- 29 Sep 2022 13:30
#15249008
September 29, Thursday
In Virginia north of Deep Bottom, the firing begins at 5 am as Birney’s skirmishers push back the Confederate pickets and approach the defensive line on New Market Heights. The difficulty in maneuvering through the tangled, swampy countryside so confuses the Federal advance that only a single division, under Paine, reaches the works; the remainder of the Federal force is blocked on the roads to the rear. And only Colonel Samuel Duncan’s brigade, 1,100 men, strikes the Confederate earthworks.
At first a dense fog obscures much of the field. The Confederates, four brigades of Brigadier General John Gregg’s division, become aware of the attack only when they hear a roar that sounds “like the bellowing of ten thousand wild bulls.” Before they can see the approaching Federals, a few excited defenders are jumping on top of the parapets and “shooting at shadows.” Birney finds the enemy resistance stiffer than he expected. Most of the Confederates hold their fire until the Federals have splashed across a creek and are struggling through the abatis. The first volley staggers the attackers. Birney orders a second assault, sending Colonel Alonzo Draper’s brigade against the earthworks. Draper’s men bravely withstand the fire of Colonel Frederick Bass’s Texas Brigade for a full thirty minutes. When the shooting slackens, the Federal troops rush over the parapets. The Confederates are gone. The 1,800 defenders had realized that they would be overrun if they were to remain. Moreover, they received word that they are needed to repel a strong Federal attack on Fort Harrison. With the morning still young, they have abandoned New Market Heights to the Federals.
Ord, meanwhile, has pushed his large force briskly up the Varina road just after daylight, driving in the Confederate pickets and pressing to within a mile of Fort Harrison. There the Federals form a line of battle—and face a dismaying prospect. They will have to advance across a mile of cleared, rising ground swept by the enemy’s guns and muskets. Then they must assault a solid hilltop fort anchored in the entrenchments enclosing Chaffin’s Bluff. Inside these impressive works, however, is a less than impressive garrison: roughly 800 inexperienced, unreliable, and badly posted men of the heavy artillery. When they catch sight of the thousands of Federals filing into line of battle, the defenders spring to their cannon, discovering too late that only four of the seven large-caliber pieces are in working order. General Ord—who in his long Regular Army career has never before led a major operation—hesitates. The Commander of his 1st Division, Brigadier General George S. Stannard, pleads with Ord to allow him to send his men against the fort, even though the 2nd Division isn’t yet in supporting position. Confederate reinforces will be on the way, Stannard argues, and the attack has to be made immediately.
Ord finally assents, and Stannard’s three brigades move forward. The fort’s few working guns and the batteries nearby on the Confederate line bang away, firing high and drawing derisive jeers from the advancing Federals. Stannard’s men tramp steadily as if on parade, his brigade commanders holding down the pace—even after the enemy guns get the range and begin exacting heavy casualties—to avoid exhausting the men with a mile-long dash. As the Federals draw closer, the Confederates discover a serious flaw in the defensive works. They can’t depress their guns enough to cover the base of the hill that Fort Harrison crowns. The entire Federal division finds a refuge there to pause and brace itself for the final assault up the steep slope to the enemy fortifications. While their troops prepare for the last advance, Ord and Stannard can see General Gregg’s Confederate troops rushing westward along the New Market road toward the fort. In one disorganized mass, the Federal division surges up the hill and into the enemy works. As the howling bluecoats clamber up the earthen ramparts—some on ladders they have improvised by jamming bayonets into the embankment and stepping on the rifle barrels—the poorly disciplined defending force begins to fall apart. The reserve units fire their volleys too early, then panic and run, leaving the few veteran companies hopelessly outnumbered. These troops have no choice but to withdraw as well.
Thus by 7 am the New Market road line has been rolled up, and the Federals are in possession of Fort Harrison. Like Burnside at Petersburg two months ago, Butler has a priceless opportunity: a shattered enemy line, a vital objective close at hand, and an overwhelming superiority of numbers. But as Burnside had demonstrated, all these advantages mean nothing if Butler can’t retain tight control over his forces, concentrate them, and keep them moving. This isn’t going to be easy. Stannard’s 1st Division has paid a heavy price for its success at Fort Harrison: Every one of its brigade commanders, four of its regimental commanders, and 18 percent of its men are casualties. Discipline, too, had become a casualty, even before the final charge. And once the Federals are inside the walls, the exhilaration of victory delays the restoration of order. An hour passes before any move is made farther into the entrenched Confederate positions. When it comes, that movement is slow and tentative.
