[Doug64]

April 24, Sunday

The “small war” continues with still more skirmishing near Camden, Arkansas; an affair near Decatur, Alabama; near Middletown, Virginia; Pineville, Louisiana; and a Federal scout from Ringgold to La Fayette, Georgia.

[Doug64]

April 25, Monday

Fresh disaster strikes General Steele at Camden, Arkansas, when his entire wagon train, on its way to Pine Bluff for supplies, is captured by 2,500 Confederate cavalrymen after a savage five-hour fight at Mark’s Mills. The Union escort had numbered about 1,600 men, and at least 1,300 of them are killed, wounded, or captured.

Also in Arkansas the fighting goes on, with action in Moro Bottom. Troops skirmish at Cotile Landing, Louisiana, on the Red River, as Federals begin arriving at Alexandria in their retreat. Most of the gunboats are already near Alexandria. Otherwise there is a skirmish near Natchez, Mississippi, and a Federal expedition of three days from Bull’s Gap to Watauga River, Tennessee.

Confederate Major General Robert Ransom is assigned to command the Department of Richmond, Virginia.

[Doug64]

April 26, Tuesday

In the crisis at Camden, Arkansas, General Steele decides to return to Little Rock. General Banks has confirmed that the campaign has failed. To march south now is pointless; to linger at Camden means starvation or capture. Today Steele’s much-reduced army crosses the Ouachita River and starts north. Tomorrow the Confederates will re-enter the town.

Federal troops in North Carolina begin to evacuate Washington, following the fall of Plymouth. The move will take four days. Skirmishing about Alexandria, Louisiana, lasts almost a month as Federal troops from the Red River expedition continue to arrive. The persistent Taylor moves his Confederate troops close to the town, forcing Banks to establish two rings of defense to protect his men and the fleet, which is in great peril. The Red River is lower than ever, and there is no telling how long it will be before the river rises. Those vessels still above Alexandria suffer considerable damage in a running engagement with onshore Confederates. There is an engagement of two days at the junction of the Cane and Red rivers, part of the campaign. Skirmishes also flare at Bayou Rapides Bridge near McNutt’s Hill, and at Deloach’s Bluff, Louisiana.

Elsewhere, there is an affair at Winchester, Virginia; skirmishing in Wayne County, Missouri; at Berwick, Louisiana; and near Little Rock, Arkansas. A Federal expedition operates until May 6th from Jacksonville to Lake Monroe, Florida.

The Union faces a potentially disastrous manpower problem this year. This is the year of discharges: Those men who patriotically enlisted for a term of three years after Fort Sumter—and who, as Sherman puts it, have been through “the dearest school on earth”—will soon be entitled to go home. Almost half of the North’s fighting force is eligible, including many of the crack regiments in the Army of the Potomac. The Federal government goes all out to inspire reenlistments. It offers each man who signs up again a thirty-day furlough and $400 (2022 ~$7,000), to be supplemented by whatever bounty the man’s state comes up with. The cash, as one veteran concludes, “seemed to be about the right amount for spending money while on a furlough.” Pride and peer pressure also come into play. A man who chooses to reenlist can wear a stripe on his sleeve as evidence that he has been in the fight from the start and is now serving of his own free will. If at least three quarters of a regiment reenlist, the regiment—after home leave—will remain intact, retaining its name and its colors. If not, the individuals who reeinlist will be scattered among outfits strange to them. Regimental officers, faced with the possibility of losing their commands, politick shamelessly among their men. The temptation to let others take up the cause is strong, but in the end more than half of those eligible for discharge choose to fight on—swayed by the bounty, the prospect of a long furlough, and by the stubborn feeling that they shouldn’t walk away from a job unfinished.

Those who reeinlist are joined by fresh volunteers, draftees, and hired substitutes. The tent city north of the Rapidan is burgeoning. Infantry, artillery, and cavalry drill relentlessly under Grant’s silent gaze, and a grudging respect for the general from the West grows among the men of the Army of the Potomac. Grant reciprocates the respect. Today he writes, “The Army of the Potomac is in splendid condition and evidently feels like whipping somebody. I feel much better with this command than I did before seeing it.”

[Doug64]

April 27, Wednesday

President Davis instructs Jacob Thompson to proceed at once to Canada as a special commissioner and a few days later asks C.C. Clay, Jr., to join him. While not officially spelled out, the mission is apparently to see what help can be obtained and to communicate with certain parties in the United States as to a possible peace or truce.

In the fighting there is a skirmish near Decatur, Alabama; a Confederate attack on Taylor’s Ridge near Ringgold, Georgia; skirmishing at Troublesome Creek, Kentucky; an affair at Masonborough Inlet, North Carolina; skirmishing at Dayton, Missouri; and an expedition until the 29th by Federals from Williamsburg, Virginia.

The Maryland Constitutional Convention meets at Annapolis; sessions will last until September 6th.

[Doug64]

April 28, Thursday

A minor bombardment of Fort Sumter lasts seven days, during which 510 rounds are fired by Federals. The fighting is listed as skirmishing at Princeton, Arkansas; in Johnson County, Missouri; and Big Bend of Eel River, California; a Federal reconnaissance to Madison Court House, Virginia; and a Union scout from Vienna toward Upperville, Virginia. Price’s Confederates at Camden, Arkansas, begin their pursuit of General Steele’s retreating army. Both armies move quickly despite pouring rain and muddy roads.

Major General Cadwallader C. Washburn, commander of the District of West Tennessee, has a new chief of cavalry, Brigadier General Samuel D. Sturgis. Washburn is a general with lofty Washington connections—including his brother Elihu, Grant’s congressional guardian angel—but showed aggressiveness at Vicksburg and because of that was appointed to his current post within a week of the Fort Pillow massacre; Sherman hopes that he will do better at keeping General Forrest out of the region. General Sturgis has been sent to him to encourage that aggressiveness. Seasoned by combat in Missouri as well as in Virginia, Sturgis graduated from West Point alongside Stonewall Jackson and George McClellan. That he is more akin militarily to the former than the latter is demonstrated by the manner in which he takes hold on arrival at Memphis. Forrest is returning to north Mississippi from his raid to the Ohio; Sturgis pursues him as far as Ripley, 75 miles southeast of Memphis, before turning back for lack of subsistence for his 6,400-man column.

President Davis tells General E. Kirby Smith, commanding the Trans-Mississippi Department, “As fas as the constitution permits, full authority has been given you to administer to the wants of your Dept., civil as well as military.”

[Doug64]

April 29, Friday

German-born General Sigel is a prime example of the Civil War generals who attain high rank without having demonstrated their military competence. When the war began, Sigel had been superintendent of schools and a leader of the large German community in St. Louis, Missouri. He received a commission, and rapid promotion to major general, primarily to encourage enlistment among the 1.25 million German-Americans living in the North. His high visibility no doubt spurred thousands of these Germans to volunteer, but his qualifications to be a commander are dubious at best. He claims to have led troops in three battles during the German revolts of the 1840s. He fails to mention that he was resoundingly defeated each time. Worse, he uses his high standing among German-Americans to pressure the government, urging his fellow immigrants to regard any setback to his career as an insult to their nationality. After the Federal defeat at Fredericksburg, for example, Sigel was put temporarily in command of one of the grand divisions of the reorganized Army of the Potomac. When he was returned to his own corps, which unhappily for him was not the largest, he demanded to be relieved. For a year he stumped the country raising a great German uproar over his misfortune. At length President Lincoln gave him command of the Department of West Virginia, largely to shut him up.

As badly as General Grant wants action in the Valley, he expects little of his self-serving department commander. It is General Crook, Grant thinks, who although subordinate to Sigel will do the important work; Grant even summons Crook to a personal briefing in Culpeper, Virginia, to make sure his instructions won’t be mishandled by Sigel. All Sigel has to do, in Grant’s view, is guard the northern portion of the Valley and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, which runs along the Potomac. Then, as an afterthought, Grant decides that any army is better off on the march than in camp. Sigel can at least meet Crook in Staunton with reinforcements and supplies. “If Sigel can’t skin, himself,” says Grant, borrowing a line from Lincoln, “he can hold a leg whilst someone else skins.” Thus, today Sigel heads timidly up the Valley toward Winchester, flinging patrols in every direction.

On the Red River yet another skirmish breaks out at Grand Ecore, Louisiana. In Arkansas, General Steele’s army, fighting off Marmaduke at its rear, reaches the Saline River at Jenkin’s Ferry. The rain continues in torrents and the riverbanks turn to mud. The troops work all night getting their wagons and artillery through the quagmire and over a pontoon bridge they have cast, but by morning most of the troops still haven’t crossed.

Elsewhere, action includes skirmishes in the Sni Hills, Missouri; and in Berry County, Tennessee; a Federal reconnaissance from Ringgold toward Tunnell Hill, Georgia; and a Union expedition from Newport Barracks to Swansborough, North Carolina.

The US Congress by a joint resolution raises all duties 50 percent for sixty days, later the rate will be extended until July 1st.

[Doug64]

April 30, Saturday

President Davis again writes General Polk that “Captured slaves should be returned to their masters on proof and payment of charges.” Then personal tragedy strikes—as he is eating lunch at his office desk, a household slave rushes in, bawling that Davis’ five-year-old son, Joe, has fallen from a rear balcony to a brick courtyard thirty feet below. The Southern White House is four blocks from the President’s office, and when Davis gets there he finds Joe unconscious. The boy dies minutes later. The Davises have three other children, but Joe has been the President’s favorite. Davis is inconsolate; when a courier arrives this afternoon with an urgent dispatch from General Lee, the President stares at the message and tries to comprehend it. But he can’t focus. “I must have this day with my little son,” he says. Davis goes upstairs to a bedroom across from the boy’s and through the night he paces the floor, intoning, “Not mine, O Lord, but thine.” Thus, while in the service of their countries, both presidents lose sons.

Lee’s message is his most urgent appeal yet. “Everything indicates a concentrated attack on this front, which renders me the more anxious to get back the troops belonging to this army, & causes me to suggest if possible, that others be moved from points at the south, where they can be spared, to Richmond.” Lee at this hour has only 61,000 men at hand to confront Grant’s swelling host of 122,000.

Help for Admiral Porter’s fleet, trapped at Alexandria, Louisiana, comes not from the Navy, but rather Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Bailey, acting chief engineer of XIX Corps. The Colonel has come up with an intricate plan to dam the river and harness its current, creating a chute of water over the rocks. Today a force of more than 3,000 men set to the task, often working in water up to their necks and fighting a current of ten miles per hour. Using trees, quarried stone, and bags filled with dirt, the men create an interlacing network of bracket dams, tree dams, and stone cribs that extend from both shores.

With Steele’s Union force at bay at Jenkins’ Ferry, Arkansas, Kirby Smith, now personally directing the Confederate troops, orders Churchill’s division, the first in line, to attack. The road leads down a steep bluff, then across swampy bottom land to a belt of timber along the river. Steele’s men have erected a defense of log breastworks and abatis, extending across a constricted area between a creek and an impassable swamp. Churchill’s men move toward the river, but they are cut down by the Federals’ frontal and enfilading fire. In the narrow space, fighting in mud and water with a blanket of fog and smoke obscuring the field, the Confederates can make no progress. After two hours, Kirby Smith throws Parsons’ division into the battle, then Walker’s brigades, one after the other. As the fighting intensifies, every one of Walker’s brigade leaders is wounded; two of them—including the veteran of New Mexico, William Scurry—will die of their wounds. Finally, Kirby Smith gives up and withdraws his battered force. The Union troops complete their crossing and destroy the pontoon bridge behind them. The desperate fighting in what will come to be called the Battle of Jenkins’ Ferry has cost Kirby Smith about 1,000 casualties, one sixth of his force. Steele has lost more than 700 men.

Others die on the battlefield: at Decatur, Alabama; and in an expedition by Federals from Memphis, Tennessee, to Ripley, Mississippi, that will last until May 9th. Three blockade runners escape from Galveston, Texas, under cover of night and rain.

President Lincoln writes General Grant to express his “entire satisfaction with what you have done up to this time, so far as I understand it.”

[Doug64]

There’s going to be a lot of long posts coming up—not as long as Gettysburg or Antietam, but long enough—as for the first time in the war the Union gets four armies in motion at the same time!

May 1864

An attack in Virginia by the Army of the Potomac is certain; exactly how, where, or when Grant will strike is the question. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia is as ready as its depleted numbers and inferior equipment and sustenance can make it. The South also expects action by Sherman in Georgia; a new drive by Butler from the James in Virginia; campaigning in the Shenandoah; perhaps a long-anticipated attack on Mobile. Tension increases. Is there any real hope left for the Confederacy? Criticism of Davis, of some generals, even of the armies grows louder, though dreams of recognized independence, courage, and faith remains. In the North Lincoln is more and more concerned with the problems of emancipation in the seceded and border slave states, restoring pro-Union governments in conquered land, and the presidential election in the fall.

May 1, Sunday

President Davis and other officials have been bombarding General Johnston with suggestions. They have wanted him to take the offensive by striking into eastern Tennessee. Richmond’s expectations are unrealistic, and Johnston has parried them. Citing the lack of wagons, the risk of being cut off from his Georgia base of supply, and, above all, the numerical superiority of 2 to 1 enjoyed by the Federals inTennessee, Johnston has rightly insisted that the army is too weak for such a campaign. Davis doubts Johnston’s gloomy assessment. For one thing, the President is getting quite a different story from one of Johnston’s own top generals. During March and April, John Bell Hood sent Richmond a series of secret and highly optimistic reports. “The enemy is weak and we are strong” goes the typical Hood refrain. It is just what the President wants to hear. Hood, though so handicapped physically that he has to be strapped into the saddle, has evidently lost none of his zest for carrying the war to the enemy nor his ambition for even higher rank. Intentionally or not, Hood is bolstering his own standing with Davis and undermining whatever confidence the Confederate President may have retained in Johnston.

Unaware of Hood’s clandestine campaign, Johnston maintains friendly relations with the young general. Characteristically, however, Johnston keeps his own counsel, revealing little of his plans for the coming months to either Hood or the government. But anyone familiar with Johnston’s tactics earlier in the war can make an educated guess at his intentions in north Georgia. On the battlegrounds of Virginia, Johnston demonstrated a marked preference for the defense and the quick counterpunch over the attack, and these would be his tactics at Dalton. The Confederate position at Dalton appears at first glance to be ideal for such moves. A series of ridges stand between Dalton and any Federal advance from Chattanooga. The nearest of these to the defenders, Rocky Face Ridge, is only a few miles west of Dalton. It provides a virtually impregnable shield of sheer rock that rears 800 feet above the valley floor and extands on a north-south axis for about twenty miles. Johnston has fortified Rocky Face Ridge and fixed his mind firmly on the defensive. He will wait for the high-strung Sherman to commit a blunder. Then he will attack. Of these plans, Johnston has told the President only: “I can see no other mode of taking the offensive here than to beat the enemy when he advances and then move forward.”

Then a spate of alarming reports from Johnston’s cavalry scouts render academic any comment from Richmond. The unseasonably cold spring has suddenly turned warm, and the Federal armies are reported to be on the move in a wide arc toward Dalton. On this lovely Sunday, with the trees bursting into full foliage, Johnston sounds the alert. He puts his officers’ wives on the train for Atlanta and wires Richmond asking for reinforcements. His army now counts nearly 45,000 men present for duty, but he needs more. The government responds by instructing Lieutenant General Polk in Alabama to send a division and whatever else he can spare. Officials hesitate to order up additional reinforcements. They suspect the Grant is about to take the offensive in Virginia, and they refuse to believe that the Federals finally intend to wage full-scale war on two fronts at once.

This same beautiful Sunday, William Sherman rides a few miles out from Chattanooga and picks bouquets of wild flowers from the deserted battlefield at Missionary Ridge. He mails the bouquets to his daughters, Minnie and Lizzie, so that—as he writes them—“both of you will have a present to commemorate this bright opening of spring.” For these few hours at least, Sherman feels at peace with himself. His preparations for the offensive are complete. To the astonishment of veteran railroad men, his supply line achieved a rate as high as 193 carloads a day. His depots in Nashville and Chattanooga bulge with rations and ammunition enough to sustain his armies in the field for more than four months.

And by rail and road, his armies are indeed on the move. The Army of the Cumberland, 60,733 men under Major General George H. Thomas, is in the center, concentrating around the Georgia rail station of Ringgold, about midway to Dalton on the Western & Atlantic Railroad. The Army of the Tennessee, 24,365 men under Major General James B. McPherson, is on the Federal right, moving toward Chattanooga from northern Alabama, soon to turn southeast on a route roughly parallel with Thomas’. The Army of the Ohio, 13,559 men under Major General John M. Schofield, is on the Federal left, marching due south via the Tennessee town of Cleveland and following another railroad—the East Tennessee & Georgia—which joins the Western & Atlantic at Dalton.

By Sherman’s strict orders, all three armies are stripped down for action. Sherman wants his fighting force to be “a mobile machine, willing and able to start at a minute’s notice, and to subsist on the scantiest food.” The wagon trains allotted to each division carry supplies for twenty days. Each regiment is limited to one baggage wagon and one ambulance. The officers in a company can take but one pack mule among them. Large field tents are discouraged except for the sick and wounded and to serve as an office for each regimental headquarters. Every soldier is under orders to carry three days’ rations—and to make them last for five days. By Sherman’s reckoning, each of his seven infantry corps thus bears on the back of its men enough supplies to eliminate 300 wagons. Sherman himself sets a spartan example. His entire field headquarters of aides, clerks, and orderlies makes due with a single wagon. Sherman stuffs all his official papers in his pocket, later filing them away in an empty candle box. “I think that is as low down as we can get,” he says, “until we get flat broke.”

In the Shenandoah Valley, General Sigel arrives at Winchester, having taken three days to march the 22 miles from Martinsburg. There, beset by rumors of enemy forces to his front, flanks, and rear, he stops.

The first day of May sees action primarily west of the Mississippi. as the Red River Campaign draws to a close with the Federal withdrawal to Alexandria, Louisiana, Confederates capture US transport Emma at David’s Ferry and there are four days of skirmishing at Governor Moore’s plantation. Elsewhere in Louisiana skirmishing breaks out at Clinton and Ashton, and an affair takes place at Berwick. In Arkansas skirmishes occur at Pine Bluff and Lee’s Creek. Far off in California an affair at Booth’s Run marks the Humboldt River Amerind operations. At Stone Church, Georgia, near Chattanooga, a skirmish presages the increase in scouting, which will culminate in Sherman’s move against J.E. Johnston.

Brigadier General John P. Hatch assumes command of the Federal Department of the South, relieving Major General Q.A. Gillmore.

[Doug64]

May 2, Monday

Steele’s soldiers, hungry, tattered, and begrimed with mud from struggling on through deep swamps, trudge into Little Rock, Arkansas. To Leander Stillwell, an Illinous veteran of Shiloh, Corinth, and Vicksburg who stayed behind in Little Rock as a provost guard, the returning troops are “the hardest looking outfit of Federal soldiers that I saw during the war, at any time. The most of them looked as if they had been rolled in the mud, numbers of them were barefoot, and I also saw several with the legs of their trousers all gone, high up, socking through the mud like big blue cranes.”

Skirmishing continues along the Red River as Confederates harass Federals at Wells’ Plantation, Wilson’s Landing, and Bayou Pierre, Louisiana. In California there is a skirmish at Kneeland’s Prairie; in Tennessee a skirmish at Bolivar and a ten-day Union scout in Hickman and Maury counties; in Missouri an affair on Bee Creek. To the 19th Federal expeditions operate against the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad in southwestern Virginia, a land of resources for the Confederates now being invaded by the foe. In Georgia, near Tunnel Hill and Ringgold Gap, outposts of Johnston and Sherman skirmish.

General Lee mounts Traveller—the seven-year-old “Confederate gray,” as Lee calls his horse—and with his ranking officers ascends Clark’s Mountain, at 700 feet the highest lookout point available. Curving around the foot of the mountain is the Rapidan, brown, flat, and 200 feet wide. Across the river lies the Army of the Potomac. Due east, about thirteen miles downstream, is Germanna Ford, and a few miles farther, Ely’s Ford. South of the fords sprawls a gray-green expanse called the Wilderness, twelve miles wide and six miles deep. If Grant can get his army swiftly through this nasty tangle of briers, ridges, hillocks, stunted pines, and dense undergrowth, he can use his superior numbers to smash Lee in open country. Grant’s alternative is to move by his right flank, west of where Lee now stands on Clark’s Mountain. In doing that, Grant would be following the line of the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, toward Gordonsville, eventually to engage Lee in open country there. A move to the right would give Grant favorable terrain, but it would expose the Union line of communications and in fact uncover Washington itself. A move to the left, fording the Rapidan into the forbidding Wilderness, would keep the moving army always within reach of tidal rivers from which it can be supplied. Lee studies the terrain through his glasses and understands his opponent’s options. Raising a hand encased in a leather gauntlet, he points eastward to the two river crossings and tells his officers: “Grant will cross by one of those fords.”

In West Virginia, Brigadier General George Cook marches out of the Kanawha Valley with 6,000 Federal infantrymen, heading southeast toward Dublin. His mission is to sever the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad at the New River Bridge while his 2,000 cavalrymen, under Brigadier General William W. Averell, rides a more southerly circuit to strike Saltville and Wytheville. Then the whole force is to move north to Staunton and cut the Virginia Central.

