Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  The moment was indeed Longstreet’s, and he never shone brighter. The energized rebels pushed Hancock’s Yankees hard down the Orange Plank Road and single-handedly turned the tide of attack. With room to breathe, Hill’s units reordered and reconnected with Ewell as the new center of the Confederate line.2 Later, Longstreet praised the intrepid courage of his men “at the extreme tension of skill and valor.”

  As Longstreet pushed forward down the Orange Plank Road, the Federals fell back, leaving Lee’s forces in place to turn Grant’s left flank at Brock Road and roll up his army. But just as rapidly the tide turned again. At the critical moment of attack, Longstreet was struck by a volley of fire issued by his own pickets and fell, badly wounded in his neck, coughing blood and unable to continue. The “Old War Horse” had fallen at the hands of his own men, just as Jackson had fallen in the Wilderness a year before.

  Longstreet would live to fight another day, but his glorious moment was lost. Still, this would not be Lee’s last thwarted opportunity. At the other end of Lee’s line, General John B. Gordon’s scouts informed him that, incredibly, Union General John Sedgwick’s right flank was exposed and “in the air.” A skeptical Gordon crawled past his lines toward the end of Grant’s breastworks, where he beheld the most amazing sight: “There was no line guarding this flank. As far as my eye could reach, the Union soldiers were seated on the margin of the rifle pits, taking their breakfasts.”3

  Ecstatic at the sight, Gordon proposed that he attack at once. His immediate superior, timid Jubal Early, refused permission to make the assault. When apprised of Gordon’s intelligence hours later, Lee immediately countermanded Early’s orders and sent Gordon forward in the waning daylight. The surprise was total as wave after wave of Gordon’s rebels rolled back entire regiments of stunned Yankees.

  Throughout the day, men fought in clumps of desperate engagement that became lonely worlds unto themselves. Lacking any visibility or contact, soldiers sometimes fired on their own men. Worse, in the dense and dry underbrush, artillery and musketry ignited fires up and down the line. Dead trees burned like kindling as two hundred wounded Union and Confederate soldiers and their fallen horses suffocated or burned where they lay. Victory could not be seized; precious daylight waned and rebel soldiers got caught in crossfire from their own troops. As later summarized by a recovered Longstreet: “Thus the battle, lost and won three times during the day, wore itself out.”4

  Grant knew he had not taken the day, but was consoled by the fact that Longstreet was removed. His loss, Grant observed, “was a severe one to Lee, and compensated in a great measure for the mishap, or misapprehensions, which had fallen to our lot during the day.”5 Grant determined nevertheless that Lee’s entrenched defenses were too powerful to carry. The next morning, May 7, both armies remained in their respective positions along the five-mile line from Germanna Plank Road to Spotsylvania Court House. With Lee well entrenched in the Wilderness, any offensive would have to originate with Grant. He was not yet ready to roll the dice again, and with good reason. The losses from the Wilderness fight were staggering on both sides. Of 115,000 Federals engaged, 17,666 were killed, wounded, or missing; of Lee’s 65,000 Confederates, the combined casualties stood at more than 7,500. Furthermore, Lee had lost the services of two of his three commanders. In addition to Longstreet, A. P. Hill was too ill to continue in front of his army and had to be replaced by Jubal Early.

  Amazingly, despite the losses on both sides, neither commanding general was deterred. As Grant smoked a cigar and whittled wood, preoccupied with his next move, Lee correctly ascertained that Grant was neither a retreating McClellan nor a rash Hooker, but rather a general of grim determination. As Grant’s army slid past Lee’s army and moved south, Lee also deduced that his destination was Spotsylvania Court House, a small village where a number of roads converged with vital strategic implications for command and communications.

  For the first time, Lee faced a general who would press on the offensive no matter what the cost in human sacrifice. No moralists moved to caution Grant. To the contrary, the people cried for more. Grant’s strategy left no room for nuance. “It was my plan, then, as it was on all other occasions,” he would later write, “to take the initiative whenever the enemy could be drawn from his intrenchments if we were not intrenched ourselves.”6 At that moment in the Wilderness, with Grant’s decision to press on, the fate of the Army of Northern Virginia was sealed. But not even Grant could estimate the butcher’s bill that Lee would extract.