General Ord desperately needs the fresh units of his 2nd Division to bolster the 1st and to take up the drive inside the Confederate fortifications. But the 2nd Division, uncertainly led by Brigadier General Charles A. Heckman, has meandered far to the right. It has become tangled in some swampy woods and is heading up the Varina road for a frontal attack on the Confederate exterior line northeast of Fort Harrison, too far away to be a support to or be supported by Stannard’s 1st Division. Frantic to sustain his momentum and facing growing resistance to his right, Order decides to thrust toward the river, along the trenches to his left. This line, with its two salients, is defended by fewer than 200 Confederates; but Ord is able to pull together only a small attacking force, composed of officers and a few men from Colonel Michael T. Donohue’s battalion of skirmishers. Hoping to inspire them, Ord leads the attack personally.
To the south of Fort Harrison, the Confederate gunners have kept up a steady fire on the Federals occupying the works. Now, flanked by Ord’s attackers, these Virginia artillerymen abandon their battery and withdraw down the line of earthworks toward the river. As they retreat other units join them, and when they reach a strong point called Fort Hoke their commander, Cornelius T. Allen, makes his stand. Grabbing smoothbore muskets stored in the fort, the artillerymen and reserves manage to stop Ord’s attack party cold. Ord himself suffers a painful leg wound that disables him. Allen’s beleaguered gunners receive help from an unexpected source. The Fredericksburg and the Richmond, two powerful Confederate ironclads, have steamed up the James with an escort of several smaller gunboats and have opened fire on the Federals. The naval gunfire is inaccurate and sporadic, but Ord’s Federals are badly shaken by the huge shells crashing near them.
Thus, at a time when everything depends on movement, the Federals are stalled; just when they most need strong leadership, they have lost their corps commander. Ord reluctantly goes to the rear in an ambulance, turning command over to his senior subordinate—who, as fate would have it, is the undistinguished General Heckman. Largely by default, Heckman’s division has managed to take a section of the Confederate exterior line northeast of Fort Harrison. But he fails to recognize the possibility of assaulting the enemy lines from the flank and rear. Instead of bringing the 2nd Division into the entrenched camp and attacking the Confederates from behind, Heckman repeatedly orders his men to make frontal attacks on the strongly held intermediate line. These thrusts, just outside the northeast corner of the entrenched camp, are made by individual brigades advancing unsupported into brutal enfilading fire. For two hours Heckman’s exhausted men and their confused officers stumble forward time and again and are shot down in droves. By 10 am the survivors are fought out, the assaults have stopped, and a lull is spreading over the field. About this time General Grant arrives in the area, not to exercise any control over the fighting—as usual, he is leaving that to his subordinates—but simply to assess the situation for himself. When Grant appears at New Market Heights to talk with Butler and Birney, the troops of X Corps cheer him, as one New Yorker will remember it, “till they fairly raised the old fellow, cigar and all, from his saddle.” Grant then rides over to Fort Harrison.
Although Grant can’t perceive it, Richmond, eight miles to the north, is in an unprecedented state of alarm. It isn’t the fall of Fort Harrison that has frightened the citizens, for they haven’t learned about it yet; they are transfixed by the roar of artillery a mere two miles east of the city: General Kautz and his 2,200 Federal cavalrymen are almost at the gates of Richmond, attacking a section of the intermediate line held by a small but stubborn force of Confederate artillery. As ordered, Kautz had headed north as soon as Birney’s corps had taken New Market Heights. In a short time his troopers reach the Darbytown road, and at 10 am they move forward to make the attack. But the little band of defenders, 100 Virginians from a Heavy Artillery Battalion, open fire with their half-dozen or so cannon and quickly discourage Kautz. He leads his men back into the safety of the woods and stays there, apparently losing all sense of urgency. It takes him three hours to move his command a mile north, to the Charles City road, and attack again. This time a somewhat stronger enemy force is ready to meet him. Upon hearing the sounds of Kautz’s attack and the thunderous defense so close at hand, officials in Richmond dragooned convicts and convalescents, and Major General James L. Kemper called out the 4,500 men and boys of his Local Defense Force. Many of these last-ditch reinforcements have reached the Charles City road by the time Kautz gets there at 1:30 pm, and the faint-hearted Union commander again retreats at the first sign of opposition. Then for four hours he stays put, unable to decide what to do, until slowly and gingerly he begins to move northward—away from Richmond.
