The battle began again at 8:30 a.m. with a Confederate attack on the Union centre. Bragg still hoped to get round the Union left and cut its communications with Chattanooga but the attacks broke on the Union barricades. Rosecrans should have maintained his position without difficulty had he not made a grave and almost inexplicable mistake. One of his staff officers misread the battle line and told Rosecrans that there was a gap, where none in fact existed; the poor visibility on the battlefield may have been to blame. Rosecrans, however, without looking for himself, took a division out of the line to fill the supposed gap, thus creating a real one, into which charged Longstreet"s corps, pushing the Union back nearly a mile at that point.
The effect was disastrous: panic took hold, shamefully affecting not only the rank and file but Rosecrans and several of his subordinate commanders as well, who made off for the safety of Chattanooga. The only senior officer of the Union left on the field was General George Thomas, who was a friend of his Confederate opponent opposite, James Longstreet. Thomas managed to rally some troops of his corps at Snodgra.s.s Hill and form a line of defence. This line held for the rest of the day, preventing the Confederates from getting into the rear of the disorganised Union army and thus saving the day. Thomas, a quiet, slow-spoken man, was known forever after as "the Rock of Chickamauga" and came to be rated by Ulysses S. Grant as one of the few indispensable generals of the Union army. He saw his men ride out the attacks, which persisted all afternoon until, as evening came, he ordered their retreat to Rossville, a little short of Chattanooga on Missionary Ridge, where Rosecrans was attempting to reorder his broken ranks. General Emerson Opdycke, who observed Thomas"s conduct during the closing stages of the battle, wrote inspiringly of his direction of the defence across the line of retreat. Only six divisions, Opdycke saw, held the line. "In front stood the whole army of the enemy, eager to fall upon us with the energy that comes from great success and greater hopes. But close behind our line rode a general whose judgement never erred, whose calm, invincible will never bent; and around him thirty thousand soldiers resolved to exhaust their last round of ammunition, and then to hold their ground with their bayonets. Soldiers thus inspired and commanded are more easily killed than defeated."1 Thomas kept close to the battle line throughout, speaking frequently to his troops and encouraging them. Encouragement was needed, for the casualties rose to terrible heights: 2,312 Confederates killed, 14,674 wounded, 1,468 missing; 1,657 Union killed, 9,756 wounded, 4,757 missing. The battle was counted a victory by the Confederacy though it could afford few more at that price. In the aftermath, Rosecrans withdrew into the defences of Chattanooga, to which Bragg laid siege. He succeeded in drawing his siege lines tight, cutting off all supplies to the trapped Union soldiers except for what could be brought in by one narrow and awkward road to the north, which was frequently raided by Confederate cavalry at great cost in destroyed wagons and slaughtered horses and mules. Bragg"s army took up positions on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, from which they commanded the Union line of retreat.
Halleck took steps to see that Rosecrans was not abandoned. In early October Hooker arrived in Chattanooga from Virginia with 20,000 troops. Hooker was sent by train, completing a journey of 1,200 miles in eleven days, a logistic movement not to be bettered until the twentieth century, and in mid-November Sherman brought 16,000 from Mississippi. Most important of all, Grant was appointed to command a new, all-embracing Division of the Mississippi, running from the river to the borders of Georgia, overseeing the armies of the Tennessee and the c.u.mberland. Rosecrans was relieved of command of the Army of the c.u.mberland and replaced by Thomas. Grant had already identified him as a battle-winning soldier, and his admiration would grow. Grant"s first act was to open a line of supply into the city, known to the soldiers as the "Cracker Line" because down it came steady supplies of hard bread, as well as beef and "small rations"-which comprised coffee, rice, sugar, and desiccated vegetables. Grant noted their transforming effect: the disappearance of la.s.situde and the return of energy and good cheer.
The Cracker Line was open by October 28, and on November 23 Grant began the attacks on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge which would raise the siege for good. While the reinforcements were arriving and Chattanooga was being resupplied with food and war materiel, Grant had put in hand a great deal of repair and rebuilding of the region"s infrastructure. In their effort to deny the Union the chance to capture positions in the state of Mississippi and to conduct operations against their soldiers, the Confederate commanders had been forced to destroy a great deal of railroad line and stock and road-works also. Grant was soon supervising a railroad-building business, constructing wagons and the tools with which to work. Fortunately he was able to find enough skilled men in his army who knew how, evidence of the extent to which the railroad boom had caught up the working population of the United States during the 1850s. In Chattanooga"s hinterland, 182 bridges had to be rebuilt, including several spans a mile long. The workforce also constructed a large number of pontoons, for use both in the laying of bridges and as ferries.
The battle to capture Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain began with a secretive crossing of Chickamauga Creek in pontoons, rowed with oars that had been brought up by the wagonload and dumped beside them. The Union advance parties got across undetected under cover of darkness on the morning of November 23. By early afternoon they had captured a hill, Orchard k.n.o.b, on which they set up an artillery position. The a.s.sault on Lookout Mountain began the next day, that on Missionary Ridge on November 25. Both were formidable natural fortresses. Lookout Mountain culminates at an alt.i.tude of 1,100 feet, in a precipitous rocky platform, while Missionary Ridge has steep sides 500 feet high. Both features had been improved for defensive purposes by digging and were crisscrossed by trenches and lines of rifle pits. An entrenchment had also been dug to connect the two heights.
