by Shelby Foote
Once more Hincks and his green black troops showed the veterans how to do the thing in style. Swarming over the cleared ground and into the red after-glory of the sunset, they pursued the grayback skirmishers through the tangled abatis, across the ditch, and up and over the breastworks just beyond. Formidable as they had been to the eye, the fortifications collapsed at a touch; no less than seven of the individual bastions fell within the hour, five of them to the jubilant Negro soldiers, who took twelve of the sixteen captured guns and better than half of the 300 prisoners. Astride and south of the railroad, the blue attackers occupied more than a mile of intrenchments, and Hincks, elated at the ease with which his men had bashed in the eastern nose of the rebel oval, wanted to continue the drive right into the streets of Petersburg, asking only that the other two divisions support him in the effort. Smith demurred. It was night now, crowding 9 o’clock, and his mind was on Lee, who was reported to have detached a considerable portion of his army for a crossing of the James that afternoon; they had probably arrived by now, in which case the Federals might be counterattacked at any moment by superior numbers of hornet-mad Confederate veterans. The thing to do, he told Hincks, was brace for the shock and prepare to hold the captured works until Hancock arrived to even or perhaps reverse the odds. Then they would see.
Hancock arrived something over an hour later; two of his three divisions, he said, were a mile behind him on the road from Prince George Courthouse. This had been a trying day for him and his dusty marchers, beginning at dawn, when he received orders to wait on Windmill Point for 60,000 rations supposedly on the way from Butler. He had no use for them, having brought his own, but he waited as ordered until 10.30 and then set out without them. That was the cause of the first delay, a matter of some five hours. The second, equally wasteful of time, was caused by an inadequate map, which misled him badly — with the result that the distance to Petersburg by the direct route, sixteen miles, was nearly doubled by the various countermarches he was obliged to make when he found that the roads on the ground ran in different directions from those inked on paper — and faulty instructions, which identified as his destination a point that later turned out to lie within the enemy lines. “I spent the best hours of the day,” he would complain in his report, “marching by an incorrect map in search of a designated position which, as described, was not in existence.”
Nor was that the worst of the oversights and errors that developed in the course of this long hot June 15, from which so much had been expected and of which some ten critical hours thus were thrown away. Approaching Prince George Courthouse about sunset, Hancock met a courier from Baldy Smith, who gave him a dispatch headed 4 p.m. and including the words: “If the II Corps can come up in time to make an assault tonight after dark, in the vicinity of Norfolk & Petersburg Railroad, I think we can be successful.” This was the first he had heard that he and his 22,000 were intended to have any part in today’s action; no one on Grant’s staff had thought to tell Meade, who could scarcely be expected to pass along orders he himself had not received. Hancock hastened his march and rode ahead to join Smith at about 10.30, two miles east of Petersburg, only to find that the Vermonter had changed his mind about a night attack. He requested, rather, that Hancock relieve Hincks’s troops — whether as a restful reward for all they had done today, or out of a continuing mistrust of their fighting qualities, he did not say — in occupation of the solid mile of rebel works they had taken when they charged into the sunset.
It was done, though Hincks continued to insist that he could march into Petersburg if his chief would only unleash and support him. Hancock rather agreed, though he declined to assume command, being unfamiliar with the ground and partly incapacitated by his Gettysburg wound, which had reopened under the strain of the fretful march. Smith — suffering too, as he said, “from the effects of bad water, and malaria brought from Cold Harbor” — was willing, even glad, to bide his time; his mind was still on all those probable grayback reinforcements coming down from Richmond in multi-thousand-man relays. The 40,000 Federals on hand would be about doubled tomorrow by the arrival of Burnside, who was over the James by now, and Warren, who had just begun to cross. Wilson and Wright would bring the total to roughly 100,000 the following morning; which would surely be enough for practically anything, Smith figured, especially since they had only to expand the gains already made today.
“Unless I misapprehend the topography,” he wired Butler before turning in at midnight, “I hold the key to Petersburg.”
