At the heart of it all is Petersburg, a two-hundred-year-old city with rail lines spoking outward in five directions. The Confederate capital at Richmond lies twenty-three miles north—or, in the military definition, based upon the current location of Lee’s army, to the rear.
The standoff began last June, when Grant abruptly abandoned the battlefield at Cold Harbor and wheeled toward Petersburg. In what would go down as one of history’s greatest acts of stealth and logistics, Grant withdrew 115,000 men from their breastworks under cover of darkness and marched them south, crossed the James River without a single loss of life, and then pressed due west to Petersburg. The city was unprotected. A brisk Union attack would have taken the city within hours. It never happened.
Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant
Grant’s commanders dawdled. Lee raced in reinforcements. The Confederates dug in around Petersburg just in time, building the trenches and fortifications they would call home through the blazing heat of summer, the cool of autumn, and the snow and bitter freezing rain of the long Virginia winter.
Under normal circumstances, Grant’s next move would be to surround the city, cutting off those rail lines. He could then effect a proper siege, his encircled troops denying Lee’s army and the inhabitants of Petersburg all access to food, ammunition, and other supplies vital to life itself—or, in more graphic terms, Grant’s men would be the hangman’s noose choking the life out of Petersburg. Winning the siege would be as simple as cinching the noose tighter and tighter with each passing day, until the rebels died of starvation or surrendered, whichever came first.
But the stalemate at Petersburg is not a proper siege, even though the press is fond of calling it that. Grant has Lee pinned down on three sides but has not surrounded his entire force. The Appomattox River makes that impossible. Broad and deep, it flows through the heart of Petersburg. The Confederates control all land north of the river and use it as a natural barrier against Union attack from the rear. This allows resupply trains to chug down from Richmond on a regular basis, keeping the Confederates armed and fed.
In this way there is normalcy, allowing men like Lee to attend church on Sundays, as he would in peacetime. Or a young general like A. P. Hill to live on a nearby estate with his pregnant wife and two small daughters, enjoying parenthood and romance. The men on both sides of the trenches live in squalor and mud, enduring rats and deprivation. But there is order there, too, as they read their newspapers and letters from home and cook their meager breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The Confederate lines are arranged in a jagged horseshoe, facing south—thirty—seven miles of trenches and fortifications in all. The outer edges of the horseshoe are two miles from the city center, under the commands of A. P. Hill on the Confederate right and John B. Gordon on the left. Both are among Lee’s favorite and most courageous generals, so it is natural that he has entrusted Petersburg’s defenses to them.
The cold, hard truth, however, is that Robert E. Lee’s dwindling army is reduced to just 50,000 men—only 35,000 of them ready to fight. String them out along thirty-seven miles and they are spread very thin indeed. But they are tough. Time and again over the past 293 days, Grant has attacked. And time and again, Lee’s men have held fast.
Lee cannot win at Petersburg. He knows this. Grant has almost four times as many soldiers and a thousand more cannon. The steam whistles of approaching trains have grown less and less frequent in the past few months, and Lee’s men have begun to starve. Confederate rations were once a pound of meal and a quarter pound of bacon a day, with an occasional tin of peas. Now such a meal would be considered a fantasy. “Starvation, literal starvation, was doing its deadly work. So depleted and poisoned was the blood of many of Lee’s men from insufficient and unsound food that a slight wound which would probably not have been reported at the beginning of the war would often cause blood poison, gangrene, and death,” one Confederate general will later write.
Many Confederate soldiers slide out of their trenches on moonless nights and sprint over to the Union lines to surrender—anything to fill their aching bellies. Those that remain are at their breaking point. The best Lee can hope for is to escape. For months and months, this has meant one of two options: abandon the city under cover of darkness and pull back toward Richmond or punch a hole in the Union lines and march south. In both cases, the goal is to reach the Carolinas and the waiting Confederate reinforcements.
On the afternoon of April 1, Grant removes the second option. At the decisive Battle of Five Forks, General Phil Sheridan and 45,000 men capture a pivotal crossing, cutting off the main road to North Carolina, handing General George Pickett his second disastrous loss of the war—the first coming at Gettysburg, and the infamous ill-fated charge that bears his name. Five Forks is the most lopsided Union victory of the war. More than 2,900 southern troops are lost.
It is long after dark when word of the great victory reaches Grant. He is sitting before a campfire, smoking one of the cigars he came to cherish long ago in the Mexican War. Without pausing, Grant pushes his advantage. He orders another attack along twelve miles of Confederate line. He hopes this will be the crushing blow, the one that will vanquish Lee and his army once and for all. His soldiers will attack just before dawn, but the artillery barrage will commence immediately. This is the bombardment Lincoln watches from eight miles away in City Point—the president well understanding that the massive barrage will cause devastating casualties and panic in the Confederate ranks.
The infantry opens fire at four A.M., per Grant’s orders, with a small diversionary attack to the east of Petersburg—cannon and musket fire mainly, just enough to distract the Confederates.