It has been less than two months since General Breckinridge assumed command of the enormous Confederate Department of Western Virginia; it includes southwestern Virginia, a portion of eastern Tennessee, and any parts of Kentucky and West Virginia that the Confederates can take and hold. In addition to the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad, it contains two industries of great strategic importance: the salt works at Saltville, from which comes a large percentage of the preservative for the Confederate Army’s meat rations, and the lead mines of Wytheville, source of precious bullets. To protect all this, Breckinridge found in his department a few brigades of poorly disciplined infantry, some dismounted cavalrymen, and a few cannon, most of them out of commission. Since then, he has been furiously assembling a respectable little army and is preparing to fend off Cook when his brigades are incorporated into General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

In Richmond the first session of the Second Confederate Congress gathers. President Davis in his message again condemns the “barbarism” of the Federals in their “Plunder and devastation of the property of noncombatants, destruction of private dwellings, and even of edifices devoted to the worship of God; expeditions organized for the sole purpose of sacking cities, consigning them to the flames, killing the unarmed inhabitants, and inflicting horrible outrages on women and children.” He sees no immediate hope for foreign recognition, but about military and other matters he is optimistic.

[Doug64]

May 3, Tuesday

The orders go out from General U.S. Grant through Major General George G. Meade that the Army of the Potomac is to move across the Rapidan tomorrow morning, march around the right flank of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and head toward Richmond once more.

There is a minor Federal raid on Bulltown, West Virginia. In Arkansas skirmishing breaks out near the mouth of Richland Creek. Skirmishes occur between Bayous Redwood and Olive Branch near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and between Federals and Amerinds at Cedar Bluffs, Colorado Territory. Along Chickamauga Creek, at Catoosa Springs, and at Red Clay, the Georgia Campaign becomes more lively as skirmishing increases.

Kirby Smith orders his troops to break off the pursuit of Steele’s Union troops now in Little Rock, returning to Camden.

The Federal Cabinet and President Lincoln discuss the alleged atrocities committed by Confederates during the attack on Fort Pillow, Tennessee.

[Doug64]

May 4, Wednesday

At midnight the Army of the Potomac sets into motion. The Federal tactics, as defined by Meade’s chief of staff, Brigadier General Andrew A. Humphreys, depends on a quick start: “By setting the whole army in motion at midnight, it might move so far beyond the Rapidan the first day that it would be able to pass out of the Wilderness and turn, or partially turn, the right flank of Lee before a general engagement took place.”

V Corps, under General Gouverneur Warren, crosses first at Germanna Ford. Warren is a 34-year-old former chief engineer of the Army of the Potomac. An ill-temptered commander, he is admired by his men, detested by his officers, and not always quick to obey a superior’s order. He distiniguished himself last July at Little Round Top; in December his reliability was questioned when he ignored Meade’s instructions to attack the formidable Confederate position at Mine Run. Next across the Rapidan is VI Corps, Major General John Sedgwick in command. Sedgwick, who likes playing solitaire in his tent, also enjoys the affection of his men, who call him “Uncle John.” A writer of the day lauds him as “the exemplar of the steadfast soldierly obedience in duty: Singularly gentle and childlike in character, he was scarcely more beloved in his own command than throughout the army.” Grant considers him an officer who “was never at fault when serious work was to be done.” Sedgwick is fifty years old.

II Corps, now led by Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, crosses at Ely’s Ford, six miles east of Germanna. Hancock “the Superb,” as he is called, is back in action but still suffering from a near-fatal wound he received at Gettysburg. “The beau ideal of a soldier,” writes an admiring correspondent, “blue-eyed, fair haired Saxon, strong, well proportioned and manly, broad chested, full and compact.” At forty, Hancock has a reputation for aggressiveness in combat that matches his knightly looks.

Still another force is available to the Union offensive. This is IX Corps, held back at the moment to protect the rebuilt Orange & Alexandria Railroad from Manassas Junction south to Rappahannock Station. In command is Major General Ambrose E. Burnside, aged 39. Burnside’s reputation, tarnished by his defeat at Fredericksburg almost two and a half years ago, has been partially restored, in Grant’s view, by his successful defense of Knoxville last autumn. Since he outranks Meade, Burnside’s is an independent corps and he reports directly to Grant.

Robert E. Lee is soon aware of the Federal advance and is determined to meet it. By 9 am, scouting reports have confirmed Lee’s prediction of a crossing on the Confederate right. The general realizes the import of the looming battle. Last night, in his headquarters at Orange Court House, about twenty miles southwest of the Wilderness, Lee wrote stoically: “If victorious, we have everything to live for. If defeated, there will be nothing left to live for.” Lee’s main force is outnumbered nearly two to one but has the advantage of operating on interior lines and in familiar territory. Lee’s army has three corps, each under a commander who has seen much—almost too much—of the war. Closest to the advancing Federals is Lieutenant General Richard S. Ewell’s II Corps, in the vicinity of Mine Run. Ewell’s troops call him “Old Baldhead.” At Groveton in 1862 a Minié ball smashed the bones in one of his knees and the leg had to be sawed away. The loss has made riding a challenge. An attendant has to help the 47-year-old Ewell into the saddle of his horse, an unimpressive gray named Rifle. Upstream on the Rapidan, south of Ewell, is A.P. Hill’s III Corps. Hill, aged 38, served with distinction under Stonewall Jackson, who was mortally wounded at nearby Chancellorsville lmost a year ago. Hill has inherited Jackson’s corps, but after eleven months in command he still lacks confidence in himself. And he has become worn and pale after suffering for months from some undiagnosed ailment. Ten miles south of Hill, seeking good forage around Gordonsville, is I Corps under Lieutenant General James Longstreet, newly returned from the campaign in Tennessee. Lee’s “Old Warhorse” is still smarting over the failure of the campaign at Knoxville and he is more eager than ever to prove himself. Today, he and his corps are at an uncomfortable distance—more than thirty miles’ march—from the Wilderness. Lee’s cavalry, as always, is in the hands of the flamboyant Jeb Stuart. Now barely past thirty, Stuart’s brilliant star was sullied during the Gettysburg campaign. He has done well since then, but his cavalry is being worn down by a chronic shortage of horses and fodder. Stuart has more than 8,000 troopers in three divisions to match Philip Sheridan’s 12,000. Around the first of May, Stuart’s men were strung out well to the east, as far away as Fredericksburg, scouting the Rapidan while searching for spring forage for their hungry horses.

Three roads, roughly parallel, lead eastward from Lee’s infantry encampments into the Wilderness. They are the Orange Turnpike, which runs from Orange Court House through Chancellorsville and continues to Fredericksburg; the Orange Plank road, about two miles south of the Turnpike; and the Catharpin road, another two or three miles further south. All three intersect with the route that the southbound Federals will eventually have to defend, the Brock road. On receiving word that his enemy is moving, Lee orders Ewell forward along the Turnpike. He then instructs A.P. Hill to send two divisions forward on the Orange Plank road, while leaving Major General Richard H. Anderson’s division to guard against any surprise attack across the upper fords of the Rapidan. Longstreet, farther away than the others, will move up along the Catharpin road. Lee chooses to ride with Hill, mounting Traveller and waiting for Hill’s men to strike their tents. They are quick about it, the command to fall in given before half the bread can be baked. A Captain from South Carolina will recall, “Knapsacks were packed, blankets rolled up, half-cooked dough or raw meal thrust into haversacks, the accumulated plunder of nine months thrown into the streets, accoutrements girded on, arms taken, and in half an hour we were on the march.”

U.S. Grant crosses the Rapidan around noon, riding Cincinnati, his big bay. Grant has donned sword, belt, and sash for the occasion, along with frock coat and a general’s gold cord around his black slouch hat. In his pockets are two dozen cigars, a day’s supply. He is accompanied by a civilian friend, Congressman Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois. It was Washburne, from Grant’s home district in Galena, who sponsored the bill creating the rank of lieutenant general that Grant now holds. The marching soldiers speculate aloud about who this stranger in the black coat might be. One suggests glumly that Grant has brought along his own undertaker. On the south bank of the Rapidan, Grant establishes temporary headquarters at a deserted farmhouse, and from its delapidated front steps he watches Sedgwick’s corps follow Warren’s across Gremanna Ford. His reverie is interrupted by a newspaper correspondent who steps up to ask, “Genetal Grant, about how long will it take you to get to Richmond?” It is a question without an answer, but Grant, his wry side showing, responds at once. “I will agree to be there in about four days. That is, if General Lee becomes party to the agreement; but if he objects, the trip will undoubtedly be prolonged.” Word soon comes that Federal signal officers have deciphered a Confederate message sent to General Ewell: “We are moving.” Clearly Lee is advancing to intercept the Federals. With that information, Grant sends off a dispatch to Burnside, in the rear: Abandon the railroad and bring the reserve IX Corps forward to the river crossing, marching all night if necessary.”

Early in the afternoon, the Army of the Potomac halts in the Wilderness. The men could have kept going, but their vast wagon train is already lagging behind, and it has to be protected. Grant’s military secretary, Lieutenant Colonel Adam Badeau, remarks that if a battle were to be fought in these thickets, it would be “a wrestle as blind as midnight.” Others know from experience how cruel the place can be, for they were in the thick of the Battle of Chancellorsville here one year ago. Hancock’s II Corps, having crossed at Ely’s Ford, bivouacks at the Chancellorsville crossroads near the ruin of the old Chancellor house, which had burned during the fighting last year. There are skeletons there, uncovered by the rains of winter. Five miles to the west, at the intersection of Warren’s route and the Orange Turnpike, V Corps’s troops make camp around an abandoned stage station called Wilderness Tavern; Sedgwick’s corp extends back to Germanna Ford, to cover the endless passage of the wagons. The men don’t sing, as they had in winter camp. There is little talk.

When Lee’s columns halt for the night the two sides are only five miles apart, but neither realizes how close it is to the other’s main force. Ewell, moving down the Turnpike, has penetrated two or three miles into the Wilderness; his lead elements stop at a place called Locust Grove. Lee, with Hill’s two divisions, camps five miles southwest of Ewell around a settlement on the Orange Plank road called New Verdiersville. (The men dub it “My Dearsville.”) Lee assumes that Grant will either turn west toward Mine Run, or turn east and march on Fredericksburg. Before going to bed, Lee sends his adjutant, Colonel Walter Taylor, to instruct Ewell to resume his march down the pike early in the morning and engage whichever side of the enemy he encounters. Despite cautions from Lee to limit his opening attack, Ewell is pleased. “Just the orders I like. Go straight down the road and strike the enemy wherever I find him.”

At a campfire fueled by fence rails near the Rapidan, General Grant sits up till midnight, smoking a cigar and sharing information with General Meade. Telegrams arrive from Washington reporting the William T. Sherman has advanced in Georgia, Franz Sigel’s forces are moving up the Shenandoah Valley, and Ben Butler’s Army of the James has assembled in transports in Hampton Roads. The army will move up the James River to operate against Richmond from the south side. At first almost nothing bars his way. Grant’s strategy of massive concerted attacks to weaken the thin Confederate defense is unfolding according to plan.

General Breckinridge receives urgent orders from Lee to confront a second Federal army of 9,000 men under Major General Franz Sigel that is marching south into the Shenandoah from Martinsburg. “Grant’s whole army is moving on our right,” Lee tells Breckinridge. Sigel’s army, he adds, “will probably cross at Chester Gap and move upon our left.” Breckinridge responds swiftly, ordering his two largest infantry brigades—slightly more than half his army—to march from Dublin to Staunton, 155 miles away.

Farther south, along Albemarle Sound, North Carolina, skirmishing flares on the Trent Road and south of the Trent River, and Federals lose an outpost at Croatan to attacking Confederates. CSS Albemarle, the powerful ironclad ram built on the Roanoke River, presents a real menace to the Federal position in North Carolina and a challenge is expected soon. Through the 21st a Federal expedition from Vicksburg to Yazoo City includes skirmishing.

Light skirmishing continues in Georgia with a fight at Varnell’s Station. On Louisiana’s Red River, Confederates destroy a US steamer and capture two others during an engagement at David’s Ferry, and a skirmish takes place at Ashwood Landing. There is skirmishing also at Doubtful Canyon, New Mexico Territory, and an affair at Callaghan’s Station, Virginia.

The Federal House passes the controversial and radical Wade-Davis Reconstruction Bill 73 to 59.

[Doug64]

May 5, Thursday

Eager to get out of the Wilderness, General Grant has the Federal army on the move by 5 am. Lieutenant Colonel Horace Porter of Grant’s staff writes that he expects “either a fight or a foot-race” before nightfall. Hancock launches his II Corps sourthward from Chancellorsville on a route that crosses the Brock road at Todd’s Tavern below the Orange Plank road. Warren, at Wilderness Tavern, deploys one of his divisions down the Orange Turnpike to the west, to shield his flank, and heads south. “I feel lighthearted and confident,” he writes his wife early this morning. “We are going to have a magnificent campaign.” Warren’s troops are soon strung out for three miles along a country lane; the roadway is no more than twenty feet wide in places and hemmed in on both sides by heavy forest. This blind path intersects with the Orange Plank road at Parker’s Store. Shortly after 7 am the head of Warren’s column is at the Chawning farm, a mile shy of Parker’s Store, and Hancock’s lead elements have already passed Todd’s Tavern when orders come from General Meade to halt the movement south. Federal skirmishers have encountered Confederate cavalry—Ewell’s men—approaching along the Orange Turnpike. The division left behind by Warren to guard the Turnpike, commanded by Brigadier General Charles Griffin, quickly throws up breastworks and send skirmishers forward to determine, if they can, the enemy’s size and intentions.

Meade wants immediate action. He orders Warren to attack at once with his entire force. North of the Turnpike, Sedgwick’s VI Corps is to advance on Warren’s right in support. Grant, too, wants action. Once he has seen for himself that Burnside’s IX Corps, after its all-night march, has reached the Rapidan and started to cross at Germanna Ford, Grant rides forward to join Meade near Wilderness Tavern. Meade at first thinks the Confederate advance is no more than a delaying action. “I think Lee is making a demonstration to gain time,” he writes in a message to Grant. “I shall, if such is the case, punish him.”

But the urge proves quicker than the deed, and hours of halting maneuver will pass before the “blind wrestle” can begin in earnest. Sedgwick, moving down the Germanna Plank road, sends a division commanded by Brigadier General Horatio G. Wright westward through the briers in hope that he will link with Griffin’s right flank. But the only route available to Wright is a path—the so-called Culpeper Mine road—that is overgrown and nearly impassable. Until Wright arrives, V Corp’s right flank is unprotected. Warren’s lead divisions, spread out along the track to Parker’s store, form their lines. Facing northwest—with little room to maneuver—they prepare to advance into the trackless, clutching undergrowth. The division closest to Griffin is commanded by Brigadier General James Wadsworth, a genial, white-haired Harvard man of 56 who once studied law under Daniel Webster. It now falls to Wadsworth to lead his men through the choking thickets to find Griffin’s bare left flank. Wadsworth has led troops from Bull Run to Gettysburg, but never in country like this. Which way? he asks Warren. The corps commander consults his pocket compass and tells Wadsworth to march his division due west. The troops plunge into the undergrowth and at length, with great difficulty and no small amount of luck, manage to link up with Griffin’s threatened line.

General Lee, who is riding with Hill, is aware that his army is not prepared for a major action. Longstreet’s corps, though moving, is still a day’s march away. Cautiously, Lee sends word to Ewell on the Turnpike around 8 am to moderate his advance to match Hill’s slow progress up the Orange Plank road. By now Ewell has seen enough signs of the enemy to know that he is in for a fight, and he begins forming his men for action. To his front, astride the Turnpike, is a large, bramble-covered clearing known as Sanders’ Field. On the east edge of the field Ewell deploys the four brigades of General Edward Johnson’s division and extends the line farther south with the troops of Major General Robert E. Rodes’s division.

No sooner has Ewell issued orders to “fall back slowly, if pressed,” then Griffin’s Federal battle line comes swarming out of the foliage. The hour is past noon. North of the Turnpike, Brigadier General Romwyn Ayres’s brigade attacks, led by a regiment of New York Zouaves and elements of five Regular Army regiments. The Federals start across Sanders’ Field, pushing through matted brambles and tangled brush; they charge across a gully and run headlong into a curtain of fire from three Confederate brigades in the woods at the east edge of the field. The New York regiment veers left, and the Regulars stop dead and give way. Behind them, Ayres’s second line, three Zouave regiments from New York and Pennsylvania, now encounter the hurricane of fire. They pass through the retreating Regulars only to be driven back themselves as volley after volley crashes into their shaken ranks. Most of the attacking regiments fall back to the shelter of the woods, but the two New York regiments stay put and renew the attack. The original New York regiment charges first, the second pressed close behind. Now Griffin sends two 12-pounder Napoleons galloping down the pike to support the Zouaves. When the New Yorkers near the trees on the far side of Sanders’ Field, they are met by a withering volley at close range. Moments later they are raked by fire from the right flank as well—a Confederate brigade has pushed to the north border of the field. Lieutenant Shelton has barely unlimbered his two Napoleons on the Turnpike when his artillerymen are hit and begin to fall. Under pressure, he loads and fires his guns—unfortunately into the back of the Zouaves fighting in the woods to his front. Staggered, the New Yorkers nevertheless push on into the woods. They close with the enemy to fight them with bayonets and clubbed muskets as well as bullets, a massive melee breaking out among the pines and flowering dogwoods. Already the Battle of the Wilderness has taken on the nightmarish quality that will define it throughout. Soon the woods are on fire and the flames spread to the dry, bramble-choked field. The screams of wounded men, hurt too badly to flee, rise above the sounds of battle. By now most of the officers of the two New York regiments have been put out of action and their disorganized men are bolting back across Sanders’ Field, pursued by two North Carolina regiments. Together, the two New York regiments have lost 567 of their 1,600 men. Shelton’s artillerymen fare no better. Most of the battery’s horses are shot down, and the gun crews find it impossible to extricate the two Napoleons. The two pieces are destined to sit in no man’s land, between the two lines, for the rest of the battle.

Across the Turnpike, meanwhile, one of Griffin’s brigades, under Brigadier General Joseph J. Bartlett, presses the attack across the south side of Sanders’ Field, with the famed Iron Brigade of Wadworth’s division hard on the left. The Federals cross the clearing and slam into a Virginia brigade under Brigadier General John Marshall Jones. In the brief, violent struggle, the Confederate line splinters and then breaks. Jones is killed trying to rally his men, and his aide, Captain Robert D. Early, a nephew of General Jubal Early, falls dead beside him. A large hole has been opened in Ewell’s line, and the Iron Brigade, led by Brigadier General Lysander Cutler, drives through it, pushing the Confederates back. But Wadsworth’s Federals to the left of the Iron Brigade are now in trouble. There, one brigade has become mired in the marshy footing next to a stream, disorienting another, under Colonel James C. Rice, on its left. Rice, confused in the thick brush, inadvertently wheels his left flank across the front of an enemy brigade—North Carolinians under Brigadier General Junius Daniel—that has stood its ground. At this critical moment, help arrives for the Confederates. Ewell, seeing his center collapsing, has turned his horse and pounded down the Turnpike toward Early’s reserve division. On the way, he happens to spot Brigadier General John B. Gordon at the head of his Georgia troops. The corps commander reins in his horse and shouts to Gordon: “Form at once on the right of the turnpike.” Gordon’s men rush forward and move into line beside Daniel’s North Carolinians. Together, they open up on the confused and stationary Federal brigades. Startled by the unexpected volume of fire, Wadsworth’s troops stagger and give way. Their withdrawal spells an end to the Federal breakthrough—without support on its flank, the Iron Brigade is forced to retreat in turn.

Griffin’s attack is over. He had been promised support on his right flank, but what happened to it? In fact, Horatio Wright’s division is still inching through the undergrowth, its march bedeviled by skirmishers from a North Caolina cavalry regiment and by sharpshooters from the Stonewall Brigade. Without Wright’s help, Griffin has only a mounting casualty list to show for his efforts. Griffin sets his division to building breastworks and spurs his horse toward headquarters, a furious man. An explosive confrontation ensues. Grant and Meade have established their command post in a clearing just west of where the Germanna Plank road crosses the Orange Turnpike, a mile or more behind the fighting. Grant, his orders given, has found a seat on a tree stump; he’s unbuttoned his coat as the day has grown warmer and begun whittling to fill the time as he awaits developments. Griffin, a bellicose West Pointer, Indian fighter, and frustrated three-year veteran of the war, has lost his temper. He leaps off his horse and, ignoring Grant, makes straight for Meade, cursing. Warren has let him down, Sedgwick has let him down, the Army has failed him. Meade, whose temper is as hot as any man’s, calmly listens and says nothing as Griffin stamps out. Grant gets up and approaches Meade. This loud act of insubordination has bothered him. “Who is this General Gregg?” Grant asks, getting the name wrong. “You ought to put him under arrest.” “His name is Griffin, not Gregg,” Meade says quietly. “And that’s only his way of talking.” Then, in an almost fatherly gesture, Meade reaches out and buttons the coat of his younger superior. The tension breaks and Grant goes back to his whittling.

