by John Keegan
Spotsylvania did not end the terrible ordeal of the Overland Campaign. More anxious than ever to reach Richmond, Grant sent his army onward from Spotsylvania to the North Anna River, a tributary of the Pamunkey, which flows round Richmond’s northern approaches. Its meanders provided firm support for Lee’s flanks; when Grant, following up Lee’s retreat from Spotsylvania, appeared on May 23, Lee easily repelled his attacks. Grant’s purpose in disengaging at Spotsylvania and marching southward was to bring Lee to battle in the open or, if battle was refused, to find his way round Lee’s right flank and press forward towards Richmond down the narrow corridor between the Chesapeake and the James River. To start this episode in the Overland Campaign going, he sent Hancock’s Second Corps, the strongest and best in the Army of the Potomac, forward along the highway known as the Telegraph Road. His calculation was that, once Lee became aware that a single Union corps was acting in detachment from the main body, he would bring his troops out of their earthworks, which, as was now standard, the Confederates had begun to dig along the far bank of the North Anna, and risk an encounter in the open. As soon as Lee got word of Grant’s movement, he did indeed order the Army of Northern Virginia to leave Spotsylvania and start for the North Anna. He remained confident of his own and his army’s ability to get the better of the enemy. He was too sanguine. His army’s strength was dwindling and now amounted, after the awful losses at Spotsylvania, to only 40,000, though he was expecting reinforcements of 13,700 from Richmond. He had lost his trusted cavalry commander, J. E. B. Stuart, while his best subordinate, James Longstreet, was still recovering from wounds suffered at the Wilderness; worse, Lee himself was now showing signs of strain and exhaustion, unsurprisingly in view of the burden laid on him by the frequency of battle in this campaign, and anxieties about supply and manpower losses.
By the afternoon of May 22, 1864, the whole of the Army of Northern Virginia had taken station on the southern bank of the North Anna. That was not what Grant had hoped. He now had to drive the Confederates out of their position if he was to resume the advance on Richmond. During May 23 the Union troops, though at considerable cost, succeeded in crossing the North Anna at several points, but left much of the southern bank in Confederate hands. Unfortunately for Grant, Lee’s chief engineer, General Martin Luther Smith, now persuaded him that a deteriorating situation could be saved if entrenchments were hastily dug along the river and across the Telegraph Road. The Army of Northern Virginia was now expert at rapid entrenchment and dug itself in during the night of May 23 so that on the morning of May 24 Grant was confronted by a new and difficult situation. Both Lee’s flanks were refused, that is, turned away from the main line of the front on the river. Lee and Smith planned to inflict defeats on the Federals as they manoeuvred to attack the separate focus of the Confederate position and in so doing lost cohesion. The final stages of the battle of May 24 did indeed go badly for the Union. Units were thrown back and heavy losses suffered. The front became disorganised. On the afternoon of May 24, an opportunity was offered for the Confederates to deliver a concentrated counter-strike and halt the Union advance in its tracks. Regrettably for his army, Lee now succumbed to the strains of the campaign and retired to his sickbed. From it he railed at his subordinates, “We must strike them a blow … We must strike them a blow.” He, however, was quite incapable of mustering the powers of command which would have made that possible, while none of his subordinates had the ability to do so. The battle began to flicker out. The rest of May 24 and the whole of May 25 was spent by the Confederates in mounting local counter-attacks at the positions taken by their much stronger enemy, while Grant organized probing movements to get around the Confederate earthworks to the east and resume the advance down the Telegraph Road. On May 27 Lee, still in a weakened physical condition, recognized that he had lost the chance of inflicting serious damage on Grant’s army, and that his own could no longer hold the North Anna position. He ordered it to march out of its entrenchments and seek a new position, farther south, and ominously nearer Richmond, where he could stand across Grant’s advance. The route chosen ran towards the crossroads of Cold Harbor.
The battle of the North Anna, though not costly by comparison with most of those in the Overland Campaign (2,100 Union casualties, 1,250 Confederate) was nevertheless crucially damaging to the South. By his failure to hold the river and inflict a serious reverse on the enemy, Lee had surrendered his last chance of keeping the Union at a distance from the defences of Richmond. At Cold Harbor, he would be fighting again on the terrain of the Seven Days’ Battles of 1862.