Forty-five minutes later, as soon there is enough light to see across to the enemy lines, Grant launches hell. Some 100,000 men pour into the Confederate trenches, screaming curses, throwing themselves on the overmatched rebels. The fighting is often hand to hand, and at such close range that the soldiers can clearly see and smell the men they’re killing. And, of course, they hear the screams of the dying.
The Union attack is divided into two waves. Just a few hours earlier, Major General John G. Parke was so sure that the assault would fail that he requested permission to call it off. But now Parke obeys orders and leads the bluecoats to the right flank. Major General Horatio Wright, employing a revolutionary wedge-shaped attack column, charges from the left flank. Wright is a West Point-trained engineer and will later have a hand in building the Brooklyn Bridge and completing the Washington Monument. He has spent months scrutinizing the Confederate defenses, searching for the perfect location to smash the rebels. Wright is far beyond ready for this day—and so are his men.
General Wright’s army shatters Lee’s right flank, spins around to obliterate A. P. Hill’s Third Corps, then makes a U-turn and marches on Petersburg—all within two hours. The attack is so well choreographed that many of his soldiers are literally miles in front of the main Union force. The first rays of morning sunshine have not even settled upon the Virginia countryside when, lacking leadership and orders, Wright’s army is stymied because no other Union divisions have stepped up to assist him. Wright’s army must stop its advance.
Meanwhile, Lee and his assistants, Generals Pete Longstreet and A. P. Hill, gape at Wright’s army from the front porch of Lee’s Confederate headquarters. They can see the destruction right in front of them. At first, as Longstreet will later write, “it was hardly light enough to distinguish the blue from the gray.” The three of them stand there, Lee with his wrap against the chill, as the sun rises high enough to confirm their worst fears: every soldier they can see wears blue.
A horrified A. P. Hill realizes that his army has been decimated. Lee faces the sobering fact that Union soldiers are just a few short steps from controlling the main road he plans to use for his personal retreat. Lee will be cut off if the bluecoats in the pasture continue their advance. The next logical step will be his own surrender.
Which is why, as he rushes
back into the house and dresses quickly, Lee selects his finest gray uniform, a polished pair of riding boots, and then takes the unusual precaution of buckling a gleaming ceremonial sword around his waist—just in case he must offer it to his captors.
It is Sunday, and normally Lee would be riding his great gray gelding, Traveller, into Petersburg for services. Instead, he must accomplish three things immediately: the first is to escape back into the city; the second is to send orders to his generals, telling them to fall back to the city’s innermost defenses and hold until the last man or nightfall, whichever comes first. The third is to evacuate Petersburg and retreat back across the Petersburg bridges, wheel left, and race south toward the Carolinas.
There, Lee believes, he can regain the upper hand. The Confederate army is a nimble fighting force, at its best on open ground, able to feint and parry. Once he regains that open ground, Lee can keep Grant’s army off balance and gain the offensive.
If any of those three events do not take place, however, he will be forced to surrender—most likely before dusk.
Fortune, however, is smiling on Lee. Those Union soldiers have no idea that Marse Robert himself is right in front of them, for if they did, they would attack without ceasing. Lee is the most wanted man in America. The soldier who captures him will become a legend.
The Union scouts can clearly see the small artillery battery outside Lee’s headquarters, the Turnbull house, and assume that it is part of a much larger rebel force hiding out of sight. Too many times, on too many battlefields, soldiers who failed to observe such discretion have been shot through like Swiss cheese. Rather than rush forward, the Union scouts hesitate, looking fearfully at Lee’s headquarters.
Seizing the moment, Lee escapes. By nightfall, sword still buckled firmly around his waist, Lee crosses the Appomattox River and then orders his army to do the same.
The final chase has begun.
CHAPTER THREE
MONDAY, APRIL 3,1865
PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA
Lee’s retreat is unruly and time-consuming, despite the sense of urgency. So it is, more than eight hours after Lee ordered his army to pull out of Petersburg, that General U. S. Grant can still see long lines of Confederate troops marching across the Appomattox River to the relative safety of the opposite bank. The bridges are packed. A cannon barrage could kill hundreds instantly, and Grant’s batteries are certainly close enough to do the job. All he has to do is give the command. Yes, it would be slaughter, but there is still a war to be won. Killing those enemy soldiers makes perfect tactical sense.
But Grant hesitates.
The war’s end is in sight. Killing those husbands and fathers and sons will impede the nation’s healing. So now Grant, the man so often labeled a butcher, indulges in a rare act of military compassion and simply lets them go. He will soon come to regret it.
For now, his plan is to capture the Confederates, not to kill them. Grant has already taken plenty of prisoners. Even as he watches these rebels escape, Grant is scheming to find a way to capture even more.
The obvious strategy is to give chase, sending the Union army across the Appomattox in hot pursuit. Lee certainly expects that.
But Grant has something different in mind. He aims to get ahead of Lee and cut him off. He will allow the Confederates their unmolested thirty-six-hour, forty-mile slog down muddy roads to Amelia Court House, where the rebels believe food is waiting. He will let them unpack their rail cars and gulp rations to their hearts’ content. And he will even allow them to continue their march to the Carolinas—but only for a while. A few short miles after leaving Amelia Court House, Lee’s army will run headlong into a 100,000-man Union roadblock. This time there will be no river to guard Lee’s rear. Grant will slip that noose around the Confederate army, then yank on its neck until it can breathe no more.