Both Ewell’s and Warren’s corps have dug in as best they can, separated by about 300 yards of woodland where flash fires erupt from time to time. The firing continues between half-hidden lines of infantry, but it is a few miles to the south, along the Orange Plank road, that the full weight of the battle is developing. When General Meade learns at mid-morning that Confederates are advancing in force on the Orange Plank road, he realizes that the Federal army is in danger of being sliced in two. If A.P. Hill’s two gray-clad divisions can take and hold the junction of the Orange Plank road and the Brock road—the Federals’ only accessible north-south route—then Hancock and his II Corps will be cut off from the rest of the Army of the Potomac. Meade sends orders to Hancock, waiting at Todd’s Tavern, to countermarch northward to the vital junction. Then Meade dispatches most of a division from Sedgwick’s corps—6,000 well-tested veterans commanded by Brigadier General Richard Getty—south on the Brock road to hold the intersection until Hancock can get there. Getty, a competent West Pointer, reaches the crossing around 11:30 am, just as Hill’s infantry is dispersing the last of the Federal cavalry that have impeded them all morning. He deploys his men on both sides of the Orange Plank road and sends them forward. When they get to within fifty yards of the Confederates, the Wilderness roars with musketry. On his right, Getty is supposed to make contact with Warren’s embattled corps. But Crawford has marched north to support Warren, and Getty’s men find the woods full of Confederates. Isolated and outnumbered, Getty’s troops entrench and steel themselves for the onslaught.

General Lee wants that crossroads too. During the day he has tacitly taken command of the troops on the Orange Plank road from Hill, whose illness is evident. Out in front, facing Getty’s lines, he has a division led by Major General Henry Heth, who fought with Braxton Bragg in Kentucky and suffered a fractured skull at Gettysburg. Behind Heth is a second division, commanded by Major General Cadmus Marcellus Wilcox. Wilcox had been a friend of Ulysses Grant at West Point and a member of Grant’s wedding sixteen years ago. Slowly, Heth’s vanguard pushes the Federals back. When Hancock arrives at the crossroads at 2 pm, the first officer to reach him reports breathlessly that Getty is hard pressed and almost out of ammunition. “Tell him to hold on,” Hancock shouts back, and directs his two lead divisions, commanded by Major General David Birney and Brigadier General Gershom Mott, to form up on Getty’s left flank. It is no easy task. The Brock road is no better than the other lanes around it—narrow, hemmed in by forest, and, by now, crowded with artillery and ordnance wagons that clog the way. Lee and A.P. Hill have stopped with their staffs at a clearing on the north side of the Orange Plank road about a mile behind the fighting. Lee sees that the place might be open enough for cannon and has Lieutenant Colonel William Pague, one of Hill’s artillery commanders, post twelve guns along the west side of the field. Lee is considering a full-scale attack on the crossroads. But he is worried about the gap on his left, two miles of snarled growth between Hill’s corps and Ewell’s. Lee orders Wilcox’s division to march across the Widow Tapp farm clearing and bridge the gap between Hill and Ewell. That leaves Heth, with about 7,000 Confederates, manning the Orange Plank road where Hancock is massing for an attack with 17,000 men.

About 4 pm, Meade, growing impatient, orders Getty to advance. Birney’s division is to stay on his right while Mott remains on the left in reserve. When the time comes to start Birney and Mott are still struggling to get into position, and Getty moves out alone. Near the Turnpike, General Wadsworth receives orders to move his wandering division south through the undergrowth—somehow—and pressure Hill’s left. Athwart the Orang Plank road, Heth’s men have thrown up light breastworks on a thickly wooded rise overlooking a swampy hollow. The Confederates meet Getty’s attack with sheets of fire that stagger the Federals as they top a low ridge fifty yards from the Confederate line. Getty’s troops return fire but can advance no farther. Just south of the pike, Getty’s leftmost brigade, Vermont men, are hit on the flank by the Confederates. As soon as the first volleys are over both sides hug the ground as closely as possible and keep up a rapid fire, every attempt by either to rise and advance cut down. Getty is stalled. He calls for assistance, and soon reinforcements from Nirney’s division are struggling forward to shore up Getty’s flanks. After a hard march, Brigadier General Alexander Hays’s brigade moves into position on Getty’s right. Hays, a close friend of Grant and Hancock’s, rides along his line encouraging his men. Passing by his old regiment from Pennsylvania, he stops to speak. Just then a bullet strikes him above the brim of his hat, and Hays falls from the saddle, mortally wounded. At 5 pm, Mott’s division attacks—only to be routed and pushed back into its lines.

Although the Federal attack has stalled, Lee doesn’t like the look of things and he sends a courier after Wilcox with orders to return to the Orange Plank road. Heth is going to need help. Indeed, Hancock is bringing his remaining two divisions into action, and the weight of Federal numbers is at last being felt. The fresh troops sprint past Getty’s exhausted men into the smoke-clouded forest, and the Confederate line shivers. But it doesn’t quite break. Wilcox returns and moves up to support Heth’s flanks. Two of Wilcox’s brigades attack south of the Orange Plank road, driving back the Federals and nearly capturing their supporting artillery before being driven back in turn by a Federal counterattack. Meanwhile, Lee sends his aide-de-camp, Colonel Charles Venable, forward to determine whether Hill’s corps can hold on until darkness stops the fighting. But before darkness comes, a courier reaches A.P. Hill with the warning that a large Union force is approaching through the gap that Wilcox had to abandon when he came to Heth’s support. The only Confederate unit on hand is a battalion of an Alabama regiment which had been held back to guard the mushrooming clusters of prisoners. Hill, his ill health forgotten in the emergency, rounds up every noncombatant he can find and has them guard the prisoners. He faces the 125 Alabamians toward the woods and tells them to charge, firing fast and giving the Rebel yell as though regiment after regiment were coming. The approaching Federals are Wadsworth’s men, who have been ordered from their position near the Orange Turnpike south to attack A.P. Hill’s left. Wadsworth’s troops are moving through brush so impenetrable that they can see no more than a few feet around them. The wild, screaming charge of the Alabamians rocks the Federals, stopping them in their tracks and riveting them in place. Soom night ends the Confederate attack. Wadsworth’s troops rest fitfully in the thickets, their presence still menacing the Confederate flank.

To the north, meanwhile, the struggle along the Orange Turnpike flares up once again. Wright’s division of VI Corps has finally pushed its way down the tangled Culpeper Mine road and taken position on Griffin’s flank. At 3 pm Wright attacks—without results. Charges and countercharges surge for hours through the woodland, without conclusion.

As darkness descends, the noise of firing gives way all along the battle front to the sound of axes as men hasten to improvise breastworks. The sounds of the wounded rise and fall in the darkness, moans and cries, calls for water and entreaties to comrades by name to come and help them. Most of the men in both armies, if they sleep at all, simply nod off at the spot where they fired their last shot. The lines are a confused jumble, fronts askew, regiments and brigades scattered all over the tangled forest, not knowing whether their closest neighbors are friends or foes. Generals Heth and Wilcox are especially concerned about the state of their front, close as it is to Hancock’s line. Their requests to realign their troops, however, are met by orders from A.P. Hill to “let the tired men rest.” Tomorrow will be soon enough.

Both armies plan to attack early. General Meade is aware from prisoner interrogations that neither Longstreet nor Anderson have joined Lee. After conferring with Grant, Meade sends orders to Hancock to move at 5 am to destroy A.P. Hill’s divisions on the Orange Plank road before the outnumbered Confederates can be reinforced. Sedgwick and Warren are to engage Ewell along the Turnpike, making it impossible for Lee to draw men from that sector to help Hill. By now Burnside’s four divisions have crossed the Rapidan, and Grant has ordered these fresh troops to advance into position before dawn. Burnside’s lead division is to march down the Brock road and join Hancock’s corp on the Orange Plank road. Grant wants the next two divisions to back up Wadsworth and penetrate the Wilderness gap that separates Lee’s forces. Burnside’s fourth division is to guard the Germanna Plank road near the ford.

Lee, by his campfire at the Widow Tapp farm, ponders his advantages. Help is coming: Longstreet should arrive and be in position by morning, and Anderson’s division is hurrying forward. Together they offer 20,000 of the Confederacy’s best troops. Lee orders Ewell to open up early and loud along the Turnpike to take some of the pressure off Hill’s men, who will have to hold on until the reinforcements arrive. Much depends on Longstreet’s timing—and Burnside’s. By 5 pm today, Lonstreet’s men are within ten miles of the front. He puts them into bivouac with orders to move out again at 1 am on the last leg. Lee has sent word for him to give up the Catharpin road and concentrate his advance on the Orange Plank road, the quicker to relieve Hill.

General Sigel has lingered for days at Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley, whiling away the time by drilling his Federal troops. Perplexed officers try to execute maneuvers they have never heard of while Sigel and his staff—many of them fellow immigrants—shout orders at them in German. Sigel demands obedience. “I don’t want any suggestions from Battalion Commanders!” he bellows on one occasion. “All I want from them is to listen carefully to the orders, as they are issued, and to repeat them, precisely as they are received.”

The confusion reaches its zenith today when Sigel stages a mock battle. At the outset of the exercise, a Massuachusetts regiment is ordered to move forward as a skirmish line. While infantry units behind them march and countermarch, batteries gallop from position to position and cavalry charges this way and that, the men of the lead regiment march on, forgotten. They struggle “over fences, through swamps, across ravines and in woodland,” in “strict obedience” to orders. At the end of the long day, the army counts its casualties: “Killed, none; wounded, none; missing, the 34th Massachusetts Infantry.” By the time frantic couriers find the still-advancing regiment and bring the men back to camp, darkness has fallen. The fiasco breeds “in everyone the most supreme contempt for General Sigel and his crowd of foreign adventurers.”

While Sigel is preoccupied with drilling and sham battles, his logistics are falling into disarray. Supply trains dispatched from Martinsburg are plundered by partisan rangers—most effectively by the 43rd Virginia Cavalry Battalion under the legendary Lieutenant Colonel John S. Mosby, operating out of the Blue Ridge Mountains. After the Confederates capture Sigel’s personal supply train, he orders each subsequent caravan guarded by 400 cavalrymen. But the partisans who cause Sigel the deepest embarrassment are a company of rangers from General John Imboden’s command. These horsemen are led by a Virginia cavalry captain named John H. (Hanse) McNeill, a young cavalier as dashing and courageous as Mosby. As Sigel is staging his mock battle, McNiell and sixty men emerge from their West Virginia hideouts and destroy a Baltimore & Ohio repair shop and storage yard. Stung by rebukes from Washington at his failure to protect the railroad, Sigel sends 500 cavalrymen under Colonel Jacob Higgins in futile pursuit of the elusive McNeill while he resumes his march south.

Gloom descends on Richmond’s citizens when they learn from downstream lookouts that an amphibious column ten miles long, containing no less than two hundred enemy vessels, is steaming up the river that laves the city’s doorstep. Loaded at Yorktown yesterday—while Grant was corssing the Rapidan—the armada rounded the tip of the York-James peninsula in the night, and now, with the morning sun glinting brilliant on the water—and Grant and Lee locked in savage combate, eighty miles to the north—it is proceeding up the broad, shining reaches of the James. Five ironclads lead the way and other warships are interspersed along the line of transports, a motley array of converted ferries, tugs and coasters, barges and canal boats, whose decks are blue with 30,000 soldiers, all proud to be playing a role in what seems “some grand national pageant.” What is more, they have a commander who knows how to supply the epitomizing gesture. Riding in the lead, General Ben Butler brings his headquarters boat about, strikes a pose on the hurricane deck, and steams back down the line. As he speeds past each transport, past the soldiers gaping from its rail, he swings his hat in a wide vertical arc toward the west and lurches his bulky torso in that direction, indicating their upstream goal and emphasizing his belief that nothing can stop them from reaching it in short order. They cheer him wildly from ship after ship as he goes by, then cheer again, even more wildly, as he turns and churns back up the line, waving his hat and lunging his body toward Richmond.

After dropping one division off at City Point, within nine miles of Petersburg, the flotilla proceeds north, past the adjoining mouth of the Appomattox River, and debarks the other five divisions at Bermuda Hundred, a plantation landing eighteen crow-flight miles from the rebel capital. Ashore, as afloat, the gesticulating Butler rides with the van. Butler is all business here today. Mindful of Grant’s injunction that he is to “use every exertion to secure footing as far up the south side of the river as you can, and as soon as you can,” he lands the bulk of his army just short of the first of the half dozen looping bends or “curls” of the James, where the Confederates have heavy-caliber guns sited high on the steep bluffs to discourage efforts to approach they city by water.

Meanwhile, Butler’s cavalry—two brigades combined with a 3,000-man division under Brigadier General August Kautz, a thirty-six-year-old German-born West Pointer, rides due west out of Suffolk for a strike at the Petersburg & Weldon Railroad, damage to which would go far toward delaying the arrival of enemy reinforcements from the Carolinas.

President Davis informs General Lee of Butler’s landings on the James and it appears in Richmond that two major drives are heading toward the capital. The unfortunate commander opposing Butler’s army—George Picket, of Gettysburg fame—has practically no troops to fight with. He has, in all, fewer than 750 of all arms to stand in the path of the 30,000 Federals debarking at Bermuda Hundred and City Point, nine miles respectively from Drewry’s Bluff and his district headquarters at Petersburg, whose garrisons are included in the total that shows him facing odds of forty-to-one or longer. General Beauregard, sixty-five miles to the south at Weldon, which he recently reached to assume command of the newly created Department of North Carolina and Southern Virginia, replies to an urgent summons from Richmond today that he is “indisposed,” too ill to take the field. Three brigades are en route from his old command at Charleston; he will do his utmost to speed them northward, so long at least as the railroad stays in operation, and will come up in person as soon as he feels well enough to travel. In the meantime, though, he leaves it to Pickett to improvise as best he can a defense against the host ascending the James.

Pickett himself isn’t even supposed to be there, having received orders yesterday to proceed by rail to Hanover Junction and there await the arrival of his four brigades—two of which are now with Hoke in the movement against New Bern, down the coast, while the other two are with Major General Robert Ransom, charged with defending Richmond north of the James—for a reunion with Lee’s army challenging Grant’s advance. The long-haired Virginian looks forward to returning to duty under Longstreet, whose guidance he has missed these past eight months on detached service. Warned of the landings downriver today, however, he stays to meet the threat to the near vacuum between the James and the Appomattox.

In the wake of his marching armies, General Sherman leaves Chattanooga and rides into Georgia. The armies of the East and West are pulling together at last.

In North Carolina Hoke’s projected attack on New Bern is a failure, due to the nonarrival of the Arbemarle. In a three-hour fight with seven Union gunboats in the Sound from which the ironclad takes her name, she disables USS Sassacus and inflicts severe damage on the rest of her challengers. Albemarle suffers little damage herself, except to her riddled stack, but the engagement has proved her so unwieldy that her skipper decides there is no hope of steaming down into Pamlico Sound to repeat at New Bern the victory she helped win two weeks ago at Plymouth; he retires up the Roanoke at night. Federals capture CSS (former USS) Bombshell.

Federal cavalry under William W. Averell set out from Logan Court House, West Virginia, on another expedition against the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad. Federal scouts in Craighead and Lawrence counties, Missouri, last five days. On the Red River, skirmishing at Graham’s Plantation and at Natchitoches, Louisiana, mark the slow Federal withdrawal after the campaign. At Dunn’s Bayou two Federal wooden gunboats and a transport are lost in a duel with Confederate shore batteries. In Georgia skirmishing at and near Tunnel Hill lasts three days; in Kentucky Federals scout in Meade and Breckinridge counties.

[Doug64]

May 6, Friday

In the Wilderness, General Ewell is the first to open fire as the sky to the east turns red. Then Hancock, at 5 am, sends his skirmish lines forward to a spattering of musketry that signals the dawn of a second violent day. With the charismatic Hancock spurring his men on, more than 20,000 Federals rumble forward in three lines of battle on a front more than a mile long. Wilcox’s Confederates are the first to receive the shock. Still in disarray from the previous day’s maneuvers, they soon fall back; then many of them turn and run. Wadsworth’s men hit the left flank of Heth’s line, rolling it up like a sheet of paper. Many of Heth’s regiments, without waiting for the hammer to fall, retreat to form a new line. Colonel Theodore Lyman, riding to the scene as the fighting begins, finds a jubilant Hancock at the crossroads. “We are driving them, sir,” Hancock shouts. “Tell General Meade we are driving them most beautifully!” Before 7 am, Hancock’s blue host has moved forward a mile or more. Wadsworth’s division, so befuddled yesterday, is crashing in on the Federal right, and Stevenson’s division is not far behind.

The Confederate front is dissolving. Some of Lee’s men make a stand at the upper end of the Widow Tapp farm. Around them the remnants of Heth’s and Wilcox’s divisions march to the rear. Lee, in the clearing at the Widow Tapp farm, watches uncomfortably as his men emerge from the woods with the Union army close behind. For a time the only force that holds this clearing is the twelve guns commanded by Colonel William Poague, a 28-year-old Virginian. Poague buys precious time, staggering Wadworth’s Federals with blasts of canister. Nevertheless, Lee, standing behind the guns, perceives a disaster in the making. He orders his wagons to make ready for immediate withdrawal. Then his slow temper flares. He calls to Brigadier General Samuel McGowan of Wilcox’s division, “Is this splendid brigade of yours running like a flock of geese?” In truth, the men aren’t panicked. “General,” answers McGowan evenly, “these men are not whipped. They only want a place to form and they will fight as well as they ever did.” Now the elements of the Wilderness take their toll on the Federal juggernaut. Having become disoriented in the thickets, Wadsworth’s troops slice to the Orange Plank road at an angle, inadvertently forcing Birney’s men—Hancock’s lead division—off the road to the left. Regiments and brigades become hopelessly entangled and, just as a glorious victory seems within reach, Hancock’s offensive begins to falter. Burnside’s two divisions in the center are having as much trouble making their way through the undergrowth as their comrades did yesterday. They are hours away from being able to offer help.

At this pivotal moment Longstreet appears, his corps striding up the Orange Plank road in parallel columns with Major General Charles W. Field’s division on the left and Brigadier General Joseph B. Kershaw’s on the right. Longstreet’s men shoulder their way through the wreckage of Hill’s corps and form to take up the fight. No one is happier to see them than Lee. As Brigadier General John Gregg of Field’s division is leading his Texans past Poague’s guns, Lee, on Traveller, begins to ride forward with them. “Lee to the rear,” the men shout. “General Lee, go back.” He seems not to hear them. Only after several men break ranks to turn Lee’s horse around does the commanding general agree to ride behind their line. He is still in danger. Longstreet rides up and, seeing Lee “off his balance,” promises the commanding general that his line will be recovered if Lee will permit him to handle the troops. Otherwise, Longstreet tells him with affectionate bluntness, “I would like to ride to some place of safety, as it is not quite comfortable where we are.” Lee reluctantly seeks cover and Longstreet proceeds with his attack. Gregg’s 800 Texans advance through the woods “with apparently resistless force.” The Federals fight back fiercely, and within ten minutes nearly half of the Texans are casualties, including Gregg, who is badly wounded. Two more of Longstreet’s brigades follow the Texans, driving the Federals back in confusion. Longstreet, meanwhile, hurls two of Kershaw’s brigades down the Orange Plank road, and all along Hancock’s right the tired and disorganized Federals are forced to withdraw. Hancock, his ebullience fading, sends a somber dispatch to Meade: “They are pressing us on the road a good deal. If more force were here now, I could use it.”

Hancock also is having problems on his left. He has entrusted the protection of that flank to his left wing commander, Brigadier General John Gibbon, a twice-wounded professional who is fighting for the Union even though his three brothers are fighting for the South. Gibbon has kept Brigadier General Francis Barlow’s division and most of II Corps’s artillery deploy on an open stretch of high ground along the Brock road about a mile south of the Orange Plank road intersection. As the rest of the corps advances, a gap opens between Birney’s troops and those of Barlow. As early as 7 am Hancock had sent a message to Gibbon, ordering him to send Barlow’s ttoops forward to attack the Confederate right. Gibbon will insist forever that he never got the message. He does send one of Barlow’s brigades forward, but he holds the rest of the force in place this morning, expecting a full-scale attack at any moment from the south.

By midmorning Longstreet has almost driven Hancock’s command back to its starting place; and soon the blue and gray have fought themselves to a stalemate. But Longstreet has been alerted to the gap between Birney and Barlow in the left of Hancock’s line. Brigadier General Martin L. Smith, Lee’s chief engineer, has made a personal reconnaissance and found a hidden route—the bed of an unfinished railroad—that leads right into it. Longstreet orders his adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel G. Moxley Sorrel, to take four brigades along the railroad cut and advance north, attacking Birney’s exposed flank. At 11 am the Confederates move out unseen, and then they burst from the brambles, yelling as they come. The closest Federals, men of Colonel Robert McAllister’s brigade, are hit before they can change their front to face the attackers, and they retreat in disorder. Then more of the Federal troops fall back, fighting, and the Union left is close to collapse. When the commanders meet years later, Hancock will tell Longstreet, “You rolled me up like a wet blanket.”

