch his attack with only a portion of his forces. He had been obliged to “scatter” his forces during the winter for fear that the army would eat the surrounding countryside into a landscape of starvation. Even his animals were in such poor condition and so reduced in number that he found it hard to concentrate the army quickly. His plan was to launch a full-scale attack on Grant’s right as soon as the bulk of the Union forces had crossed the Rapidan and entered the Wilderness. This might have succeeded had Lee been able to bring to bear all three of his corps; but Longstreet was still at Gordonsville, over forty miles away, so only Ewell and A. P. Hill were left to attack. As for Grant, he underestimated the difficulty of moving his army rapidly, through such a dense, desolate place, particularly since his army’s “wagon train [was] between sixty and seventy miles long,” and moving over roads that were poorly marked and even less well maintained.
“The Wilderness,” General Fuller writes, “. . . covered [Lee’s] numerical weakness and his administrative deficiencies; his army had so long inhabited it that every cow-path, fastness and ravine was known to his men. Lee’s whole strategy now depended upon holding this natural stronghold, . . . entrapping Grant in it and so exhaust[ing] the patience and resources of the North. His idea was to bring his enemy to battle as soon as possible, and his plan was an able one, namely to let Grant cross the Rapidan and get thoroughly entangled in the forest, where numbers, cavalry, and artillery were of little account, and there attack him in flank and force him to retire as he had forced away Hooker.”
But Grant was not Hooker. To begin with, while he respected Lee, he was not in awe of him, as almost every other Union general was. He would write later, in his Memoirs, “The natural disposition of most people is to clothe a commander of a large army whom they do not know, with almost superhuman abilities. A large part of the National army, for instance, and most of the press of the country, clothed General Lee with just such qualities, but I had known him personally, and knew he was mortal.” Grant’s refusal to be awed by Lee’s “superhuman” skill as a commander was his first step to victory.*
The second advantage was Grant’s firm determination to keep his army moving forward—no matter how unpromising the terrain. He intended to keep advancing, inflicting on Lee day by day, mile by mile, casualties the Confederacy could not sustain.
Grant moved swiftly into the “narrow peninsula” that separates the Rappahannock and the Rapidan rivers until they join about three miles north of Chancellorsville. His troops forded the Rapidan at two points beginning at midnight on May 3. Colonel Vincent Esposito speculates that if Grant had crossed the Rapidan at nightfall instead of at midnight he might have emerged from the Wilderness in one day and foiled Lee’s plan, but considering the size of Grant’s force, his extensive ordnance and supply train,† and the poor state of the roads running from north to south through the forest, this may not have been as feasible as it looks on a map. Grant’s supply train lagged well behind his first two corps, so they were obliged to bivouac in the Wilderness, waiting for it to catch up. This gave Lee a perfect opportunity to attack. All he had to do was push Ewell’s corps east down Orange-Fredericksburg Turnpike and A. P. Hill’s corps down Orange Plank Road so they would meet at Old Wilderness Tavern, and catch both Federal corps spread out and off guard in the flank. It helped him that the roads running from west to east through the Wilderness were better than those running north to south.
Fighting began early in the morning of May 5, with the surprised Federals initially not realizing that they were facing Ewell’s entire corps. In the heavy underbrush and dense pine thickets it was almost impossible for the Union troops to deploy and form coherent lines or take advantage of their superior artillery, but the Union generals Gouverneur Kemble Warren and Winfield Scott Hancock flung in division after division as each arrived on the field, finally bringing the Confederate advance to a halt in the late afternoon. The fighting was so fierce that many of the men’s muskets “became too hot to handle.”
Lee established his own headquarters less than a mile behind the front at the Widow Tapp’s farmhouse—the Wilderness contained isolated cleared spots for farms, old forges, and, at places where
the dirt roads met, simple crossroads stores whose names would pass into history over the next two days. In the middle of the afternoon a party of Union soldiers charged into Widow Tapp’s farmyard, forcing Lee, Jeb Stuart, and A. P. Hill to run for the nearby woods just in time to avoid capture, surely a sign that Lee was, as usual, too far forward for a commanding general.
Neither side could claim a victory after a day of desperate fighting at close range in impenetrable second-growth forest and dense undergrowth, split by unmapped, wandering creeks, streams, and swamps, a place where men could not see their own comrades in arms, let alone the enemy, and where volleys of massed musketry and artillery fire seemed to come from nowhere. Even Douglas Southall Freeman, who seldom has a bad word to say about Virginia, calls it a “gloomy maze.” The battle has been compared to jungle fighting in World War II, and to Indian fighting in the eighteenth century; and at the end of a bloody and by any standards largely fruitless day, almost any Union general would have withdrawn back to the Rapidan to lick his wounds and start looking for a way around the Wilderness. But Grant did not. He stayed put, to resume the fight the next day.