General Grant, visiting Fort Harrison shortly after Kautz’s initial attack, apparently takes at face value the achievement of the operation’s first objectives and doesn’t detect any signs of impending disaster. He simply scrawls a message to Birney saying that XVIII Corp is ready to advance on Richmond and that Birney’s X Corps should do likewise. Then the general in chief returns to Deep Bottom to await developments.
On the Confederate side of the lines, these developments are now coming fast. The ailing Lieutenant General Richard S. Ewell, whom Lee has gently removed from corps command and put in charge of the defenses of Richmond, rises to the occasion with all of his former ferocity. Taking personal charge of the threatened encampment at Chaffin’s Bluff, the one-legged Ewell has thrown a line diagonally across its wooded interior, from the embattled redans on the river northeastward to Fort Johnson on the opposite corner. The line is little more than a façade, manned by badly shaken heavy artillerymen now forced to fight as infantry and by Major Alexander W. Starke’s battalion of light artillery. Ewell, however, is a gambler; he rides up and down the line, facing the Federals. “I remember very distinctly how he looked,” one of his soldiers will recall, “mounted on an old gray horse, as mad as he could be, shouting to the men and seeming to be everywhere at once.” The ruse works. No Federals advance from Fort Harrison.
As serious as the situation is at Chaffin’s Bluff, General Lee also has to worry about what the Federals are doing south of the river. Yesterday they showed signs of concentrating on the left of their lines below Petersburg—a deliberate deception—and since dawn today there have been further ominous indications of movement there. Throughout the morning Lee has waited, until he can be certain about his enemy’s intentions. Finally, at midday, he decides the thrust north of the river is the real peril, and he moves decisively. He orders substantial reinforcements to march north toward the embattled Confederate position, and in early afternoon he, too, heads for Chaffin’s Bluff.
By this time General Birney and the Federal X Corps are struggling northeast along the New Market road, supposedly to join XVIII Corps in the drive toward Richmond. Birney’s 2nd Division, under Brigadier General Robert S. Foster, takes the lead. Exhausted by their long night march and forced to fight every step this morning against persistent rearguard actions, Foster’s men are literally dropping out by the hundreds. When the rapidly weakening force approaches the intersection of the New Market and Varina roads, Foster finds, instead of an inviting gap in the Confederate defenses, the bristling works of the intermediate line. Just to the southwest of the intersection looms the squat expanse of Fort Gilmer, a salient only slightly less imposing than Fort Harrison. It, too, is poorly designed and undermanned, and again the Federals throw against it a vastly superior force.
But Birney’s attack has none of the punch that had been delivered against Fort Harrison. After a considerable delay, Birney wheels his 2nd Division to attack southward, but the inexperienced General Foster deploys his men in a thin line of battle with no reserves. Meanwhile, Brigadier General William Birney, older brother of the X Corps commander, prepares his brigade of Black troops for a simultaneous attack westward, against the salient’s other wall. Foster’s men struggle forward through three brush-tangled ravines, under intensifying artillery fire. Confederate reinforcements—including Colonel Bass with some of the Texans who lost their race to Fort Harrison—are streaming into the works. They bring their rifles to bear as the Federals emerge from the last ravine and charge across a cornfield. The attackers can manage only a few steps into the furious hail of bullets and canister. Leaving scores of dead and wounded comrades behind, they flee back into the deadly ravine. General Paine’s entire division is in reserve behind Foster’s men, but despite the gravity of the moment, David Birney sends only one of Paine’s regiments—a Black unit—to reinforce Foster so he can regroup and attack again. The assault force makes it to within forty paces of the works, when “a whirlwind” seems to rush across their front. The line disappears “as though an earthquake had swallowed it.” It is impossible to go forward, unthinkable to remain; Foster orders retreat, leaving 400 of his men and 100 men of the Black regiment dead or wounded on the field. In all, the 2nd Division has lost 35 percent of its men as casualties, and for the time being, it is finished as a fighting force.