Beauregard agreed that Baldy held the key. What was more, he also agreed with Hincks that the key was in the lock, that all the bluecoats had to do at this point was give the thing a turn and the gate would swing ajar. “Petersburg was clearly at the mercy of the Federal commander, who had all but captured it,” he said later, looking back on that time of strain and near despair.
He had in all, this June 15, some 5400 troops in his department: 3200 with Bushrod Johnson, corking the bottle in which Butler was confined on Bermuda Hundred, and 2200 with Brigadier General Henry A. Wise at Petersburg. The rest — Hoke’s division and the brigades of Ransom and Gracie; about 9000 in all — were beyond the James, detached to Lee or posted in the Richmond fortifications. Wise, it was true, had held his own last week in the “Battle of the Patients and the Penitents,” which turned back a similar southside thrust, but the Creole identified this recent probe by Butler as no more than “a reconnaissance connected with Grant’s future operations.” Heavier blows were being prepared by a sterner commander, and he had been doing all he could for the past five days to persuade the War Department to return the rest of his little army to him before they landed. Smith had no sooner been spotted moving in transports up the James the day before, June 14, than Beauregard redoubled his efforts, insisting, now that the crisis he had predicted was at hand, that Hoke and the others be sent without delay. Next morning — today — with Smith bearing ponderously down on him from Broadway Landing and his detached units still unreleased by Richmond, he warned Bragg that even when these were returned, as he was at last assured they would be, he probably would have to choose which of his two critical southside positions to abandon, the Howlett Line above the Appomattox or the Dimmock Line below, if he was to scrape together enough defenders to make a fight for the other. While Wise shifted his few troops into the eastern nose of the intrenchments ringing Petersburg, thus to confront the enemy approaching down the City Point Railroad, Beauregard put the case bluntly in a wire to Richmond: “We must now elect between lines of Bermuda Hundred and Petersburg. We can not hold both. Please answer at once.” Evading the question, Bragg merely replied that Hoke was on the way and should be used to the best advantage. Old Bory lost patience entirely. “I did not ask your advice with regard to the movement of troops,” he wired back, “but wished to know preference between Petersburg and lines across Bermuda Hundred Neck, for my guidance, as I fear my present force may prove unequal to hold both.”
Bragg made no reply at all to this, and while Wise and his 2200, outnumbered eight-to-one by the blue host assembling in front of their works, made enough of a false show of strength to delay through the long afternoon an assault that could scarcely fail, the Creole general fumed and fretted.
Smith’s sunset attack was about as successful as had been expected, though fortunately it was not pressed home; Hoke came up in time to assist in work on the secondary defenses, to which Wise and his survivors had fallen back when more than a mile of the main line caved in. Beauregard’s strength was now about 8000 for the close-up defense of the town, but this growth was inconsiderable in the light of information that a second Federal column, as large as the first, was approaching from Prince George Courthouse. Dawn would no doubt bring a repetition of the sunset assault, which was sure to be as crumpling since it could be made with twice the strength. Alone in the darkness, ignored by his superiors, and convinced that Wise and Hoke were about to be swamped unless they could be reinforced, the southside commander, wh
o had joined them by then from his headquarters north of the Appomattox, notified Richmond that he had decided to risk uncorking Butler so as to reinforce Petersburg, even though this was likely to mean the loss of its vital rail and telegraph connections with the capital beyond the James. “I shall order Johnson to this point,” he wired Bragg. “General Lee must look to the defenses of Drewry’s Bluff and Bermuda Hundred, if practicable.”