Grant hands a courier the orders. Then he telegraphs President Lincoln at City Point, asking for a meeting. Long columns of rebels still clog the bridges, but the rest of Petersburg is completely empty, its homes shuttered, the civilians having long ago given them over to the soldiers, and soldiers from both sides are now racing across the countryside toward the inevitable but unknown point on the map where they will fight to the death in a last great battle. Abandoned parapets, tents, and cannons add to the eerie landscape. “There was not a soul to be seen, not even an animal in the streets,” Grant will later write. “There was absolutely no one there.”
The five-foot-eight General Grant, an introspective man whom Abraham Lincoln calls “the quietest little man” he’s ever met, has Petersburg completely to himself. He lights a cigar and basks in the still morning air, surrounded by the ruined city that eluded him for 293 miserable days.
He is Lee’s exact opposite: dark-haired and sloppy in dress. His friends call him Sam. “He had,” noted a friend from West Point, “a total absence of elegance.” But like Marse Robert, Grant possesses a savant’s aptitude for warfare—indeed, he is capable of little else. When the Civil War began he was a washed-up, barely employed West Point graduate who had been forced out of military service, done in by lonely western outposts and an inability to hold his liquor. It was only through luck and connections that Grant secured a commission in an Illinois regiment. But it was tactical brilliance, courage under fire, and steadfast leadership that saw him rise to the top.
General Grant, “Sam” to his friends
The one and only time he met Lee was during the Mexican War. Robert E. Lee was already a highly decorated war hero, while Grant was a lieutenant and company quartermaster. He despised being in charge of supplies, but it taught him invaluable lessons about logistics and the way an army could live off the land through foraging when cut off from its supply column. It was after one such scrounge in the Mexican countryside that the young Grant returned to headquarters in a dirty, unbuttoned uniform. The regal Lee, Virginian gentleman, was appalled when he caught sight of Grant and loudly chastised him for his appearance. It was an embarrassing rebuke, one the thin-skinned, deeply competitive Grant would never forget.
Lee isn’t the only Confederate general Grant knows from the Mexican War. James “Pete” Longstreet, now galloping toward Amelia Court House, is a close friend who served as Grant’s best man at his wedding. At Monterrey, Grant rode into battle alongside future Confederate president Jefferson Davis. There are scores of others. And while he’d known many at West Point, it was in Mexico that Grant learned how they fought under fire—their strengths, weaknesses, tendencies. As with the nuggets of information he’d learned as a quartermaster, Grant tucked these observations away and then made keen tactical use of them during the Civil War—just as he is doing right now, sitting alone in Petersburg, thinking of how to defeat Robert E. Lee once and for all.
Grant lights another cigar—a habit that will eventually kill him—and continues his wait for Lincoln. He hopes to hear about the battle for Richmond before the president arrives. Capturing Lee’s army is of the utmost importance, but both men also believe that a Confederacy without a capital is a doomsday scenario for the rebels. Delivering the news that Richmond has fallen will be a delightful way to kick off their meeting.
The sound of horseshoes on cobblestones echoes down the quiet street. It’s Lincoln. Once again the president has courted peril by traveling with just his eleven-year-old son, a lone bodyguard, and a handful of governmental officials. Lincoln knows that, historically, assassination is common during the final days of any war. The victors are jubilant, but the vanquished are furious, more than capable of venting their rage on the man they hold responsible for their defeat.
A single musket shot during that horseback ride from City Point could have ended Lincoln’s life. Despite his profound anxieties about all other aspects of the nation’s future, Lincoln chooses to shrug off the risk. At the edge of Petersburg he trots past “the houses of negroes,” in the words of one Union colonel, “and here and there a squalid family of poor whites”—but no one else. No one, at least, with eno
ugh guts to shoot the president. And while the former slaves grin broadly, the whites gaze down with “an air of lazy dislike,” disgusted that this tall, bearded man is once again their president.
Stepping down off his horse, Lincoln walks through the main gate of the house Grant has chosen for their meeting. He takes the walkway in long, eager strides, a smile suddenly stretching across his face, his deep fatigue vanishing at the sight of his favorite general. When he shakes Grant’s hand in congratulation, it is with great gusto. And Lincoln holds on to Grant for a very long time. The president appears so happy that Grant’s aides doubt he’s ever had a more carefree moment in his life.
The air is chilly. The two men sit on the veranda, taking no notice of the cold. They have become a team during the war. Or, as Lincoln puts it, “Grant is my man, and I am his.” One is tall and the other quite small. One is a storyteller, the other a listener. One is a politician; the other thinks that politics is a sordid form of show business. But both are men of action, and their conversation shows deep mutual respect.
Former slaves begin to fill the yard, drawn back into Petersburg by the news that Lincoln himself is somewhere in the city. They stand quietly in front of the house, watching as the general and the president proceed with their private talk. Lincoln is a hero to the slaves—“Father Abraham”—guiding them to the promised land with the Emancipation Proclamation.
Killing Lincoln/Killing Kennedy Page 2