Grant spent the rest of May trying to outflank Lee from the Tidewater side. Lee, though forced to surrender territory, fell back from one secure position on the Pamunkey to another on the Totopotomoy.
These two little waterways would support Lee’s flanks in the next, almost last stage of the Overland Campaign. Grant had fixed on a road junction known as Cold Harbor as the site of his next action. It lies close to Mechanicsville on the northeastern outskirts of Richmond, scene of one of the earliest of the Seven Days’ Battles of 1862. Lee was ahead of him and, despite heavy skirmishing by Sheridan’s cavalry, managed to entrench a position on a front of seven miles between the Pamunkey and the Totopotomoy. He had made good his losses but so had Grant, partly by remustering some heavy artillery regiments as infantry. Lee appealed to Richmond for reinforcements, but despite the failure of Sigel’s campaign in the Shenandoah Valley and Butler’s confinement in the Bermuda Hundred, none could be spared. Lee had to defend the Cold Harbor position with the troops on hand, now numbering, after receiving all available reinforcements, about 60,000. Grant had over 100,000 troops but his attack was disjointed. He shrank from ordering a frontal attack on what he recognised to be a very strong enemy position but he believed—wrongly—that the Army of Northern Virginia was nearly at the end of its tether and he hoped for a clear-cut victory to clinch the outcome of the impending presidential election. Grant began the attack in darkness on June 1, it was then broken off for the day. At dawn of June 3, 1864, three corps of the Army of the Potomac attacked. The result was calamity, worse than Fredericksburg. What thwarted Grant’s hopes of victory were the preparations Lee’s men had made to render their positions impregnable. The fighting in the first days of June had been so intense that the events of the battlefield had concealed from both Grant and Meade how skilfully the Army of Northern Virginia had prepared the ground it held. Heavy skirmishing at Haw’s Shop, along the Totopotomoy, on the Matadequin, at Bethesda Church, and at Cold Harbor itself, skirmishes that might realistically have been denoted proper battles in their own right, had not only checked Grant’s advance upon Richmond but had solidified the grip of the Confederates on highly defensible ground, a muddle of marshland, thickets, and ravines which had allowed them to dig in along a concave front, a curve including two subordinate concavities, all covered by thousands of rifles and dozens of artillery pieces; the front was about seven miles long, resting at its ends on the Totopotomoy and the Chickahominy, and so not susceptible to being turned. It could only be attacked frontally, though where to attack baffled the Union commanders seeking to glimpse what lay behind the screen of vegetation their troops faced. At the beginning of the Cold Harbor engagement a week before June 1, a Union soldier in the 110th Ohio Regiment had referred to the scene of action as “this wilderness looking place;” the poor worked-out farmland of Richmond’s environs did readily recall that of the Wilderness, farther north, and though the line running across it had been dug largely with bayonets, mess plates, and drinking cups—spades were not a general issue in either army and the entrenching tool had not yet been invented—the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia had made themselves experts at sinking beneath the surface whenever serious battle threatened. Although Grant did not know what lay to the front, his orders for June 3 were that the Eighteenth, Sixth, and Second Corps were to advance at half past four in the morning and attack along the entire front.
