The American Civil War

by John Keegan

  To Meade, commanding the Army of the Potomac, Grant sent the order, “Lee’s army will be your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.” Grant had already decided, with Lincoln’s approval, to make his headquarters with Meade, while leaving him as much freedom of action as possible. That would require nice judgement, not always achieved. Meade would complain frequently in his letters to his wife that any achievement of the Army of the Potomac was credited by the press to Grant, any failure to himself. Still, Grant’s intentions were fair and honest, and the two men would sustain an equable working relationship throughout the rest of the campaign in the East.

  Meanwhile, in the West, Sherman was beginning what would become the culminating campaign of the war.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Overland Campaign and

  the Fall of Richmond

  JOSIAH GORGAS MIGHT have sensed that the Confederacy was tottering after Gettysburg, but it was not racing to destruction. As Adam Smith might have phrased it, there is an awful lot of destruction in a country. America was still full of Confederate troops, who were armed and supplied with the necessities of war-making and whose morale, despite the loss of Vicksburg and the defeat of Gettysburg, remained high. Lincoln, anxious to see the Gettysburg victory completed, urged Meade to harry Lee’s army to destruction but Meade missed his opportunity. His pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia was lethargic. He should have backed Lee against the Potomac as he retreated to the Virginia line, but though the bridges at Williamsport had been destroyed, he hesitated to attack the enemy in his defended bridgehead, fearing fierce resistance, and allowed Lee sufficient time to improvise a bridge from the timbers of a dismantled warehouse, to cross and slip away during the night of July 13-14. Lee then withdrew to the Rappahannock, where he stood, watched by Meade, occasionally exchanging shots but not closing for battle, for the next five months.

  “Soon after midnight, May 3rd, 4th [1864], the Army of the Potomac moved out of its positions north of the Rapidan, to start upon that memorable campaign destined to result in the capture of the Confederate capital and the army defending it,” recorded Grant in his memoirs.1 Though now general in chief, his headquarters were with the Army of the Potomac, whose commander, General George Meade, Grant had resolved to leave as far as possible in independence. It was inevitable, however, that Meade’s freedom of action should be exercised in consultation with his superior and so proved to be the case. The course of the coming campaign was to be determined by Grant, as were the operations of the subordinate armies, Butler’s on the James River, Sigel’s in the Shenandoah Valley, and Banks’s on the Gulf. Sherman, commanding the Union’s other great army, was under less detailed supervision but the broad thrust of its drive was directed so as to further the main purpose of the 1864 campaign. Sherman, marching through Georgia and the Carolinas, would be heading to make contact with Grant, who would be fighting his way southward into central Virginia.

  Yet, despite the absence of immediately bad consequences, in the wake of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the rebel war clerk’s judgement was correct. In July 1863 the war took a fatal turn for the South. In retrospect it is clearly visible what had happened. Two areas of vital importance to the South’s survival had been lost or their defence compromised. The first of these areas was northern Virginia, which Lee’s decision to invade Pennsylvania and Maryland had turned into a critical forward defence zone, or glacis, for the Confederacy. Its geography made it very difficult to use as an offensive campaigning ground by the Union; its narrowness and its plethora of short rivers flowing into Chesapeake Bay provided a defender with a succession of excellent lines of defence. McClellan, though he had not expressly voiced the perception, had correctly seen at the outset that to use the Army of the Potomac to butt its way southwards from one river line to the next would waste its strength and do the Confederates a favour. His scheme to bypass the region altogether by an amphibious but flanking movement to the Virginia Peninsula was strategically brilliant, and one for which he has never received correct credit. The withdrawal from Harrison’s Landing after the Seven Days was consonantly a serious strategic mistake. Had the landing places been kept open, Richmond would have been kept under permanent threat, with highly beneficial consequences. Withdrawal provided Lee with the opportunity to stage his two invasions of the North and to recapture the ground which would have to be fought over at such cost and such delay during 1864.

  Yet, even as he embarked on his advance into Virginia in May 1864, Grant maintained the healthiest respect for Lee’s army. Though its commander had lost the most gifted of his subordinates, Grant doubted whether the Army of Northern Virginia could be pinned against an obstacle or denied a line of retreat. Lee was too skilful and his army too attuned to his methods to be trapped in the open field. Grant had decided that the only certain way of overcoming the enemy was by the relentless reduction of his fighting numbers. He had always been completely unsentimental about the nature of war, which he genuinely disliked. He had hated the Mexican War, which he thought an act of unjustified aggression. He had disliked everything about the Civil War so far, but had learnt to get on with it at whatever cost to his feelings. What sustained him was he disliked rebellion even more than than bloodletting. If blood was the price of restoring the Union, then he would shed it. It was in that spirit that he set out south from the Rapidan in May 1864.