  On the evening of May 7, Grant issued the fateful orders to Meade, directing him to move Warren’s Fifth Corps overnight to Spotsylvania Court House, twelve miles away. Having anticipated this aggressive movement, Lee was already marching in the same direction. General Richard Anderson, temporarily replacing Longstreet in command of First Corps, was ordered to lead the race to Spotsylvania. When Meade’s infantry and Sheridan’s cavalry got entangled and clogged the road south, Lee’s more nimble troops took advantage of interior routes and arrived at the crossroads first. Immediately they began digging for their lives to construct stout entrenchments.

  In his memoirs, Grant later described Lee’s anticipation and pointed to the irony of cause and effect in time of war. Despite the best-laid plans of men, Grant conceded, “accident often decides the fate of battle.”7 Anderson entrenched his corps immediately across Warren’s front and beat back initial assaults. Aware of the full strength of the enemy before him, and leery of suicidal offensive charges, Warren established a position at Lee’s front, which he too immediately fortified with formidable entrenchments.

  Fortifications had reached new levels of sophistication in these spring campaigns of 1864. Already past masters of their craft, Lee’s soldiers constructed a deadly matrix of breastworks with trenches behind, artillery emplacements, traverses, and abatis of spikelike trees felled toward the enemy. General Meade’s staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Lyman, observed with wonder how the rebels could put together earthworks:Hastily forming a line of battle, they then collect rails from fences, stones, logs and all other materials, and pile them along the line; bayonets with a few picks and shovels, in the hands of men who work for their lives, soon suffice to cover this frame with earth and sods; and within one hour, there is a shelter against bullets, high enough to cover a man kneeling, and extending often for a mile or two.... It is a rule that, when the Rebels halt, the first day gives them a good rifle pit; the second, a regular infantry parapet with artillery in position; and the third a parapet with an abatis in front and entrenched batteries behind. Sometimes they put this three days’ work into the first twenty-four hours. Our men can, and do, do the same; but remember, our object is offense—to advance.8

  While the tactical defensive often determined the outcome of individual battles in the Civil War, Lee recognized that purely defensive wars would ultimately end in submission. Sooner or later Lee would have to catch Grant in a fatal mistake and switch to a counterattack or the game would be up. In a message to President Davis, Lee summarized his strategy by observing that Grant’s entrenched army was virtually impregnable: “We cannot attack it with any prospect of success without great loss of men which I wish to avoid if possible.” But then Lee concluded on an offensive note: “I shall continue to strike him whenever opportunity presents itself.”9

  Had Grant seen Lee’s determined message, he might not have continued to underestimate his adversary—which led him to miss the determined warrior lurking within the gentleman. Colonel Lyman overheard Grant say with confidence that a bloodied Lee would retreat south. Lyman feared otherwise: “[Lee] will retreat south, but only far enough to get across your path, and then he will retreat no more, if he can help it.”10 Lyman was correct. In fact, General Grant still had much to learn about General Lee.

  Across the extended lines, Grant faced the similarly hoary specter of massive blood sacrifice, but was willing to trade a “great loss of men” in return for steadily eroding Lee’s dwindling army. Had the s
oldiers sensed that millions back home would have been morally aghast and outraged at the looming slaughter, desirous only of peace, neither Grant, nor Lincoln, nor all the statesmen on earth could have impelled the soldiers forward. In this war, however, citizens on both sides cried for no surrender.

  As Grant faced Lee at the strategic crossroads at Spotsylvania Court House, he faced two options: either flank the defenses as he had done earlier at Vicksburg and as Sherman would do so successfully against Johnston in Georgia, or attempt another frontal assault along Lee’s five miles of defensive works. He would try both, and both would fail. The assaults would come first.