Grant began his grand a.s.sault on the mountain stronghold on November 25, following a preliminary success the day before on Missionary Ridge. Grant had now received the reinforcements brought from Mississippi by Sherman and had strength enough to press Bragg hard. Bragg"s ability to hold the position was weakened by the deterioration of his relations with his subordinates, which, never good, now trembled on the brink of the mutinous. Jefferson Davis had been forced to come from Richmond to adjudicate between them, only to be met by demands that Bragg be dismissed and replaced by either Johnston or Longstreet. Johnston was not trusted by Davis, while Longstreet, as an officer of the Army of Northern Virginia, felt he lacked the authority to command western soldiers. So Bragg had been left in his post, with consequences he, the president, and the army would regret.
The consequences ensued soon after the opening of Grant"s a.s.saults on Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, led by Hooker and Sherman. On November 24 Hooker"s men got to grips with the Confederates on a narrow bench on the slopes of Lookout Mountain. The day was misty and the mist became thick fog, which made it difficult for the warring parties to see each other. As a result, the fight was broken off, though it would be known thereafter as "the Battle Above the Clouds." In the night that followed, the Confederate defenders slipped away to join those on Missionary Ridge. For November 25 Grant had made a new plan which required Sherman"s corps to attack the Confederate right, Hooker"s the Confederate left, while Thomas held the centre sector but did not attack. After a morning and early afternoon of heavy fighting Grant decided that neither Sherman nor Hooker could do any more and sent orders to Thomas to advance. The orders entailed an advance by 25,000 men across a mile of open ground from Orchard k.n.o.b into the enemy centre. Thomas"s men were anxious to vindicate their performance at Chickamauga and advanced to contact in a headstrong mood calling out "Chickamauga! Chickamauga!" as they moved. They quickly took the line of rifle pits at the foot of Missionary Ridge and then began to move up its slopes, ignoring their officers" orders to halt and re-form. The supports and reserves joined in and soon all 25,000 were racing to storm the summit, driving the demoralised Confederates ahead of them.
Grant, who was watching the action with Thomas from the prominence of Orchard k.n.o.b, began questioning his entourage in a testy fashion, believing he had been disobeyed. "Thomas, who ordered those men up the ridge?" Thomas answered that he did not know and that it had not been he. Then to General Gordon Granger, commander of the Fourth Corps in Thomas"s army, he said, "Did you order them up, Granger?" "No, they started up without orders. When those fellows get started, all h.e.l.l can"t stop them." Grant warned that if things did not turn out well, someone would suffer. General Joseph Fullerton, a staff officer of Thomas"s army, then rode about to make enquiries, but also to give orders to push on if that were possible. General Philip Sheridan said, "I didn"t order them up but they are going to take that ridge." He raised his canteen in salute, at a group of Confederate officers who were watching from a vantage point, and was fired on by Confederate artillery in response.
During the night, Bragg"s army withdrew completely from the Chattanooga position and did not attempt to re-enter Tennessee. His vanguard was already thirty miles inside Georgia. Bragg wrote to Jefferson Davis to tender his resignation in recognition of the completeness of the defeat he had suffered and was replaced by Johnston, an unwilling change by Davis but he had exhausted his reserve of generals.
Given the intensity of the fighting on the two mountains, and the amount of ammunition expended, casualties, on both sides, were lower than might have been expected: 753 Union killed, 4,722 wounded, 349 missing; 361 Confederates killed, 2,160 wounded, 4,146 missing.
THE SIEGE OF KNOXVILLE Knoxville was the major city of eastern Tennessee, the mountainous region for which Lincoln felt such concern as it was the centre of Union sentiment inside the Confederacy. From the beginning of the war, he was anxious to bring it under Federal control, and throughout 1862-63 he urged a succession of Union commanders to move against it. In March 1863 General Ambrose Burnside, who had been so heavily defeated at Fredericksburg the previous December, was transferred to the West. He was ordered to move against Knoxville as quickly as possible, while General William Rosecrans was ordered to operate against Braxton Bragg in what became the Tullahoma campaign. Burnside commanded the Army of the Ohio, Rosecrans the Army of the c.u.mberland.
Burnside intended to advance from Cincinnati with two corps, the Ninth and the Twenty-third, but lost the Ninth when it was given to Grant for the campaign against Vicksburg. While awaiting the return of the Ninth Corps, Burnside sent a brigade and some cavalry to advance on Knoxville. During June, this force, led by General William Sanders, destroyed railroads around the city, where General Simon Buckner was in command.
In August Burnside began his advance on Knoxville. His direct route ran through the c.u.mberland Gap, heavily defended by the Confederates. To avoid them Burnside made a flank movement to the south, by forced marches through the broken country. As the Chickamauga campaign began, Buckner was ordered to take most of his troops to join Bragg at Chattanooga and was left with only two brigades, one in the c.u.mberland Gap, on the northeastern border of the state, and another east of Knoxville. In these circ.u.mstances Burnside pressed forward and was able to send a cavalry brigade into Knoxville on September 2. It was unopposed and found the city empty of rebel troops. He was enthusiastically welcomed by the loyal population. Burnside arrived with his army the next day.
