The 20 Most Significant Events of the Civil War

by Alan Axelrod

  The tangled woods and undergrowth were allies for the outnumbered, outgunned Lee. Grant could not use his cavalry on this ground, and artillery was all but useless. The Confederate commander had enlisted nature itself to even the long odds against him as the fighting began on May 5. Grant turned over the tactical management of the battle to Meade. It was behavior typical of a humble and selfless commander. Noble—but, in this case, a mistake. The conventionally competent Meade was thoroughly out-generaled by Lee. Not that fighting in the Wilderness was easy for the Army of Northern Virginia. Confusion, in fact, gripped both sides, and while the combat on May 5 was horrific, it was also non-decisive, necessitating another day of battle.

  On May 6, Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet led his corps in an envelopment of Meade’s inadequately deployed troops. In a brilliant move, Longstreet drove one flank of the Army of the Potomac into the other, creating a potentially catastrophic situation that prompted Grant to belatedly usurp Meade’s command prerogative by ordering him to make a fighting retreat. Nothing, not even the commencement of an attack, is more intense and desperate than a fighting withdrawal. In this case, the musket fire was so fierce that the surrounding woods and brush soon caught flame. Within a short time, entire tracts of the Wilderness were engulfed, and it is believed that as many as two hundred men, both Confederate and Union, either perished in the flames or were asphyxiated by smoke during the hellish night of May 7–8.

  The butcher’s bill for two days of battle was 17,666 killed, wounded, captured, or missing out of an engaged force of 101,895 soldiers in the Army of the Potomac—a 17 percent casualty rate that included the deaths of two generals, the wounding of two more, and the capture of another two. Less accurately recorded were Confederate losses, but it is estimated that out of 61,025 troops engaged, 11,125 were killed, wounded, missing, or captured. It was an 18 percent casualty rate, and it included three generals killed and four (among them Longstreet) wounded.

  Grant, having lost more men than Lee, was forced to disengage from the battle. In this sense, he suffered defeat. But, in proportion to the number of men fielded, Lee fared even worse, yet he held his ground. It was not the way Grant wanted to begin his grand offensive. But it was also true that he could afford to lose men whereas Lee certainly could not. In any case, whether he should be judged defeated or marginally victorious, Grant behaved nothing like a beaten general. Instead of withdrawing, he advanced. Having disengaged from Lee, he side-stepped the position held by the Army of Northern Virginia and continued south to a courthouse at a Virginia crossroads town called Spotsylvania Court House. One of the roads crossing here led straight to Richmond. Far from avoiding further battle, Grant invited it—for all practical purposes demanded it. Win, lose, or draw, he intended to kill more of Lee’s army.

  For his part, Lee saw that his men were in high spirits. For all the blood they had shed, they felt that they had won—as, by the raw numbers, they had. Anticipating Grant’s destination, Lee drove his army to beat him in Spotsylvania. Elements of Jeb Stuart’s Confederate cavalry and I Corps commanded by Richard H. Anderson (substituting for Longstreet, who was recovering from his wounds) clashed with the Army of the Potomac’s V Corps under Major General Gouverneur K. Warren on May 8. The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House began as a skirmish, but Lee intended to fight on this spot the showdown battle of the Civil War. His aim was to exact a toll on Grant so terrible that the Northern electorate would not return Lincoln to the White House in the General Election of November 1864. His Democratic opponent—most believed it would be none other than George B. McClellan—would favor an immediate negotiated end to the war. That was the best the Confederacy could hope for, and, as Lee saw it, it was worth spilling blood for now.