About 2:30 pm, the first of the Confederate reinforcements from Petersburg—a brigade from General Charles Field’s division led by Colonel Pinkney D. Bowles—arrives at Fort Gilmer. With these troops comes their corps commander, Lieutenant General Richard Anderson, and General Lee.
Only now does William Birney get his Federal troops in position to begin the attack on the western wall that should have coincided with Foster’s. The Confederates, heartened by their repulse of the 2nd Division and by the arrival of fresh troops, turn all their firepower on Birney’s advancing brigade. This attack is even more piecemeal than Foster’s had been. The men are sent forward a regiment at a time into a storm of bullets and artillery fire that consumes them at a ghastly rate. Black soldiers under Captain Edward Babcock get halfway to the fort before being driven back into the woods to their rear. Bur four companies of Colonel James Shaw’s Black troops—men recruited in Maryland—deploy as skirmishers and rush the fort alone. The 189 men advance under galling fire and pile through the abatis and into the ditch at the base of the fort. Though half of them are already casualties, the rest try valiantly to scale the walls. The defenders shoot every man who raises his head over the parapet and drop short-fused howitzer shells into the ditch. A mere handful of survivors are taken prisoner; only one man returns to the Federal lines.
The Federal drive has been stopped, and the troops can’t stay where they are. Confederate reinforcements now pouring over the Chaffin’s Bluff bridge pose a serious threat to the Federal left and rear. The Federals see this danger early in the afternoon, and General Stannard orders a defensive line prepared. In late afternoon David Birney draws X Corps back along the New Market road to make a junction with the XVIII Corps right, and Heckman refuses his left by forming a new line from Fort Harrison back to the river. The Federals begin to fortify their positions as best they can, throwing up a wall across the open end of Fort Harrison, reversing some old Confederate works, digging new trenches where they have to, and preparing for the counterattack they know will come in the morning.
The Federal high command is worried about what has become of Kautz. During the afternoon and evening, his cavalry grope their way northward almost to the Chickahominy River. There, at midnight, Kauts attempts a feeble attack on the Confederate intermediate line where it bends to the west, and after a confusing and ineffective round of firing at one another as much as at the enemy, the Federals mount up and ride back to the south. Kautz’s riders will rejoin X Corps on the Federal right at 7:30 tomorrow morning.
In the Valley, the path of destruction of the Virginia Central Railroad by Sheridan’s cavalry extends all the way to Waynesboro. They are planning to destroy the iron railroad bridge and the tunnel through the Blue Ridge there. As they begin work, however, Early’s entire force arrives from Brown’s Gap and drives the Federal troopers back. Sheridan orders the cavalry to burn all the “forage, mills, and such other property as might be serviceable to the Rebel army” between Staunton and Harrisonburg. Military necessity or not, it is a distasteful business for many of the Federals who have to carry it out. After troopers from Custer’s brigade set fire to a mill in Port Republic, they end up turning back to help the village’s residents save their homes from the flames. When the destruction has been accomplished as far north as Harrisonburg, Sheridan halts for a few days while he continues his correspondence with Grant about what the Army of the Shenandoah should do next.
This day sees action on all fronts. Price’s raiders clash with Federals at Leasburg or Harrison, and at Cuba, Missouri. Forrest is carrying out his raid, with action near Lynchburg, Tennessee. Hood leads his troops across the Chattahoochee River, headed north to disrupt Sherman’s supply line. In addition, skirmishes occur at Centreville and Moore’s Bluff, Tennessee. An expedition by Federals moves from Vicksburg to beyond Port Gibson, Mississippi. Operations also take place in northwestern Tennessee around Jonesborough and the Watuga River; at Scuppernong River, North Carolina; and Plum Creek, Nebraska Territory.