He then set about dealing with the Confederates at the c.u.mberland Gap in order to open up a more direct route to Kentucky. He had two forces in position to confront the new Confederate commander, General John Frazer; though outnumbered, Frazer refused to surrender. Burnside then led a brigade from Knoxville to the gap, making a march of sixty miles in fifty-two hours. On his arrival, Frazer, accepting that he was hopelessly outnumbered, surrendered on September 9. Burnside recruited new units of Tennessee volunteers and set about clearing the roads and gaps leading northward towards Virginia. Meanwhile, Grant, who had now captured Chattanooga, was preparing to fight at Chickamauga, to which Lincoln and Halleck ordered Burnside to detach troops in order to support Rosecrans, who was in difficulty. But, unwilling to surrender Knoxville, Burnside procrastinated; he was having difficulty supplying his troops in the desolate country to the east of Knoxville. During September and early October he was forced to fight two small battles, at Blountsville and Blue Springs, both minor victories, which led to the reestablishment of Union authority in eastern Tennessee.
Braxton Bragg, fearing that Burnside might reinforce the Union troops at Chattanooga, asked Jefferson Davis to order Longstreet to concentrate against him. Longstreet objected, knowing he would be severely outnumbered, since large Union reinforcements were approaching Chattanooga to add to the imbalance. He also objected to the division of force involved, which, he said, would expose both Confederate commanders to defeat. He therefore resumed his preparations to move against Knoxville. The move was to be made by rail, but the journey proved difficult. The trains did not arrive on time, so that the advance had to begin on foot. When the trains did arrive, the locomotives proved underpowered, forcing the troops to dismount on the steeper gradients. They also had to collect wood for the engines. Food ran short. Longstreet"s advance nevertheless cheered Lincoln, who, having previously told Burnside to leave Knoxville, now ordered him to stay and defend the city. Grant prepared to send reinforcements from Chattanooga, but Burnside now convinced him that he could detach sufficient troops to hold Longstreet at a distance. Grant willingly concurred. Next the Confederates attempted to encircle Knoxville with cavalry, but Union resistance thwarted their plan and the cavalry joined Longstreet in the north. Burnside manoeuvred outside the city and successfully reached a vital crossroads. Burnside won a brisk minor victory at this point, Campbell"s Station, which allowed him to withdraw his strength inside Knoxville. On November 17 Longstreet laid siege. His a.s.sault on the defences was delayed, and Longstreet took advantage of the opportunity to strengthen his earthworks. Longstreet eventually attacked a week after the siege had begun, at a point he judged weak, Fort Sanders, but which was deceptively strong. The Union had surrounded the earthworks with a network of telegraph wire strung between trees. The Confederate attack launched on November 29, 1863, was effectively checked by the defences and Union covering fire. There were 813 Confederate losses, only 13 Union.
The defeated Longstreet considered his options. He had been ordered to join Bragg, who had just been defeated at Missionary Ridge on November 25. He felt that move impracticable and told Bragg that he would withdraw with the Army of Tennessee to Virginia, but would keep up the siege of Knoxville as long as possible, to prevent Grant and Burnside concentrating against him. Longstreet"s stubbornness had the effect of causing Grant to send Sherman with 25,000 men to raise the siege of Knoxville. Longstreet accordingly abandoned the siege on December 4 and retired northwards to Rogersville, Tennessee, where he prepared to go into winter quarters. Sherman left part of his force at Knoxville and took the rest back to Chattanooga. General John Parke, Burnside"s chief of staff, pursued the retreating Confederates with 8,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry, though he did not press the pace. Longstreet"s route took him through Rutledge and Rogersville, followed by General John Shackelford with 4,000 cavalry and infantry. On December 9, he was near Bean"s Station when Longstreet decided to turn and attack. The Confederates got Shackelford in a pincer movement but the Union troops defended so stoutly that they repelled all Confederate attacks until reinforcements joined in. Shackelford was then forced to withdraw to Blain"s Crossroads. Longstreet followed but declined to attack their entrenchments. Both sides withdrew and left the area to go into winter quarters. Longstreet, who blamed subordinates for his failures in the campaign, asked to be relieved of command but was refused. His troops suffered in a severe winter, and he was unable to return to Virginia until the spring. His reputation and self-confidence were damaged by the campaign, while Burnside"s reputation was restored. The campaign of Knoxville, together with Grant"s victory at Chattanooga, returned eastern Tennessee to Union control for the rest of the war.