  A determined Lee initiated some of the most desperate fighting in a war that had been far more desperate than anyone could have imagined. He saw this engagement as quite possibly the last chance for the Confederacy. As for Grant, he deliberately avoided the behavior of a conventional commander. Instead of taking a stand or withdrawing, he did what virtually no commander would do under heavy attack. He maneuvered, repeatedly shifting his main line to his own left while continually counterpunching Lee, continually probing for a weak spot in the enemy flank. Lee was having none of it. Observing the action closely, he was always able to cover any portion of his flank that became exposed. His troops worked furiously to dig out of the Virginia clay a hasty defense. In some places, this consisted of shallow but serviceable trenches. In others, it was no more than a collection of holes, each dug by an individual soldier for his own protection. Elsewhere, a few men scraped out rifle pits, larger “firing holes” capable of accommodating several men. From their cover, crude as it might be, the Confederates took a terrible toll—yet Grant continued to sidestep, each time threatening to come around on Lee’s exposed flank. And, each time, Lee was forced to extend an already undermanned defensive line. This meant more digging and more exhausting labor, while also spreading the entire line thinner and thinner.

  The old rules of warfare, the Napoleonic rules, the rules taught at West Point by men like Old Brains Halleck dictated that whichever side could concentrate the most fire on the enemy would prevail. These old rules called for taking a stand and firing on the enemy until the enemy gave up. Grant broke those rules by combining attack with maneuver. He refused to simply mass against some particular point in Lee’s line. Instead, he attacked and then sidestepped, threatening Lee’s flank and thereby forcing him to keep extending his line, which thereby became thinner. Who would lose? The general whose line was the first to snap.

  Grant needed to find an edge in this blood-soaked contest of endurance. He had earlier pressured Meade into installing Philip Sheridan to command the Cavalry Corps of the Army of the Potomac; however, Meade and Sheridan immediately came into conflict over the proper role of the cavalry. Sheridan wanted to use it offensively, as a means of conducting hit-and-run raids, whereas the conservative Meade insisted on reserving the cavalry mainly for traditional reconnaissance missions. Now locked in desperate combat at Spotsylvania Court House, Grant threw his weight behind Sheridan’s proposal to lead the 10,000-man Cavalry Corps in a breakout toward Richmond. When Meade objected, Grant simply overruled him. Stuart’s cavalry consisted of 4,500 troopers versus Sheridan’s 10,000. Grant believed that menacing Richmond would force the outnumbered Stuart to fight and to lose. When Stuart was beaten, a gap would open up in the lines around Richmond, and then Lee would have no choice but to break off the battle at Spotsylvania Court House, withdraw closer to the capital, and thereby allow an additional Union advance.

  Sheridan considered the size of the Army of the Potomac Cavalry Corps to be a great asset, but he soon discovered that it was also a liability, since it made it impossible for him to mask its movement from Jeb Stuart’s prying eyes. Seeing the approach—riding four abreast, the Union cavalry column extended about thirteen miles—Stuart decided to ambush Sheridan at Yellow Tavern, an abandoned inn six miles north of Richmond. He deployed his troopers in strong defensive positions, and he motivated them by explaining that they—and they alone—were all that stood between Grant and the capital city of their Confederacy.

  Sheridan’s men rode into the trap—though it was sprung only on the leading edge of the Union column. The Battle of Yellow Tavern (May 11, 1864) raged for three hours before Sheridan pulled back, but not before one of his troopers shot Jeb Stuart, who died two days later. As with the loss of Stonewall Jackson to friendly fire at the Battle of Chancellorsville a year earlier (wounded on May 2, he died on May 10, 1863), the death of Stuart was a blow from which there could be no recovery. Like Jackson, Stuart was irreplaceable.

  In the meantime, Grant repeatedly struck at Lee’s flank, only to be repulsed each time. At last, however, he was convinced he had found a vulnerability. He ordered Major General Winfield Scott Hancock and 20,000 men to engage Ewell’s Corps. The Confederate general had deployed his line in a salient—entrenchments bul
ging toward the Union lines in a pattern that gave the rebels a 180-degree field of fire. To Hancock’s men, it resembled an upside-down “U,” which they called Mule Shoe. By the end of May 12, Mule Shoe would acquire a new name: Bloody Angle.

  Hancock was one of the most admired officers in the Union army. At Gettysburg, he was among the most aggressive commanders, and, as Grant expected him to do on May 12, he pushed everything he had against Mule Shoe. Beginning well before dawn, at 4:30 in the morning, Hancock began punching through Ewell’s line, breaching several places by five. Ewell, however, was not one given to panic. He sent every man he could to plug the breaches and, before noon, had managed to halt Hancock’s advance.