What took place the following morning was described with a degree of horror by Brigadier General Adam Badeau, an aide of Grant’s, as “a wrestle as blind as midnight, a gloom that made maneuvers impracticable, a jungle where regiments stumbled on each other and on the enemy by turns, firing sometimes into their own ranks, and guided only by the crackling of the bushes or the cheers and cries that rose from the depths around.” Even Grant’s normally unemotional prose becomes incandescent describing the day: “The woods were set on fire by the bursting shells, and the conflagration raged. The wounded who had not strength to move themselves were either suffocated or burned to death. . . . But the battle still raged, our men firing through the flames until it became too hot to remain longer.” Photographs of the Wilderness taken after the battle show a thicket of pine saplings shattered by gunfire, and a macabre, gruesome pile of skulls from the Battle of Chancellorsville, left unburied. Accounts of the battle over the next three days remind one of Matthew Arnold’s famous lines in “Dover Beach”:
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Even to hardened veterans, the first day of battle in the Wilderness seemed like Armageddon, full of lurid horrors lit by flames, the clash of hand-to-hand combat, and the screams of the wounded. As the flames spread and engulfed the dry underbrush, the seriously wounded clung to their loaded muskets with fierce determination in case they had no choice but to shoot themselves or be burned alive. It was a portent of things to come.
Lee had counted on Longstreet’s corps to arrive by noon on May 5; indeed if Lee had had all three corps deployed that afternoon, the outcome might have been a Confederate victory. Longstreet, however, marched his corps sixteen miles on May 4 and fifteen miles on May 5, and it is difficult to see how he could have arrived on the battlefield in time to join Ewell and A. P. Hill before nightfall. This, like Longstreet’s handling of his corps on the second and third days of Gettysburg, has been a subject of fierce controversy over the past century and a half. The only objective conclusion one can draw is that Longstreet may have promised Lee more than he could deliver, and that Lee, given Longstreet’s slowness at Second Manassas and Gettysburg, should not have counted on having his whole army concentrated on May 5.
But it is easy to be wise so long after the event—Grant attacked when Lee had only two corps partially deployed, and the day was essentially another long, bloody standoff. Grant did not succeed in getting his army out of the Wilderness into the open country to the southeast, and Lee did not succeed in driving Grant back across the Rapidan.
At dawn on May 6 Grant again attacked first, with an assault down Orange Plank Road intended to shatter Hill’s corps. This might have succeeded if Hill’s men had not spent the night entrenching their line, and if Burnside had not managed to get lost with most of his corps in two miles of dense, jungle-like second growth—the “grim tangles” between Wilderness Tavern and Widow Tapp’s farm.
The previous day, Lee had almost been captured at Widow Tapp’s farm. Now, early in the morning of May 6, concerned that his entire line might be driven back before Longstreet was up, Lee attempted to lead a counterattack himself in the same place. Watching as the Confederate line began to crumble, he rode out into the open field to within less than 200 yards of the enemy, while a Confederate battery behind him fired volley after volley of canister into the advancing Union ranks. Surrounded by smoke, explosions, and confusion, Lee saw a few ragged soldiers running forward through the gaps between the guns and cried out, “Who are you, my boys?”
They shouted back that they were Texans, of General Hood’s division, the first of Longstreet’s corps to arrive. Almost everybody agrees that Lee was “excited,” perhaps as much because he was in the front line as because the Texans were proof that Longstreet had arrived at last. He waved his hat, shouting, “Hurrah for Texas!” And after ordering them to form “a line of battle,” he led them past the Confederate guns in a swift charge. Although Lee seldom touched wine or liquor, he was not immune to the intoxication of battle: “His face was aflame and his eyes were on the enemy in front.” The spectacle of the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia eagerly spurring Traveller ahead of a brigade of Texans toward a Union infantry line now only 150 yards distant apparently attracted the attention of soberer spirits among those infantrymen who suddenly recognized him, and they shouted, “Go back, General Lee, go back!” Beneath the calm exterior, he hid the spirit of a berserker; the blood of Light-Horse Harry Lee ran in his veins. Lee’s personal courage, his indifference to danger, and his aggressive nature had been proved over and over again; still, the sight of their gray-bearded, fifty-seven-year-old commanding general proposing to lead a “desperate” infantry charge under fire was enough to startle these hardened veterans, who cried out that they would not go forward unless he went back. A grizzled sergeant finally seized Traveller’s bridle, and at that moment Colonel Charles Venable, of Lee’s staff, rode up and leaning over close to Lee’s ear shouted to him that Longstreet was now close at hand and awaiting his orders.
