Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  Lee had not dozed or dawdled at West Point during the lectures on Vauban and the art of fortification; he never forgot that he was an engineer first, before becoming a cavalry officer; he looked to his earthworks to compensate for the difference in size between the Army of the Potomac and his own—and when one earthwork was no longer tenable, he moved quickly to a new one. As a result, Lyman remarked, “this country is intersected with field works, extending for miles and miles in different directions and marking the different strategic lines taken up by the two armies, as they warily move about each other.”

  “Warily” is the key word. Grant was determined to swing around Lee’s right, and Lee was equally determined not to let him. Lee got to Spotsylvania ahead of Grant, and “ably entrenched himself between the rivers Po and Ny, his entrenchments taking the form of an inverted V,” in which position he was able to fight off Grant’s greater numbers, and to transfer reinforcements from one side of the V to the other as the situation required. Lee’s superb command of his profession and his calm in the face of repeated assaults at Spotsylvania (and bad news from other fronts) serves as a model of generalship to this day. At this point Grant had nearly twice Lee’s number of men (120,000 versus about 60,000), and far superior artillery, as well as an abundant and unimpeded supply line. Nevertheless, Lee managed to hold him off, prompting Grant’s famous telegraphic message to Halleck: “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer,” a response to growing criticism of his heavy casualties and rumors (incorrect) that he had resumed drinking. Both generals committed errors, Grant’s from a rare burst of overconfidence, Lee’s from his old habit of letting J. E. B. Stuart choose what to do with his cavalry, thus leaving Lee blind again as he had done at Gettysburg. As for Grant, he sent his cavalry commander Major General Philip Sheridan off on a raid to the outskirts of Richmond, which left him blind too. Sheridan had conspicuously failed to screen the army’s advance toward Spotsylvania from the Confederate cavalry. Although less of a swashbuckler, Sheridan shared Stuart’s preference for the dramatic use of cavalry on a large scale over the less glamorous but vital tasks of screening the infantry’s advance, clearing the roads in front of the army, and keeping his commander informed of the enemy’s movements. The raid on Richmond was similar to Stuart’s ride around McClellan’s army on the peninsula in 1862, but it deprived Grant of his cavalry for nearly two weeks and had little effect on the campaign, except to give the Richmond home guard something to do.

  The most important effect on the Confederacy was the loss of Major General J. E. B. Stuart, who was severely wounded in a clash at Yellow Tavern on May 11 and died later that day, at the age of thirty-one. “He never brought me a piece of false information,” Lee said; then, badly shaken and close to tears, he retired to his tent “to master his grief.” He wrote to Mary, “A more zealous, ardent, brave, and devoted soldier than Stuart the Confederacy cannot have”; and announced to the army, “To military capacity of a high order and to the noble virtues of a soldier he added the brighter graces of a pure life, guided and sustained by the Christian’s faith and hope.” In addition to his bravery and fighting spirit Stuart had the rare ability to amuse and entertain Lee, even in the grimmest moments of the war. Lee had treated Stuart like one of his own sons since the days when he had been superintendent of West Point—“I can scarcely think of him without weeping,” he told one of Stuart’s officers. The loss went far beyond that of a gifted cavalry commander, and came at a moment when one by one Lee’s closest commanders were being swept away from him—Longstreet recovering slowly from his wounds; A. P. Hill sick and hardly able to lead his corps; Ewell not much better off after the amputation of his leg; Jackson, the man Lee had trusted most, dead.

  27. Hotchkiss sketch map of the Confederate positions around Spotsylvania Court House, May 1864, after Grant’s advance through the Wilderness.

  {Robert E. Lee, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, by Douglas Southall Freeman, copyright © 1934, 1935, by Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright renewed 1962, 1963, by Inez Godden Freeman. All rights reserved.}

  Lee struggled to handle an amount of work and responsibility that would have kept a deputy commander of the army, a chief of staff, and three corps commanders busy, while his own health, about which he never complained, gave those around him constant anxiety. Widespread as the troubles of the Confederacy might be, they seemed to rest on the shoulders of one man. He had correctly predicted that Grant would strike out for Spotsylvania Court House, and had deftly moved there just in time to thwart him. The Army of Northern Virginia was now firmly established between Grant’s army and Richmond, only fifty miles away, and Grant would have to fight for every mile.

