From his position on the extreme left of the Union line, Chamberlain received word that the Confederates were advancing through the thick woods. Ordering his men to pile up brush, rocks, and anything to give them cover, the regiment beat back one attack after another by the determined Rebel troops. Suddenly a cry went out that the Confederates had marched still farther to the Union left and that they intended to flank Chamberlain’s position. Whether at his order or at the suggestion of a subordinate, the 20th Maine “refused the line,” bending backward at a 45-degree angle to keep the Confederates in front of its fire. By that time, Chamberlain’s men were almost entirely out of ammunition. Many had only two or three rounds left. Chamberlain shouted “Bayonet! Forward to the Right!” and the 20th Maine fixed bayonets.
From its refused position, the Yankees swept down on the exhausted Confederates. The bold maneuver, combined with the shock of men racing downhill in a bayonet assault on weary attackers, shattered the Confederate advance, routing the Rebels down the hill. Although fighting raged on for hours on both ends of the fishhook, Chamberlain’s men had saved the Union Army.102 Chamberlain claimed he never felt fear in battle. “A soldier has something else to think about,” he later explained. As a rule, “men stand up from one motive or another—simple manhood, force of discipline, pride, love, or bond of comradeship…. The instinct to seek safety is overcome by the instinct of honor.”103
Late in the evening of July second, however, the engagement hardly seemed decisive. General George Pickett’s division had just come up to join Lee, and Stuart had finally arrived. On the evening of July second, ignoring the appeals from Longstreet to disengage and find better ground, Lee risked everything on a massive attack the following day. Longstreet’s final attempt to dissuade Lee was met with the stony retort that he was “tired of listening, tired of talking.”104
After two days of vicious fighting, Lee was convinced that the federal flanks had been reinforced by taking men from the center, and that an all-out push in the middle would split their line in two. Pickett’s Charge, one of the most colorful and tragic of all American military encounters, began on July third when the South initiated a two-hour artillery barrage on the middle of the Union line at Cemetery Ridge. Despite the massive artillery duel between Yankee and Rebel cannons, Lee did not know that under the withering steel torrent coming from his artillery, only about 200 Yankees had been killed and only a handful of Union guns destroyed.
At one-thirty in the afternoon, Pickett’s entire division—15,000 men, at least—emerged from the orchards behind the artillery. In long and glorious well-ordered lines, a march of just under a mile began across open ground to attack the federal position. Longstreet vociferously protested: “General Lee, there never was a body of fifteen thousand men who could make that attack successfully.”105 At a thousand yards, the Union artillery opened up and at 100 yards they changed to canisters—tin cans filled with minié balls that flew in all directions upon impact. Row after row of Rebels fell. Then the long lines of Yankee infantry, which had lain prone beneath the artillery rounds sailing over their heads, stood or kneeled when the Rebels marched to within two hundred yards to deliver a hailstorm of lead.
Amazingly, Virginians under General Lewis Armistead reached the stone wall from which the Yankees were hurling a withering fire into their midst. Armistead stuck his general’s hat on his saber and screamed, “Give them the cold steel!” Scaling the wall with about 200 Virginians following him, Armistead was killed. Known as the high-water mark of the Confederacy, it was a scene later recaptured in film and art, yet it lasted for only minutes as Union reserves poured new volleys into the exposed Confederates, then charged, reclaiming the stone wall. The attack utterly erased Pickett’s division, with only half the 15,000 men who began the attack straggling back to Rebel lines in the orchards. As they ran, a chant rose up from the Yankee infantry behind the stone wall. “Fred-ricks-burg. Fred-ricks-burg.”106
Reports trickled in to Longstreet, then Lee, who, in despair, kept repeating, “It’s all my fault.” The final tally revealed that the Army of Northern Virginia had taken a terrible beating at the hands of Meade: the Confederates lost 22,638, the Union, 17,684. Yet the most important phase of Gettysburg had just started. Defeated and nearly broken, could Lee escape? Would Meade blink, and prove to be another McClellan and Hooker?