For a moment Lee resisted, as if he had not heard. Then he regained his calm, waved the Texans on with his hat, and reined in Traveller. Venable rode off to bring Longstreet the news that Lee was proposing to lead a brigade into battle. Longstreet, if his memoirs are to be believed, asked Venable to return to General Lee with his compliments and say “that his line would be recovered in an hour if he would permit me to handle the troops, but if my services were not needed, I would like to ride to some place of safety, as it was not quite comfortable where we were.” This reproof sounds a little too pat, but Longstreet was writing fourteen years after the event. Freeman is probably more correct when he writes that when Lee reached Longstreet, the latter told him “bluntly that he should go farther behind the lines.” Longstreet ought to have paid attention to this advice himself, in view of what was shortly to happen.
By ten o’clock in the morning Lee had “stabilized” his front, despite ferocious fighting back and forth across an almost “impassible barrier” of scrub, undergrowth, and tangled saplings broken by bullets and canister shot, in which it was impossible to move without treading on the bodies of the wounded and dead. Casualties had reduced Lee’s brigades to one-third of their strength. Of the 800 Texans whom Lee had briefly led forward at Widow Tapp’s Farm, fewer than 200 were still alive and unwounded four hours later. Still, Lee could not win a “pounding match,” to borrow the Duke of Wellington’s description of Waterloo, against superior numbers. He had to find a way to turn Grant’s left flank and either cut Grant off from the fords across the Rapidan, or drive him to retreat toward them.
One of Longstreet’s staff had discovered an unfinished railway cut less than half a mile south of Orange Plank Road. Lee instantly sa
w the possibility of using it to turn Grant’s flank. Before noon he had begun to roll up General Winfield Scott Hancock’s Union line, as Hancock put it, “like a wet blanket.” A victory like Chancellorsville must have seemed to be within Lee’s grasp as the Union left began to collapse, but Grant did not allow or contemplate a retreat, and held his ground. Longstreet, ignoring his own advice to Lee, rode forward for a closer look as his troops sought to outflank Hancock’s corps where Orange Plank Road joined Brock Road and, like Stonewall Jackson, was shot by his own troops, who mistook him and his staff for Federal cavalry. Unlike Jackson, Longstreet survived. The ball pierced his throat and his right shoulder—but as he was carried from the battlefield, he gamely took off his hat, which had been placed over his face to hide his identity, and waved it to prove to his troops that he was still alive. Still, the impetus seemed to drain from the Confederate attack, and the day ended in another stalemate.
That night, an officer warned Grant that he knew Lee’s methods from experience, and that Lee would move to cut the army off from the fords across the Rapidan. Grant replied wearily, “Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.”
This was a new spirit in which to fight Lee, whose reputation was almost as high in the North as in the South, despite his defeat at Gettysburg. When the next day dawned, Grant did not attack or retreat—he simply broke off the battle and withdrew southeast toward Spotsylvania Court House, where he would be closer than Lee to Richmond. In three days of fighting Grant had taken nearly 18,000* casualties, while Lee’s army had suffered only 11,000; but as a proportion of the total Grant’s losses were about 17 percent of his force, while Lee’s represented about 20 percent—which he could not replace. It is a testimony to Lee’s extraordinary skill, and to the powers of recovery of his soldiers, that he managed to reach Spotsylvania before Grant. Thrown on the defensive by Grant’s stubborn refusal to retreat, Lee relied on his army’s ability to move quickly, in part because of its modest supply train, and on his own “wonderful tactical eye for defensive positions.” Wherever Lee went, he sought a place he could defend, and at once set his men to digging. The master of maneuver had again become the master of the spade and shovel. A Union officer serving on Meade’s staff, Captain Theodore Lyman, a future overseer of Harvard University, remarked of Lee’s skill with earthworks that when the Army of the Potomac advanced it always saw before it “the line of the enemy, nothing showing but the bayonets, and the battle-flags stuck on the top of the works. It is a rule that when the Rebels halt, the first day gives them a good rifle pit; the second a regular infantry parapet with artillery in position; and the third a parapet with an abattis in front and entrenched batteries behind. Sometimes they put this three days work into the first twenty-four hours.”
Clouds of Glory Page 74