On Hancock’s right, General James Wadsworth is working hard to rally his division. By now 1,100 of his 5,000 men are casualties. The troops are falling back, not in panic but, as one officer will say, “as though they had fought all they meant to fight for the present.” Wadsworth orders a Massachusetts regiment to attack directly down the Orange Plank road. Soon the regiment’s Colonel George N. Macy falls with a shattered foot and has to pass command over to Major Henry Abbott. Within moments, Abbott falls mortally wounded. Wadsworth is riding with the Massachusetts men. Suddenly his horse bolts forward into the Confederate line and he takes a bullet to the head and falls mortally wounded, surrounded by Confederates who take him back to their own field hospital. By 12:30 pm the Confederate momentum has slowed, allowing Hancock’s battered Federals to withdraw behind their earthworks.

Longstreet is riding along the Orange Plank road with his officers, planning a follow-up attack. At his side rides Brigadier General Micah Jenkins, a 28-year-old South Carolinian and one of the most able young officers in the Army of Northern Virginia. Jenkin’s brigade is to lead the new assault. All at once rifles open up from the woods to the right, Confederates firing down the road at troops they mistakenly think are the enemy. Longstreet and his party are in the line of fire. “Friends!” shouts General Joseph Kershaw. “We are friends!” The firing stops, but the damage has been done. A courier and a staff captain were killed instantly. Jenkins took a bullet to the brain, though that doesn’t stop him from cheering his men as he is being carried away and imploring them to sweep the enemy into the river. He will live only a few hours. Longstreet, too, has been hit, a Minié ball passing through his throat and right shoulder. The blow lifts him from the saddle, his right arm dropping to his side, but he settles back in his seat and starts to ride on. But within a minute the flow of blood admonishes him that his work for the day is done. As he turns to ride back, members of his staff, seeing him about to fall, dismount and lift him to the ground. he is placed on a litter and carried to the rear, his hat over his face to shield him from the sun. The wounded general can hear the men murmuring along the line: “He is dead, and they are telling us he is only wounded.” Wanting to reassure them, Longstreet raises his hat with his left hand and a cheer goes up, the burst of voices and the flying of hats in the air easing his pain somewhat. Almost exactly a year earlier, and in the same cursed woods and in similar circumstances, Stonewall Jackson fell. But Longstreet’s chief medical officer pronounces his wound “not necessarily mortal.” For now, Lee takes over his command.

At 3 pm there is a lull in the fighting. On his headquarters stump near the crossroads, Grant is still whittling and smoking. Earlier, when told of Hancock’s reversal, his quiet response was to throw more troops into the melee. “Feeding the fight,” his staff calls it. In early afternoon, Grant schedules a coordinated attack against Longstreet and Hill along the Orange Plank road. It is to commence at 6 pm. But Lee strikes first. Shortly after 4 pm he sends Hill’s and Longstreet’s troops forward in a concentrated assault on Hancock’s line. Hancock’s divisions are waiting behind their breastworks along the Brock road. During the lull, their flank has been shored up—Burnside has moved in on the right. As the Confederates attack, brush fires break out again on the battlefield; the grayclad men move past little patches of flame as they advance into raking rifle volleys and artillery fire from Hancock’s breastworks. The wind is in their favor, blowing from west to east. Soon the breastworks themselves catch fire. Federal soldiers pull back, choking on the smoke, and in places Federal and Confederate are no more than a dizen paces apart, firing at each other through sheets of flame. Anderson’s Georgians and South Carolinians of Colonel John Henagan’s brigade reach the burning earthworks in Gershom Mott’s front and plant their flags in the face of devastating artillery fire. But Hancock has reserves to send in, among them Colonel Sprigg Carroll’s brigade—veterans of Gettysburg. Carroll’s men recapture the length of breastwork and plug the hole, while suffering great losses. Carroll himself is wounded for the second time in two days. Burnside’s two divisions join in and hold their own, if no more. After an hour of fighting, the Confederate offensive has been stymied. A smoldering no man’s land littered with bodies separates the two armies as the shooting slows. There is no possibility now of the Union attack that Grant ordered.

Lee, in frustration, rides north to where Ewell is holding his position astride the Turnpike. “Cannot something be done on this flank?” he asks. The answer is yes. Brigadier General John Gordon, whose Georgians man the Confederate far left, has been convinced since morning that his line overlaps that of the Federals to his front, making them vulnerable to a flanking attack. He has scouted the area himself to confirm his conviction that the enemy flank is in the air. At first Ewell refused Gordon’s requests to attack; but after making a reconnaissance of his own, he changes his mind. Lee likes the idea. He sees a chance to repeat the devastating surprise flank attack that he and Stonewall Jackson accomplished against Joseph Hooker at Chancellorsville a year ago. So about 6 pm Gordon’s Georgians move forward, supported by Brigadier General Robert Johnston’s brigade. As the fighting develops, Early will throw in additional troops.

The Union right flank is John Sedgwick’s responsibility, and throughout the day he has ignored the possibility of an attack. To make matters worse, the troops there are among his least dependable: two brigades that had been led to defeat so often by a previous commander, Major General Robert Milroy, that they have become known as “Milroy’s weary boys.” Between them and the Rapidan stretches several miles of unoccupied country. From this unexpected direction, the Georgians strike with a whoop, and the weary boys break and flee. Soon fleeing soldiers are rushing past Sedgwick’s headquarters. He sends for reinforcements and gallops toward the fighting. Shortly, a few officers reach Meade and Grant’s campsite, spouting tales of disaster: The entire VI Corps is collapsing, Sedgwick himself has been captured. All is lost. “Nonsense!” bellows Meade. “If they have broken our lines, they can do nothing more tonight.” Grant is also told of the Confederate flank attack. A panicky officer approaches him, predicting that Lee is throwing his entire force between them and the river, cutting the Union army off. Retreat is imperative. Grant, usually so phlegmatic, replies with an outburst that matches Meade’s: “I am tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault and land in our rear and on both our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command and try to think about what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.” Darkness and Federal reinforcements put an end to Gordon’s attack. The Georgians have inflicted about 400 casualties and captured several hundred men, including the commanders of the two hapless brigades on the Federal far right. Even General Sedgwick has a narrow escape. A Confederate officer levels a pistol at him at close range—just before the Confederate himself is shot down.

The casualties are staggering. In two days of fighting, of over 100,000 Federals engaged, 2,246 have been killed, 12,037 wounded, and 3,383 missing for a total of 17,666; Confederates number something over 60,000; losses are uncertain but probably total more than 7,500. Robert E. Lee rides back to his headquarters at the Widow Tapp farm. In the woods the moans of the wounded turn to screams as fire engulfs them. Paper cartridges in their pockets ignite and explode with an eerie clatter. The general puts the survivors to work strengthening their defenses. Shortly after dark, Ulysses Grant offers George Meade the last cigar in his pocket and seeks the privacy of his tent. Before retiring, he has a word for a correspondent who is about to depart for Washington to file his story on the battle: “If you see the President, tell him, from me, that whatever happens, there will be no turning back.”

Elsewhere this morning, on the James, General Butler’s men see the steeples of Petersburg seven miles to the southwest. Richmond lies about fifteen miles to the north. There are fewer than 10,000 Confederates in the fifty-mile area around Richmond and Petersburg to oppose the Army of the James, numbering nearly 39,000. Butler begins to comply with another item in his instructions: “Fortify, or rather entrench, at once, and concentrate all your troops for the field there as rapidly as you can.” Five miles west of Bermuda Hundred, between Farrar’s Island and Port Walthall, the James and the Appomattox are less than four miles apart. By intrenching this line he will be safe from a frontal attack, while the rivers secure his flanks and rear. It is true, the Bermuda debarkation requires a crossing of the Appomattox to reach either City Point or Petersburg, but this is better, Butler reasons—bearing in mind Grant’s double-barreled admonition “that Richmond is to be your objective point, and that there is to be cooperation between your force and the Army of the Potomac”—than having to cross it in order to reach the fattest and best-defended prize of all. By sundown of his first full day ashore, he has not only completed the preliminary intrenchment of the line connecting the bends of the two rivers, he also orders troops of his two corps, commanded by W.F. Smith and Quincy A. Gillmore, to send a brigade of infantry another two or three miles west to look into the possibility of cutting the railroad between Petersburg and Richmond, which in turn affords the rebel defenders their only rail connection with the Carolinas and the reinforcements they no doubt are calling for, even now, in their distress at his appearance on their doorstep. Smith sends one brigade, Gillmore none.

General Pickett gathers what men he can. Fortunately for him, the first of the three promised brigades from Charleston reach Petersburg this morning, and Pickett gets those 600 Carolinians up the turnpike in time to delay the advance. They manage this, though only by the hardest fighting, and just as they are about to be overrun they are reinforced by a brigade sent down from Richmond: Tennesseans who arrived this morning under Brigadier General Bushrod Johnson, the first of two western outfits summoned east to replace Pickett’s two brigades in the capital defenses. Johnson is a heavy hitter, as he had shown by spearheading the Chickamauga breakthrough, and his attack drives the reconnoitering Federals back on the line of intrenchments constructed today across Bermuda Neck; the first half-hearted attempt at Petersburg, Richmond, and the lines of communication in between has failed. Pickett tells Johnson to dig in along the pike, and then—reinforced by the rest of the Charleston brigade, which comes up after midnight to lift his strength to about 3,000—settles down to wait, as best his tormented nerves will permit, for what tomorrow is going to bring.

While this is going on, the navey sends out a squadron to investigate an account by a runaway slave that the Confederates have torpedoes planted thickly in the James, especially in the vicinity of Deep Bottom, a dozen miles up the winding river from Bermuda Hundred. It is all too true: as the crew of the big double-ender Commodore Jones finds out, about 2 pm. A 2,000-pound torpedo, sunk there some months ago and connected by wires to galvanic batteries on the bank, explodes “directly under the ship with terrible effect, causing her destruction instantly.” So her captain will later state from a bed in the Norfolk Naval Hospital. Another witness, less disconcerted because he is less involved, being aboard another gunboat, goes into more detail. “It seemed as if the bottom of the river was torn up and blown through the vessel itself,” he will write. “The Jones was lifted almost entirely clear of the water, and she burst in the air like an exploding firecracker. She was in small pieces when she struck the water again.” For days, bodies and parts of bodies float up and are fished out of the James; the death toll will finally be put at 69. Just now, though, the problem of how to keep the same thing from happening over an over again is solved by the capture of two men caught lurking in the brush where the batteries are cached. They triggered the explosion, and what is more they helped plant other such charges up ahead. They refuse to talk, however, until one of them is placed in the bow of the lead vessel and the squadron continues its upstream probe: whereupon, in the words of an interrogator, he signifies “his willingness to tell all.” That more or less solves the problem of torpedoes (in any case, of the ones already planted; future sowings are of course another matter).

Far from the Wilderness, guns sputter as always. On the Red River there are skirmishes at Bayou Lamourie and at Boyce’s and Wells’ plantations, Louisiana. Skirmishing at Princeton, West Virginia, marks the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad expedition. Other skirmishes break out on the Blackwater River in Virginia; at Tampa, Florida (temporarily occupied by Federals); near Byonton’s Prairie, California; and Morganfield, Kentucky. Federals scout from Bloomfield and Patterson, Missouri. Five days of Confederate operations in Calcasieu Pass, Louisiana, include capture of USS Granite City today. Confederates stage a raid on Napoleonville, Louisiana. In Georgia skirmishing continues at Tunnel Hill.

At Camden, Arkansas, Kirby Smith sends Walker’s Texans back to Louisiana to rejoin Taylor.

Conscious of the double threat to Richmond from the north and the southeast, President Davis wires General Beauregard, commanding south of the capital, “I hope you will be able at Petersburg to direct operations both before and behind you, so as to meet necessities.”

[Doug64]

May 7, Saturday

From his forward base at Ringgold, General Sherman formally launches the campaign against Atlanta. Early in the morning, the vanguard of Thomas’ Army of the Cumberland attacks the Confederate outpost at Tunnel Hill, a ridge seven miles southeast of Ringgold. Here, where the Western & Atlantic tunnels through the ridge, a Federal battle line more than a mile long confronts three thin brigades of Confederate cavalry. The defenders, fighting dismounted behind breastworks with support from horse artillery, delay the Federals for a couple of hours but then fall back so rapidly that they neglect to destroy the tunnel.

A few miles farther down the railroad, the Federal advance comes up against the main Confederate line at Rocky Face Ridge. The west face of the ridge rises almost vertically in a craggy wall of quartz. On the knife-edge crest, Confederate officers sip water from their canteens and gesture smugly to the mass of Federals far below them. Only one major pass breaches Rocky Face. Through this gateway, Mill Creek Gap, the railroad mounts the ridge and descends to Dalton just beyond. But Confederate engineers have flooded much of the gap by damming Mill Creek. The reservoir they’ve created is sixteen feet deep in places and flanked by earthworks. And the gap itself is dominated by towering cliffs that bear the ominous name Buzzard’s Roost and bristle with cannon and grayclad infantry.

Sherman, glimpsing all this through a glass from atop Tunnel Hill, sees the gap as a “terrible door of death.” He has no intention of attempting to enter it, he will merely pretend to. In a masquerade Sherman plans for Joseph Johnston’s benefit, two Federal armies will act as decoys. Thomas’ Army of the Cumberland, confronting Rocky Face from the west, will feign an aggressive assault on the ridge. From the north, Schofield’s Army of the Ohio will demonstrate at the northern terminus of the ridge, where its right links up at a 90-degree angle with Thomas’ troops and its left extends to the east across Crow Valley. Sherman’s script calls for the real drama to take place farther south and to star McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee. McPherson is already engaged in a wide flanking maneuver, marching in a southeasterly direction toward the little town of Villanow. From there he is to slip through Snake Creek Gap, a long defile that separates the impenetrable Rocky Face from a ridge to the south. Then McPherson will march east and strike the railroad in the Confederate rear at Resaca, fifteen miles south of Dalton, severing Johnston’s lifeline. When that happens, Sherman reasons, his enemy will have to withdraw south from Dalton. Then McPherson can hit the Confederates in the flank while the other two Federal armies cross the Rocky Face unopposed and pursue Johnston from the north.

The basic idea for this plan, which holds promise of ending the campaign before it has scarcely begun, came from George Thomas. He thought of it back in February when his army felt out the enemy defenses at Rocky Face in support of Sherman’s raid in Mississippi. In proposing it to Sherman, Thomas wanted his army to carry out the flanking maneuver. But Sherman insisted that his own old Army of the Tennessee—“my whiplash,” he calls it—is faster on its feet. Thomas’ Army of the Cumberland, nearly three times as large, has the reputation of being resolute in battle but slow and cumbersome—not unlike the methodical Thomas himself. Sherman wants to keep that massive force of Cumberlanders in front of Rocky Face, between the Confederates and Chattanooga, just in case Johnston decides to attack.

Sherman may have another reason as well for selecting the Army of the Tennessee to play the pivotal role. McPherson is a fellow Ohioan, an old friend, and a favorite of both Grant and Sherman. A handsome ans engaging six-footer, first in his class at West Point, the 35-year-old McPherson clearly is headed for higher command. “If he lives,” Sherman says, “he’ll outdistance Grant and myself.” Thomas took Sherman’s decision with his usual stoicism. He made no show of pique, just as he didn’t complain back in March when Grant passed over him on the seniority list and appointed Sherman to the Western command. Sherman appreciates this quality in his old West Point roommate. At Tunnel Hill, he looks the other way when Thomas sets up an elaborate field headquarters with so many tents Sherman laughingly but affectionately calls it “Thomasville.” But more important, Sherman knows, is that Thomas will loyally carry out his orders to “occupy the attention of all the enemy” while McPherson skirts south of Rocky Face.

The vanguard of General Polk’s reinforcements requested by Johnston—a 4,000-man division under Brigadier General James Cantey—arrives at Resaca by train and Johnston orders it to remain there.

In Virginia’s Wilderness, fog, smoke, and the loathsome stench of burned and decaying flesh hang over the battlefield. So does an eerie calm, bewildering after the violence of the past two days. There are sporadic bursts of musket fire, signaling brief encounters between Federal and Confederate skirmishers, and a few cannon shots, but veterans—their ears attuned to the ominous roar that indicates the start of a real battle—shrug off these noises as meaningless clatter. Slowly the troops on both sides realize that neither of the commanding generals are inclined to renew the carnage in the desolate forest.

General Lee briefly entertains the notion that Grant might be about to disengage and withdraw eastward, following the long train of ambulances that the Confederates can see snaking toward Fredericksburg. Another alternative for Grant is a retreat north, back across the Rapidan. The fact that Grant didn’t attack at first light seems to indicate that he is contemplating a move, but in what direction?

For Grant, there is only one choice. At 6:30 am he writes an order that is soon delivered to General Meade. It begins: “Make all preparations during the day for a night march to take position at Spotsylvania Court House with one corps”—a move not to the north or east, but to the southeast, a dozen miles closer to Richmond. Grant is not going to retreat. Despite the heavy losses in the Wilderness, he will continue to press the enemy. Grant has chosen Spotsylvania as his immediate objective for several reasons. It is an important crossroads that lies on the route from the Wilderness to Hanover Junction, where Lee’s principal supply lines meet—the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac and the Virginia Central Railroads. And it is the logical target if Grant means to slip by Lee’s right flank. Should the Federals reach Spotsylvania first, they will be astride the best route to Richmond and Lee will be forced to either attack Grant’s larger army or to lead a desperate race on inferior roads to reach a blocking position and protect the Federal capital. Grant’s orders to Meade are, as usual, clear and specific. General Warren’s V Corps will march south on the Brock road, passing behind General Hancock’s men in their charred and smoking breastworks. Hancock’s troops will hold their position, covering the army’s shift southward, and then follow Warren. John Sedgwick and his VI Corps will head for Chancellorsville and turn south. General Ambrose Burnside is to follow Sedgwick. If the movement goes as planned, Warren’s vanguard will be at Spotsylvania early tomorrow morning, digging trenches and preparing to meet any troops Lee might send in pursuit.

Before Grant’s flanking march begins, parties of Federal troops emerge from their lines to recover the wounded that can be reached and to bury the dead. Confederates, also taking advantage of the lull, perform the same sade chores, often burying blue-clad corpses. As they bury the dead, they rifle the bodies for supplies—they ran through their rations during the battle and can’t get to their wagons, but the Yankees have four or five days rations of hard tack and bacon in their haversacks. All day ambulances roll away from the Union line, but when night and the time to march approaches, scores of wounded still lie uncollected. The ambulances and army wagons have been loaded to their utmost capacity, making a train of many miles in extent, but VI Corps alone leaves some two hundred wounded on the ground when it begins its march.

During the day, reports of Federal cavalry activity to the southeast persuades Lee that Grant is about to move and that Spotsylvania is his destination. For insurance Lee has ordered a rough track cut through the forest, connecting his right on the Orange Plank road to a branch of the Catharpin road that gives access to Spotsylvania. It will give him the shortest route for a covering march to the courthouse. Then when some of A.P. Hill’s staff officers inform Lee that, using a telescope, they have seen guns being moved to the Federal left, the Confederate commander is convinced. Clearly a race is on. Lee orders Richard Anderson, who has taken over for the wounded James Longstreet, to ready two divisions for a night march toward Spotsylvania. Anderson, holding the Confederate right, is in the best position for this side slip. Richard Ewell and A.P. Hill will follow with their corps as soon as they are certain that the enemy trenches on their front are empty.

Anderson, figuring he has eleven miles to cover, sets his starting time for 11 pm. The Federals are on the move well before that. Around 8:30 this night, Grant and his staff make for the Brock road to ride with Warren’s vanguard. Warren’s men, pulled from their positions and told to march, don’t know at first whether they are advancing or retreating. Progress is even more difficult than usual. The road is dry and the dust is choking. Smoky fires still sputter nearby and that smell is everywhere. The men are forced to halt and stand aside as ambulances rattle past. Hancock’s troops, sprawled by the road trying to sleep, present an obstacle course in the dark. Then comes a call “Give way to the right!” and a small cavalcade is let through, Grant in the lead on Cincinnati, riding south. The men grasp what this means and, despite orders to be as quiet as possible, give a great cheer, tossing their hats as they yell. The big horse grows excited and rears. When Grant gets the animal under control, he tells his staff to hush the men lest the Confederates hear. Nevertheless, a great burst of cheering greets Grant wherever he rides. The agony of the Wilderness is not to be wasted, after all.

The Confederates hear the cheering, of course, as well as the tramp of thousands of feet. They, too, have been admonished to maintain silence: “No fire or noise or any unusual signs, such as rattling canteens or metal.” But unlike the Federals, the Confederates are jubilant. They assume the Federals are in retreat and look upon the Wilderness as a victory. As they move down the stump-studded, fresh-cut road, some of Anderson’s men cry out, “Three cheers for General Lee!” The result is “the grandest vocal exhibition” some there have ever heard. One brigade after another let out the Rebel yell until it goes “echoing to the remotest corner of Ewell’s corps.” Three times that mighty wave of sound rings along the Confederate lines. The yelling over, Anderson’s men stumble on down the crude road through the woods. The troops badly need a rest, but as Anderson will recall, “I found the woods in every direction on fire and burning furiously, and there was no suitable place for rest.” So he keeps his troops moving.