  The inverted V of the Confederate lines around Spotsylvania grew stronger every hour, but the weakest point was at the apex of the V, which was in effect a salient that could be attacked from, both sides. Grant was determined to break it. From May 8 through May 21 he kept up a series of costly attacks against Lee’s lines, sometimes breaking through them, but never quite able to hold or extend his gains. The fighting has been described as “some of the most intense of the Civil War,” with a total of almost 32,000 casualties on both sides, along a front that was only four miles long. As one Union officer graphically described it, “the enemy’s dead . . . were piled upon each other in some places four layers deep, exhibiting every ghastly phase of mutilation. Below the mass of fast-decaying corpses, the convulsive twitching of limbs and the writhing of bodies showed that there were wounded men still alive and struggling to extricate themselves from the horrid entombment.” Grant, like no Union general before him in northern Virginia, managed to disentangle himself from the battle of attrition around Spotsylvania, and tried once again to flank Lee’s right, in a series of moves that Lee, like a skilled chess player, managed to parry each time. Each move, however, drove Lee back closer and closer to Richmond. The two armies clashed again at the North Anna River, just over twenty miles from Richmond. From May 23 to 26 Grant moved south along the east bank of the North Anna River, while Lee moved south down the western bank, eventually establishing an entrenched line northeast of Richmond around Mechanicsville and Cold Harbor—exactly where Lee had made his first mark as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia three years ago, in June 1862. This was familiar ground, only eight miles from Richmond; but instead of having the hesitant McClellan facing him, he now had a grimly determined Grant, who arrived on May 28 with four corps, and two more corps due to arrive at White House on May 30. Thus two years of bloody war had brought Lee full circle back to the defense of Richmond, on ground most of which bore the scars and graves of previous battles—an ironic reversal, but not one Lee can have appreciated.

  On May 25, Lee was felled by a serious illness. His usually equable temper was frayed, but he remained the animating spirit of his army. What his illness was is hard to tell—it may have been an attack of angina, but it sounds more like dysentery, which was the scourge of all armies in the field and was widespread throughout this army. General Ewell was so ill that he had to surrender command of his corps to General Early. He and Lee had to travel all day on May 28 in their ambulance, something that Lee seldom did, both because he enjoyed riding and because he knew the value to his army’s morale of seeing him on Traveller, even from a distance.

  Despite his poor health, Lee was still anxious to take the offensive. He was less than ten miles from Richmond; he was receiving such reinforcements as the government could send by stripping divisions from other armies; he had the benefit of short interior lines while Grant’s lines of communications were stretched to the breaking point and Grant’s men were exhausted by endless marches and daily skirmishes with the enemy. But Lee could not abandon his elaborate defensive works for a set-piece battle against Grant in open country, and Grant remained committed to his strategy of wearing Lee down. Lee’s principal aide, Colonel Taylor, accurately describes the actions of the army after Grant disengaged from the Wilderness: “We were in constant contact with the enem
y, and every day brought its episodes of excitement and struggling at different points of our line.” There was never a moment when cavalry and infantry actions were not taking place, as both armies made their way toward Richmond, where there were elaborate fortifications and earthworks that Lee intended would protect his army from an all-out assault. On the other hand, Lee was acutely aware of the danger of allowing himself to become besieged there. Once he had lost his ability to maneuver, it would become a war of numbers, which favored Grant, with the added danger that the army and the city might be starved into submission. No less an authority than the future Field Marshal Lord Wolseley,* then another British officer observing the war from the Confederate side, wrote, “Lee was opposed to the final defense of Richmond that was urged upon him for political, not military reasons. It was a great strategic error.” Wolseley was correct. Lee thought that the policy of defending Richmond to the last man was a mistake, but Jefferson Davis was determined that he do so. As for Grant, while he had no interest in taking Richmond, he was now fighting his way toward it day by day, just as McClellan had been two years ago, although more successfully. Neither general was doing what he wanted.

  It is remarkable that Lee still retained his optimism and his determination to keep on fighting. As his son Robert remarks, “When [after his illness] we saw him out again, on the lines, riding Traveller as usual, it was as if some great crushing weight had been suddenly lifted from our hearts.” Even allowing for a son’s natural admiration of his father, the whole army seems to have shared this unyielding belief in its commander—as long as Lee led these men, they would fight on, whatever the odds. With scarcely concealed admiration, Grant wrote of Lee and his army, “The enemy are obstinate, and seem to have found the last ditch.”

  Grant was determined to put that to the test. Lee had established himself in an ambitious crescent-shaped fortified line near Mechanicsville, using every elaborate feature of Vauban’s classic art of fortification; it stretched nearly seven miles in length on the north bank of the Chickahominy River from Atlee’s farm on his left, with his right anchored on the river itself. Grant had 108,000 men, Lee about 59,000; and Grant’s plan remained to crush the smaller Confederate force, then to swing around Lee’s right flank, separate him from Richmond, and give the final coup de grâce to the Army of Northern Virginia once it was driven from its trenches. Grant’s temper seems to have been fraying. On the road to Cold Harbor he came across a Union teamster whipping his exhausted horse across the head and face, and, after “an explosion of anger,” had the man tied to a tree, with God knows what punishment in mind. Shortly afterward he ordered a full-scale frontal attack against Lee’s formidable line, and by noon, scarcely half an hour later, he had taken over 7,000 casualties. By the end of the day, Grant had accomplished nothing, and by some estimates he had taken over 13,000 casualties against 2,500 on the Confederate side. At the very end of his life, as he lay dying, still completing his memoirs, the memory continued to haunt Grant. “I still regret,” he wrote, “that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made. . . . No advantage was gained for the heavy loss we sustained.” It was a day of constant horrors. The Union soldiers, as they dug trenches, were dismayed at uncovering countless human remains from the 1862 battle on the same ground; and after the battle the Union dead and wounded were left between the lines in the broiling sun for two days while Lee and Grant corresponded with each other in a tone of prickly dignity about the conditions for removing them. The dead were grotesquely bloated and “as black as coal,” and the wounded were tormented by pain, thirst, and insects, and methodically picked off by Confederate sharpshooters as they lay there helpless. Grant had a brief letter carried under a white flag to Lee proposing that “unarmed men bearing litters” be authorized “to pick up their dead or wounded, without being fired upon by either party.”