  On the morning of May 8, elements of the Union Fifth Corps engaged the Confederate First Corps at Spindle Farm, along the Brock Road. The fighting lasted all day. Additional troops arrived on both sides with neither able to force their way through the other’s defenses. By nightfall, parallel fieldworks faced each other across the Brock Road. The battle of Spotsylvania Court House would grind on for two weeks from May 8 to 20. By the fifth day, Grant was farther south than ever, with no intention of letting up. At the end of six days of constant engagement, he signaled his resolve to finally defeat Lee in a famous memo to General Halleck that closed: “I am now sending back to Belle Plain all my wagons for a fresh supply of provisions and ammunition, and propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”11 In fact, it would take all summer—and more. In the process, it would lead to the most desperate fighting ever visited in the war.

  Grant and Meade believed that a massive assault on one Confederate soft spot would split the Army of Northern Virginia and win the battle. The spot selected was “the Mule Shoe,” a U-shaped salient in advance of Lee’s main line, about a mile deep and a half-mile wide. If enough concentrated force could be brought to bear on that soft middle, Grant reasoned, the seam of Lee’s army could be rent and the battle won. But it would not be easy. Confederate commanders also understood the vulnerability of their principal salient at the Mule Shoe, and battle-savvy rebel soldiers redoubled their efforts, digging even deeper entrenchments and denser abatis. They had no place to retreat; they would have to stand and fight.

  At 4:35 a.m. on May 12, the Federal Second Corps, commanded by General Winfield Scott “The Superb” Hancock, moved forward and struck the apex of the salient.12 The initial assault was a staggering success. Before Confederate artillery could be brought to bear, the enemy was already in their rear demanding surrender. In a mere thirty minutes, Hancock informed Grant that three thousand soldiers from Ewell’s “Stonewall Brigade” had been taken prisoner.

  Thinking Lee whipped, Grant’s staff burst into applause—except for Meade and Lyman, whose “own experiences taught me a little more skepticism.” Sure enough, the determined rebels hit back as John B. Gordon, sensing the fate of Lee’s entire army in the balance, re-formed a line midway down the salient between Brock Road and Harrison House.

  Gordon knew that his forces could not dig in and hold their position forever. They would have to counterattack. As soon as Lee arrived on the scene, Gordon proposed another audacious plan that Lee immediately approved. Once again Lee appeared to head his horse to lead the advance. And once again he was turned back as worshipful troops called “Go back!” “General Lee to the Rear!” At last Lee relented and Gordon turned to his electrified troops, fixing the order, “Forward! Guide-Right!”13 As the rebels yelled and the line surged, Gordon’s division, reinforced by North Carolinians, clawed and hacked their way through the mud, rain, and chill, pushing the enemy steadily back traverse by bloody traverse.

  Badly surprised and bloodied by the counterattack, Hancock’s line buckled, but it would not back down. The Federals retained a strong toehold at the northeastern tip of the Mule Shoe, and all day, infuriated soldiers fought eyeball to eyeball, each trying to overwhelm and destroy the other. Before this, relatively few battlefield casualties had come from bayonets and hand-to-hand combat. Where such encounters emerged, they had seldom lasted for more than an hour before one side or the other retreated. But in an unprecedented reach, soldiers who had already been fighting nonstop for days literally lost all respect for life—theirs or the enemy’s.

  In what would prove to be the longest sustained hand-to-hand action of the war, the soldiers clawed, bit, and stabbed at each other in a fifteen-hundred-yard killing pit known variously as the “Corner,” “the Death-angle,” or, later, the “Bloody Angle.” In that agonizingly small space, two entire corps piled in and stood facing each other at fifty yards. Large trees were cut in half, severed by musket fire coming from both sides. For twenty-three hours, from dark to dark, soldiers threw themselves at one another in a savage death dance during which communications were impossible, lines unformed, and men fighting desperately for their lives.