The equally weary Federals are having their own problems moving on the clogged Brock road—and the delays almost cost them their lieutenant general. As Grant and his party approach Todd’s Tavern late at night, they decide to take a lane to the right rather than struggle through the crowds of troops up ahead. Lieutenant Colonel Cyrus B. Comstock, Grant’s staff engineer, soon senses they are going in the wrong direction. Riding ahead, Comstock sees Anderson’s Confederate infantry crossing the lane a couple of hundred yards away. Comstock spurs back to his commander, urging him to turn around immediately or risk becoming a prisoner of war. An annoyed Grant reluctantly reverses Cincinnati and, reaching Todd’s Tavern at midnight, sleeps on the ground under his overcoat.

Despite the wrong turn, Grant reaches Todd’s Tavern ahead of Warren’s infantrymen, who have been moving all too slowly through the darkness. The road is literally jammed with troops. But some of the delay is the fault of the Union army’s own cavalry. Earlier in the day, two divisions of Philip Sheridan’s horsemen, having bested General Jeb Stuart’s cavalry in a sharp clash at Todd’s Tavern, have blithely bivouacked by the side of the road south of the tavern. Sheridan intends that the troopers ride in the morning, to block the bridges across the Po River, heading off any of Lee’s units that are Spotsylvania bound. But Anderson’s troops have been marching hard, and they will reach the most important of the spans, Block House Bridge, at daybreak. General Meade, arriving at Todd’s Tavern after midnight with the head of Warren’s column, is outraged to find Federal cavalry sleeping up ahead. Riding forward, he angrily orders Sheridan’s two division commanders to clear out and ride southward: “It is of the utmost importance that not the slightest delay occur in your opening the Brock Road beyond Spotsylvania Court House, as an infantry corps is now on the way to occupy the place.” Despite Meade’s peremptory order, Warren’s infantroy find their march stalled by a sea of Federal troopers jamming the Brock road as they prepare to move out. The foot soldiers are ordered to close up and halt—and quickly fall asleep in the road. It is 6 am before Warren can get his men moving again. As they start, they hear carbine fire ahead.

Just south of Richmond, encouraged by a report from the brigadier who conducted yesterday’s reconnaissance (he ran into spirited resistance on the turnpike, half a mile short of the railroad, but nothing that can’t be brushed aside, he thinks, by a more substantial force), Butler decides this morning to gor for the railroad in strength, then turn southward down it to knock out Petersburg and thus assure that his rear will be unmolested when he swings north to deal with Richmond. While the others keep busy with axes and spades, improving the earthworks protecting their base from attack, four of the fourteen brigades in the two corps, each of which has three divisiosn, move out to attend to this preamble to the main effort: three from Gilmore and one from Major General W.F. Smith, whose third division debarked at City Point and is still there, despite his protest that it “might as well have been back in Fort Monroe.” The march is along the spur track from Port Walthall, and their initial objective is its junction with the trunk line, three miles west. As they approach it around midday, a spatter of fire from the skirmishers out front informs them that the junction—grandly styled Port Walthall Junction, though all it contains is a rundown depot and a couple of dilapidated shacks—is defended. The four brigades come up in turn to add their weight to the pressure being exerted, but the rebels either are there in heavy numbers or else they are determined not to yield, whatever the odds. This continues for two hours, in the course of which the Federals manage to overlap one gray flank and tear up about a quarter mile of track on the main line. But that is all. The Confederates have a new commander, Major General D.H. Hill, famed for a ferocity in battle rivalling that of his late brother-in-law Stonewall Jackson. His caustic tongue having cost him lofty posts in both of the Confederacy’s main armies—together with a promotion to lieutenant general, withdrawn when he fell out with Bragg after Chickamauga—Hill has offered his services to Beauregard as an aide-de-camp, and Beauregard has sent him at once to Petersburg to see if Pickett thinks he can be of any help. Pickett does indeed think so, and puts the rank-waiving North Carolinian in charge of the two brigades in position up the turnpike. Hill has handled them so skillfully in today’s action around Port Walthall Junction, losing 184 to inflict 289 casualties on a force twice his own, that at 4 pm Butler, more or less baffled, decides to pull back behind his fortifications and return in greater strength tomorrow. Soldiers begin to call the campaign a “stationary advance.”

Bad news awaits Butler, back on Bermuda Neck, of yesterday’s sinking of the Commodore Jones. Also, about the time that the four brigades today skirmish down the spur track from Port Walthall, the navy was given a violent reminder that older dangers, familiar to sailors long before anyone thought of exploding powder under water, still threatens the existence of the fleet. USS Shawneen, a 180-ton sidewheel gunboat on patrol at Turkey Bend, dropped anchor under the loom of Malvern Hill to give her crew time out for the midday meal, only to have it interrupted when a masked battery and four companies of Confederate infantry opened fire from the north bank, peppering the decks with bullets and puncturing the steam drum. While most of the crew went over the side to keep from being scalded, Shawneen’s captain ordered her colors struck to save the lives of the injured still aboard. Ceasing fire, the rebel colonel in command sent out a boat to remove survivors and blow the vessel up. Such is the bad news—bad for Butler because it means that the navy, having lost two ships in as many days, is likely to be reluctant to give him the slam-bang close support he will want when he moves against or beyond the high-sited batteries on Chaffin’s and Drewry’s bluffs, fortified works flanking the last tortuous upstream bend of the river below Richmond, both of them integral parts of the hard-shell outer defenses he will have to pierce if he is to put the hug on the rebel capital.

While D.H. Hill is making his fight for the Junction, the second western brigade reaches Richmond—Alabamians under Brigadier General Archibald Gracie, another Chickamauga hero—and is sent across the James by Ransom, who not only follows in person but brings along Pickett’s other pair of brigades and posts all three in the works around Drewry’s Bluff, bracing them for a stand in case the Federals turn in that direction.

Butler isn’t the only one receiving bad news. Butler’s cavalry has encountered little opposition and now strikes at Stony Creek, where they burn the hundred-foot railway bridge twenty miles south of Petersburg. This cuts off Pickett’s hope for the early arrival of more troops from the south.

Meanwhile, skirmishing occurs near Florence, Alabama; and on the Red River at Bayou Boeuf. Ironclad ram CSS Raleigh goes aground and has to be destroyed, but not until she had engaged two blockaders yesterday and four Federal vessels off the mouth of the Cape Fear River, North Carolina, today.

At a marine band concert in Washington the President declines to make a speech but proposes three cheers for Grant “and all the armies under his command.”

[Doug64]

May 8, Sunday

The carbine fire Warren and his men hear as they finally get moving again toward Spotsylvania Court House signals the beginning of the Battle of Spotsylvania. Like many of history’s great battles, it begins with a series of accidental engagements as opposing units blunder into each other. The first shooting occurs at the crossroads itself, where yet another division of Sheridan’s cavalry, led by Brigadier General James Wilson, clashes with Brigadier General Thomas Rosser’s cavalry brigade. Then Wesley Merritt’s horsemen, urged down the Brock road by Meade, run head on into a blocking force of Confederate cavalry commanded by General Lee’s nephew, Major General Fitzhugh Lee, about two miles short of the courthouse. Jeb Stuart immediately sends a courier to General Lee, asking for reinforcements. En route the messenger encounters General Anderson’s division. Anderson’s column of weary infantrymen have completed the worst of their exhausting march, outdistancing Warren’s Federals in the nightlong race southward; the Confederates are just falling in to continue across the undefended Block House Bridge when Stuart’s messenger gallops up. Anderson sends one brigade along the Brock road to help Fitzhugh Lee hold off Merritt’s troopers. He then orders a second brigade to march to the relief of Rosser’s men, who have been driven out of Spotsylvania by Wilson’s Federals.

Merritt, meanwhile, has called for aid from Warren’s approaching corps. Warren sends Brigadier General John Robinson’s division down the Brock road to a clearing on the farm of a family named Alsop. It is already “broad day and scorching hot” when they reach the cleared lands of the Alsop farm. They are fully two miles from where they had first deployed, having run a part of the way. Many have dropped out, overcome by heat and weariness. Robinson and his two leading brigades are in for an unpleasant surprise. Thinking they are attacking only a relatively small if stubborn line of dismounted Confederate cavalry, they find themselves instead facing furious volleys from a brigade of Anderson’s infantry. General Robinson himself is among the first to go down, badly wounded in the left knee. His troops are bloodily repulsed, and they retreat back across the clearing. The exhausted Federal survivors find they don’t have the strength to run back to safety; they can only stumble to the rear.

Meade, establishing his headquarters two miles east of Todd’s Tavern, initially refuses to believe that Confederate infantry have beaten Warren’s corps to Spotsylvania. But as the morning wears on and Warren’s tired regiments are unable to dent the improvised Confederate line, Meade realizes that he is facing more than cavalry. By noon Meade has received word from Warren that the Federal attacks are hopelessly stalled and that reinforcements are needed. Meade immediately orders Sedgwick’s corps to form on Warren’s left, then directs that combined attack be made “with vigor and without delay.” Again Meade is frustrated, however. Sedgwick can’t get into position until 5 pm. By then, Ewell’s 17,000 men are coming in on Anderson’s right. The Federal assault is ill-coordinated and halfhearted; like those that have gone before, it ends in failure. With Ewell’s troops now extending and strengthening Lee’s defensive line, the Confederates are simply too strong for the dog-tired Federal attackers. When darkness ends the firing for the day, Meade’s route to Spotsylvania remains blocked.

In temperament, Major General Philip Sheridan has much in common with his volatile superior, George Meade. Both men are pugnacious, fiercely independent, and indisposed to accept criticism. So when Meade accuses Sheridan of being derelict in his duty, the army commander receives not contrition from his cavalry chief, but a tirade in return. At issue is the lost race to Spotsylvania. In the confrontation at army headquarters, Meade blasts the cavalry for delaying General Warren’s advance for several crucial hours last night, thereby allowing Lee to reach the objective first. Sheridan snarls back at his commander, complaining that Meade had deployed the cavalry divisions last night without even consulting him. He is through giving orders, Sheridan says; Meade can command the troopers from now on. Sheridan ends his outburst by asserting that, if headquarters would only get out of his hair, he and his cavalry would leave straightaway and defeat Jeb Stuart.

Meade stamps off to complain to Grant of Sheridan’s insubordination. Grant seems to pay scant attention until Meade relates Sheridan’s boast about knocking Jeb Stuart out of action. “Did Sheridan say that?” asks Grant. “Well, he generally knows what he is talking about. Let him start right out and do it.” Meade returns to Sheridan, ordering him to collect his cavalry, ride south, disrupt Lee’s supply lines, and strike Stuart. Sheridan can then resupply his troopers from General Benjamin Butler’s stores south of Richmond and rejoin the Army of the Potomac.

On the James River, Butler’s cavalry burns a second railroad bridge, twice as long, five miles down the line at the Nottoway River, before turning north to rejoin the army in two days at City Point. Meanwhile, Butler hears of the bridge destroyed yesterday at Stony Creek. Encouraged by this news, he spends today in camp, secure behind his Bermuda Neck intrenchments, putting the final touches to his plans for a movement against Petersburg in the morning, much heavier than yesterday’s movement as far as Fort Walthall Junction.

The news of Kautz’s destruction of a second bridge makes today one of mixed news for General Pickett. He’s learned of Hoke’s failure at New Bern—a failure, but one that frees five brigades, including the two from Pickett, for use elsewhere. Nowhere are they needed worse than at Petersburg, and Pickett is pleased to learn that they are to join him there by rail from Goldsboro—though when they will arrive is even more doubtful now than it was yesterday; with the second destroyed bridge being twice the length of the first, it is likely to require about twice the time to replace. Offsetting this last, there is good news from above—Pickett learns of the arrival of the three Confederate brigades at Brewry’s Bluff. This addition of 4,500 troops, combined with Wickett’s remnant and the two brigades with Hill, increases the strength of the southside force to about 8,000, roughly one third the number Butler has on Bermuda Neck. Pickett is greatly encouraged by this reduction of the odds—and so, apparently, is Beauregard, who wires Secretary of War Weldon today: “The water has improved my health.” Whether the cause is the water or the buildup (not to mention the strangely hesitant performance of Pickett’s opponent, who seems to be groping his way piecemeal toward eventual destruction), the Louisiana general announces that he will soon be well enough to come to Petersburg and lift the awesome burden of responsibility from the district commander’s shoulders.

In the Shenandoah Valley, by this time Sigel’s every move is being reported, virtually within minutes, to Brigadier General John D. Imboden at Woodstock by Confederate signalmen atop Shenandoah Peak, the 2,300-foot crest at the north end of Massanutten Mountain. Thus Imboden knows that a cavalry force has gone after Captain McNeill; that Sigel has resumed his march south, only to stop again near Strasburg; and that another 500-man cavalry detachment is headed east around Massanutten Mountain and up the Luray Valley toward New Market Gap. Imboden is worried by the information. General Breckinridge and his staff may have covered the 155 miles from Dublin to Staunton in only three days, but his two infantry brigades lag well in the rear, although in their attempt to intercept General Sigel’s 9,000 Federal troops Brigadier Generals John Echols—despite a weak heart that will repeatedly disable him—and Gabriel Wharton are driving the men to the brink of exhaustion in a series of forced marches. At the moment Breckinridge only has a few hundred militiamen at his disposal. Besides, Staunton is more than seventy miles to the southwest of Sigel’s position at Strasburg. Sigel must be checked, but Imboden himself only has 1,600 cavalry. Considering Sigel’s performance so far, Imboden reckons that he will advance no farther until his wide-ranging cavalry patrols reassure him that the road is clear. The best way to slow him, Imboden decides, is “to attack these detachments as far from Strasburg as possible and delay their return as long as possible.”

Meanwhile, the troops Breckinridge has left behind, perhaps 4,000 men in all, scramble to meet the rapidly approaching infantry of George Crook and Averell’s Federal cavalry. Facing two foes, the Confederates split up. A brigade of infantry and one of the cavalry remain at Dublin while two understrength cavalry brigades guard the passes between Saltville and the Narrows of the New River.

The Confederate cavalrymen guarding the Saltville passes are soon handed what amounts to a minor victory. As Averell and his Federal troops are heading for the salt works, they hear a rumor that the formidable John Hunt Morgan and his feared Confederate raiders are dead ahead. Averell therefore contents himself with a feint toward Saltville and its few defenders today and shies off to seek easier going at Wytheville—where ironically he does run into Morgan and is soundly beaten.

In Georgia, Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland and Schofield’s Army of the Ohio probe for the weakest places in the Confederate defenses at Rocky Face. The main Confederate line begins about a mile south of Mill Creek Gap, extends north for a couple miles, and then bends eastward at a right angle to cover Crow Valley, north of Dalton. This morning, Thomas sends one division scrambling up the lightly defended northern end of Rocky Face, where the slope is least precipitous. These soldiers, supported by one of Schofield’s divisions, work their way south for about a mile on a crest so narrow it permits passage of no more than four men abreast. About a third of the way to Mill Creek Gap, they are forced to halt under heavy fire from the Confederate main line, which is shielded by stone breastworks, and begin piling up boulders of their own for protection.

In the meantime, this afternoon another of Thomas’s divisions stages a strong demonstration at a point about four miles south of Mill Creek Gap. Here, a slight depression known as Dug Gap has been gouged out of the mountain to permit the passage of a country road. Dug Gap lies to the south of the main Confederate defenses and is guarded by a force of only about 1,000 men—two Arkansas regiments and a small brigade of Kentucky cavalry commanded by Colonel J. Warren Grigsby. About 3 pm the Federal division commander, Brigadier General John W. Geary, deploys two full brigades at the base of Dug Gap and starts them up the ridge. At first, moving through thick woods and rocky outcroppings, the Federals meet only Confederate skirmishers who quickly retreat back up the mountain. Nearing the top, however, Geary’s men encounter an awesome obstacle. Looming above them, the crest consists of a palisade of rock that is almost perpendicular. It is fifteen or twenty feet high and pierced by some narrow crevices, through which but a single man can pass at a time. The retreating Confederate skirmishers pass through the crevices, and then the main line opens furiously upon the Federals, and adds to their confusion by sending from the top great boulders rolling down the mountainside.

From this stronghold, the Confederate defenders—using the boulders to supplement their dwindling supply of ammunition—stubbornly hold their ground despite a Federal numerical superiority of more than 4 to 1. Toward evening, the Confederates get help: Two brigades of infantry under General Patrick Cleburne hurry out from Dalton. Cleburne rides on ahead of his troops, accompanied by the corps commander himself, William Hardee. As Cleburne’s column reaches the eastern base of the ridge, the brigade of Texans in the lead makes a happy discovery. The Kentucky cavalrymen who are fighting up in the gap have left their horses down below. The footsore Texans jump on the mounts and, with many of them riding double, gallop whooping and shouting up the mountainside. The first Texan to reach the crest rides up to where Cleburne and Hardee are watching the progress of the battle. He dismounts, salutes with a flourish, and asks, “Where am I most needed?” The two generals look at the boy in disbelief and then burst into laughter.

By now it is getting dark, and Geary’s Federals are already beginning to withdraw down the mountain. Their demonstration has proven costly: Gerry reports losses of 357 men. Confederate casualties are perhaps one fifth that number. But the demonstration also proves effective. While Geary has kept the Confederates occupied at Dug Gap, McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee has been marching unmolested from Vallanow, a half dozen miles to the southwest. McPherson’s leading elements reach the western entrance to Snake Creek Gap just about the same time Geary’s brigades are withdrawing down Rocky Face. Incredibly, the Confederates have failed to guard this six-mile-long defile, which points like an arrow toward their rear at Resaca. McPherson’s men occupy it without firing a shot and camp there this night secure in its thickly wooded wilderness.

Farther west, Federal engineers and soldiers under Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Bailey have dammed most of the Red River’s 758-foot width, leaving a gap of 150 feet at the center. To narrow this opening, Bailey sinks four barges weighted with stone in the river and has them hauled into position alongside the dam wings with tow lines pulled by men on shore, who work to the spirited accompaniment of an army band. Just as the river level rises high enough for Porter’s ships to attempt the passage, two of the barges break loose and slam into a ledge of rocks downstream. Water surges through the opening, lowering the level of the water that has collected above the dam. Admiral Porter, watching from horseback on shore, orders the USS Lexington to make a run for it. As thousands of soldiers watch breathlessly from shore, the Lexington steams at full speed into the churning waters of the gap. Rolling wildly, the gunboat sweeps over the falls and caromes off a crippled barge before sweeping into the deeper waters below. The other boats follow safely, to the wild cheers of the watching army. Buoyed by this success, Bailey begins damming the lower rapids and by the 13th Admiral Porter’s fleet will be on its way to the Mississippi. Porter will call Bailey’s rescue operation “the best engineering feat” he has ever seen. “To an ordinary mind, the whole thing would have appeared an utter impossibility.”

Sporadic action elsewhere includes an affair at Halltown near Harpers Ferry and a skirmish at Jeffersonville, West Virginia, on the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad; skirmishing near Decatur, Alabama; near Maysville, Arkansas; and at Bayou Robert on the Red River.

A disturbed Lincoln awaits news in Washington.

[Doug64]

May 9, Monday

During the night, someone in Confederate headquarters at Dalton, Georgia, belatedly realizes that Snake Creek Gap is undefended and orders a brigade of cavalry to stand guard over the passage. The assignment is given to Colonel Grigsby’s Kentucky troopers, who have been so effective in helping to defend Dug Gap. It is after dawn when they approach the eastern entrance to Snake Creek Gap—too late. Just then, McPherson’s army begins to emerge from the gap into Sugar Valley with an Illinois regiment of mounted infantry in the lead. The Kentuckians open fire on the Illinoians and manage to stop the Federal advance for a moment or two. But then blueclad infantry move at the double-quick to the head of the column and force Grgsby’s troopers back toward Resaca.

At 12:30 pm, McPherson starts a messenger to Sherman with the news that he is only five miles from Resaca—his advance elements much closer—with no real opposition in sight. Back at his headquarters at Tunnel Hill, Sherman awaits word of his protégé’s progress with “electric alertness.” Everything else is going according to plan. On the northern summit of Rocky Face and farther south at “the terrible door of death,” Sherman’s two remaining armies have successfully occupied the Confederates’ attention. The railroad is operating on schedule. With Federal work crews repairing the tracks in front of the locomotive, the first trainloads of supplies from Chattanooga arrive today at Tunnel Hill. Sherman is sitting down to supper late in the afternoon when the message from Resaca finally arrives. He reads it with increasing excitement. If McPherson was five miles from Resaca at 12:30, Sherman reasons, then the Army of the Tennessee must have reached there by this time and already begun tearing up the Confederates’ railroad lifeline. He can hardly contain his joy, hammering his fist on the table until the supper dishes rattle, and shouting: “I’ve got Joe Johnston dead!”

Joseph Johnston passes the afternoon at his headquarters in Dalton quite unaware of the threat to his rear. He is looking to the north for trouble, not to the south and Resaca. From the beginning of the campaign, Johnston has expected the main Federal attack on Dalton to come down the open avenue of Crow Valley along the East Tennessee & Georgia Railroad, and he has concentrated the bulk of his forces there. He is surprised when the Federals keep popping up not only on the north but on the west as well, along the length of Rocky Face Ridge. Now McPherson and his Army of Tennessee are marching on Resaca and Johnston doesn’t even know it.