Meade’s son, a captain on his father’s staff, wrote confidently on July seventh that “Papa will end the war,” a phrase the general himself made two days later in a missive to Washington when he said, “I think the decisive battle of the war will be fought in a few days.”107 Yet Meade did not follow up, even when it appeared that nature herself demanded the war end then and there. Storms had swollen the Potomac River, temporarily blocking Lee’s escape. An aggressive general could have surrounded the demoralized Confederate Army and crushed it by July 15, 1863. Instead, Lee’s engineers hastily put up new pontoon bridges, and the Rebels began to slip away. When he learned the news, Lincoln wept.
Despite monumental failure, Meade also had achieved monumental success. He had done what no other Union general had done—whipped Bobbie Lee in a head-to-head battle—and shattered the Army of Northern Virginia. That, in turn, meant that Lincoln had to be careful how he dealt with Meade in public. He could not, for example, fire him outright, but the president continued his search for a general who would fight ceaselessly. When, simultaneously with Meade’s victory, Ulysses S. Grant resolutely took Vicksburg in his ingenious campaign, Lincoln found his fighting general.
From Chickamauga to Charleston
Gettysburg and Vicksburg marked a congruence of the war effort, a deadly double blow to the hopes of the Confederacy, capping a string of battlefield failures that met the Confederates in 1863. By that time, Ulysses Grant commanded all the military operations in the West, and he promptly sent Sherman to open up the road to Atlanta—and the Deep South. Then, on March 10, 1864, Lincoln appointed Grant as supreme commander over all Union armies, and Grant, in turn, handed control of the western war over to Sherman.
William Tecumseh Sherman resembled Grant in many ways, not the least of which was in his utter failure in civilian life, as a banker and lawyer. How much he owed his command to political favoritism, especially the influence wielded by his powerful brother, John Sherman, the new senator from Ohio, is not clear. Unlike Grant, however, Sherman was already a Republican and a member of the Radical wing of the Republican Party that opposed slavery on moral grounds. But he was also a racist whose view of the inferiority of blacks—especially Negro troops—would bring him into constant friction with Lincoln, whom he despised. His unintended role in reelecting the president in 1864 nearly led him to switch parties, just as Grant had switched from Democrat to Republican over almost the same issues. Sherman’s hatred of Lincoln, whom he labeled a black gorilla (echoing terms used by McClellan), was exceeded only by his animosity toward the Confederates.108 Although he admitted that Lincoln was “honest & patient,” he also added that Lincoln lacked “dignity, order & energy,” many of the traits that McClellan also thought missing in the president.109
Born in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1820, Sherman had been unloaded on relatives by his widowed mother. His foster father, Thomas Ewing, proved supportive, sending Sherman to West Point, and the young red-haired soldier eventually married Ewing’s daughter. The Mexican War took him to California, where he later resigned and ran a bank—poorly. By the time the Civil War broke out, he had found some measure of success running the Louisiana State Seminary and Military Academy—later known as Louisiana State University—but resigned to serve the Union after Louisiana’s announcement of secession. He wrote the secretary of war requesting a colonelcy rather than a general’s position, and wanted a three-year appointment, wishing to avoid the impression he was a “political general.”
In late 1861, facing Confederate troops in Kentucky, Sherman became delusional, plummeting into a deep clinical depression that left him pacing his residence all night long,
muttering to himself, and drinking heavily. Thus the relationship between Lincoln and Sherman—both probably manic depressives—was even more complex than either man realized. It remains one of the astounding pieces of history that the Union was saved by two depressives and a partially re-formed drunk! After fighting effectively at Shiloh, Sherman received special praise from Grant and earned promotion after promotion. Grant named the red-haired Ohioan commander of all the armies in the West in the spring of 1864, with instructions to “create havoc and destruction of all resources that would be beneficial to the enemy.”110 On May 4, 1864, with almost 100,000 men, Sherman stuck a dagger into the heart of the South by attacking Atlanta. Joe Johnston’s defending Confederate armies won minor engagements, but the overwhelming Union advantage in men and supplies allowed Sherman to keep up the pressure when Johnston had to resupply or rest. Jefferson Davis blamed Johnston, removing him in July in favor of John Bell Hood, but the fact was that even a mediocre general would have crushed Atlanta sooner or later. Sherman was no mediocre general.