In Virginia north of Deep Bottom, the firing begins at 5 am as Birney’s skirmishers push back the Confederate pickets and approach the defensive line on New Market Heights. The difficulty in maneuvering through the tangled, swampy countryside so confuses the Federal advance that only a single division, under Paine, reaches the works; the remainder of the Federal force is blocked on the roads to the rear. And only Colonel Samuel Duncan’s brigade, 1,100 men, strikes the Confederate earthworks.
At first a dense fog obscures much of the field. The Confederates, four brigades of Brigadier General John Gregg’s division, become aware of the attack only when they hear a roar that sounds “like the bellowing of ten thousand wild bulls.” Before they can see the approaching Federals, a few excited defenders are jumping on top of the parapets and “shooting at shadows.” Birney finds the enemy resistance stiffer than he expected. Most of the Confederates hold their fire until the Federals have splashed across a creek and are struggling through the abatis. The first volley staggers the attackers. Birney orders a second assault, sending Colonel Alonzo Draper’s brigade against the earthworks. Draper’s men bravely withstand the fire of Colonel Frederick Bass’s Texas Brigade for a full thirty minutes. When the shooting slackens, the Federal troops rush over the parapets. The Confederates are gone. The 1,800 defenders had realized that they would be overrun if they were to remain. Moreover, they received word that they are needed to repel a strong Federal attack on Fort Harrison. With the morning still young, they have abandoned New Market Heights to the Federals.
Ord, meanwhile, has pushed his large force briskly up the Varina road just after daylight, driving in the Confederate pickets and pressing to within a mile of Fort Harrison. There the Federals form a line of battle—and face a dismaying prospect. They will have to advance across a mile of cleared, rising ground swept by the enemy’s guns and muskets. Then they must assault a solid hilltop fort anchored in the entrenchments enclosing Chaffin’s Bluff. Inside these impressive works, however, is a less than impressive garrison: roughly 800 inexperienced, unreliable, and badly posted men of the heavy artillery. When they catch sight of the thousands of Federals filing into line of battle, the defenders spring to their cannon, discovering too late that only four of the seven large-caliber pieces are in working order. General Ord—who in his long Regular Army career has never before led a major operation—hesitates. The Commander of his 1st Division, Brigadier General George S. Stannard, pleads with Ord to allow him to send his men against the fort, even though the 2nd Division isn’t yet in supporting position. Confederate reinforces will be on the way, Stannard argues, and the attack has to be made immediately.
Ord finally assents, and Stannard’s three brigades move forward. The fort’s few working guns and the batteries nearby on the Confederate line bang away, firing high and drawing derisive jeers from the advancing Federals. Stannard’s men tramp steadily as if on parade, his brigade commanders holding down the pace—even after the enemy guns get the range and begin exacting heavy casualties—to avoid exhausting the men with a mile-long dash. As the Federals draw closer, the Confederates discover a serious flaw in the defensive works. They can’t depress their guns enough to cover the base of the hill that Fort Harrison crowns. The entire Federal division finds a refuge there to pause and brace itself for the final assault up the steep slope to the enemy fortifications. While their troops prepare for the last advance, Ord and Stannard can see General Gregg’s Confederate troops rushing westward along the New Market road toward the fort. In one disorganized mass, the Federal division surges up the hill and into the enemy works. As the howling bluecoats clamber up the earthen ramparts—some on ladders they have improvised by jamming bayonets into the embankment and stepping on the rifle barrels—the poorly disciplined defending force begins to fall apart. The reserve units fire their volleys too early, then panic and run, leaving the few veteran companies hopelessly outnumbered. These troops have no choice but to withdraw as well.
Thus by 7 am the New Market road line has been rolled up, and the Federals are in possession of Fort Harrison. Like Burnside at Petersburg two months ago, Butler has a priceless opportunity: a shattered enemy line, a vital objective close at hand, and an overwhelming superiority of numbers. But as Burnside had demonstrated, all these advantages mean nothing if Butler can’t retain tight control over his forces, concentrate them, and keep them moving. This isn’t going to be easy. Stannard’s 1st Division has paid a heavy price for its success at Fort Harrison: Every one of its brigade commanders, four of its regimental commanders, and 18 percent of its men are casualties. Discipline, too, had become a casualty, even before the final charge. And once the Federals are inside the walls, the exhilaration of victory delays the restoration of order. An hour passes before any move is made farther into the entrenched Confederate positions. When it comes, that movement is slow and tentative.