But for all his ignorance about Sherman’s intentions, Johnston is also the recipient of a piece of extraordinary good fortune. The vanguard of General Leonidas Polk’s reinforcements—a 4,000-man division under Brigadier General James Cantey that had arrived at Resaca by train last Saturday—is still there as per Johnston’s orders. Thus, as McPherson moves east through Sugar Valley this afternoon, a rude surprise awaits the young general. In midafternoon the head of McPherson’s column encounters some of Cantey’s Confederate skirmishers stationed on a hill about a mile west of Resaca. Federal skirmishers clear the hill, and McPherson deploys one of his two corps and brings the other up in support. This takes more that two hours, and it is well after 5 pm when McPherson decides to take a firsthand look at the enemy before ordering a full-scale assault. He rides up the hill, mounts a tree stump, and scans the Confederate line through a glass while his conspicuous six-foot frame attracts Confederate artillery fire. McPherson does not like what he sees: The Confederates, presumably in great numbers—are well fortified on the heights in front of Resaca, supported by artillery, and protected by the swampy bottoms of Camp Creek, which separates the enemy forces. Though the Federals have a manpower advantage of nearly 5 to 1, McPherson doesn’t know it. Moreover, only an hour of daylight remains. McPherson steps down from the stump and decides not to risk an assault. After dark, his men light bonfires to mask the withdrawal. Then the entire army marches back to Snake Creek Gap and bivouacs there.

McPherson will later explain that if he had attacked or remained in front of Resaca this night, Johnston would have been able to sweep down on his vulnerable flank from Dalton and cut off his army “as you cut off the end of a piece of tape with a pair of shears.” During the night, in fact, three Confederate divisions under John Bell Hood do arrive at the outskirts of Resaca. Johnston ordered them there from Dalton when he learned at last of McPherson’s presence in Sugar Valley. But when Hood finds that McPherson has retired to Snake Creek Gap, Johnston recalls one of the divisions and brings the other two back as far as Tilton Station, there to keep watch midway between Dalton and Resaca.

At Spotsylvania, the Confederates spend the hot morning digging, strengthening their earthworks by the hour, and waiting for the attack. The neighboring fences are robbed, and the rails piled up before them. Earth is then thrown over these, from the inner side, so by night the troops have a pretty good trench and breastwork to cover them. With Ewell’s corps, Lee has extended Anderson’s right on a northeast slant. A.P. Hill’s corps—now commanded by Major General Jubal Early because Hill is so sick he can’t even sit up—moves into line of battle along Ewell’s right rear. By 4 pm the Confederate front resembles a ragged V, the flanks bent back to meet attacks from either left or right and a strong salient in the center, protruding northward.

While the Confederates dig in, Meade and Grant are busy deploying their forces for battle. Three of Hancock’s divisions march crosscountry from Todd’s Tavern to take up positions on Warren’s right. Sedgwick’s corps takes Warren’s left and entrenches. Beyond Sedgwick, Burnside is moving under orders to swing out and come at Spotsylvania from the northeast. Much of Lee’s position, situated on a curving ridge and screened by trees and undergrowth, is difficult for Federal officers to discern, and Confederate skirmishers keep up a sniping fire on anyone who shows himself along the Federal lines. One of these snipers deals the Army of the Potomac a costly blow. “Uncle John” Sedgwick is overseeing the placement of some artillery in his corps’ forward lines. Trying to reassure his men, who are unnerved by the Confederate sharpshooters, he says in jest that “they couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” Just then a bullet slams into Sedgwick’s face below the left eye. His stunned staff rush to Sedgwick’s side, but can do nothing for him. Grant pronounces the loss as costly as that of a division. “Never had such a gloom rested upon the whole army on account of the death of one man as came over it when the heavy tidings passed along the lines that General Sedgwick was killed,” surgeon George Stevens of Sedgwick’s corps will write. General Horatio Wright replaces Sedgwick as commander of VI Corps.

Grant spends the afternoon searching for a soft spot in Lee’s lines. His most promising probe is directed at the Confederate left. Hancock crosses the meandering Po River with three divisions and advances south toward Block House Bridge, intending to cross the river again there and circle eastward around the exposed left flank of Anderson’s corps. Dense woods slow Hancock’s advance, however, and dark comes before his men can reach the bridge.

This same morning, General Sheridan moves out at the head of a 13-mile-long column of horsemen. To his division commanders, he has said imperiously: “I expect nothing but success.” “Little Phil,” as the men have come to call the bantamweight general, has the world by the tail this bright, hot May morning. He is leading the most powerful cavalry force the Army of the Potomac has ever mustered—10,000 horsemen in three divisions, backed by 32 guns. And he is relishing the prospect of what he calls a “cavalry duel” with his celebrated adversary, Jeb Stuart.

Sheridan first swings his long column to the northwest, skirting the developing hell at Spotsylvania; then he loops around toward the southwest and heads for Richmond. On his orders, the cavalrymen move slowly, at a sedate walk. With a force so strong, there is no need for speed or deception. Besides, Sheridan wants to allow Stuart the time to ride past the Federal flank, “urging his horses to the death so as to get in between Richmond and our column.” And Sheridan wants to keep his own horses and men fresh for the fight. The march leads over the Ni, the Po, the Ta, and skirts the Mat, four small streams that combine—along with their names—to become one river called the Mattaponi. Soon Sheridan’s leading units are at the North Anna River, a sizable waterway a mere three miles from the Federal cavalry’s initial target, Beaver Dam Station, a depot on the Virginia Central line. Beaver Dam Station serves as the forward supply base for Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia; its sheds are full of food brought in from the Carolinas and from the Shenandoah Valley.

Sheridan’s troopers miss the opportunity to send these precious supplies up in smoke, the job is done for them by the Confederate depot guards. Alerted to Sheridan’s approach, the guards set fire to 915,000 rations of meat and 504,000 rations of bread—enough food to sustain the Army of Northern Virginia for three weeks. The first Federals to reach Beaver Dam Station, a brigade of Michiganders led by 24-year-old Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer, find that despite the blazing fires there is still plenty on hand to destroy. Custer’s men, along with two other brigades of Wesley Merritt’s division, manage to burn 100 or so railway cars and two locomotives—25 percent of the Virginia Central’s entire rolling stock at this time.

Jeb Stuart learned from his pickets of Sheridan’s movement almost as soon as the Federal troopers broke camp this morning. Stuart has approximately 8,000 men in half a dozen brigades at his disposal. One of these brigades—roughly 1,000 horsemen led by Brigadier General William C. Wickham—swiftly depart to harass Sheridan’s rear. But Stuart has a problem deciding how to deploy the remainder of his cavalry corps. The size of Sheridan’s force reveals to Stuart that “Little Phil” has monumental objectives in mind. He is planning either to press on and attack Richmond or to double back and fall on Lee’s rear at Spotsylvania. To be ready for either maneuver, Stuart will have to divide his command. He orders three of his brigades to stay with Lee, leaving himself only three others—4,500 troopers in all—to deal with Sheridan’s three divisions. Stuart sends Brigadier General Lunsford Lomax and his brigade to join Wickham in nipping at Sheridan’s heels, placing the two units under the command of General Fitzhugh Lee. Then Stuart sets of on a parallel route southward with a brigade of North Carolinians commanded by Brigadier General James B. Gordon. By nightfall Stuart and Gordon have arrived at Davenport’s Bridge, a few miles up the North Anna from Beaver Dam Station—too late to save the supply depot from destruction, but close enough to see the flames illuminate the night sky to the southeast.

In the Shenandoah Valley, the 3,000 Confederates defending Dublin don’t get off as easily as their comrades holding the passes. The commander at Dublin, Brigadier General Albert Jenkins, has entrenched his men a few miles north of town on the crest of a steep hill named Cloyd’s Mountain, across the road leading to the vital New River railroad bridge. It is a good position and looks far stronger than it actually is.

But George Crook, made of sterner stuff than Averell, isn’t daunted. “They may whip us,” he is reported to have growled, “but I guess not.” Whereupon he orders one of his brigades to work its way through thick woods around the Confederate right flank and attack. Then the rest of the Federal force, including a brigade commanded by a future US president, Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes, charges the Confederate center. At the foot of Cloyd’s Mountain, Hayes’s men encounter a stream. Although small, its steep banks and waist-deep water makes it difficult to cross, and Hayes orders a halt at the bottom of the ridge to restore his formation. The respite is especially appreciated by one officer whose high cavalry boots have filled with water, nearly immobilizing him. The men who go to the officer’s assistance are shocked to recognize General Crook himself, who has been charging in the middle of the front line. It is a rare thing for a general to do, and a lieutenant from Ohio later remarks that the only problem with a general leading a charge is that he has to be helped.

Meanwhile, the flank attack has failed to dislodge the Confederates. The Federals pull themselves together, charge again, and succeed in driving the outnumbered defenders from their line. In the ensuing melee, the Confederates lose more than 530 men, among them General Jenkins, who is mortally wounded. Colonel John McCausland takes command of the shaken men as they make a fighting withdrawal through Dublin and retreat eight miles east to the New River Bridge. “I found the works at this place incomplete and untenable,” McCausland will later report; instead of making a stand in front of the bridge, he crosses to the far side. The Federals, who have suffered nearly 700 casualties in the 90-minute fight, halt for the night in Dublin.

Elsewhere in the Valley, leaving only 500 Confederate troopers in front of General Sigel’s army at Strasburg, General Imboden takes 800 men and rides northwest into the Alleghenies. By dawn they have traversed twenty rugged miles of little-traveled mountain passes and have set up an ambush for one of Sigel’s cavalry patrols at Baker, West Virginia, on the Lost River.

On the James River, General Butler again advances, this time getting a solid half of his infantry in motion—14,000 in all. Smith, on the left, again runs into fire as he approaches Port Walthall Junction and calls on Gillmore, who has advanced by now to Chester Station unopposed, to come down and join the fight. Gillmore does, although regretfully, having just begun to rip up track and tear down telegraph wire along the turnpike. But when the two corps begin to maneuver in accordance with a scheme for bagging the force at the Junction, the graybacks slip from between them and scuttle south. Pursuing, the Federals find the Confederate main body dug in behind unfordable Swift Creek, three miles north of Petersburg, which in turn lies beyond the unfordable Appomattox. When Butler comes up to observe their fruitless exchange of long-range shots with the enemy on the far side of the creek, Gillmore and Smith inform him that Petersburg can’t be taken from this direction. The thing to do, they say, is return at once to Bermuda Neck and lay a pontoon bridge across the Appomattox at Point of Rocks, which will permit an attack on Petersburg from the east. Fuming at this after-the-fact advice from the two professionals, Butler replies testily that he has no intention of building a bridge for West Pointers to retreat across as soon as things get sticky. Smith will later declare that he found this remark “of such a character as to check voluntary advice during the remainder of the campaign.” Butler, feeling his reputation threatened (in the North, that is; in the South he is already known as “Beast” Butler, hanger of patriots, insulter of women), this night writes to Secretary of War Stanton, reviewing his progress to date and placing it in the best possible light, even though this involves a rather ingenuous reinterpretation of his share in Grant’s overall design for crushing Lee and the taking of Richmond. “We can hold out against the whole of Lee’s army,” he informs the Secretary, and adds for good measure: “General Grant will not be troubled with any further reinforcements to Lee from Beauregard’s force.” Not that Lee is expecting any reinforcements from the area, however much he would appreciate them.

Considerable cavalry skirmishing flares around the edges of the armies, with a serious combat at Varnell’s Station. Other skirmishes break out at Boyd’s Trail, Snake Creek Gap, and Sugar Valley.

In the Far West through June 22nd a Federal expedition operates against Amerinds from Fort Crittenden, Utah Territory, to Fort Mojave, Arizona Territory. Today and tomorrow Federals scout from Indian Ranch to Cedar Bluffs, Colorado Territory. Through June 3rd the Gila, Arizona Territory, expedition operates against Amerinds. Federal troops on a railway-destroying raid in Virginia fight Confederates at Cloyd’s Mountain, successfully assaulting a strong position. Casualties are considerable on both sides. In Kentucky a skirmish takes place near Rock House Creek, West Virginia. In St. John’s River, Florida, Confederates destroy the US transport Harriet A Weed. In Arkansas there is a skirmish at Eudora Church.

Major General Stephen D. Lee assumes command of the Confederate Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana, as Polk and many of his troops have gone to join Johnston in Georgia.

President Davis writes embattled General Lee, “Your dispatches have cheered us in the anxiety of a critical position....”

President Lincoln tells another serenading group, “Our commanders are following up their victories resolutely and successfully.... I will volunteer to say that I am very glad at what has happened; but there is a great deal still to be done.”

[Doug64]

May 10, Tuesday

When the sun rises at Spotsylvania, Hancock’s II Corps skirmishers find Brigadier General William Mahone’s Confederate brigade blocking the way on the far bank of Block House Bridge. Nevertheless, Hancock adroitly slips a brigade commanded by Colonel John Brooke farther south and across the river well in Mahone’s rear. Now Lee is in trouble, his position turned and his communications threatened. If Brooke’s lone brigade can be reinforced quickly and heavily, Lee would be forced to abandon his trenches. Unfortunately for the Army of the Potomac, Grant fails to appreciate the opening Hancock and Brooke have provided. Knowing that Mahone has been detached to extend the Confederate left flank, Grant assumes that the Confederate line must have been weakened elsewhere. He busily sets to work planning a frontal attack, proposed by General Warren, on Anderson’s main works. Giving Warren a free rein, Grant and Meade recall two of Hancock’s divisions from the far right to assist. But Warren fails completely to break the Confederate line. Only a few of his troops reach the Confederate entranchments, and they are killed or driven back. Three hours later the assault is renewed and is again repulsed. The Federals have been committed piecemeal, and the two fruitless attacks cost them about 3,000 men.

The Federals see another chance farther to the east. There, Horatio Wright has made a reconnaissance and concluded that the salient in the center of the Confederate positions—called the Mule Shoe by its defenders—is a vulnerable spot. To assault it, Wright calls on one of his most brilliant young officers, a freckled 24-year-old colonel and West Point graduate named Emory Upton. A brigade commander in Wright’s VI Corps, Upton has been preaching a new theory of attack—a hammer blow by a concentrated striking force advancing on a much narrower front than usual. Once this force has shattered a small segment of the enemy’s line, a second wave of attackers would pour through the gap and strike the beleaguered Confederates in flank and rear. To Upton’s mind, that is the way to crack those solid fortifications. Wright decides to test Upton’s theory, giving him twelve vetern infantry regiments totaling roughly 5,000 men to use as his hammer.

Upton’s objective is formidable. The Mule Shoe bristles with artillery and is shielded by a heavy abatis of felled trees, their branches sharpened and pointed toward the attackers. The main trench line, built up with logs and banked earth, is the strongest constructed thus far by Lee’s forces. At right angles to this line run traverses, mounds of earth that extend rearward and protect the defenders against enfilade fire. And 100 yards to the rear of the principal breastworks Ewell is building a second set of defenses.

Upton’s men for their part will have one advantage: Advancing from the northeast, they will be hidden by thick pine woods until they get to within 200 yards of Ewell’s forward trenches. They will charge across those 200 yards, with bayonets fixed. It is pointless, Upton believes, to stop and shoot while moving over open ground swept by both canister and rifle fire. Only speed will effect a breach. The men, therefore, will not open fire until they have arrived at the enemy works. Upton forms the troops into a compact mass, four lines deep, three regiments side by side in each line. The first line is to cross the Confederate earthworks and then split up, a Maine regiment swinging left, New York and Pennsylvania regiments turning right, to capture a Confederate battery. The second line is to dash through the gap and head for Ewell’s backup trenches. The third and fourth lines are to go into action wherever more Federal pressure is needed. If the plan is successful, Upton’s novel assault will produce a narrow but deep fissure in the Confederate defenses. If the hole can be widened, Lee’s entire front might collapse.

Shortly before 6 pm Federal batteries open fire, and at 6:10 Upton gives the order to charge. The defenders in the Mule Shoe are cooking their “mean and meager little rations.” Then someone rises up, and looking over the works—it is shading down a little toward the dark—cries out that the Yankees are coming on the run. Within five minutes, the swiftest men in Upton’s three leading regiments have made ut through the tangled abatis to the parapet of the earthworks. The Confederate troops, part of General George Doles’s Georgia brigade, absolutely refuse to yield the ground but their stand doesn’t last long. Numbers prevail, and the column pours over the works. As more and more Federals get into the trenches, the Georgia troops break and run for the second line, which also gives way. The gap, meanwhile, is being widened by more waves of Upton’s attackers. The plan has worked so far, but twelve regiments cannot be expected to hold the gap open without help. Upton needs reinforcements. Support has to come from Brigadier General Gershom Mott’s division of Hancock’s II Corps. Mott’s troops have been formed on high ground to the left and rear of Upton’s line of attack. their orders are to advance across a glade, 400 yards deep, and then pour through the hole created by Upton’s attack. But Mott’s troops come under heavy fire as soon as they emerge from cover into the glade. Some of the troops flee immediately; others make it about halfway to their objective and then withdraw. Now Upton has no choice but to fight his way rearward. Darkness helps his retreat. All twelve regiments make it back to their lines, taking with them 950 Confederate prisoners. The Federals have suffered about 1,000 casualties. The last regiment to leave the Confederate works, from Pennsylvania, has lost 246 of 474 men; the regiment’s colonel and lieutenant colonel are dead.

The failure of Gershom Mott’s division to press on draws heavy criticism—perhaps unfairly, Mott’s troops were badly shot up and demoralized four days ago in the Wilderness. Nevertheless, thaere are cries of outrage. Horatio Wright tells Meade this night that he would rather have no troops on his left at all than Mott’s men. Meade soon acts, reducing the division to brigade status and folding it into another division. Grant, who promises Upton an immediate promotion to brigadier general, shares the widespread disappointment over Mott’s failure. Still, the attack encourages him. Upton has shown that Lee’s best and most sophisticated works can be smashed. This night an orderly overhears Grant say to Meade, “A brigade today—we’ll try a corps tomorrow.”

Lee also perceives the significance of Upton’s assault—and fears a repeat performance. Writing to Ewell at 8:15 this night, he urges his veteran corps commander to strengthen the Mule Shoe defenses. “It will be necessary for you to reestablish your whole line tonight. Set the officers to work to collect and refresh their men and have everything ready for the renewal of the conflict at daylight tomorrow.” As an afterthought, Lee adds: “Perhaps General Grant will make a night attack as it was a favorite amusement of his at Vicksburg. See that ammunition is provided and every man supplied.”

Grant, retiring for the evening, hasn’t thought of a night attack. he has decided, in fact, that tomorrow would be too soon to launch an assault of the magnitude he has in mind. It will be in Upton’s style, to be sure, but on a grand scale, and to undertake it will take time. He will strike Lee the hardest blow yet. With luck it might prove decisive.

For Sheridan’s raid at Beaver Dam Station, Merritt’s Federal troopers tear up ten more miles of track, rip down telegraph wires, and free 378 Union prisoners, including two colonels, one major, and several other officers, all of whom had been taken prisoner during the Battle of the Wilderness. This accomplished, the column forms again and snakes south, heading toward Ground Squirrel Bridge on the South Anna River. Custer’s brigade destroys railroad tracks and running equipment between the North and South Anna rivers on the Virginia Central.

Stuart may have been too late to save the supply depot, but he faces a more pressing problem: to protect Richmond. Early in the morning, he telegraphs Richmond to alert Braxton Bragg, now Confederate chief of staff and commander of Richmond’s defenses, that Sheridan appears to be moving south from Beaver Dam Station. Reinforcements from the Richmond garrison will be needed, Stuart says, should a fight develop on the city’s outskirts. Stuart then orders Fitzhugh Lee and his two brigades to circle to the east around Sheridan’s column and head toward Richmond with all the speed they can get from their underfed mounts. Gordon’s brigade will assume the task of harassing the rear of Sheridan’s column. Even though his men are outnumbered better than 2 to 1, Stuart reasons that he might be able to deal Sheridan a paralyzing blow if Fitzhugh Lee, with support from the Richmond garrison, can block the Federal column from the front while Gordon’s brigade attacks the enemy rear.

Having given his orders, Stuart calculates that he has time for a brief visit with his wife, Flora, and their two children, who are staying at a plantation near Beaver Dam Station—thought until yesterday to be a safe refuge from marauding Yankees. As Stuart rides into the plantation yard, Flora rushes out to greet him. He cannot linger long enough even to dismount, but he leans down and kisses her and they talk privately for a few moments. Then he kisses her again and takes his leave. The parting casts a somber spell over the normally jovial Stuart, and he remains silent for a long time. When at last the cavalry commander does speak, it is on a subject that he seldom mentions—death. He doesn’t expect to survive the conflict, Stuart says; he doesn’t wish to live in a defeated South.

Pushing on to the southeast, Stuart manages to rejoin Fitzhugh Lee shortly after nightfall near Hanover Junction. There he learns from a courier sent by General Gordon that the Federals are camped about ten miles away, near Ground Squirrel Bridge on the South Anna. That puts Sheridan within twenty miles of Richmond—five miles closer to the city than Fitzhugh Lee’s horsemen. The impatient Stuart wants to move at once, but Fitzhugh Lee is able to convince him that the troopers have to eat and rest, lest they fall out from exhaustion. The march is to be resumed at 1 am.

