by Shelby Foote
Back in Richmond, although fighting had raged even closer to the city throughout five of the Seven Days, two years ago, citizens had been jolted awake that morning by the loudest firing they had ever heard. Windows rattled with the coming of dawn and kept on rattling past midday, one apprehensive listener declared, “as if whole divisions were firing at a word of command.”
No one could say, at that range, who was getting the worst and who the best of it. Before noon, as a result, distinguished visitors began arriving at Lee’s headquarters in search of firsthand information. Among them was Postmaster General John H. Reagan, who brought two lawyer friends along to help find out how the battle was going. Lee told them it was going well, up to now at least, and when they wondered if the artillery wasn’t unusually active here today, the general said it was, but he added, with a gesture toward the contending lines, where the drumfire of a hundred thousand rifles sounded to Reagan like the tearing of a sheet: “It is that that kills men.”
What reserves did he have on hand, they asked, in case Grant managed a breakthrough at some point along his front?
“Not a regiment,” Lee replied, “and that has been my condition ever since the fighting commenced on the Rappahannock. If I shorten my lines to provide a reserve, he will turn me. If I weaken my lines to provide a reserve, he will break them.”
Thinking this over, the three civilians decided it was time to leave, and in the course of their ride back to the capital they met the President coming out. Today was his fifty-sixth birthday. He had spent the morning, despite the magnetic clatter of the batteries at Cold Harbor, with his three children and his wife, who was soon to be delivered of their sixth; but after lunch, unable any longer to resist the pull of guns that had been roaring for nine hours, he called for his horse and set out on the nine-mile ride to army headquarters. There he found the situation much as it had been described in a 1 o’clock dispatch (“So far every attack has been repulsed,” Lee wired) except that by now the Federals had abandoned all pretense of resuming the assault. The staff atmosphere, there in the clearing above Gaines Mill, was one of elation over a victory in the making, if not in fact over one already achieved. Returning to Richmond soon after dark, Davis was pleased to read a message Seddon had just received from Lee in summary of the daylong battle, which now had ended with his army intact and Grant’s considerably diminished. “Our loss today has been small,” the general wrote, “and our success, under the blessing of God, all that we could expect.”
Beyond the lines where Lee’s men rested from their exertions, and beyond the intervening space where the dead had begun to spoil in the heat and the wounded cried for help that did not come, the repulsed survivors brooded on the outcome of a solid month of fighting. This was the thirtieth day since the two armies first made contact in the Wilderness, and Union losses were swelling toward an average of 2000 men a day. Some days it was less, some days more, and some days — this one, for example — it was far more, usually as the result of a high-level miscalculation or downright blunder. Even Grant was infected by the gloom into which his troops were plunged by today’s addition to the list of headlong tactical failures. “I regret this assault more than any one I ever ordered,” he told his staff that evening. Uncharacteristic as it was, the remark made for a certain awkwardness in the group, as if he had sought to relieve his anguish with a scream. “Subsequently the matter was seldom referred to in a conversation,” a junior staffer was to state.
Others were less reticent. “I think Grant has had his eyes opened,” Meade wrote home, not without a measure of grim satisfaction, “and is willing to admit now that Virginia and Lee’s army is not Tennessee and Bragg’s army.”
According to some observers, such an admission was a necessity if the campaign was to continue. James Wilson, riding over for a visit, found that several members of Grant’s official family, including Rawlins, “feared that the policy of direct and continuous attack, if persisted in, would ultimately so decimate and discourage the rank and file that they could not be induced to face the enemy at all. Certain it is,” the cavalryman added, “that the ‘smash-’em-up’ policy was abandoned about that time and was never again favored at headquarters.” This would indeed be welcome news, if it was true, but just now the army was in no shape to take much note of anything except its weariness and depletion. A line colonel, stunned and grimy from not having had a full night’s sleep or a change of clothes since May 5, found himself in no condition to write more than a few bleak lines in a family letter. “I can only tell my wife I am alive and well,” he said; “I am too stupid for any use.”