The plan was fo
r the whole of the seven-mile front to be attacked simultaneously, but because of its concave form the Union line was unable to exert an equal pressure at all points. The attack diverged. What made it even less concentrated was that the attackers could not see the enemy clearly, they being concealed by breastworks or by standing vegetation. Even the defenders lacked a clear view; Lee worked by hearing rather than sight. As the attack swelled in force, he remarked to a subordinate when the rattle of musketry swelled that that was what killed rather than the artillery, the roar of which was joining in. Confederate fire began to beat down the Union efforts to get onto the enemy position, efforts renewed in some places as many as fourteen times. The heavier and more frequently repeated assaults were made at the extreme right of the Confederates’ line, delivered by Hancock’s Second Corps against Marylanders and Alabamans dug in along Boatswain Creek. Defensive fire was so heavy that by six o’clock the ground in front of the Confederate earthworks was covered with the bodies of dead and wounded and the survivors were scratching the earth with spoons and fingernails to raise the slightest shelter. In places the Union troops got onto the enemy parapet and drove the Confederates out; but Lee, fearing weakness at this point, had positioned his only reserve to the rear, and the lost ground was recaptured, at even heavier loss to the Union. It was here that General Evander Law framed his later celebrated remark that the battle was “not war but murder.” Union soldiers not killed or disabled took shelter behind the bodies of dead comrades and tried to wriggle their way backwards, but signs of movement attracted sharpshooter fire. Meade issued orders at quarter-hourly intervals for the attacks to be pressed but they could not be obeyed, if they even reached the men pressed to the ground by the weight of Confederate fire, and he had no fresh troops to reinforce the front. By ten o’clock it had become clear that the attack was a disastrous failure, clear to the tortured troops at the front, and dawningly so to Meade and other superiors in the rear. Meade continued to order an advance but it had no effect, and in some cases met flat refusals to obey. An estimated 3,000 to 7,000 Union soldiers had been killed and wounded, including a disproportionate number of officers; most of the losses had been suffered in the first hour of the Union assault. Four days after the battle opened, days spent in skirmishing and sniping, Lee and Grant at last agreed on terms for a truce to bring in the wounded and bury the dead. The Confederates, though so much better protected, had suffered 1,500 fatalities. In the interval a large number of the untended wounded had died of shock, loss of blood, or thirst.
Grant decided to terminate the offensive. He wrote later in his memoirs that he “always regretted the last assault on Cold Harbor.” In truth, the whole battle was regrettable, since it hurt the Union more than the Confederacy and still left Richmond at a distance.
Grant had now to reconsider his strategy for bringing the campaign to a conclusion, which he wrongly believed might be done soon. What he could not afford, at least at this stage of the Overland Campaign, was another battle against entrenchments, since fighting behind earthworks favoured the defending Confederates, often in terms of casualties by a ratio of two to one or more. Accordingly, after Cold Harbor he decided to divide his efforts, which given his great superiority in numbers he could afford to do. He directed Sheridan to lead his cavalry on a raid into the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley, the source of much of the Army of Northern Virginia’s food, to destroy its rail connections with Richmond. The Sheridan raid was only partly successful because he was intercepted by Lee’s cavalry, now commanded by Wade Hampton, at Trevilian Station and because he then failed to join forces with General David Hunter’s Union force in the valley. Hunter, harried by Confederate guerrillas, achieved little more than the destruction of the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington, where he burnt the buildings before beating a retreat across the mountains into West Virginia. His withdrawal was prompted by the appearance of Jackson’s old valley army, now commanded by Jubal Early, who displayed remarkable initiative by using the valley, as Stonewall had done in his time, as an avenue of advance which would threaten Washington. Having clashed with Hunter at Lynchburg during June, Early turned about and crossed the Potomac in July, reached Frederick in Maryland, and proceeded to invest the defences of Washington, which had been stripped of their garrison to strengthen Grant’s forces in Virginia. One Union contingent, the Sixth Corps, was hastily recalled and arrived just in time to deter Early from mounting an attack. There was scratch fighting nonetheless, witnessed by the president, his first view of the reality of the war thus far. As other Union troops marched to the rescue, Early found himself between two fires, so he prudently decided to retire into Virginia and got away scot-free. He had, however, reached as close as five miles to the White House, caused a sensation, and raised the spectre of a Southern military revival.