General Ord desperately needs the fresh units of his 2nd Division to bolster the 1st and to take up the drive inside the Confederate fortifications. But the 2nd Division, uncertainly led by Brigadier General Charles A. Heckman, has meandered far to the right. It has become tangled in some swampy woods and is heading up the Varina road for a frontal attack on the Confederate exterior line northeast of Fort Harrison, too far away to be a support to or be supported by Stannard’s 1st Division. Frantic to sustain his momentum and facing growing resistance to his right, Order decides to thrust toward the river, along the trenches to his left. This line, with its two salients, is defended by fewer than 200 Confederates; but Ord is able to pull together only a small attacking force, composed of officers and a few men from Colonel Michael T. Donohue’s battalion of skirmishers. Hoping to inspire them, Ord leads the attack personally.
To the south of Fort Harrison, the Confederate gunners have kept up a steady fire on the Federals occupying the works. Now, flanked by Ord’s attackers, these Virginia artillerymen abandon their battery and withdraw down the line of earthworks toward the river. As they retreat other units join them, and when they reach a strong point called Fort Hoke their commander, Cornelius T. Allen, makes his stand. Grabbing smoothbore muskets stored in the fort, the artillerymen and reserves manage to stop Ord’s attack party cold. Ord himself suffers a painful leg wound that disables him. Allen’s beleaguered gunners receive help from an unexpected source. The Fredericksburg and the Richmond, two powerful Confederate ironclads, have steamed up the James with an escort of several smaller gunboats and have opened fire on the Federals. The naval gunfire is inaccurate and sporadic, but Ord’s Federals are badly shaken by the huge shells crashing near them.
Thus, at a time when everything depends on movement, the Federals are stalled; just when they most need strong leadership, they have lost their corps commander. Ord reluctantly goes to the rear in an ambulance, turning command over to his senior subordinate—who, as fate would have it, is the undistinguished General Heckman. Largely by default, Heckman’s division has managed to take a section of the Confederate exterior line northeast of Fort Harrison. But he fails to recognize the possibility of assaulting the enemy lines from the flank and rear. Instead of bringing the 2nd Division into the entrenched camp and attacking the Confederates from behind, Heckman repeatedly orders his men to make frontal attacks on the strongly held intermediate line. These thrusts, just outside the northeast corner of the entrenched camp, are made by individual brigades advancing unsupported into brutal enfilading fire. For two hours Heckman’s exhausted men and their confused officers stumble forward time and again and are shot down in droves. By 10 am the survivors are fought out, the assaults have stopped, and a lull is spreading over the field. About this time General Grant arrives in the area, not to exercise any control over the fighting—as usual, he is leaving that to his subordinates—but simply to assess the situation for himself. When Grant appears at New Market Heights to talk with Butler and Birney, the troops of X Corps cheer him, as one New Yorker will remember it, “till they fairly raised the old fellow, cigar and all, from his saddle.” Grant then rides over to Fort Harrison.
Although Grant can’t perceive it, Richmond, eight miles to the north, is in an unprecedented state of alarm. It isn’t the fall of Fort Harrison that has frightened the citizens, for they haven’t learned about it yet; they are transfixed by the roar of artillery a mere two miles east of the city: General Kautz and his 2,200 Federal cavalrymen are almost at the gates of Richmond, attacking a section of the intermediate line held by a small but stubborn force of Confederate artillery. As ordered, Kautz had headed north as soon as Birney’s corps had taken New Market Heights. In a short time his troopers reach the Darbytown road, and at 10 am they move forward to make the attack. But the little band of defenders, 100 Virginians from a Heavy Artillery Battalion, open fire with their half-dozen or so cannon and quickly discourage Kautz. He leads his men back into the safety of the woods and stays there, apparently losing all sense of urgency. It takes him three hours to move his command a mile north, to the Charles City road, and attack again. This time a somewhat stronger enemy force is ready to meet him. Upon hearing the sounds of Kautz’s attack and the thunderous defense so close at hand, officials in Richmond dragooned convicts and convalescents, and Major General James L. Kemper called out the 4,500 men and boys of his Local Defense Force. Many of these last-ditch reinforcements have reached the Charles City road by the time Kautz gets there at 1:30 pm, and the faint-hearted Union commander again retreats at the first sign of opposition. Then for four hours he stays put, unable to decide what to do, until slowly and gingerly he begins to move northward—away from Richmond.