Notified of this development two hours past midnight, Lee reacted promptly. He had suspected from the outset that Grant would do as he had done; “I think the enemy must be preparing to move south of James River,” he warned Davis at noon on June 14, before the first blue soldier crossed to Windmill Point. Still, that did not mean that he could act on the supposition. Responsible for the security of Richmond, he had his two remaining corps disposed along a north-south line from White Oak Swamp to Malvern Hill, where he covered the direct approach to the capital twelve miles in his rear, and he could not abandon or even weaken this line until he was certain that the Federals did not intend to come this way. Information that Smith was back at Bermuda Hundred, and then that he had crossed the Appomattox for an attack on Petersburg, was no real indication of what Meade would do; Smith was only returning to the command from which he had been detached two weeks ago. Nor was the report that a corps from the Army of the Potomac was on the march beyond the James conclusive evidence of what Grant had in mind for the rest of that army. Butler had reinforced Meade for the northside strike at Lee: so might Meade be reinforcing Butler for the southside strike at Beauregard — who, in point of fact, had yet to identify or take prisoners from any unit except Smith’s; all he had really said, so far, was that he had an awesome number of bluecoats in his front, and that was by no means an unusual claim for any general to make, let alone the histrionic Creole.
However, when Lee was wakened at 2 o’clock in the morning to learn that the Howlett Line had been stripped of all but a skeleton force of skirmishers (“Cannot these lines be occupied by your troops?” Beauregard inquired. “The safety of our communications requires it”)
he no longer had any choice about what to do if he was to save the capital in his rear. A breakout by Butler, westward from Bermuda Hundred, would give the Federals control of the one railroad leading north from Petersburg, and that would have the same effect as if the three railroads leading south had been cut; Richmond would totter, for lack of food, and fall. Accordingly, Lee had Pickett’s division on the march by 3 a.m. and told Anderson to follow promptly with one of his other two divisions, Field’s, and direct the action against Butler, who almost certainly would have overrun the Howlett Line by the time he got there. Moreover, leaving instructions for A. P. Hill to continue shielding Richmond from a northside attack by Meade — whose army, even with one corps detached, was still better than twice as large as the Army of Northern Virginia, depleted by Early’s departure three days ago — Lee struck his tent at Riddell’s Shop, while it still was dark, and mounted Traveller for the headquarters shift to Chaffin’s Bluff, where Anderson’s troops would cross by a pontoon bridge to recover the critical southside works Beauregard had abandoned the night before.
Sure enough, when Lee reached Chaffin’s around 9.30 this June 16 and crossed the James behind Pickett, just ahead of Field, the nearby popping of rifles and the distant rumble of guns informed him, simultaneously, that Butler had indeed overrun the scantly manned Bermuda works, whose northern anchor was six miles downriver, and that Beauregard was fighting to hang onto Petersburg, a dozen miles to the south. Presently word came from Anderson that Butler’s uncorked troops had advanced westward to Port Walthall Junction, where they were tearing up track and digging in to prevent the movement of reinforcements beyond that point, either by rail or turnpike. Lee replied that they must be driven off, and by nightfall they were, though only as far as the abandoned Howlett Line, which they held in reverse, firing west. All this time, Beauregard’s guns had kept growling and messages from him ranged in tone from urgent to laconic, beginning with a cry for help — to which Lee replied, pointedly, that he could not strip the north bank of the James without evidence that more than one of Meade’s corps had crossed — and winding up proudly, yet rather mild withal: “We may have force sufficient to hold Petersburg.” In response to queries about Grant, whose whereabouts might indicate his intentions, Old Bory could only say at the end of the long day’s fight: “No satisfactory information yet received of Grant’s crossing James River. Hancock’s and Smith’s corps are however in our front.”
Lee already knew this last. What he did not know, because Beauregard did not know it to pass it along to him, was that Burnside had been in front of Petersburg since midmorning (in fact, his was the corps responsible for such limited gains as the Federals made today) and that Warren was arriving even then, bringing the blue total to more than 75,000, with still another 25,000 on the way. Wilson, who had served Grant well in Sheridan’s absence with the other two mounted divisions, was riding hard through the twilight from Windmill Point, and Wright would finish crossing the pontoon bridge by midnight with the final elements of Meade’s army. Beauregard, whose strength had been raised in the course of the day to just over 14,000 by the arrival of Johnson from Bermuda Hundred and Ransom and Gracie from Richmond, might find the odds he had faced yesterday and today stretched unbearably tomorrow, despite the various oversights and hitches that had disrupted the Union effort south of the James for the past two days.