In the past month the Army of the Potomac, under Grant, had lost no less than half as many men as it had lost in the previous three years under McDowell, McClellan, Pope, Burnside, Hooker, and Meade on his own. Death had become a commonplace, though learning to live with it produced a cumulative strain. High-strung Gouverneur Warren, whose four bled-down divisions had fewer troops in them by now than Wright’s or Hancock’s three, broke out tonight in sudden expostulation to a friend: “For thirty days it has been one funeral procession past me, and it has been too much!” Criticism was mounting, not only against Grant, who had planned — or, strictly speaking, failed to plan — today’s attack, but also against those immediately below him on the military ladder. “I am disgusted with the generalship displayed,” young Emory Upton wrote his sister on the morning after the battle. “Our men have, in many cases, been foolishly and wantonly slaughtered.” Next day, continuing the letter, he went further in fixing the blame. “Our loss was very heavy, and to no purpose.… Some of our corps commanders are not fit to be corporals. Lazy and indolent, they will not even ride along their lines; yet, without hesitancy, they will order us to attack the enemy, no matter what their position or numbers. Twenty thousand of our killed and wounded should today be in our ranks.”
Horror was added to bitterness by the suffering of the wounded, still trapped between the lines, and the pervasive stench of the dead, still unburied after two sultry nights and the better part of a third day under the fierce June sun. “A deserter says Grant intends to stink Lee out of his position, if nothing else will suffice,” a Richmond diarist noted, but a Federal staff colonel had a different explanation: “An impression prevails in the popular mind, and with some reason perhaps, that a commander who sends a flag of truce asking permission to bury his dead and bring in his wounded has lost the field of battle. Hence the resistance upon our part to ask a flag of truce.”
No more willing to give that impression here in Virginia than he had been a year ago in Mississippi, following the repulse of his two assaults on the Vicksburg fortifications, the Union general held off doing anything to relieve either the stench or the drawn-out agony of his fallen soldiers until the afternoon of June 5, and even then he could not bring himself to make a forthright request for the necessary Confederate acquiescence. “It is reported to me,” he then wrote Lee, “that there are wounded men, probably of both armies, now lying exposed and suffering between the lines.” His suggestion was that each side be permitted to send out unarmed litter bearers to take up its casualties when no action was in progress, and he closed by saying that “any other method equally fair to both parties you may propose for meeting the end desired will be accepted by me.” But Lee, who had no wounded out there, was not letting his adversary off that easy. “I fear that such an arrangement will lead to misunderstanding and difficulty,” he replied. “I propose therefore, instead, that when either party desires to remove their dead or wounded a flag of truce be sent, as is customary. It will always afford me pleasure to comply with such a request as far as circumstances will permit.”
Thus admonished, Grant took another night to think the matter over — a night in which the cries of the injured, who now had been three days without water or relief from pain, sank to a mewling — and tried a somewhat different tack, as if he were yielding, not without magnanimity, to an urgent plea from a disadvantaged opponent. “Your commun
ication of yesterday is received,” he wrote. “I will send immediately, as you propose, to collect the dead and wounded between the lines of the two armies, and will also instruct that you be allowed to do the same.” Not so, Lee answered for a second time, and after expressing “regret to find that I did not make myself understood in my communication,” proceeded to make it clear that if what Grant wanted was a cease-fire he would have to come right out and ask for it, not informally, as between two men with a common problem, but “by a flag of truce in the usual way.” Grant put on as good a face as he could manage in winding up this curious exchange. “The knowledge that wounded men are now suffering from want of attention,” he responded, “compels me to ask a suspension of hostilities for sufficient time to collect them in; say two hours.”
By the time Lee’s formal consent came back across the lines, however, the sun was down on the fourth day of exposure for the wounded and even the mewling had reached an end. Going out next morning, June 7, search parties found only two men alive out of all the Federal thousands who had fallen in the June 3 assault; the rest had either died or made it back under fire, alone or retrieved by comrades in the darkness. At the end of the truce — which had to be extended to give the burial details time to roll up the long blue carpet of festering corpses — Grant fired a parting verbal shot in concluding his white-flag skirmish with Lee: “Regretting that all my efforts for alleviating the sufferings of wounded men left upon the battlefield have been rendered nugatory, I remain, &c., U. S. Grant, Lieutenant General.”