  Lee replied that “he feared such an arrangement would lead to misunderstanding,” and proposed instead that removing the wounded be done under a flag of truce, adding, “It will always be my pleasure to comply with such a request as far as circumstances will permit.” The next day Grant replied that he would accept what Lee had proposed and collect his wounded and dead between 12 noon and 1 p.m., to which Lee politely replied that without a truce he would be obliged to turn back any parties sent for that purpose. In the end Grant accepted Lee’s terms, but it was not until midmorning on June 7, forty-eight hours having elapsed, that the wounded were collected, by which time only two were still alive.

  At first sight this correspondence does not reflect well on either general. Grant went to great lengths in his memoirs to make his position seem reasonable and humane—he devoted two and half pages of small type to it. But Lee’s view of the situation was professionally correct, and he would not modify it. If Grant wanted to remove his wounded he would have to ask for a formal truce, not merely order a cease-fire of two hours for the purpose. A request for a truce would indicate that Grant had lost the battle, as indeed was the case. Since all but a small number of the wounded were Federals, Lee in his own courteous but stubborn way stuck to his guns.

  Grant learned a lesson from the slaughter at Cold Harbor—his most formidable asset was that he was a practical, logical man, unmoved by the chivalry and romantic glory of war. He would not repeat a frontal attack on Lee’s lines on the northeast outskirts of Richmond. Instead he would outfox the fox, and continue his attempt to turn Lee’s right, this time with one of the most ambitious and spectacular flanking movements in military history. Although Lee was the engineer, Grant had a modern grasp of technology—he had used everything from steam shovels to ironclads to take Vicksburg, and had not hesitated to dig canals and cut through levees in his first attempt to attack it from behind. On the night of June 12 Grant abandoned his trenches at Cold Harbor and moved his whole army southward across the peninsula, exposing it to what might have been a crippling attack while it was on the move, if Lee had guessed what was going on. By June 13 Grant had bridged the Chickahominy River, and by June 15 he had built a pontoon bridge across the James River over 2,000 feet long, and designed to withstand both the river’s strong currents and its tidal rise and fall. He protected the bridge by sinking boats and barges filled with stone upstream to prevent an attack by Confederate ironclads. To speed the transfer of the army Grant had one corps transported from White House, the site of Rooney Lee’s ruined home and plantation, down the York River and up the James on steamboats, while his vast wagon train moved south via White House and New Kent Court House, to avoid blocking the roads the army was taking. Even a modern, mechanized army would have been hard pressed to equal Grant’s achievement in moving the Army of the Potomac despite poor roads, dense swamps, and two difficult river crossings, as well as a local population that was unsympathetic to his cause and certain to pass information back to Lee. For all that, Grant managed to keep his goal secret for over three days “in a hostile country swarming with spies.” By June 16 Grant had his whole army south of the James River facing Petersburg, where two of the railway lines connecting Richmond with the rest of the South passed. Lee would either have to move his army south of Richmond to defend Petersburg, or abandon Richmond and move west.

  There is no doubt that Grant took Lee by surprise. It was not until June 13 that Lee realized the Union trenches in front of him were empty. At first he assumed Grant was once again trying to outflank his right by moving to a position between White Oak Swamp and Malvern Hill, exactly the area where Lee had fought McClellan in 1862; but then he realized that Grant had in fact marched his army nearly fifty miles, had bridged and crossed two major rivers, and was now twenty miles south of Richmond, where he could be supplied and reinforced by sea. As early as June 9 Lee had remarked presciently that if Grant got to the James River, “it will become a siege, and then it will become a mere question of time.” Now what Lee feared most was happening.

  Once Lee realized what Grant had done, he moved with lightning speed to the defense of Petersburg. Despite repeated and co
stly assaults against the elaborate fortifications Lee had prudently prepared around the town, by June 21 it was clear that old-fashioned siege warfare had set in. Lee’s skill at siting and building the redan, a V-shaped wall of two parapets, placed at regular intervals to cover a length of trench with artillery fire in both directions, was as impressive as his speed in maneuver. No sooner had he arrived in Petersburg than he set his men to strengthening every aspect of its fortifications. Inadvertently, Grant by his bold move and Lee by his quick recovery had created a dreadful, static siege that would postpone the end of the war by ten painful months, during which Sherman would march through Georgia, taking Atlanta, marching from there “to the sea,” and destroying everything along his way: towns, railway lines, telegraph lines, homes, farms, crops, and livestock.