In all that time, hamstrung by conflicting orders and inadequate maps — and rendered cautious, moreover, by remembrance of Cold Harbor, fought two weeks ago tomorrow — the attackers had not managed to bring their preponderance of numbers to bear in a single concerted assault on the cracked and creaking Dimmock Line. Yet Grant, for one, was not inclined to be critical at this juncture. As he prepared for bed tonight in his tent at City Point, where he had transferred his headquarters the day before, he said with a smile, sitting half undressed on the edge of his cot: “I think it is pretty well, to get across a great river and come up here and attack Lee in the rear before he is ready for us.”
So he said, and so it was; “pretty well,” indeed. But June 17, even though all of Meade’s army was over the James before it dawned and had been committed to some kind of action before it ended, turned out to be little different. Today, as yesterday, the pressure built numerically beyond what should have been the rebel breaking point — better than 80,000 opposed by fewer than 15,000 — yet was never brought decisively to bear. From the outset, things again went wrong: beginning with Warren, who came up the previous night. Instructed to extend the left beyond the Jerusalem Plank Road for a sunrise attack up that well-defined thoroughfare, he encountered skirmishers on the approach march and turned astride the Norfolk Railroad to drive them back, thus missing a chance (which neither he nor his superiors knew existed) to strike beyond the occupied portion of the Dimmock Line. If this had not happened, if Warren had brushed the skirmishers aside and continued his march as instructed, Beauregard later said, “I would have been compelled to evacuate Petersburg without much resistance.” As it was, the conflict here at the south end of the line amounted to little more than an all-day long-range demonstration.
Northward along the center, where Burnside’s and Hancock’s corps were posted, the fighting was a good deal bloodier, although not much more productive in the end. One of Burnside’s divisions started things off by seizing a critical hill, yet could not exploit the advantage because he failed to alert his other two divisions to move up quickly in support. The Confederates had time to shore up their crumbling defenses, both here and just to the north where Hancock’s three divisions were lying idle; Hancock having been obliged by his reopened wound to turn the command over to Birney — a good man, but no Hancock — they too had failed to get the word, with the result that they were about as much out of things as were Wright’s three divisions, one of which was used to bolster the fought-out Smith, inactive on the right, while the other two were
sent in response to Butler’s urgent plea for reinforcements to keep Lee from driving him back into the bottle he had popped out of yesterday. Wright went, but failed to arrive in time to do anything more than join the Bermuda Hundred soldiers in captivity. By midafternoon, Pickett and Field had retaken the Howlett Line from end to end; Butler was recorked, this time for good, and still more troops were reported to be on the march from Lee’s position east of Richmond.
If they got there, if Petersburg was heavily reinforced, the Army of the Potomac would simply have exchanged one stalemate for another, twice the distance from the rebel capital and on the far side of a major river. There still was time to avoid this, however. None of Lee’s veterans was yet across the Appomattox, and most of them were still beyond the James. With the railroad severed at Walthall Junction, even the closest were unlikely to reach the field by first light tomorrow; which left plenty of time for delivering the coördinated attack the Federals had been trying for all along, without success.
Happily, near sunset, at least a portion of the army recovered a measure of its old élan. Burnside and Birney, suddenly meshing gears, surged forward to seize another mile of works along the enemy center, together with a dozen guns and about 500 prisoners. A savage counterattack (by Gracie’s brigade, it later developed, though at the time the force had seemed considerably larger) forestalled any rapid enlargement of the breakthrough, either in width or depth. Dusk deepened into darkness, and though the moon, only two nights short of the full, soon came out to flood the landscape with its golden light, Meade — like Smith before him, two dusks ago — declined to follow through by continuing the advance. Instead, he issued orders for a mass assault to be launched all along the line at the first wink of dawn.