Lee made no reply to this, no doubt feeling that none was called for, and not even the northern commander’s own troops were taken in by a blame-shifting pretense which did little more than show their chief at his worst. They could discount the Copperhead charge that he was a butcher, “a bull-headed Suvarov,” since his methods so far had at least kept the rebels on the defensive while his own army moved forward more than sixty air-line miles. But this was something else, this sacrifice of brave men for no apparent purpose except to salve his rankled pride. Worst of all, they saw in the agony of their comrades, left to die amid the corpses on a field already lost, a preview of much agony to come, when they themselves would be left to whimper through days of pain while their leader composed notes in defense of conduct which, so far as they could see, had been indefensible from the start.
There was that, and there was the heat and thirst, the burning sun, the crowded trenches, and always the snipers, deadly at close range. “I hated sharpshooters, both Confederate and Union,” a blue artillerist would recall, “and I was always glad to see them killed.” Because of them, rations and ammunition had to be lugged forward along shallow parallels that followed a roundabout zigzag course and wore a man down to feeling like some unholy cross between a pack mule and a snake. “In some instances,” another observer wrote, “where regiments whose terms of service had expired were ordered home, they had to leave the field crawling on hands and knees through trenches to the rear.” That was a crowning indignity, that a man had to crouch to leave the war, at a time when he wanted to crow and shout, and that even then he might be killed on his way out. Devoured by lice and redbugs, which held carnival in the filthy rags they wore for clothes and burrowed into flesh that had not been washed for more than a month, the men turned snappish, not only among themselves but toward their officers as well. Tempers flared as the conviction grew that they were doing no earthly good in their present position, yet they saw no way to change it without abandoning their drive on Richmond, a scant ten miles away. At a cost of more than 50,000 casualties, Grant had landed them in coffin corner — and it did not help to recall, as a few surviving veterans could do, that McClellan had attained more or less the same position, two years ago, at practically no cost at all.
One who could remember that was Meade, the “damned old goggle-eyed snapping turtle” who had contributed a minor miracle to the campaign by holding onto his famous hair-trigger temper through a month of tribulations and frustrations. But now, in the wake of Cold Harbor, he lost it: lost it, moreover, in much the spectacular manner which those who knew him best had been expecting all along.
Baldy Smith was the first to see it coming. Two days after the triple-pronged assault was shattered, and with thousands of his soldiers lying dead or dying in front of his works, Meade paid Smith a routine visit, in the course of which the Vermonter asked him bluntly how he “came to give such an order for battle as that of the 2d.” According to Baldy, Meade’s reply was “that he had worked out every plan for every move from the crossing of the Rapidan onward, that the papers were full of the doings of Grant’s army, and that he was tired of it and was determined to let General Grant plan his own battles.” The result, once Grant had been left to his own devices, was the compounded misery out there between the lines. Smith saw from this reaction what was coming of the buildup of resentment, and two days later it came.
While the burial details were at work out front at last, Meade glanced through a hometown newspaper, a five-day-old copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and his eye was caught by a paragraph that referred to him as being “entitled to great credit for the magnificent movements of the army since we left Brandy, for they have been directed by him. In battle he puts troops in action and controls their movements; in a word, he commands the army. General Grant is here only because he deems the present campaign the vital one of the war, and wishes to decide on the spot all questions that would be referred to him as general-in-chief.” This was gratifying enough, but then the Pennsylvanian moved on to the following paragraph, the one that brought on the foreseen explosion. “History will record, but newspapers cannot, that on one eventful night during the present campaign Grant’s presence saved the army, and the nation too; not that General Meade was on the point of committing a blunder unwittingly, but his devotion to his country made him loth to risk her last army on what he deemed a chance. Grant assumed the responsibility, and we are still on to Richmond.”