  His first point of encounter with Lee ensured that the cost of battle would be high. The ground on which the two armies met was the dense woodland of the Wilderness, abandoned farmland gone back to secondary forest, where Lee and Hooker had clashed at the battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. Lee found Grant first and attacked. In the dense cover manoeuvre was difficult, though Longstreet delivered one dashing flank attack, and the fighting resolved itself into volleying whenever visibility offered a sight of the enemy. The conditions, which had led to Stonewall Jackson being shot by his own troops at Chancellorsville, now produced another similarly costly mistake. Longstreet was shot by Confederates, also in the arm, but though the wound was serious it did not prove fatal. The Wilderness was fatal to many others. Grant had hoped to cross it in a single day’s march and press on to meet Lee in open country. Meade, however, was encumbered with the large transport train of the Army of the Potomac and, reluctant to be separated from it, made himself a target of Confederate attack.

  Gettysburg had spelled the end of the use of northern Virginia by the Confederates as a strategic buffer zone. The loss of Vicksburg was worse. It inaugurated the hollowing out of the South, of the Union’s capture of bases and lines of communication in the South’s interior from which campaigns could be mounted to enlarge the void in the South’s heartland and set about its destruction from within. It also spelled the end to the South’s hope of mounting a strategic threat to the North equivalent to that staged by Grant when he embarked on his campaign to seize the line of the Mississippi and to bisect the Confederacy at mid-point. Its chance of so doing, given its relative weakness in numbers and resources, never equalled that of the North’s bisecting the Confederacy.

  Grant had been anxious to avoid fighting in the Wilderness, where the Union army had suffered so grievously the previous May. Lee, believing that his smaller army would be at less of a disadvantage in the tangled undergrowth of the forest, was prepared to risk a battle there. He recognised that the enemy was perilously close to Richmond and might, by successful manoeuvre, get past the Wilderness and into the open country which led across the little rivers of the Chesapeake shore to the capital’s outskirts. In a day of heavy and confused fighting on May 5, the Union forces drove the outnumbered Confederates south and by evening had secured ground from which next day they might fall on Lee’s right.

  Lee planned an attack at the same time in the same sector. The Army of the Potomac, however, attacked first, driving the Confederate vanguard through the woods until both sides confronted each other across a small clearing where Lee had his headquarters. The circumstances of the
battlefield were now chaotic, with the bush ablaze and threatening the many wounded with death. Union success had been partly due to the absence from the Confederate mass of Longstreet’s corps, which was returning from Tennessee. In the nick of time its advance guard appeared; Lee himself tried to lead it into action. The Texans who formed the leading unit drove Lee back with shouts of dismay and as more of their comrades appeared the tide was turned. In two hours of fighting, Lee’s men had driven Meade’s units almost back to their starting point. The Confederates were assisted by knowledge of the ground. One of Lee’s brigadiers knew of the existence of an unfinished railroad track, down which Longstreet directed four of his brigades in an attack on the Union flank. They achieved a successful surprise. In the fracas that followed Confederate units collided with one another unexpectedly, and just as had happened at Chancellorsville in 1863, a Confederate rifleman mistakenly hit one of his own comrades. Longstreet was struck in the throat and shoulder by a bullet which, though it did not kill him, severely incapacitated him and kept him out of action for several months.

  Longstreet’s wounding drew the fangs of the Southerners’ attack, until Lee reorganised his entangled lines. In late afternoon one of his brigadiers discovered that Grant’s right flank was exposed and, on his own initiative, won permission to launch an attack, during which two Union generals were captured. Grant, however, refused to be moved by the general turmoil. Instead he laid plans for a Union assault the following day.

  In all previous battles in northern Virginia, the Army of the Potomac was accustomed to being led to the northern bank of one of the nearby rivers to establish a defensive position within which to rest and refit after a heavy engagement. In the aftermath of the Wilderness battle, which had cost 17,500 casualties overall (Confederate losses were 7,750), the soldiers were surprised to be overtaken by Grant and his staff, riding southward in order, as quickly became apparent, to resume the offensive. His objective, ten miles south of the Wilderness, was Spotsylvania Court House. If it could be seized, he would be closer to the Confederate capital than the Army of Northern Virginia would be and occupying a position Lee would either have to attack or retreat from. During May 7 the armies skirmished without serious fighting, while Grant sent his supply columns and heavy artillery to the rear; Meade had recently attempted to reduce the logistic train, but on the passage through the Wilderness it still consisted of 4,000 wagons. This overprovision assured that its soldiers were so well-fed that they could easily march on short rations for a few days without hardship. During the night of May 7, the fighting divisions were put on the road also. To their soldiers’ surprise they found they were advancing, not retreating. Some began to sing. Despite the certainty of battle to come, they were exhilarated by the change of mood Grant’s assumption of command had brought.

  The infantry advance was complemented by a cavalry advance. Sheridan’s 10,000 horsemen set off southward to harass Lee’s line of communications. They were opposed by their old enemies, J. E. B. Stuart’s cavalry corps, which challenged them to fight. Eventually they did, on May 11 at Yellow Tavern, after Sheridan had done a good deal of destruction to the local railroads and supply depots. The Union cavalry was now much better armed than their opponents, every man having a repeating carbine. The encounter at Yellow Tavern resulted in an easy success for Sheridan’s men, who dispersed Stuart’s horsemen in separate directions. During the firefight, Stuart suffered a mortal wound; his death was almost as grave a blow to Lee as that of Jackson a year before.