With Yankee troops on the outskirts of Atlanta, Hood burned the railroads and withdrew, and on September 1, 1864, Union forces entered the city. Offering the Confederates the opportunity to remove all civilians, Sherman announced he would turn the city into a military base. Hood, hoping to draw the federal troops away from Atlanta, moved around him to the north, in an effort to destroy Sherman’s supply lines. Sherman scoffed that he would “supply him with rations” all the way to Ohio if Hood would keep moving in that direction. Instead, Sherman headed south, preparing to live off the land and to destroy everything the Union Army did not consume. “War is hell,” he soberly noted.
Sherman’s great victory at Atlanta constituted one of a trio of critical victories in late 1864, news of which reached Washington—and the voters—just as Lincoln was under political assault. One of Lincoln’s detractors thus ensured his reelection.
Politics in the North
By early 1864, in retrospect, Union victory seemed inevitable. U.S. Navy ships blockaded Southern ports, breached only occasionally (and ineffectively) by blockade runners. The Mississippi now lay open from Missouri to the Gulf, while Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana were surgically isolated from the rest of the Confederacy. In the far West, small important battles there had ensured that New Mexico, Utah, and California would remain in the Union and supply the federal effort with horses, cattle, gold, silver, and other raw materials. Braxton Bragg’s northern defensive perimeter had shrunk from the Kentucky border on the north to Atlanta. In Virginia, Lee’s army remained a viable, but critically damaged, fighting unit. Northern economic might had only come fully into play in 1863, and the disparities between the Union and Confederate abilities to manufacture guns, boots, clothes, ships, and, most important, to grow food, were shocking.
Given such a string of good news, Lincoln should have experienced stellar public approval and overwhelming political support. In fact, he clung to the presidency by his fingernails. Some of his weakened position emanated from his strong support of the man he had named commander of the Union armies.
Ulysses Grant and Abraham Lincoln rarely corresponded, though Grant tended to send numerous messages to Halleck, who would, he knew, read them to Lincoln. A Douglas Democrat in 1860, Grant had nonetheless gravitated toward unequivocal emancipation, though he was not a vocal abolitionist. No one seems sure when he actually changed parties. Courted by the Democrats as a potential presidential nominee in 1864, Grant refused to be drawn into politics at that time, and, in reality, never liked politics, even after he became president himself. By the fall of 1864, though, Grant endorsed Lincoln indirectly in a widely published letter.
When Hooker descended to the low expectations many had of him, Grant recommended Meade for command of the Army of the Potomac. Even after Lincoln gave Grant overall command of the army, he and the president were not particularly friendly, despite their similarities. For one thing, Mary Todd Lincoln, whose bitterness knew no bounds once it was directed at someone, despised Grant’s wife, Julia.111
Grant intended to grind down the Confederates with a steady series of battles, even if none proved individually decisive. Grant’s style caught the Rebels off guard. One Confederate soldier wrote:
We had been accustomed to a programme which began with a Federal advance, culminating in one great battle, and ended in the retirement of the Union army, the substitution of a new Federal commander for the one beaten, and the institution of a more or less offensive campaign on our part. This was the usual order of events, and this was what we confidently expected when General Grant crossed into the Wilderness. But here was a new Federal General, fresh from the West, and so ill-informed as to the military customs in our part of the country that when the Battle of the Wilderness was over, instead of retiring to the north bank of the river and awaiting development of Lee’s plans, he had the temerity to move by his left flank to a new position, there to try conclusions with us again. We were greatly disappointed with General Grant, and full of curiosity to know how long it was going to take him to perceive the impropriety of his course.112
The Rebels quickly realized that “the policy of pounding had begun, and would continue until our strength should be utterly worn away….”113
The low point for Grant’s reputation came in May 1864, when he launched a new offensive through the Wilderness again. Two days of bloody fighting at the Second Battle of the Wilderness ensued, and more bodies piled up. On this occasion, however, Grant immediately attacked again, and again. At Spotsylvania Court House, Lee anticipated Grant’s attempt to flank him to get to Richmond, and the combat lasted twelve days. Despite the fact that Grant’s armies failed to advance toward Richmond spatially, their ceaseless winnowing of the enemy continued to weaken Confederate forces and morale. It was costly, with the Union suffering 60,000 casualties in just over a month after Grant took over, and this politically damaged Lincoln.