  At this point, the manner of the fighting changed. It was no longer something out of the industrial mid-nineteenth century—massed musket fire. It was primitive, hand-to-hand, the men fighting with fists or, grasping their muskets by the barrel, using the butt as a club. Grant’s own aide-de-camp, Horace Porter, reported seeing “opposing flags … thrust against each other, and muskets … fired with muzzle against muzzle.” He spoke of men ramming their swords and their bayonets “between the logs in the parapet which separated the combatants” blindly stabbing at the enemy. By day’s end, a torrential rain began, but the fighting continued. Even darkness, which usually brought an intermission in battle, did not stop what Porter called “the fierce contest, and the deadly strife did not cease till after midnight.”

  Lee saw the Bloody Angle as the battle’s crisis and, ignoring the entreaties of his officers and men, rode down to it, intending to command its defense in person. The men at the front threatened to mutiny if Lee, so important to them, refused to withdraw. At length, he did. Inspired nevertheless, his soldiers finally managed to beat back Hancock’s assault, and thus the action at the Bloody Angle came to an end.

  The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House would not end until nine days later—and then inconclusively. As before, Grant refused to withdraw. As before, he would side-slip his men and edged them closer to Richmond. On May 11, he telegraphed the War Department in Washington that he had suffered heavy losses. Eventually, these would be tallied as 18,399 killed, wounded, captured, or missing—a casualty rate of nearly 18 percent. In raw numbers, Confederate losses were 12,687 killed, wounded, captured, or missing. But this was out of a strength half that of the Army of the Potomac and amounted to a casualty rate of 23 percent. Grant concluded his telegram by declaring, “I … propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer.”

  His next major move came on May 31. Mindful of what it had cost when Lee beat him to the crossroads at Spotsylvania Court House, he was determined to reach the next crossroads, Cold Harbor, before him. Because it was a mere half-dozen miles northeast of Richmond, Grant was certain Lee would do battle here. Yet again, however, Lee outguessed his opponent. When Grant arrived at Cold Harbor, Lee was waiting for him. The battle commenced on May 31, reached its height on June 2, and then petered out through June 12. This time, it ended in a frank defeat for the Army of the Potomac, which suffered nearly 13,000 casualties (killed, wounded, captured, or missing) to about 5,300 for the Army of Northern Virginia. Grant responded to this truly terrible defeat by continuing his advance despite a renewed public outcry in the North for his removal. Under his command in the Overland Campaign, 50,000 Union soldiers had been killed, wounded, captured, or had simply gone missing. This was 41 percent of the force (continually replenished) with which he had begun the campaign. Lincoln agreed with the public, including those who called for Grant’s dismissal. These losses were indeed unthinkable. But then he pointed out that the losses among the Army of Northern Virginia amounted to 46 percent. The Army of the Potomac could be restored to its full strength. The Army of Northern Virginia could not. Robert E. Lee was losing the war.

  And so Grant once again slipped his army out of Cold Harbor, doing so this time by night, and crossing the Chickahominy. Lee watched. Lee knew what it meant. Grant was continuing on to Richmond. The Confederate commander realized that, short of surrender, he had no choice but to fight again. He did not believe Grant would ever quit. His only hope was that the people of the North would elect a new president, come November, who would quit—right out from under their general. But, right now, under Lincoln, Grant would not turn back. He would fight again. There was no question about that, Lee knew. The only question Lee must have asked himself was whether the Army of Northern Virginia could possibly last to November.

  14

  April 6–7, 1862

  Shiloh Creates a New American Reality

  Why it’s significant. When it occurred Shiloh (April 6–7, 1862) was the biggest and bloodiest battle ever fought on the North American continent. It was an early tipping point of the Civil War, convincing generals, politicians, and people, both North and South, that only a total victory would end the conflict—a total victory that would take many more months, maybe years, and would consume who knew how many more lives. Before Shiloh, the conflict that began with the firing on Fort Sumter, on April 12, 1861, had been an insurrection. Shiloh transformed it into total war between two peoples of one divided nation.