The battles of Chattanooga, Knoxville, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary Ridge had now altered the balance of advantage in Tennessee very much in the Union"s favour. With Rosecrans in strength at Chattanooga, Burnside operating in upper eastern Tennessee, and Grant free to strike in several directions from Tennessee eastward or southward, Lincoln"s long-cherished ambition, to liberate Unionist Tennessee from the Confederacy, could be safely regarded as achieved. Grant, as overall commander in the western theatre, was now at liberty to propose, if he so chose, a broad strategy for the Union"s conduct of the war in the western theatre. In the spring of 1864 he did so choose. Grant did not affect to be a high-level strategic thinker. Nothing in his manner or appearance suggested that he was anything but a commonsense, down-to-earth fighting soldier. Common sense and down-to-earthness are among the most valuable qualities, however, that a strategist can possess and he possessed them in abundance. What is valuable to those who interest themselves in his career is that in his Personal Memoirs Personal Memoirs he describes with engaging frankness how he formed his way of thinking. Grant also preferred to attack, if possible. He was not a "wait and see," but a "go and see" general, as his conduct after Chattanooga showed. He then decided to lay plans before Lincoln for the next stage of the campaign in the West. He may have done so because he had at his headquarters a "special commissioner" from Washington, Charles Dana, formerly of the he describes with engaging frankness how he formed his way of thinking. Grant also preferred to attack, if possible. He was not a "wait and see," but a "go and see" general, as his conduct after Chattanooga showed. He then decided to lay plans before Lincoln for the next stage of the campaign in the West. He may have done so because he had at his headquarters a "special commissioner" from Washington, Charles Dana, formerly of the New York Tribune New York Tribune. Dana had been sent partly because a trickle of unflattering reports about Grant continued to reach Washington about his bad habits and Lincoln, who already wanted to promote Grant, sought his own source of information. Grant used Dana as a messenger to take his ideas for the West to Washington. He proposed leaving a reduced Army of the Tennessee to watch Bragg and to take the largest part down the Mississippi to New Orleans and then via the Gulf of Mexico to Mobile, Alabama, whence he would strike at important points in Alabama and Georgia. He had proposed such a scheme before and continued to believe in it. Those in power in Washington, however, did not. Lincoln, Halleck, and Stanton feared that if Grant"s force was moved so far away, the rebels would reawaken the war in eastern Tennessee. Communication with Washington had the result, however, of involving Grant in highlevel strategic discussion. Halleck explained to Grant that the president"s anxieties in the West remained fixed on Tennessee and its Unionists, and that before any move was made elsewhere he wanted the surviving Confederate forces in Tennessee chased down and defeated; he also wanted the Confederate army in southern Georgia pushed far enough away from the Tennessee border to ensure that it could not intervene in the state; only when those things had been achieved would he consider approving wider operations in the West.
Grant"s plan for an operation against Mobile was-surprisingly, given how clearly Grant thought-not a sound one. The Union lacked the troops in the West to mount two large operations at the same time. It could not move on Mobile and yet continue to menace the Confederates in Georgia. To attempt to find the necessary troops would inevitably result in weakening the position around Chattanooga and so encourage Johnston to strike into Tennessee. Chattanooga was that rare thing in strategy, a genuinely critical point. Held by the Union, it allowed the retention of Tennessee and the menacing of Georgia. Should it pa.s.s back into Confederate possession, Tennessee would be lost and so would the future dominance of Georgia. Halleck wrote to Grant vetoing the plan, on the grounds that the president would not approve it, a perfectly legitimate thing for Halleck to say, so perfectly did he understand Lincoln"s mind.
Later in January 1864, Grant wrote again to Halleck outlining a plan for the next stage of operations in the East. He proposed abandoning the direct advance upon Richmond for an indirect approach. The navy should embark 60,000 troops of the Army of the Potomac and land them on the coast of North Carolina, whence they could march to sever the Confederate capital"s rail connection with the Lower South and so force Lee to abandon Richmond. Halleck answered Grant as he had done earlier in January: Lincoln would not approve, since the scheme would encourage Lee to move in force against any Union army in the Carolinas; moreover, it would weaken the defences of Washington. He pointed out to Grant that his scheme contained no plan to fight Lee"s army, which should be the proper object of an eastern strategy, and was the president"s favoured aim. The best way to defeat Lee, he insisted, was to fight him in the open field near Washington. He concluded his second letter to Grant, however, by hinting that he would soon have a hand in drafting strategy for the eastern theatre, a closer hint that Grant was about to be appointed to the supreme command.
There had been strong rumours circulating to that effect, of which Grant cannot have been unaware. In February Congress pa.s.sed an act reviving the rank of lieutenant general. The Confederacy appointed generals in the rank of brigadier, major general, lieutenant general, and by 1864 (full) general. In the Union army, however, major general was the highest rank granted and most Union generals held the rank in the United States volunteers, as Grant had done until his victory at Vicksburg. Then he was made a major general in the regular army. The new rank of lieutenant general was open to regular major generals, so Grant qualified for the promotion. The law allowed the lieutenant general to be appointed general in chief. In early March, Grant, still in Tennessee, received orders to go to Washington, where he arrived on March 8. He stayed first at Willard"s Hotel, where he received an invitation to attend a reception at the White House that evening. On his arrival there was a rise in the noise level. Grant knew almost no one in the capital, but since Vicksburg he was widely known there. The president recognised the signal and approached Grant with the words, "This is General Grant, is it?" After a few words, Grant was drawn away by the crowd, but later that evening Lincoln and Stanton took him into the Blue Room, where he was told that Lincoln would present him with his commission in the morning. The president also said that he would show him beforehand the draft of the short speech he would make. Lincoln may also have already known that Grant was tongue-tied and a hopelessly inept public speaker. He did, however, suggest that Grant should say something to forestall jealousy among other commanders and something to please the Army of the Potomac. It was entirely characteristic of Grant that when the time came he did neither. When nominated for the presidency, in 1868, his speech of acceptance ran to five words. On this occasion, when appointed by Lincoln in the White House room where the cabinet met, the president made a short but elaborate speech. "With this high honour devolves upon you also a corresponding responsibility. As the country herein trusts you, so, under G.o.d, it will sustain you. I scarcely need add that with what I here speak for the nation goes my own hearty personal concurrence."2 Grant had an answer written on a half sheet of paper but read it so haltingly that his words were not recorded. Grant had an answer written on a half sheet of paper but read it so haltingly that his words were not recorded.