  All discipline broke down as the soldiers devolved into wild men. When ammunition ran dry, they threw bayonets like spears or used their rifles as clubs to beat the enemy senseless. Even the dead were reenlisted in this fight as soldiers shaped the hands of their dead and dying comrades to hold cartridges, so that as those fingers stiffened in a cupped position, they would provide ready access to the ammunition. Union Major General Lewis A. Grant described the fatal intimacy of the battle: “Many were shot and stabbed through crevices and holes between the logs; men mounted the works, and with muskets rapidly handed them kept up a continuous fire until they were shot down, when others would take their places and continue the deadly work.”14

  As afternoon passed into night, no relief arrived. Exhausted Confederate troops at the apex were ordered to hold the line “at all costs” until a new line could be entrenched at the base of the salient. Finally, at midnight, the exhausted rebel survivors fell back, wild-eyed and mad with the horror of nonstop killing. More than five thousand Confederates lay dead or wounded, alongside six thousand Yankees, many of them pressed so deep in the mud by the feet of their comrades that their features could not be discerned.

  The next day Lieutenant Colonel Lyman walked the battlefield. In a letter to his wife, he described the scene: “The bodies of friend and foe covered the ground. Some wounded men were then taken out from under three or four dead ones. One body, that lay exposed to the fire, had eighty bullets in it.”15

  Still the fighting pressed on as the warrior priests prepared for new sacrifices. The next day, both armies withdrew and re-formed their lines north of the salient along Fredericksburg Road. On May 19, Ewell assaulted Grant’s right flank but was stopped at Harris Farm by a former artillery company pressed into service as infantry under General Robert O. Tyler. The fighting was brief but intense, leaving fifteen hundred Union casualties to nine hundred Confederates. Though small by Bloody Angle standards, Harris Farm marked the end of the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House.

  CHAPTER 35

  “JUNE 3. COLD HARBOR. I WAS KILLED.”

  In the aftermath of Spotsylvania, even Grant was stunned by the carnage. By the time the two armies finally broke off on May 20, they left behind eighteen thousand Federal casualties to Lee’s ten thousand. In little over twelve days, the Army of the Potomac had lost thirty-two thousand men. Northern reporters, and not a few Democrats, branded Grant a “butcher,” and some of his own soldiers agreed. Nothing before had equaled the sheer intensity of killing. Yet even as the mounting death reports hit home, thoughtful men and women did not raise serious questions of scale and proportionality. Grief and sorrow mixed aplenty, fueling new levels of hate and fury. The bottom line was: more.

  As Northern readers groaned, Southern readers thrilled to heroic accounts of Confederate bravery. A writer for the Mobile Daily Advertiser and Register described the scene in characteristically purple prose:The battle was soon fully joined, and for nine hours it roared and hissed and dashed over the bloody angle and along the bristling entrenchments like an angry sea beating and chafing against a rock bound coast. The artillery fire was the most sustained and continuous I have ever heard for so long a time.... The rattle of musketry was
not less furious and incessant.1

  Readers of the Advertiser could exult in a battle that “roared and hissed” without ever having to reflect on the lives lost at the Bloody Angle and the blood shed obscenely on both sides.

  The religious press, no less than the secular press, filled its columns with live reports on the progress of the war. On May 19, as the battles raged, a writer for the American Presbyterian wrote: “While we write there is a lull in the fearful storm of battle raging for eight or ten consecutive days in Virginia. It is but for a moment, doubtless; and soon the strife will recommence; and a contest which is accepted as final by the rebels ... will go forward to the dire conclusion.”2 One thing had become clear to Lee and to Grant, and eventually to the entire citizenry: There would be no spending limit on this butcher’s bill.

  From the first battles, civilians on both sides knew a surprising amount about battles and generals. For Richmond’s diarist Sallie Putnam, the spring campaign proved that Lee’s army, though “barefooted, ragged, ill-fed,” was not demoralized, so that “Grant and his friends were alike astonished.” Still, she could not help but be impressed by Grant:The most striking feature in the character of this distinguished commander of the Federal army, seems to be quiet determination, and indomitable perseverance and energy. Under similar disappointment, another would have had his courage so shaken that he would gladly have foregone an undertaking that promised so little fulfillment in success. The saving of his army appeared not to have been with him an object, if by it he should lose an advantage.3