  IN AMERICA IN the middle of the nineteenth century, disunity was the dominant theme. Yet, even as the divided nation was fighting a civil war, the North and the South could agree on at least one thing—the greatness of William Shakespeare. By 1810, scores of permanent theater companies, all offering Shakespeare and some specializing in the Bard, were thriving from Boston to the Gulf of Mexico and from the eastern seaboard to the Ohio River. By mid-century, the permanent companies had reached the Pacific Coast, and those communities in between New York and San Francisco—farming towns, trading posts, mining camps—not yet served by their own company, welcomed regular visits by traveling Shakespeare companies, both domestic and British.

  One of the most popular plays in Civil War-era America was also the bloodiest—Macbeth. The title character begins as the most loyal servant of his king, Duncan, but by Act 3, Scene 4, having done the unimaginable, having killed his monarch and others, too, Macbeth explains to his wife:

  I am in blood

  Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,

  Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

  Having killed and killed again, Macbeth discovers that he has become a confirmed assassin and murderer, a self-identity he could never before have imagined. The two sides in the Civil War experienced a similar self-revelation on April 7, 1862, at the end of a battle fought on a wooded patch of southwestern Tennessee adjacent to a tiny Methodist chapel named Shiloh. The lovely name came from the Hebrew of the Old Testament’s Book of Joshua, in which Shiloh appears as the town in Samara that built a sanctuary to shelter the Ark of the Covenant. Modern biblical scholars disagree on how to translate this name. Some have suggested “Tranquility Town,” others “Place of Peace.” In the course of twelve hours, of the roughly 100,000 men who fought in the vicinity of Shiloh’s Tennessee namesake, nearly one in four, just under 24,000, were killed, wounded, went missing, or were made prisoners of war. Place of Peace? This Battle of Shiloh was the bloodiest in all American history up to that day.

  No one imagined such a thing would or even could ever happen in the United States. Even Union commander Ulysses S. Grant wrote in his Private Memoirs, published days after his death in 1885, “Up to the battle of Shiloh, I, as well as thousands of other citizens, believed the rebellion against the Government would collapse suddenly and soon, if a decisive victory could be gained over any of its armies.” Grant noted that, prior to Shiloh, he had captured the key Confederate strongholds of Forts Donelson and Henry, and that a Confederate “army of more than 21,000 men was captured or destroyed” as a result. “Bowling Green, Columbus and Hickman, Kentucky, fell in consequence, and Clarksville and Nashville, Tennessee, the last two with an immense amount of stores, also fell into our hands. The Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, from their mouths to the head of navigation, were secured.” It seemed impossible that the
South would or even could continue to prosecute the war, but because the soldiers of the Confederacy at Shiloh “made such a gallant effort to regain what had been lost,” Grant wrote, he was forced to give “up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.”

  Some historians identify the Battle of Shiloh as the first turning point of the Civil War. But it was less a turning point—the result of one side’s victory and the other’s defeat—than it was a tipping point. The murderous product of this battle fought in an obscure patch of woods did not chasten the two sides, did not compel them to heed what Abraham Lincoln had called, in his first inaugural address, “the better angels of our nature.” No, it committed both sides to redouble their mutual blood sacrifice. It committed both to a fight to the death.

  Shiloh would not long hold the record for American bloodshed. Americans on both sides now believed they were “in blood / Stepped in so far” that they could not turn back. Total, brutal, annihilating war became an article of national political and military policy. As Grant noted in his Personal Memoirs, before Shiloh, “it had been the policy of our army … to protect the property of the citizens whose territory was invaded, without regard to their sentiments, whether Union or Secession.” After Shiloh, it became Grant’s policy to “protect the persons of those found at their homes, but to consume everything that could be used to support or supply armies.” Shiloh was the tipping point at which a military action to suppress a sectional insurrection became an all-consuming war.