The day after his appointment the U.S. War Department announced the termination of Halleck"s position as general in chief but his reappointment in the new office of chief of staff. Thus was inaugurated in the United States what would become the normal arrangement of a modern command system, with Lincoln as supreme commander, Grant as operational commander, and Halleck as princ.i.p.al military administrator. Over the course of the next century the high command structure of all large armies would be adjusted to conform, beginning with the Prussian, where, in 1870-71, Bismarck acted as supreme commander and Moltke the elder as chief of operations. The rationalisation of the Federal or, as Grant called them, the national armed forces was essential, for under him, on his a.s.sumption of the generalship in chief, there were seventeen different Union commanders overseeing 533,000 men. The most important was the Army of the Potomac, which still lingered in northern Virginia opposite Lee"s army but was not at that time undertaking active operations. Elsewhere the military situation was determined by the Confederate deployments, which princ.i.p.ally included that of Johnston"s Army of Tennessee at Dalton, Georgia, on the Western and Atlantic Railroad, which ran from Chattanooga to Atlanta. The other large Confederate force in the West was the cavalry corps under Nathan Bedford Forrest, located in eastern Tennessee. Forrest was a potential threat since he might raid as far as Cincinnati but as long as he was detached from either of the big Confederate armies, Lee"s and Johnston"s, he did not really multiply Confederate power.
Grant, as general in chief, could now consider what large operations he might launch. His first act in high command was to return to the West, to confer with Sherman, who, at his behest, had been appointed to succeed him. Grant had already identified Sherman as the most competent of his subordinates, a true battle-winning soldier of indefatigable temperament. He had also secured the advancement of Sheridan, another western general who had won his good opinion, to come east as commander of the Army of the Potomac"s cavalry, replacing Pleasanton, who was competent but lacked the aggressiveness by which Grant set such store.
On his visit to Sherman, Grant outlined his general philosophy for what he intended to be the closing stages of the war. It coincided with and may have been inspired by what was now Lincoln"s fixed conception of strategy, formed by trial and error in three years of frustration. Lincoln in 1861 had known nothing of war, but harsh experience had now taught him some essentials which he held with the force of unshakable conviction. He had abandoned altogether the conventional thought that the capture of the enemy"s capital would bring victory. Instead he now correctly perceived that it was only the destruction of the South"s main army that would defeat the Confederacy and he had enlarged that perception to believe that it would be achieved by attacking the enemy at several points simultaneously.
This is what the French have called a "rich solution" to the problem of the Civil War, open only to the side with greater numbers and several armies, as opposed to the South"s strategy of a "poor power" with weaker numbers and effectively only one or at most one and a half armies. Halleck, an extremely orthodox military thinker, had replied that the proper response to the rebellion was to concentrate the North"s force at decisive points: "To operate on exterior lines against an enemy occupying a central position will fail, as it has always failed, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. It is undermined by every military authority I have ever read." Lincoln had read almost no military textbooks while Grant had profited from the notoriously patchy West Point syllabus by avoiding most of them also. It was a merit of West Point that its teaching, though dusty to a degree, was practical-mathematics and engineering-which were actually useful, particularly during his efforts to alter the geography of the Mississippi Valley in 1863. A doctrine that Grant might have imbibed but did not was that of the climactic battle, which at a single strike resolved a conflict and ended it. The doctrine has been called Napoleonic, and with reason. Napoleon was the master of the great battle and his name was a.s.sociated with several which had ended conflicts and altered history. Lee aspired to fight such battles and to end the war with the Union by a single overpowering act, as Napoleon had ended the conflict with Prussia in 1806 by winning the battles of Jena-Auerstedt and had almost ended the war with Russia by fighting at Borodino in 1812. Ultimately Napoleon, however, had been the victim of his own method, Waterloo having been the outstandingly decisive battle of the Napoleonic Wars. Since 1815, moreover, there had been few, if any, decisive battles. Indeed the era of decisive battles was drawing to a close. There would be several during Prussia"s wars of unification in 1866-71, notably the victory of Koniggratz-Sadowa against Austria, and Sedan against France in 1870. At the end of the era, states were learning to deny an enemy the chance of decisive battle by enlarging the size of their armies to a point at which it became difficult, if not impossible, to dispose of them in a single pa.s.sage of fighting, while at the same time resorting to unorthodox tactics which would involve an opponent in guerrilla warfare or the tactics of protracted warfare should the main field army suffer defeat. France would cheat Prussia of a clear-cut decision in 1870-71 by resorting to a war in the provinces with irregular forces after the defeat of Sedan.
In mid-1863, the Union was approaching the point where it would have to decide by what military means the war was to be concluded: by pursuing the object of the final decisive battle or by some less direct method. Likewise, the Confederacy, which was rapidly losing the power to fight and win large-scale battles, would have to consider whether it should turn to protracted guerrilla tactics if it was to stave off defeat. The instructions Grant gave to Sherman on his visit to the western armies following his appointment as general in chief would soon confront the Confederacy with the necessity of fighting a small-scale, low-level war within its own territory, as opposed to a conventional army-to-army war on its frontier. Grant"s written instructions to Sherman were "to move against Johnston"s army, to break it up and to get into the interior of the enemy"s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources." Sherman was perfectly willing to carry out such instructions since he had already formed the conclusion that the quickest way to break the Confederacy was to make its ordinary people suffer.