In the Shenandoah Valley, minutes after daybreak, Colonel Jacob Higgins’ Federal cavalry patrol, on its way back after failing to catch McNeill, trots into view of General Imboden’s ambush. Seeing a few Confederate riders fleeing into a narrow gap, Higgins orders a charge—into the jaws of Imboden’s trap. As hidden Confederates open fire from the slopes on either side of the gap, the Federal troopers wheel about and begin “a ride for life.” Imboden’s riders thunder close behind the desperate Federals, who abandon their wagons to speed their flight. Imboden gives Higgin’s horsemen little rest until the Federals cross the Potomac River into Maryland, sixty miles from the site of the ambush. By nine in the evening, Imboden is back in the Valley reporting his success to Breckinridge from Mount Jackson, a town 24 miles south of Strasburg. He has left his troopers behind, “much jaded, and camped tonight on the head of Lost River. They will be here by 4 p.m. tomorrow.” The question is whether they will be back in time, for despite the rout of Higgins’ command, General Sigel has started to move again.

Elsewhere in the Valley, General Crook moves out of Dublin to the massive 400-foot wooden New River Bridge eight miles to the east. Colonel McCausland tries to keep them away from the bridge they have come to destroy with artillery fire from across the river, which the Federals return. Crook allows the gunners a two-hour duel, then orders a party onto the bridge to set it afire. As the flames consume the impressive structure, the men on both sides cease firing and line the banks to watch—while a Federal band plays martial airs.

Then, with his first mission accomplished, Crook suffers a curious failure of resolve. Instead of joining Sigel in order to advance on Lynchburg as Grant wants, he retreats into the Alleghenies. He has seen a captured dispatch claiming a Confederate victory over Grant in the Wilderness and he fears being cut off by forces detached from Lee’s army. Soon joined by Averell, who has been driven back from Wytheville, Crook and his weary army will set out in pouring rain on a gruelling 50-mile withdrawal. In nine days they will go into bivouac in Meadow Bluff, West Virginia, for the time being out of the campaign they so forcefully began.

A couple of hours after dark, a messenger gallops up to the fortress-like main building of the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington. The cadets have enjoyed a respite today from their usual round of duties and classes. It is the first anniversary of the death of Stonewall Jackson, a former VMI professor, and the boys’ activities had been a morning memorial ceremony and an evening parade. They had gone to bed at 9 pm, but many of them are sufficiently awake to wonder about the sudden pounding of hoofs and the hasty gathering of officers by lantern light near the institute’s statue of George Washington. Moments later the drums rattle the long roll, calling the young men to an emergency assembly on the parade ground. Such a commotion usually means that a cadet is absent without leave or that there is a fire in town; it doesn’t occur to the students that this drum roll has anything to do with the war. However ardently these young men have followed every detail of the fighting and have yearned to be a part of it, rarely in three years has any serious alarm filtiered through to these tranquil, manicured grounds. But after the startled cadets have tumbled into formation, they hear their adjutant read an electrifying message: Major General John C. Breckinridge, commander of the Confederate Department of Western Virginia, urgently requires their services. They are to march at dawn for his headquarters at Staunton, 32 miles to the northeast. The VMI cadets are going to war. The air is rent with wild cheering at the thought that their hour has come at last.

On the James, Union tempers have gotten no better overnight. Contemplating the situation in the morning light, with the uncrossable creek still before him, General Butler decides that Petersburg is of little importance anyhow, now that Kautz’s cavalry have burned two bridges on the railroad in its rear. Accordingly, he orders everyone back to Bermuda Neck, there to regroup for an advance to be made on Richmond as soon as he gets his plans worked out.

For General Pickett commanding the forces opposing Butler, the past five days have been an unrelenting nightmare, illuminated from time to time by flashes of incredible luck which then have served perversely, not to resolve, but rather to prolong the strain on his jangled nerves. But now General Beauregard arrives, in time to watch the baffled Army of the James—so Butler styles it—fade back once more from approximate contact and set out rearward to find sanctuary within its fortifications. Coming fast behind Beauregard on the railroad are seven veteran brigades of infantry, Hoke’s five from Goldsboro and two more from Charleston. All reach Petersburg by nightfall, having marched across the five-mile gap between the Nottoway and Stony Creek, where they get aboard waiting cars for the last twenty miles of their ride. Pickett’s five days are up at last, and rather as if the strain has been what kept him rigid, after all, he collapses and takes to his bed with a nervous exhaustion vaguely diagnosed as “fever.” To replace him, Beauregard summons Major General W.H.C. Whiting from Wilmington, and turns at once to the task of organizing the twelve brigades now south of the James into four divisions. Their combined strength is just under 20,000: enough, he thinks, to deal with Ben Butler for once and for all by going over to the offensive, provided of course that the Beast can be lured from behind his intrenchments and out from between the two rivers protecting his flanks.

South of the James action erupts at Chester Station, and a Confederate torpedo station on the James is destroyed. Other lesser fighting includes skirmishing at Lost River Gap, West Virginia; and Dardanelle, Arkansas. A two-week Union scout moves from Pilot Knob, Missouri, to Gainesville, Arkansas; guerilla fighting occurs at Winchester, Tennessee; and in Virginia railroad raiding engagement take place at Cove Mountain or Grassy Lick, near Wytheville.

In Georgia, early in the morning, General Sherman learns of McPherson’s withdrawal from Resaca. He is “much vexed.” His favorite army and most trusted general have failed him. They “could have walked into Resaca,” he will write after the war, “but at the critical moment McPherson seems to have been a little cautious.” The next time he sees McPherson, however, Sherman will simply say, “Well, Mac, you have missed the opportunity of your life.” For now, though, he sends word to McPherson to stay put in Snake Creek Gap, and then he works out a new plan. This time Sherman adopts George Thomas’s original idea of flanking Dalton with a much larger force. Leaving one corps to maintain the demonstration in front of Rocky Face Ridge, he will move the rest of his forces south and through the gap. Then, as he reports to Washinton this night, he will place those troops “between Johnston and Resaca, when we will have to fight it out.” Sherman is in no hurry. Before carrying out the march to the gap, he intends to wait for a division of cavalry—approximately 3,000 men under Brigadier General George Stoneman—en route from Tennessee and not expected for two days. He needs Stoneman to protect his left flank when the Army of the Ohio moves out. Meanwhile, he is counting on the enemy to remain in Dalton.

Joseph Johnston unwittingly goes along with Sherman’s plan. He isn’t worried about Resaca. McPherson’s thrust there, he concludes, was merely a feint designed to divert attention from the attack he still expects to come from north of Dalton. In any event, Resaca appears secure. Major General William W. Loring’s division of reinforcements from Mississippi is pouring in there to join Cantey’s men, and another division is now within easy supporting distance.

Off Charleston, Rear Admiral Dahlgren’s ship commanders vote against attacking Fort Sumter directly.

[Doug64]

May 11, Wednesday

General Grant’s preparations for the assault on the Mule Shoe is hampered by a sudden change in the weather. Unseasonable heat gives way to uncomfortable cold, followed by a wet northeaster—wind, rain, and hail. Grant ignores the rain and writes orders to Meade. He wants three divisions of Hancock’s II Corps to shift eastward, moving behind the lines held by Warren and Wright to a position directly north of the enemy salient. Hancock, his formations massed for a concentrated blow, will attack the apex of the Mule Shoe at first light tomorrow. When Hancock attacks, Burnside’s corps, on the left, is to hit the eastern face of the salient. On the Federal right, Warren and Wright are to stand by to exploit Hancock’s advantage.

Grant’s failure to attack today sparks doubts in the mind of Robert E. Lee, as do some fragmentary intelligence reports. Word has come from Anderson’s men on the Confederate left that the Federals are moving east. Reports from observers in a church steeple on the Confederate right have the Federals backing off their line, perhaps moving toward Fredericksburg. Lee meets with Ewell, and then calls a conference with Major General Henry Heth, the still-ailing A.P. Hill, and their staffs. Several of the younger officers present gloat that Grant is slaughtering the Union army by throwing it against the Confederate earthworks. “Gentlemen,” Lee replies calmly, “I think General Grant has managed his affairs remarkably well up to the present time.” Then he offers his reckoning—that Grant, blocked at Spotsylvania, will move east in search of another route to Richmond. “My opinion is the enemy are preparing to retreat tonight to Fredericksburg. I wish you to have everything in readiness to pull out at a moment’s notice.” Lee adds: “We must attack these people if they retreat.” The decision shocks some of the officers, who think the Confederate army’s best hope is to remain on the defensive. “General Lee,” Hill implores, “let them continue to attack our breastworks; we can stand that very well.” But Lee’s mind is set. He fears most being forced back to Richmond and bottled up there. That, he is convinced, would doom the Confederacy. “This army cannot stand a siege,” he declares. “We must end this business on the battlefield, not in a fortified place.”

The immediate effect of Lee’s decision is to imperil the Mule Shoe defenses only hours before the Federal attack is to begin. Many of the guns in the salient are hidden in groves of trees; it would be difficult to deploy them in the darkness to join in the pursuit of a retreating enemy. At Lee’s order, Ewell limbers up 22 of his 30 field pieces and moves them a mile and a half to the rear. From there the guns can be trotted out quickly should Grant march east. The sudden departure of the guns puzzle the men in the Mule Shoe and disturb several officers—especially when, just before midnight, an ominous rumbling is heard coming from the Union lines. It is “plainly audible in the still, heavy night air, like distant falling water or machinery.” One officer alarmed by the noise is Howard’s superior, Brigadier General George H. (Maryland) Steuart, a West Pointer who commands a brigade in Major General Edward Johnson’s division, which holds the toe of the Mule Shoe. Steuart concludes that the sound is moving toward the salient. He goes to Johnson to urge the return of the guns. Johnson passes the request to Ewell. The cannon will be back by 2 am, Johnson is told. Inexplicably, the request doesn’t reach Brigadier General Armistead Long, Ewell’s artillery chief, until 3:30, an hour and a half later than Ewell’s promised return of the guns.

To the south, General Jeb Stuart’s Confederate horsemen have crossed the South Anna by dawn, and shortly afterward they pick up the region’s main north-south highway, the Telegraph road. Stuart soon receives word from Gordon that two of Sheridan’s divisions have left Ground Squirrel Bridge and are clattering down the Mountain road toward Richmond. The two cavalry forces are now clearly on a collision course. Less than ten miles ahead the Telegraph and Mountain roads meet, merging to form Brook Turnpike, a thoroughfare running straight into the Confederate capital. One-half mile south of the intersection is a ramshackle, paintless former stagecoach inn called Yellow Tavern. By eight in the morning Stuart has reached the abandoned hostelry with Lee’s vanguard, well ahead of the approaching Federals. Hoping that reinforcements are en route from Bragg, Stuart goes on the defensive. He forms a line that stretches across both the Mountain road and the Telegraph road just about the intersection of the two routes. Fitzhugh Lee deploys Wickham’s brigade on the right and Lomax’s on the left. On a hill near the end of Lomax’s line, Captain William Griffin emplaces the guns of his Baltimore Light Artillery.

Around 11 am Colonel Thomas Devin’s Union brigade turns south off the Mountain rad and thrusts hard at Lomax’s skimpy gray line on the Confederate left. After a sharp encounter, the Federal attack is driven back by dismounted troopers of the 5th Virginia, led by a fierce fighter, Colonel Henry Clay Pate—who will be killed later in the day.

At 2 pm, during a lull in the fighting, Stuart receives an encouraging message from Richmond. Bragg can field 4,000 defenders, counting convalescents. He has also ordered up three brigades from the Confederate force led by the hero of Bull Run, General P.G.T. Beauregard, who is facing Benjamin Butler’s Federal army along the James River east of Richmond. With these forces and Richmond’s artillery, Bragg believes he can hold the capital. The news heartens Stuart, and he chats cheerfully with his staff. He is thinking of mounting a counterattack on Sheridan’s flank when Sheridan seizes the initiative. First he sends General James Wilson’s division sweeping around Wickham’s flank, cutting Brook Turnpike and Stuart’s natural line of retreat. Then about 4 pm Sheridan orders both Wilson and Merritt to attack the Confederate line. As Federal horse artillery pound the Confederate position, George Custer leads his Michiganders in a thundering charge on Griffin’s Maryland battery. Many of the Marylanders have already fallen to the Federal artillery fire. Even so, Griffin’s gunners take a heavy toll, bowling over horses and riders with double-shotted canister, before being overrun by Custer’s troopers. While Custer throws more regiments into the fray, Colonel William Chapman’s brigade wheels into position to strike the Confederate center and General Wilson leads forward a line of dismounted troopers that overlaps the Confederate right. First Lomax’s and then Wickham’s men begin to break for the rear.

Stuart determines to recapture the battery and rally the left of his line. He brings up his only reserves—eighty mounted Virginia men—and leads them at a gallop to his beleaguered left, shouting: “Charge, Virginians, and save those brave Marylanders!” Major Venable, riding at the general’s side, urges Stuart to keep out of the fighting. “I don’t reckon there is any danger!” Stuart replies, all but laughing. The Virginians engage Custer’s horsemen in a swirling melee. Stuart wheels his mount to and fro, attempting to rally his troopers. Lomax’s dismounted cavalrymen have withdrawn to the shelter of a creek bed, but soon the entreaties of their officers have them moving forward once more. And now it is the Federals’ turn to retreat. Stuart stays very close to the action, crying encouragement to his resurging troopers as he empties his big nine-shot LeMatt revolver at the fleeing Michigan horsemen. Soon the area is clear of all but disordered clusters of Federals, most of whom have lost their mounts and are trying to get away on foot. One of them sees a red beard, a plume, a silk-lined cape, a large figure on a horse thirty feet away. The Federal aims, squeezes the trigger, and then runs off, his pistol smoking. Stuart’s chin drops to his chest and his hat falls off as he claps a hand to his right side.

Captain G.W. Dorsey helps Stuart off his panicked horse, and several soldiers support him while Dorsey finds a calmer mount. The men escort Stuart to the rear as the fighting rages around them. Fitzhugh Lee, having ridden the length of the Confederate line to see his wounded superior, arrives in great distress. “Go ahead, Fitz, old fellow,” Stuart says to him. “I know you will do what is right.” At length an ambulance is found, and Stuart begins the excruciating journey to Richmond. There is no direct route, for by now the Federals hold much of the Brook Turnpike. Carrying its bleeding passenger, the springless vehicle bucks and sways along rutted back roads for six hours, arriving in the city well after dark. Stuart is taken into the house of his brother-in-law, Dr. Charles Brewer, a physician. Between paroxysms of pain, he asks for his wife, who is on her way from Beaver Dam Station. Stuart also bequeaths some official papers and some of his personal effects, including a pair of favorite mounts. As he continues to dispose of his possessions, he becomes aware of the rolling sound of artillery fire to the north of Richmond. He asks Henry McClellan, one of his staff officers, for the news. Sheridan had continued to hit Fitzhugh’s line for an hour or so after Stuart had been removed from the field, McClellan reports. Lee’s line had slowly given way, and the Union general, shouldering aside the Confederates, had continued southward down the Brook Turnpike. By dark Sheridan’s cavalry had reached Richmond’s outer line of defense. But instead of attacking the capital, Sheridan had suddenly turned his troopers and headed east.

“Little Phil,” in fact, has faced a quandry this evening. He is sorely tempted, he will later report to General Meade, to storm the town. “It is possible I might have captured the city of Richmond by assault,” Sheridan will write. “I should have been the hero of the hour. I could have gone in and burned and killed right and left.” But he knows he lacks the strength to hold the prize, that in the end his cavalry would be sacrificed “for no permanent advantage.” Sheridan decides instead to withdraw swiftly eastward: Gordon is still threatening his rear, and Fitzhugh Lee is somewhere on his flank. To evade pursuit, the Federals will have to make for Meadow Bridge on the Chickahominy, cross there, and then ride downstream, with the river between them and any oncoming Confederates. Then Sheridan will recross the river, arriving behind Benjamin Butler’s lines on the James River, where he will replenish his troopers’ nearly exhausted supplies of food and ammunition. Sheridan’s withdrawal is a risky and difficult maneuver, made worse by a storm so fierce that it topples a church steeple in Richmond.

At the Virginia Military Institute, after working all night to assemble their gear, pack the wagons, and load the caissons, more than 200 cadets form up on the garade ground at first light. At the order from their amiable, overweight commandant of cadets, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Shipp, they playfully stomp across the rickety little bridge leading from the campus, making the span sway and groan, and march jauntily northward down the valley of the Shenandoah. The expedition is a poignant illustration of the Confederacy’s increasingly desperate straits. This is no ordinary militia unit; this is the student body of the West Point of the South, the school that had provided 425 of the thousand or so trained army officers available to the Confederacy when the war began. These young men, ranging in age from 15 to 25 years, are to be the next genetation of military leaders. Their intelligence, training, spirit, and, above all, their promise are quite simply irreplaceable. Any threat that can justify using them in combat has to be a deadly one indeed.

The threat is real enough. General Lee not only has to fend off Grant’s advancing Federals, but also feed his men. For relief, Lee looks as always to the Shenandoah. This lush strip of fertile, river-bottom land along Virginia’s western border is the breadbasket of the South. Unlike the war-blasted terrain of eastern Virginia, the Valley, protected by the barrier of the Blue Ridge Mountains, hasn’t been trampled by large armies. There had been battles, of course, during Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign two years ago. And Lee used the Shenandoah as an invasion route to Maryland two years ago and Pennsylvania last year. But the fighting has been relatively small in scale and infrequent. Between engagements, the hardworking people and their productive farms have been little disturbed. Despite repeated Federal incursions, the Confederates have held onto the Valley for three years. Now more than ever Lee cannot afford to lose it. The hungry Confederacy desperately needs the calves fattening on its sweet grass; the flour that its mills will grind in a month or two when the winter wheat has ripened; and the poultry, milk, vegetables, eggs, and butter that flow from this quiet cornucopia. Federal occupation would also mean the loss of the Virginia Central Railroad, with its major station at Staunton. It would put within enemy reach the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad, which snakes its way to Richmond through the eastern foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Perhaps even worse, a Federal force in the Valley would be behind Lee’s left flank. A sudden assault from that direction could prove fatal to the Army of Northern Virginia.

There are few Confederate forces to counter these dark possibilities. Brigadier General John D. Imboden, at his Valley District headquarters in Staunton, has only 1,600 cavalrymen at Mount Jackson to guard this portion of the Valley. The nearest help is 155 miles away at Dublin, in southwestern Virginia, where Breckinridge is stationed with 6,500 men. When Lee learned earlier this month that two Federal armies are threatening the Valley—one from the west, by way of Dublin, another from the northern, or lower, end of the Valley at Martinsburg—he asked Richmond to attach Imboden’s and Breckinridge’s forces to his command so that he can more efficiently protect his vital lines of supply and communication. And General Sigel’s advance into the Valley has reached Woodstock. Now the loss of New River Bridge to General Crook has caused his old enemy, Braxton Bragg—now an advisor to President Jefferson Davis—to recommend that Breckinridge be ordered back to southwest Virginia to stop Crook. The decision is ultimately left to Lee and Lee isn’t sure what is wise. During a break in the heavy fighting near Spotsylvania he wires Breckinridge tersely: “You myst judge.” As there is no sign of a further advance by Crook, Breckinridge decides to defend the Valley. His men expect him to stay put and fortify Staunton, to make up for his disadvantage in numbers. But Breckinridge’s idea of defense is to attack. He will lead his 3,500 infantrymen and two batteries north toward Sigel and “give him battle wherever found.”

General Butler’s army returns to Bermuda Neck on the James, filing in through gaps in the intrenchments around noon, and Butler retires to his tent to think things over for a while. If he is bitter, so are his lieutenants, contrasting what had been so boldly projected with what has been so timidly and erratically performed. In Smith’s opinion, based on what he has seen in the past six unprofitable days, the army commander is “as helpless as a child on the field of battle and as visionary as an opium eater in council.” Butler returns the compliment in kind, including Gilmore in the indictment. Both generals, he will say, “agreed upon but one thing and that was how they could thwart and interfere with me,” while to make matters worse, neither of them “really desired that the other should succeed.”

In Georgia, General Leonidas Polk arrives to take charge of the Confederate defenses at Resaca. Polk, the 58-year-old “bishop-general,” is a West Pointer who entered the ministry, became Episcopal bishop of Louisiana, and, in 1861, took up his sword again. This night, riding the train up to Dalton in the company of John Bell Hood, Polk is pleased to find need of his prewar vocation. Hood confides his wish to be baptized into the Church. At Dalton, after meeting with his old friend Johnston, Polk goes to Hood’s headquarters about midnight. There, while the one-legged Hood, unable to kneel, leans on his crutches in the dim candlelight, the portly bishop dips his hands into a horse bucket of consecrated water and performs the rite of baptism. Then he buckles on his sword and returns to Resaca.

A Confederate reconnaissance in Sugar Valley results in rather extensive casualties.

In the seldom considered but strategically important Union raids on Confederate railroads deep in southwest Virginia there is a skirmish at Blacksburg. A Federal expedition through the 14th moves from Point Lookout, Maryland, to the Rappahannock in Virginia.

President Lincoln and General Grant merge the Gulf and Arkansas Departments into a new, enlarged Military Division of West Mississippi with Major General Edward R.S. Canby—who in 1862 drove the Confederates from New Mexico—in charge.

At the Louisiana Constitutional Convention in New Orleans the reconstructed Federal state government adopts an ordinance of emancipation without compensation.

President Davis writes Lee that he is trying to send more troops, but “we have been sorely pressed by the enemy on south side. Are now threatened by the cavalry....”