  Meanwhile on May 9, the two marching armies had met at Spotsylvania. Grant’s plan was to outflank Lee to the east and so get on the road to Richmond, now only forty-five miles distant, though still defended by several of the short rivers which had bedevilled campaigning in northern Virginia since the first days of the war. It was not water which was to form the critical obstacles at Spotsylvania, however, but earth. The Army of Northern Virginia had, as soon as it knew it would have to fight, fortified its front with entrenchments and timber obstacles. In the previous twelve months digging had become an automatic preparation for combat in both armies, though perhaps more so on the Southern side, which could afford the heavy casualties of close-range rifle volleying less than the Union. Unusually, the tactics of entrenchment do not seem to have been imposed from above but to have been adopted as a measure of self-protection by the rank and file. Preexisting obstacles had so obviously played a part in Confederate success at Fredericksburg: the stone-walled road at the foot of Marye’s Heights had held the Northerners at a distance while they were shot down in hundreds. Deliberate digging on the battlefield had begun earlier, however. Both sides had dug extensively during the Peninsula Campaign. Some of the digging was to construct formal siege defences around Richmond. Some, however, was “hasty” entrenchment, dug to defend a position before a coming firefight. At Beaver Dam Creek (Mechanicsville), Union troops had constructed timber barricades, called abatis, to hold the Confederates at a distance, and extensive barricades were thrown up next day along Boatswain’s Creek. It was an enormous advantage to whichever side was defending that timber was so abundant in nineteenth-century America. Even when battle was not joined in woodland, as at Shiloh, Chancellorsville, and the Wilderness, timber was still available. Field fences of the time were usually of the split rail type, which had only to be pulled to pieces to yield the material for abatis, barricades, and chevaux-de-frise. American farmers were profligate in their use of timber, which anyhow had to be cleared to make fields. Their lumbering efforts provided huge quantities of already worked wood which was immediately suitable for military engineering.

  Though the impetus to fortify implanted itself eventually among ordinary soldiers, for the best of reasons, that of sparing their lives, it was also part of the military mentality of the regular officer corps. West Point was an engineering school and the professor of engineering, Denis Hart Mahan, father of the most important American strategist of the nineteenth century, Alfred T. Mahan, was an advocate of engineering on the battlefield. A student of contemporary European warfare, he drew from his studies the doctrine that the rising losses in combat caused by long-range fire could only be stemmed if soldiers dug. Some of his pupils took note. By 1864 they were digging, and strengthening their diggings with cut timber, without any encouragement from higher up. At Spotsylvania, Lee’s soldiers built the strongest entrenchment yet to appear on any battlefield of the war. Grant tried to outflank their defences on May 9 but failed. On May 10 he sent a stronger force to make yet another of his costly frontal assaults. The attack repelled on the enemy’s left was more successful in the centre, where the young General Emory Upton ordered the assaulting force to try novel tactics. He formed his twelve regiments into four lines, with instructions not to fire their rifles until they were on top of the enemy trenches, which were to be carried by the bayonet. The succeeding regiments were to pass through the first to the next line of enemy trenches and so on, until a breach had been made and widened into the heart of the enemy position. Upton, though he could not know it, was anticipating a solution to the problem of carrying entrenched positions that would present itself on the Western Front sixty years later during the First World War. Upton’s men took a thousand prisoners and opened a wide gap in Lee’s front. Then the attack failed, for a reason often to be repeated in the First World War. The supporting division which was intended to exploit the success was slow coming forward and, when it did get into action, ran into massed artillery fire and retreated with heavy losses.

  On May 11 Grant decided to make an all-out attack on the Confederate position, choosing as his centre of effort a salient known to the defenders as the Mule Shoe for its shape; its apex would become known as the Bloody Angle. During May 12-13, a ghastly eighteen-hour, close-quarters battle ensued, neither side giving ground. Huge quantities of ammunition were expended at close range, the trenches filling up with the bodies of those killed and wounded and the soil turning red with blood. Not until darkness fell did the Confederates wi
thdraw. In the week which ended on May 12, Grant’s army had lost 32,000 killed, wounded, and missing, more than in any previous single week of fighting throughout the war. The Confederates, despite defending and from behind entrenchments, had lost over 18,000. Grant was accused by some of adopting the strategy of attrition—not yet a word in use—but that was not his intention. He was still striving to find a direct route to Richmond or open country in which to force Lee to fight in conditions where superior Union numbers would carry the day. Because Lee had skilfully met all his manoeuvres with counter-manoeuvres, he had been forced instead into pitched battles on Confederate terms. The frightful casualties of the second week of May 1864 were the inevitable consequence. It was not only the rank and file that paid the price. Lee lost twenty general officers in the twenty days that culminated at the Bloody Angle. James McPherson observes that the episode visibly marked those who survived to stay in the ranks. They looked thin and pale; many exhibited the symptoms of what would be called shell shock in the First World War and combat fatigue in the Second.