To Meade, commanding the Army of the Potomac, Grant sent the order, "Lee"s army will be your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also." Grant had already decided, with Lincoln"s approval, to make his headquarters with Meade, while leaving him as much freedom of action as possible. That would require nice judgement, not always achieved. Meade would complain frequently in his letters to his wife that any achievement of the Army of the Potomac was credited by the press to Grant, any failure to himself. Still, Grant"s intentions were fair and honest, and the two men would sustain an equable working relationship throughout the rest of the campaign in the East.
Meanwhile, in the West, Sherman was beginning what would become the culminating campaign of the war.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Overland Campaign and the Fall of Richmond
JOSIAH G GORGAS MIGHT have sensed that the Confederacy was tottering after Gettysburg, but it was not racing to destruction. As Adam Smith might have phrased it, there is an awful lot of destruction in a country. America was still full of Confederate troops, who were armed and supplied with the necessities of war-making and whose morale, despite the loss of Vicksburg and the defeat of Gettysburg, remained high. Lincoln, anxious to see the Gettysburg victory completed, urged Meade to harry Lee"s army to destruction but Meade missed his opportunity. His pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia was lethargic. He should have backed Lee against the Potomac as he retreated to the Virginia line, but though the bridges at Williamsport had been destroyed, he hesitated to attack the enemy in his defended bridgehead, fearing fierce resistance, and allowed Lee sufficient time to improvise a bridge from the timbers of a dismantled warehouse, to cross and slip away during the night of July 13-14. Lee then withdrew to the Rappahannock, where he stood, watched by Meade, occasionally exchanging shots but not closing for battle, for the next five months. have sensed that the Confederacy was tottering after Gettysburg, but it was not racing to destruction. As Adam Smith might have phrased it, there is an awful lot of destruction in a country. America was still full of Confederate troops, who were armed and supplied with the necessities of war-making and whose morale, despite the loss of Vicksburg and the defeat of Gettysburg, remained high. Lincoln, anxious to see the Gettysburg victory completed, urged Meade to harry Lee"s army to destruction but Meade missed his opportunity. His pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia was lethargic. He should have backed Lee against the Potomac as he retreated to the Virginia line, but though the bridges at Williamsport had been destroyed, he hesitated to attack the enemy in his defended bridgehead, fearing fierce resistance, and allowed Lee sufficient time to improvise a bridge from the timbers of a dismantled warehouse, to cross and slip away during the night of July 13-14. Lee then withdrew to the Rappahannock, where he stood, watched by Meade, occasionally exchanging shots but not closing for battle, for the next five months.
"Soon after midnight, May 3rd, 4th [1864], the Army of the Potomac moved out of its positions north of the Rapidan, to start upon that memorable campaign destined to result in the capture of the Confederate capital and the army defending it," recorded Grant in his memoirs.1 Though now general in chief, his headquarters were with the Army of the Potomac, whose commander, General George Meade, Grant had resolved to leave as far as possible in independence. It was inevitable, however, that Meade"s freedom of action should be exercised in consultation with his superior and so proved to be the case. The course of the coming campaign was to be determined by Grant, as were the operations of the subordinate armies, Butler"s on the James River, Sigel"s in the Shenandoah Valley, and Banks"s on the Gulf. Sherman, commanding the Union"s other great army, was under less detailed supervision but the broad thrust of its drive was directed so as to further the main purpose of the 1864 campaign. Sherman, marching through Georgia and the Carolinas, would be heading to make contact with Grant, who would be fighting his way southward into central Virginia. Though now general in chief, his headquarters were with the Army of the Potomac, whose commander, General George Meade, Grant had resolved to leave as far as possible in independence. It was inevitable, however, that Meade"s freedom of action should be exercised in consultation with his superior and so proved to be the case. The course of the coming campaign was to be determined by Grant, as were the operations of the subordinate armies, Butler"s on the James River, Sigel"s in the Shenandoah Valley, and Banks"s on the Gulf. Sherman, commanding the Union"s other great army, was under less detailed supervision but the broad thrust of its drive was directed so as to further the main purpose of the 1864 campaign. Sherman, marching through Georgia and the Carolinas, would be heading to make contact with Grant, who would be fighting his way southward into central Virginia.
Yet, despite the absence of immediately bad consequences, in the wake of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the rebel war clerk"s judgement was correct. In July 1863 the war took a fatal turn for the South. In retrospect it is clearly visible what had happened. Two areas of vital importance to the South"s survival had been lost or their defence compromised. The first of these areas was northern Virginia, which Lee"s decision to invade Pennsylvania and Maryland had turned into a critical forward defence zone, or glacis, for the Confederacy. Its geography made it very difficult to use as an offensive campaigning ground by the Union; its narrowness and its plethora of short rivers flowing into Chesapeake Bay provided a defender with a succession of excellent lines of defence. McClellan, though he had not expressly voiced the perception, had correctly seen at the outset that to use the Army of the Potomac to b.u.t.t its way southwards from one river line to the next would waste its strength and do the Confederates a favour. His scheme to bypa.s.s the region altogether by an amphibious but flanking movement to the Virginia Peninsula was strategically brilliant, and one for which he has never received correct credit. The withdrawal from Harrison"s Landing after the Seven Days was consonantly a serious strategic mistake. Had the landing places been kept open, Richmond would have been kept under permanent threat, with highly beneficial consequences. Withdrawal provided Lee with the opportunity to stage his two invasions of the North and to recapture the ground which would have to be fought over at such cost and such delay during 1864.