Meade reacted fast. Though the piece was unsigned, he had the Inquirer correspondent — one Edward Crapsey — brought to his tent, confronted him with the article, and when the reporter admitted that he had written it, demanded to know the source of his remarks. Crapsey rather lamely cited “the talk of the camp,” to the effect that after the second day of battle in the Wilderness, with both flanks turned and his center battered, only Grant had wanted to keep moving south. Enraged by the repetition of this “base and wicked lie,” Meade placed the offender in arrest and had his adjutant draw up a general order directing that he “be put without the lines [of the army] and not permitted to return.” The provost marshal was charged with the execution of the order next morning, June 8, and he carried it out in style. Wearing on his breast and back large placards lettered LIBELER OF THE PRESS, Crapsey was mounted face-rearward on a mule and paraded through the camps to the accompaniment of the “Rogue’s March,” after which he was less ceremoniously expelled. “The commanding general trusts that this example will deter others from committing like offenses,” Meade’s order read, “and he takes this occasion to notify the representatives of the public press that … he will not hesitate to punish with the utmost rigor all [such] instances.”
Whatever he might have “trusted,” the outcome was that Meade now had two wars on his hands, one with the rebels in his front, the other with “the representatives of the public press” in his immediate rear. Making his way to Washington, Crapsey recounted his woes to newspaper friends, who were unanimous in condemning the general for thus “wreaking his personal vengeance on an obscure friendless civilian.” What was more, their publishers backed them up; Meade, one said, was “as leprous with moral cowardice as the brute that kicks a helpless cripple on the street, or beats his wife at home.” By way of retaliation for what they called “this elaborate insult,” they agreed that his name would never be mentioned in dispatches except in connection with a defeat, and they held to this for the next six months or more, with the result that another
casualty was added to the long Cold Harbor list, a victim of journalistic strangulation.
Eleven months ago, the Gettysburg victor had been seen as a sure winner in some future presidential election; but not now. Now and for the rest of the year, a reporter noted privately, “Meade was quite as much unknown, by any correspondence from the army, as any dead hero of antiquity.”
* * *
Meade had his woes, but so it seemed did everyone around him, high or low, in the wake of a battle whose decisive action was over in eight holocaustic minutes. Not only had it been lost, and quickly lost; it had been lost, the losers now perceived, before it began. Despite the distraction of wounds that smarted all the more from having been self-inflicted, so to speak, this made for a certain amount of bitter introspection at all levels, including the top. A colonel on Lee’s staff, coupling quotes from Grant and Hamlet — admittedly an improbable combination — remarked that the Union commander’s resolution “to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer” seemed, at this stage, to be “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
It was in fact, all quips aside, a time for taking stock. Beyond the knowledge that attrition was a knife that cut both ways, Grant had accepted from the outset, as a condition of the tournament, the probability that the knife would slice deeper into the ranks of the attacker; but how much deeper he hadn’t known, till now. For twenty-nine days he had been losing about two men to Lee’s one, and if this was hard, it was at any rate in proportion to the size of the two armies. Then came the thirtieth day, Cold Harbor, and his loss was five to one, a figure made even more doleful by the prospect that future losses were likely to be as painfully disproportionate if he tried the same thing again in this same region. Lodged as he was in coffin corner, it was no wonder if the cast of his thought was sicklied o’er, along with the thoughts of those around him, staff or line; Rawlins and Upton, for example. Moreover, the effect of that month of losses was cumulative, like the expenses of a spender on a spree, and during the lull which now ensued the bill came due. Halleck sent him what amounted to a declaration of bankruptcy, or in any case a warning that his credit was about to be cut off. On June 7, while the burial details were at work and Meade was berating Crapsey in his tent, Old Brains served notice from Washington that the bottom of the manpower barrel was in sight: “I inclose a list of troops forwarded from this department to the Army of the Potomac since the campaign opened — 48,265 men. I shall send you a few regiments more, when all resources will be exhausted till another draft is made.”