[Doug64]

May 12, Thursday

In front of the house where General Hancock has his headquarters at Spotsylvania, 15,000 infantrymen have been gathering since midnight for the dawn attack in “a cold, cheerless rain, falling in torrents.” Emulating Upton’s tactics, the men are to advance in a massive formation fifty ranks deep, rifles uncapped and bayonets fixed. At 4 am, Hancock decides there isn’t enough light. At 4:30, the men move out, but even now so thick a fog clings to the ground that Hancock, sitting his horse, can’t see the lower bodies of his troops.

The lead division is led by 29-year-old Brigadier General Francis Channing Barlow, a hard-fighting but eccentric officer whose usual battle costume consists of “a flannel checked shirt, a threadbare pair of trousers and an old blue kepi.” As the advance begins, Barlow turns to his staff and says, “Make your peace with God and mount, gentlemen; I have a hot place picked out for some of you today.” Barlow’s troops slog through a muddy stretch of woods, then emerge into a large clearing. They quickly overwhelm a line of enemy pickets, then rush toward the spiky abatis. Men with axes are soon chopping paths through the barrier of felled trees and sharpened stakes. Much to the surprise of Barlow and his troops, the Confederate artillery has so far been virtually silent. Scattered fire comes from the Confederate trenches beyond the abatis, but nothing more. Encouraged by the paltry resistance, Barlow’s troops break into a run, the men yelling as they go. All formation dissolves, and the division becomes a solid mass. Like a great herd of horses, the roaring men stampede over the Confederate works just east of the Mule Shoe’s apex, overrunning Colonel William Witcher’s brigade and smashing into the left flank of Steuart’s brigade. On Barlow’s right, Major General David Birney’s division charges into the trenches held by General Johnson’s division, overwhelming Colonel William Monaghan’s Louisiana brigade and taking Brigadier General James Walker’s Stonewall Brigade in flank. Then ensues one of those hand-to-hand encounters with clubbed rifles, bayonets, swords, and pistols. Then, having broken Johnson’s defenses, the men, without waiting to reform, or for the orders of their officers, rush through the forest shouting like madmen, shooting at every fleeing Confederate they see, picking up prisoners by the score, and sweeping away every living thing from in front of them for fully one-third of a mile.

The crusty General Johnson, stumping around with the aid of a long hickory cane he has used since taking a bullet in the leg two years ago, keeps hollering “Fire fast! Fire fast!” The artillery is moving up at last, and “Old Clubby,” as Johnson is called, exhorts the crews to come at a gallop. Captain William Page Carter has the lead battery, and as it careers into the salient and the first gun is unlimbered, he leaps to help load it. Carter’s men get off one round. “Stop firing that gun,” a man orders. Carter turns and finds that he is surrounded by Federal troops. By this time thousands of Yankees have swarmed into the Mule Shoe and completed the rout of General Johnson’s brigades. Soon Johnson himself is taken prisoner, though not without difficulty; he is almost shot as he swats at the Yankees with his cane. Maryland Steuart is also captured, along with twenty Confederate cannon and 3,000 men. Hancock’s troops possess 32 stands of enemy colors and a crucial half mile of terrain in the very center of Lee’s line.

Lee has awakened at his customary 3:30 am. He is having breakfast by lantern light when he hears the firing around the center of his line. The volume indicates that the Federals are attacking, not retreating. Mounting Traveller, he spurs in the direction of the fight. Soon he encounters his own men streaming past in full flight. Lee tries to rally the men, taking off his hat to make sure that they recognize him. Ahead of Lee, a second Confederate defensive line is being patched together by Brigadier General John B. Gordon, commanding Jubal Early’s old division. “With that splendid audacity which characterized him” Gordon has rushed his three brigades from the west side of the Mule Shoe across the middle of the salient and into the path of the oncoming Federals. A little later, Lee appears near the flank of one of Gordon’s brigades. When Gordon asks what Lee wants him to do, Lee orders him to form a counterattack, as he is doing. Gordon salutes and starts to leave but, looking back, sees that Lee is now riding to the center of the improvised line, hatless, giving every sign that he intends to personally lead the advance. Gordon rides swiftly to intercept him, and to cries of “General Lee to the rear!” the men gather around Traveller, grab the bridle, and turn horse and rider back. Lee doesn’t resist and is soon safely behind the fighting front.

At 5:30, Gordon orders a charge. The line isn’t wide enough to stretch across the entire salient, but what there is of it—three brigades—go forward as a furious tide. And as Gordon’s men start forward, two of General Robert Rode’s Confederate brigades swing into action on Gordon’s left. One of them slows down after its commander, Brigadier General Junius Daniel, is mortally wounded, but Brigadier General Stephen Dodson Ramseur’s North Carolinians forge ahead. Three horses are shot under Ramseur in the charge and a bullet rips through his right arm. Still he leads his men forward. Gordon’s desperate assault staggers Hancock’s attack—which by now is losing momentum. The men of Brigadier General John Gibbon’s Federal division are piling up as they try to tunnel into the crowded salient. Meanwhile, the Union brigades within the Mule Shoe are dissolving into an unmanageable mob. Commanders are losing control, some giving orders to a dozen different organizations. The impact of Gordon’s attack pushes the confused Federals back toward the toe of the Mule Shoe; eventually, however, the men of the first Federal waves get back into the trenches they had captured earlier and pour fire into the ranks of the Confederates, managing to stop their counterattack.

While the troops in the apex of the Mule Shoe continue this ugly struggle, fighting breaks out on the salient’s western face. There, at 6 am, several brigades of Wright’s VI Corps strike hard at the trenches now held by some of Rodes’s troops. As Wright’s massed infantry, led by Emory Upton’s hard-fighting brigade, move up a slope toward the Confederates, artillery fire piles up Federal bodies three, four, and five deep. Once the Federals reach Rodes’s works, near a sharp angle in the Confederate line, a vicious and seemingly interminable hand-to-hand struggle begins. More brigades of VI Corps crowd up against the embattled earthworks only to be thrown back by Confederate reinforcements. In desperation, Upton calls for artillery to blast a hole through the Confederate line. Lieutenant Richard Metcalf gallups up with two Napoleons. They are unlimbered and open fire at point-blank range. Rounds of double-shotted canister slam into the defenders, splintering muskets and tearing men to pieces. But the Confederates bring all their fire to bear on the exposed artillerists and within minutes all of Metcalf’s horses and half of his men go down. Nearby infantrymen help the surviving gunners drag their Napoleons to the rear, but the limbers are abandoned, their shattered wheels sunk hub-deep in the mud. Hour after hour the slaughter continues. The rain keeps falling. Wounded men suffocate in the mud and drown in the flooded trenches. Here and there the firing ceases for moments as bodies are flung outside the trenches so the infantrymen can gain a footing to continue firing. The volume of fire is unprecedented in the history of warfare. Pack mules, each carrying 3,000 rounds of ammunition, bring a continuous supply of cartidges to the Federal lines. Large oak trees are chopped down by the hail of lead and come crashing down onto the huddled ranks below. Some corpses are hit by so many bullets that they simply fall apart. This place of horror will be remembered ever after as the Bloody Angle.

Initially it seems to Grant that the day is going well. At headquarters, when he gets word that large numbers of Confederates are prisoners, Grant lights up “with the first trace of animation he had shown.” When the captured General Edward Johnson rides up, muddy and bedraggled, Grant shakes his hand warmly, commiserates with him on “the sad fortunes of war,” then gives him a cigar and a chair at the campfire.

Lee, meanwhile, is busy urging reinforcements toward his threatened center. In the Bloody Angle, Rodes’s badly outnumbered men are holding Wright’s troops, but they can’t hold them for long. Lee summons William Mahone’s division from Anderson’s far left, the Block House Bridge area; then the commanding general, growing impatient, rides behind Anderson’s line to meet Mahone’s men. He finds the lead brigade at a spot where Anderson’s trenches are being hammered by Warren’s artillery. The falling shells drive Traveller wild; as the horse rears and bucks, a solid shot narrowly misses Lee. The Mississipians shout for Lee to go back, and he tells them, “If you will promise me to drive those people from our works, I will go back.” They cheer and set off at double time to join Rodes.

While the fighting rages hand-to-hand in the toe of the Mule Shoe, Burnside’s IX Corps to the east has a momentary success. A division under Brigadier General Robert Potter, a courageous New Yorker, drives the Confederates from their line, taking prisoners and two field pieces. But the Confederates are reinforced and strike back ferociously, forcing Potter to retreat. Next, Burnside commits General Orlando Willcox’s division, but it too is driven back by a furious enemy charge. Burnside barely manges to hold his own, containing the Confederate counterattack with close-range artillery fire. He will lose 1,200 men today. His main contribution to the battle is to prevent Lee’s right from reinforcing the Confederate center. Far down on the Confederate left, Warren’s V Corps attacked Richard Anderson’s line at 9:15 am; but after hours of fighting, Warren’s gain is no more than Burnside’s.

As evening approaches, word filters back from Confederate commanders in the Mule Shoe that the men cannot hold out much longer. They have been fighting since dawn without rest or food. The answer comes back that Major General Martin Smith, chief engineer for the Army of Northern Virginia, is supervising the construction of a line of works across the base of the salient 800 yards to the rear—the troops will have to hold on until dusk. But when dusk comes, the men are told they still can’t withdraw; the line isn’t finished. The men of Federal VI Corps, pinned down in front of the Confederate parapet, are equally desperate. They have fired three or four hundred rounds per man. Their lips are encrusted with powder from biting cartridges. Their shoulders and hands are encrusted with mud that had adhered to the butts of their rifles. When darkness comes they drop from exhaustion.

Sometime after midnight the battlefield at last falls quiet. Far behind the Bloody Angle, a Confederate band begins to play “The Dead March” from Handel’s Saul. When the band finishes, one of the Union bands plays “Nearer My God to Thee.” Then the Confederate band plays “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” and the Union band responds with “The Star Spangled Banner.” The Confederate band follows up with “Dixie,” and the Union band ends the impromptu dual performance with a song that undoubtedly brought tears rolling down many powder-blackened cheeks in both armies, “Home, Sweet Home.”

And now the new Confederate trenches are ready at last. Unit by unit, Lee’s battered defenders retreat, moving so quietly that the Federals, lying on their rifles in the mud, don’t here them depart.


To the south, the rain slows Sheridan’s retreating cavalry; the long Federal column doesn’t reach Meadow Bridge until daylight—and then finds that a Confederate detachment has set fire to the highway bridge and the railroad bridge during the night. Fortunately for Sheridan’s men, the pelting rain has doused most of the flames—though the highway bridge needs some reflooring. Dismounted troopers from Custer’s brigade dash across the railroad bridge and secure the opposite bank. While repairs are being made on the highway bridge, Braxton Bragg’s infantry and Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry catch up with the Federals and join Gordon’s brigade in attacking Sheridan’s flanks and rear. A short, hot fight develops. The divisions of Gregg and Wilson staunchly hold off the Confederate attackers while the rest of Merritt’s brigades join Custer’s in securing and repairing the vital highway span. Just as they are finishing, General Gordon leads a Confederate charge against the hard-fighting Federal rearguard. Gordon is mortally wounded, and his attack falters. Sheridan manages to get his three divisions across the bridge at last. They make their way without further interference to Haxall’s Landing on the James River, where they rest for four days and refit before setting out to rejoin the Army of the Potomac. Other fighting during Sheridan’s operations near Richmond include, over the next twelve days, action at Mattapony Church, Jones’ Bridge, Haxall’s, White House Landing, and Hanover Court House. In all, Sheridan has lost about 625 men killed, wounded, or missing, but he has recovered nearly 400 Union prisoners and captured about 300 Confederates, whom he takes with him behind Butler’s lines. He can further avow that his raid has damaged the Confederate cause by destroying large quantities of supplies. And what better evidence of a Federal victory can he present than the death of Major General James Ewell Brown Stuart?

As Sheridan’s men are moving down the Chickahominy to safety, Stuart is indeed near death. By dusk he is told that he won’t last the night. “I am resigned if it be God’s will,” he says. “But I would like to see my wife.” A little after 7 o’clock in the evening, two clergymen are brought to his bedside. Stuart, always fond of singing, ask them to join him in a rendition of his favorite hymn, “Rock of Ages.” The three men sing the old anthem: “Rock of ages, cleft for me, / Let me hide myself in thee.” Stuart dies at 7:38. Flora Stuart and the children don’t arrive until shortly before midnight. On the same night, when the hellish struggle in the Bloody Angle is at its height, someone delivers a telegram to Robert E. Lee. He opens and reads it, then gives a stricken look. Moments pass before he feels he can speak. “Gentlemen,” he says to those around him, “we have very bad news. General Stuart has been mortally wounded.” Later in the night, Lee says, “I can scarcely think of him without weeping.”


At Woodstock in the Shenandoah Valley, Union General Sigel sends a cavalry advance toward Mount Jackson. General Imboden and his skeleton force of 1,600 cavalry fall back toward New Market, seven miles farther south, while keeping an eye out for Colonel Boyd’s New York cavalry, which has been scouting somewhere on the eastern flank of Massanutten Mountain.

Late in the day, the VMI cadets reach Breckinridge. Ignoring their blistered feet and a heavy rainstorm, they step snappily into Staunton while their fifers play “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” Breckinridge’s veterans look over the young faces and the natty gray uniforms—and welcome the self-conscious cadets with a chorus of nusery rhymes.


South on the James, General Butler accommodates General Beauregard’s wish for him to bring his Federal army out of its defensive works at Bermuda Neck by moving northward against the works around Drewry’s Bluff, apparently having decided to go for Richmond after all. Meanwhile, Federal cavalry under Brigadier General A.V. Kautz raid the Richmond & Danville Railroad. The Confederate capital is thus threatened from the north and from the southeast and pestered by cavalry raids as well. Beauregard has anticipated this by sending Hoke with seven brigades to join Ransom, and now he prepares to follow and take command in person, leaving Whiting to hold Petersburg with the other two brigades of infsantry, plus one of cavalry just come up from North Carolina.


Even with Polk now covering his rear of his position at Dalton, Georgia, General Johnston nevertheless begins to feel uneasy. Worried by reports of enemy movements on the far side of Rocky Face, at dawn he orders Major General Joseph Wheeler to take all his available cavalry around the northern tip of the ridge and find out what General Sherman is up to. All Wheeler finds is Stoneman’s Federal cavalry. The Federal infantry, except for Thomas’s IV Corps, which is still in place west of the ridge, has departed for Snake Creek Gap. Johnston, aware at last of the real threat to his rear, abandons Dalton this night. The withdrawal begins about 1 am and goes smoothly. Johnston, ever the master of retreat, is prepared: He sends his columns toward Resaca on routes designated in advance; the troops are accompanied by local guides.


Fighting elsewhere is minor by comparison, but an affair occurs at Strasburg, Virginia; and skirmishes at Jackson’s Ferry, Alabama; Smith’s Station, Nebraska Territory; Bayou Lamourie on the Red River, Louisiana; and in southwest Virginia at Newport, Brown’s Ferry, Salt Ponds, and Gap Mountain.

[Doug64]

May 13, Friday

When the morning dawns at Spostylvania, the Federal troops awake to find nothing but corpses in the Mule Shoe. In one part of the Bloody Angle measuring no more than twelve by fifteen feet, they discover 150 bodies. A Pennsylvanian recalls seeing rifle pits filled with corpses eight to ten deep. The landscape is macabre. The trees near the works are stripped of their foliage, and look as though an army of locusts had passed. The brush between the lines is cut and torn to shreds, and the fallen bodies of men and horses lie there with the flesh torn from the bones. In two days of fighting, the 10th and the 12th, close to 6,000 of Lee’s veterans have been killed or wounded; nearly 4,000 men have been captured. Grant’s official toll is equally devastating—10,920 killed, wounded, or captured. Yet attrition is more serious for the Confederates. Where are replacements to come from?

Grant sends a note to General Meade: “I do not desire a battle brought on with the enemy in their position of yesterday, but want to press as close to them as possible to determine their position and strength. We must get by the right flank of the enemy for the next fight.” Grant is trying to find a way out of the murderous impasse at Spotsylvania. “The world has never seen so bloody or so protracted a battle as the one being fought, and I hope never will again,” he writes his wife. He will make another attempt to move to his left in the hope of turning Lee’s right flank. Come night Grant pulls Gouvernor K. Warren’s V Corps out of the trenches on the Federal right, swinging it behind the entire Union rear to a new position east of Spotsylvania Court House. At 3 am Horatio Wright’s VI Corps follows, and it takes a position on Warren’s left. Both corps have orders to attack at dawn after making the shifts of front. Before retiring this night, Grant telegraphs Halleck in Washington, putting the best face he can on his failure to break Lee’s line. “The enemy,” he wires, “are obstinate and seem to have found the last ditch.”


At New Market in the Shenandoah Valley, General Imboden keeps his Confederate troopers in line of battle all day, determined to hold General Sigel north of the town. He asks Breckinridge, “By what hour can I expect support here?” Late in the afternoon Imboden learns to his relief that Sigel has not yet left Woodstock with his infantry. Colonel Boyd is still a threat, but “if he comes on,” Imboden wires to Breckinridge from New Market, “I will fight him here.” Just as the telegraph operator finishes keying that message, hundreds of Federal horsemen appear in the gap above the town.

On the mountain, Boyd has come to the mistaken conclusion that the soldiers and wagons he can see around New Market are part of Sigel’s command, although he thinks it strange that the supply wagons are positioned ahead of the army. Ignoring the apparent oddity, Boyd leads his column down toward the town. As the unsuspecting Federals approach New Market, a boy named Elon Henkel hears a rumbling noise and runs to the front of his Main Street home to investigate. There he sees Imboden’s two Virginia regiments pounding toward him “neck and neck, horses’ hoofs hammering the pike, the scabbards of the sabers rattling, and the cavalrymen giving the Rebel yell.” While Henkel flees for cover, the Confederate horsemen turn at the crossroads and gallop toward Boyd’s New Yorkers, who are nearing a bridge over Smith’s Creek, east of town. Shouting orders as he rides, Imboden sends a regiment to engage the Federals at the bridge while he circles around them with his other regiment and two guns. Boyd’s men are crossing the creek when the first regiment hits them; the astonished Federals, outnumbered two to one, try to make a stand, but within moments they are virtually surrounded. They attempt to break out with a desperate charge to the rear, only to find that the road behind them is blocked by the second regiment. The Federals’ only alternative is to retreat up the mountain slopes, into the cover of the woods. “Our men were seen running in all directions,” Captain James H. Stevenson will write, “their horses having given out or got fast among the rocks; while some of the horses rushed along wildly, without riders, the saddles under their bellies.”

In three days, the hard-riding Imboden has smashed two enemy forces that were thirty mountainous miles apart. He has caused roughly 150 casualties. More important, he has rendered more than 800 Federal troopers ineffective. As for Boyd’s men, “They are wandering in the mountin tonight cut off,” Imboden tells Breckinridge with grim satisfaction. “Colonel Boyd was wounded. We have his horse, and he is in the brush.”

Meanwhile, General Breckinridge orders his men to move out of Staunton at dawn.


Sheridan’s cavalry leaves the Richmond area and heads for the James at Haxall’s Landing.


Johnston reaches Resaca, Georgia, with his army this morning—just in time. Even as his men file into position, the Federal armies are massing in Sugar Valley and sending skirmishers toward Resaca. Polk is on the job in his customary battle garb of slouch hat and old gray hunting shirt. Polk’s men hold off the Federals long enough for Johnston to bolster the lines on the high ground commanding Camp Creek west of Resaca. These defenses form a four-mile-long arc, anchored on the left at the Oostanuala River, just below the hamlet, and on the right at the Conasauga, a tributary of the Oostanaula east of the railroad. Johnston has the high ground—and better numerical odds than before. With the arrival of most of Polk’s men, who now constitute a third corps of infantry, he can count about 66,000 men. Sherman, with the addition of Stoneman’s cavalry, numbers approximately 104,000; he stays up late into the night mapping his tactics. Thomas’s IV Corps, commanded by Major General Oliver O. Howard and posted at Rocky Face Ridge as a decoy, has crossed Rocky Face and followed the Confederates south. Fighting breaks out at Tilton, Resaca, and near Dalton during the course of the realignment.


At Drewry’s Bluff, Butler’s Federals are laboriously getting into position to attack, this giving Beauregard’s Confederates time to arrange their thin line of defenders. Butler does unleash his cavalry under Kautz, however, and they strike the Richmond & Danville, wrecking switches and culverts.


On the Red River in Louisiana, the Federal gunboats continue their retreat, and with them on their way Banks’ army evacuates Alexandria. Meanwhile, to the north, Steele’s Federal column has returned to Little Rock. The Federals’ entire spring operation across the Mississippi has been a failure.


Through the 16th Federal guns strike Fort Sumter again at Charleston, firing 1,140 rounds in four days. Skirmishes flare at Pulaski, Tennessee; Spavinaw, Arkansas; and Cuba, Missouri. Jo Shelby’s Confederate cavalry begins a new campaign north of the Arkansas River, with skirmishing at Cypress Creek in Perry County. Shelby’s operations last the rest of the month.

President Davis, beset with many threats and concerns, writes General Lee, “If possible will sustain you in your unequal struggle so long and nobly maintained.”