Yet, even as he embarked on his advance into Virginia in May 1864, Grant maintained the healthiest respect for Lee"s army. Though its commander had lost the most gifted of his subordinates, Grant doubted whether the Army of Northern Virginia could be pinned against an obstacle or denied a line of retreat. Lee was too skilful and his army too attuned to his methods to be trapped in the open field. Grant had decided that the only certain way of overcoming the enemy was by the relentless reduction of his fighting numbers. He had always been completely unsentimental about the nature of war, which he genuinely disliked. He had hated the Mexican War, which he thought an act of unjustified aggression. He had disliked everything about the Civil War so far, but had learnt to get on with it at whatever cost to his feelings. What sustained him was he disliked rebellion even more than than bloodletting. If blood was the price of restoring the Union, then he would shed it. It was in that spirit that he set out south from the Rapidan in May 1864.
His first point of encounter with Lee ensured that the cost of battle would be high. The ground on which the two armies met was the dense woodland of the Wilderness, abandoned farmland gone back to secondary forest, where Lee and Hooker had clashed at the battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. Lee found Grant first and attacked. In the dense cover manoeuvre was difficult, though Longstreet delivered one dashing flank attack, and the fighting resolved itself into volleying whenever visibility offered a sight of the enemy. The conditions, which had led to Stonewall Jackson being shot by his own troops at Chancellorsville, now produced another similarly costly mistake. Longstreet was shot by Confederates, also in the arm, but though the wound was serious it did not prove fatal. The Wilderness was fatal to many others. Grant had hoped to cross it in a single day"s march and press on to meet Lee in open country. Meade, however, was enc.u.mbered with the large transport train of the Army of the Potomac and, reluctant to be separated from it, made himself a target of Confederate attack.
Gettysburg had spelled the end of the use of northern Virginia by the Confederates as a strategic buffer zone. The loss of Vicksburg was worse. It inaugurated the hollowing out of the South, of the Union"s capture of bases and lines of communication in the South"s interior from which campaigns could be mounted to enlarge the void in the South"s heartland and set about its destruction from within. It also spelled the end to the South"s hope of mounting a strategic threat to the North equivalent to that staged by Grant when he embarked on his campaign to seize the line of the Mississippi and to bisect the Confederacy at mid-point. Its chance of so doing, given its relative weakness in numbers and resources, never equalled that of the North"s bisecting the Confederacy.
Grant had been anxious to avoid fighting in the Wilderness, where the Union army had suffered so grievously the previous May. Lee, believing that his smaller army would be at less of a disadvantage in the tangled undergrowth of the forest, was prepared to risk a battle there. He recognised that the enemy was perilously close to Richmond and might, by successful manoeuvre, get past the Wilderness and into the open country which led across the little rivers of the Chesapeake sh.o.r.e to the capital"s outskirts. In a day of heavy and confused fighting on May 5, the Union forces drove the outnumbered Confederates south and by evening had secured ground from which next day they might fall on Lee"s right.
Lee planned an attack at the same time in the same sector. The Army of the Potomac, however, attacked first, driving the Confederate vanguard through the woods until both sides confronted each other across a small clearing where Lee had his headquarters. The circ.u.mstances of the battlefield were now chaotic, with the bush ablaze and threatening the many wounded with death. Union success had been partly due to the absence from the Confederate ma.s.s of Longstreet"s corps, which was returning from Tennessee. In the nick of time its advance guard appeared; Lee himself tried to lead it into action. The Texans who formed the leading unit drove Lee back with shouts of dismay and as more of their comrades appeared the tide was turned. In two hours of fighting, Lee"s men had driven Meade"s units almost back to their starting point. The Confederates were a.s.sisted by knowledge of the ground. One of Lee"s brigadiers knew of the existence of an unfinished railroad track, down which Longstreet directed four of his brigades in an attack on the Union flank. They achieved a successful surprise. In the fracas that followed Confederate units collided with one another unexpectedly, and just as had happened at Chancellorsville in 1863, a Confederate rifleman mistakenly hit one of his own comrades. Longstreet was struck in the throat and shoulder by a bullet which, though it did not kill him, severely incapacitated him and kept him out of action for several months.
Longstreet"s wounding drew the fangs of the Southerners" attack, until Lee reorganised his entangled lines. In late afternoon one of his brigadiers discovered that Grant"s right flank was exposed and, on his own initiative, won permission to launch an attack, during which two Union generals were captured. Grant, however, refused to be moved by the general turmoil. Instead he laid plans for a Union a.s.sault the following day.