General Grant, visiting Fort Harrison shortly after Kautz’s initial attack, apparently takes at face value the achievement of the operation’s first objectives and doesn’t detect any signs of impending disaster. He simply scrawls a message to Birney saying that XVIII Corp is ready to advance on Richmond and that Birney’s X Corps should do likewise. Then the general in chief returns to Deep Bottom to await developments.
On the Confederate side of the lines, these developments are now coming fast. The ailing Lieutenant General Richard S. Ewell, whom Lee has gently removed from corps command and put in charge of the defenses of Richmond, rises to the occasion with all of his former ferocity. Taking personal charge of the threatened encampment at Chaffin’s Bluff, the one-legged Ewell has thrown a line diagonally across its wooded interior, from the embattled redans on the river northeastward to Fort Johnson on the opposite corner. The line is little more than a façade, manned by badly shaken heavy artillerymen now forced to fight as infantry and by Major Alexander W. Starke’s battalion of light artillery. Ewell, however, is a gambler; he rides up and down the line, facing the Federals. “I remember very distinctly how he looked,” one of his soldiers will recall, “mounted on an old gray horse, as mad as he could be, shouting to the men and seeming to be everywhere at once.” The ruse works. No Federals advance from Fort Harrison.
As serious as the situation is at Chaffin’s Bluff, General Lee also has to worry about what the Federals are doing south of the river. Yesterday they showed signs of concentrating on the left of their lines below Petersburg—a deliberate deception—and since dawn today there have been further ominous indications of movement there. Throughout the morning Lee has waited, until he can be certain about his enemy’s intentions. Finally, at midday, he decides the thrust north of the river is the real peril, and he moves decisively. He orders substantial reinforcements to march north toward the embattled Confederate position, and in early afternoon he, too, heads for Chaffin’s Bluff.
By this time General Birney and the Federal X Corps are struggling northeast along the New Market road, supposedly to join XVIII Corps in the drive toward Richmond. Birney’s 2nd Division, under Brigadier General Robert S. Foster, takes the lead. Exhausted by their long night march and forced to fight every step this morning against persistent rearguard actions, Foster’s men are literally dropping out by the hundreds. When the rapidly weakening force approaches the intersection of the New Market and Varina roads, Foster finds, instead of an inviting gap in the Confederate defenses, the bristling works of the intermediate line. Just to the southwest of the intersection looms the squat expanse of Fort Gilmer, a salient only slightly less imposing than Fort Harrison. It, too, is poorly designed and undermanned, and again the Federals throw against it a vastly superior force.
But Birney’s attack has none of the punch that had been delivered against Fort Harrison. After a considerable delay, Birney wheels his 2nd Division to attack southward, but the inexperienced General Foster deploys his men in a thin line of battle with no reserves. Meanwhile, Brigadier General William Birney, older brother of the X Corps commander, prepares his brigade of Black troops for a simultaneous attack westward, against the salient’s other wall. Foster’s men struggle forward through three brush-tangled ravines, under intensifying artillery fire. Confederate reinforcements—including Colonel Bass with some of the Texans who lost their race to Fort Harrison—are streaming into the works. They bring their rifles to bear as the Federals emerge from the last ravine and charge across a cornfield. The attackers can manage only a few steps into the furious hail of bullets and canister. Leaving scores of dead and wounded comrades behind, they flee back into the deadly ravine. General Paine’s entire division is in reserve behind Foster’s men, but despite the gravity of the moment, David Birney sends only one of Paine’s regiments—a Black unit—to reinforce Foster so he can regroup and attack again. The assault force makes it to within forty paces of the works, when “a whirlwind” seems to rush across their front. The line disappears “as though an earthquake had swallowed it.” It is impossible to go forward, unthinkable to remain; Foster orders retreat, leaving 400 of his men and 100 men of the Black regiment dead or wounded on the field. In all, the 2nd Division has lost 35 percent of its men as casualties, and for the time being, it is finished as a fighting force.