Continuing to try to flank Lee, Grant moved to Cold Harbor, where, on June first, he sent his men against entrenched positions. One Confederate watched with astonishment what he called “inexplicable and incredible butchery.”114 Yankee troops, recognizing the futility of their assaults, pinned their names and addresses to their coats to make identification of their bodies easier. One of Lee’s generals saw the carnage and remarked, “This is not war, this is murder.”115 Grant lost 13,000 men to the Confederates’ 2,000—the only battle in which the Army of Northern Virginia achieved any significant ratio of troops lost to the numbers engaged in the entire war.
Cold Harbor was the only action that Grant ever regretted, a grand mistake of horrific human cost. Callous as it seemed, however, Grant had, in more than a month, inflicted on the Confederates 25,000 casualties, or more than Gettysburg and Antietam put together. Shifting unexpectedly to the south, Grant struck at Petersburg, where he missed an opportunity to occupy the nearly undefended city. Instead, a long siege evolved in which “the spade took the place of the musket.”116
Searching for a way to break through Lee’s Petersburg fortifications, Grant received a plan from Colonel Henry Pleasants, a mining engineer in command of a regiment of Pennsylvania coal miners, who proposed tunneling under the fortifications and planting massive explosives to blast a hole in the Confederate defenses. On July twenty-seventh, the tunneling was completed, and tons of black powder were packed inside the tunnel. Troops prepared to follow up, including, at first, a regiment of black soldiers who, at the last minute, were replaced on Burnside’s orders. When the charge detonated on July thirtieth, a massive crater was blown in the Rebel lines, but the advance troops quickly stumbled into the hole, and Confederates along the edges fired down on them. It was another disaster, costing the Union 4,000 casualties and an opportunity to smash through the Petersburg defenses.
Since 1862 Lincoln had faced turmoil inside his cabinet and criticism from both the Radical Republicans and Democrats. Prior to 1863, antislavery men were angry with Lincoln for not pursuing emancipat
ion more aggressively. At the same time, loyal “war Democrats” or “Unionists” who remained in Congress nipped at his heels for the army’s early failings, especially the debacles of McDowell, Burnside, and Hooker. Their favorite, McClellan, who scarcely had a better record, nevertheless was excused from criticism on the grounds that Lincoln had not properly supported him.
During the 1862 congressional election, criticism escalated, and the Republicans barely hung on to the House of Representatives, losing seats in five states where they had gained in 1860. These, and other Democratic gains, reversed a series of five-year gains for the Republicans, with the cruelest blow coming in Illinois, where the Democrats took nine seats to the Republicans’ five and won the state legislature. Without the border states, James G. Blaine recalled, the hostile House might have overthrown his emancipation initiative.117
If the House losses were troublesome, Salmon Chase posed a genuine threat to the constitutional order. His financing measures had proven remarkably efficient, even if he ignored better alternatives. Yet his scheming against Seward, then Lincoln, was obvious to those outside the administration, who wrote of the Chase faction, “Their game was to drive all the cabinet out—then force…the [reappointment] of Mr. Chase as Premier, and form a cabinet of ultra men around him.”118 Seward, tired of the attacks, submitted his resignation without knowing the larger issues that swirled around him. Lincoln convened a meeting with several of the senators involved in the Chase schemes. Holding Seward’s resignation in his hand, he demanded the resignation of all his cabinet, which he promptly placed in his top desk drawer and threatened to use if he heard of further intrigue. Lincoln’s shrewd maneuver did not end the machinations by the Radicals, but it severely dampened them for the rest of the war.
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