Such a reaction to what was only an impertinent raid was quite unjustified. It was the Confederacy which was now in danger, deadly danger, as Grant edged inexorably towards its capital. Lee had held him off so far by his unrivalled capacity to manoeuvre his pursuer onto ground where he could entrench and fight successful defensive battles. But he was running out of space in which to continue his game of evasion and delay, hemmed in as he now was between Chesapeake Bay, the lower courses of its rivers, and the fortifications of Richmond. On June 13 Grant disengaged his army from the Cold Harbor position and marched south, leaving Richmond to the west, until he reached the estuary of the James River, where he had arranged to be met by a pontoon-bridging train. What followed was an almost unprecedented achievement of combat engineering, made possible because Lee, short of cavalry, had temporarily lost touch with Grant and could not identify his whereabouts. While his military blindness persisted, the bridging column laid a span across the James, 2,100 feet long, and so got the Army of the Potomac across dry-shod, just east of City Point. The campaign had returned to the ground on which McClellan made his first attempt to take Richmond in 1862, with the difference that operations were now in the hands of a man who looked for reasons to press forward, rather than excuses to avoid action. Grant began to cross the James on June 14 and by June 15 was deploying the two most advanced of his five corps opposite the entrenchments defending Petersburg, Richmond’s railroad town, through which ran five railroads. Its capture would cut Richmond off from communication with the rest of the South and so ensure the Confederacy’s decapitation.
Grant recognised that. So did Lee, and he was determined to make the defence of Petersburg as tenacious as possible. Twenty miles separated the two cities, but because of the Army of Northern Virginia’s extraordinary capacity to dig, acquired in the pitched battles fought during the Overland Campaign, it was quite possible to connect them with continuous earthworks which would protect the railroads and the outskirts of the capital itself. When the Union troops, who had crossed the James by the pontoon bridge, arrived in the vicinity of Petersburg in mid-June, they found the earthworks already complete over a distance of ten miles. The breastworks were twenty feet thick and the ditch to the front fifty feet deep. The works included fifty-five artillery positions full of cannon. Smith, the Union corps commander, did not appreciate that Beauregard, commanding the defences, had almost no troops with which to garrison them. Fearing a repetition of the losses suffered in earlier attacks on Confederate entrenchments, as at Cold Harbor, he declined to mount an assault until evening and, though his soldiers then took a mile of trenches, they did not progress further, allowing Lee the chance to bring up reinforcements from Richmond. During the next three days, both sides reinforced as Grant brought more of the Army of the Potomac across the James and Lee weakened the defences of Richmond to reinforce those of Petersburg. On June 18 General Meade lost patience with his subordinates and commanded a full-scale advance, but the men, also remembering Cold Harbor, were unwilling to face the risk. One of the heavy artillery regiments that had been re-formed as infantry did mount a charge across open ground at the breastworks, only to lose three-quarters of its number. Meade then call
ed a halt, and was supported by Grant, who ordered the army to dig itself in until a weak spot could be found.
After this decision, the struggle for Petersburg and Richmond resolved itself into a stalemate which anticipated trench fighting on the Western Front sixty years later, and for the same reason: unsustainable casualties. Since early May, when the Overland Campaign had opened with the fighting in the Wilderness, the Union army had lost 65,000 men killed, wounded, or missing, a casualty rate equal to three-fifths of that it had suffered during the previous three years. Because of the North’s superior manpower resources and the efficiency of its enlistment process, the losses could still be made good, as was decreasingly the case in the South. Nevertheless, such losses could not be sustained incessantly. The report of casualty figures in the newspapers encouraged time-expired regiments, those raised for three years’ service in 1861, to insist on their right to muster out, while also driving up the desertion rate, which at its worst could reach a hundred a day. Unsurprisingly, the struggle to take Petersburg and Richmond declined after midsummer 1864 into siege warfare, with the Union forces seeking to envelop Richmond from the west and the defenders extending their entrenchments to prevent them. The Army of the Potomac also sought to cut the railroads into the city, and its cavalry tore up many miles of the Weldon and the South Side railroads. The cavalrymen were unable, however, to mount a permanent block of the lines of communication, as the Confederates brought the railroads back into service, a remarkable achievement given the shortage of almost every sort of railroad equipment and necessity, particularly rail and fixing spikes. The South was already cannibalising the less essential railroads to provide track for the vital links. There were other expedients. On one railroad in Texas which had worn out all its locomotives, traffic was maintained by harnessing oxen to pull the rolling stock. During nearly a year of siege in 1864-65, the railroads running into Richmond were kept open. Only when they were interrupted would the siege succeed. Between August and December 1864 the lines scarcely altered.