About 2:30 pm, the first of the Confederate reinforcements from Petersburg—a brigade from General Charles Field’s division led by Colonel Pinkney D. Bowles—arrives at Fort Gilmer. With these troops comes their corps commander, Lieutenant General Richard Anderson, and General Lee.
Only now does William Birney get his Federal troops in position to begin the attack on the western wall that should have coincided with Foster’s. The Confederates, heartened by their repulse of the 2nd Division and by the arrival of fresh troops, turn all their firepower on Birney’s advancing brigade. This attack is even more piecemeal than Foster’s had been. The men are sent forward a regiment at a time into a storm of bullets and artillery fire that consumes them at a ghastly rate. Black soldiers under Captain Edward Babcock get halfway to the fort before being driven back into the woods to their rear. Bur four companies of Colonel James Shaw’s Black troops—men recruited in Maryland—deploy as skirmishers and rush the fort alone. The 189 men advance under galling fire and pile through the abatis and into the ditch at the base of the fort. Though half of them are already casualties, the rest try valiantly to scale the walls. The defenders shoot every man who raises his head over the parapet and drop short-fused howitzer shells into the ditch. A mere handful of survivors are taken prisoner; only one man returns to the Federal lines.
The Federal drive has been stopped, and the troops can’t stay where they are. Confederate reinforcements now pouring over the Chaffin’s Bluff bridge pose a serious threat to the Federal left and rear. The Federals see this danger early in the afternoon, and General Stannard orders a defensive line prepared. In late afternoon David Birney draws X Corps back along the New Market road to make a junction with the XVIII Corps right, and Heckman refuses his left by forming a new line from Fort Harrison back to the river. The Federals begin to fortify their positions as best they can, throwing up a wall across the open end of Fort Harrison, reversing some old Confederate works, digging new trenches where they have to, and preparing for the counterattack they know will come in the morning.
The Federal high command is worried about what has become of Kautz. During the afternoon and evening, his cavalry grope their way northward almost to the Chickahominy River. There, at midnight, Kauts attempts a feeble attack on the Confederate intermediate line where it bends to the west, and after a confusing and ineffective round of firing at one another as much as at the enemy, the Federals mount up and ride back to the south. Kautz’s riders will rejoin X Corps on the Federal right at 7:30 tomorrow morning.
In the Valley, the path of destruction of the Virginia Central Railroad by Sheridan’s cavalry extends all the way to Waynesboro. They are planning to destroy the iron railroad bridge and the tunnel through the Blue Ridge there. As they begin work, however, Early’s entire force arrives from Brown’s Gap and drives the Federal troopers back. Sheridan orders the cavalry to burn all the “forage, mills, and such other property as might be serviceable to the Rebel army” between Staunton and Harrisonburg. Military necessity or not, it is a distasteful business for many of the Federals who have to carry it out. After troopers from Custer’s brigade set fire to a mill in Port Republic, they end up turning back to help the village’s residents save their homes from the flames. When the destruction has been accomplished as far north as Harrisonburg, Sheridan halts for a few days while he continues his correspondence with Grant about what the Army of the Shenandoah should do next.
This day sees action on all fronts. Price’s raiders clash with Federals at Leasburg or Harrison, and at Cuba, Missouri. Forrest is carrying out his raid, with action near Lynchburg, Tennessee. Hood leads his troops across the Chattahoochee River, headed north to disrupt Sherman’s supply line. In addition, skirmishes occur at Centreville and Moore’s Bluff, Tennessee. An expedition by Federals moves from Vicksburg to beyond Port Gibson, Mississippi. Operations also take place in northwestern Tennessee around Jonesborough and the Watuga River; at Scuppernong River, North Carolina; and Plum Creek, Nebraska Territory.
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
—Edmund Burke
—Edmund Burke