In all previous battles in northern Virginia, the Army of the Potomac was accustomed to being led to the northern bank of one of the nearby rivers to establish a defensive position within which to rest and refit after a heavy engagement. In the aftermath of the Wilderness battle, which had cost 17,500 casualties overall (Confederate losses were 7,750), the soldiers were surprised to be overtaken by Grant and his staff, riding southward in order, as quickly became apparent, to resume the offensive. His objective, ten miles south of the Wilderness, was Spotsylvania Court House. If it could be seized, he would be closer to the Confederate capital than the Army of Northern Virginia would be and occupying a position Lee would either have to attack or retreat from. During May 7 the armies skirmished without serious fighting, while Grant sent his supply columns and heavy artillery to the rear; Meade had recently attempted to reduce the logistic train, but on the pa.s.sage through the Wilderness it still consisted of 4,000 wagons. This overprovision a.s.sured that its soldiers were so well-fed that they could easily march on short rations for a few days without hardship. During the night of May 7, the fighting divisions were put on the road also. To their soldiers" surprise they found they were advancing, not retreating. Some began to sing. Despite the certainty of battle to come, they were exhilarated by the change of mood Grant"s a.s.sumption of command had brought.
The infantry advance was complemented by a cavalry advance. Sheridan"s 10,000 hors.e.m.e.n set off southward to hara.s.s Lee"s line of communications. They were opposed by their old enemies, J. E. B. Stuart"s cavalry corps, which challenged them to fight. Eventually they did, on May 11 at Yellow Tavern, after Sheridan had done a good deal of destruction to the local railroads and supply depots. The Union cavalry was now much better armed than their opponents, every man having a repeating carbine. The encounter at Yellow Tavern resulted in an easy success for Sheridan"s men, who dispersed Stuart"s hors.e.m.e.n in separate directions. During the firefight, Stuart suffered a mortal wound; his death was almost as grave a blow to Lee as that of Jackson a year before.
Meanwhile on May 9, the two marching armies had met at Spotsylvania. Grant"s plan was to outflank Lee to the east and so get on the road to Richmond, now only forty-five miles distant, though still defended by several of the short rivers which had bedevilled campaigning in northern Virginia since the first days of the war. It was not water which was to form the critical obstacles at Spotsylvania, however, but earth. The Army of Northern Virginia had, as soon as it knew it would have to fight, fortified its front with entrenchments and timber obstacles. In the previous twelve months digging had become an automatic preparation for combat in both armies, though perhaps more so on the Southern side, which could afford the heavy casualties of close-range rifle volleying less than the Union. Unusually, the tactics of entrenchment do not seem to have been imposed from above but to have been adopted as a measure of self-protection by the rank and file. Preexisting obstacles had so obviously played a part in Confederate success at Fredericksburg: the stone-walled road at the foot of Marye"s Heights had held the Northerners at a distance while they were shot down in hundreds. Deliberate digging on the battlefield had begun earlier, however. Both sides had dug extensively during the Peninsula Campaign. Some of the digging was to construct formal siege defences around Richmond. Some, however, was "hasty" entrenchment, dug to defend a position before a coming firefight. At Beaver Dam Creek (Mechanicsville), Union troops had constructed timber barricades, called abatis, to hold the Confederates at a distance, and extensive barricades were thrown up next day along Boatswain"s Creek. It was an enormous advantage to whichever side was defending that timber was so abundant in nineteenth-century America. Even when battle was not joined in woodland, as at Shiloh, Chancellorsville, and the Wilderness, timber was still available. Field fences of the time were usually of the split rail type, which had only to be pulled to pieces to yield the material for abatis, barricades, and chevaux-de-frise. American farmers were profligate in their use of timber, which anyhow had to be cleared to make fields. Their lumbering efforts provided huge quant.i.ties of already worked wood which was immediately suitable for military engineering.
Though the impetus to fortify implanted itself eventually among ordinary soldiers, for the best of reasons, that of sparing their lives, it was also part of the military mentality of the regular officer corps. West Point was an engineering school and the professor of engineering, Denis Hart Mahan, father of the most important American strategist of the nineteenth century, Alfred T. Mahan, was an advocate of engineering on the battlefield. A student of contemporary European warfare, he drew from his studies the doctrine that the rising losses in combat caused by long-range fire could only be stemmed if soldiers dug. Some of his pupils took note. By 1864 they were digging, and strengthening their diggings with cut timber, without any encouragement from higher up. At Spotsylvania, Lee"s soldiers built the strongest entrenchment yet to appear on any battlefield of the war. Grant tried to outflank their defences on May 9 but failed. On May 10 he sent a stronger force to make yet another of his costly frontal a.s.saults. The attack repelled on the enemy"s left was more successful in the centre, where the young General Emory Upton ordered the a.s.saulting force to try novel tactics. He formed his twelve regiments into four lines, with instructions not to fire their rifles until they were on top of the enemy trenches, which were to be carried by the bayonet. The succeeding regiments were to pa.s.s through the first to the next line of enemy trenches and so on, until a breach had been made and widened into the heart of the enemy position. Upton, though he could not know it, was antic.i.p.ating a solution to the problem of carrying entrenched positions that would present itself on the Western Front sixty years later during the First World War. Upton"s men took a thousand prisoners and opened a wide gap in Lee"s front. Then the attack failed, for a reason often to be repeated in the First World War. The supporting division which was intended to exploit the success was slow coming forward and, when it did get into action, ran into ma.s.sed artillery fire and retreated with heavy losses.
On May 11 Grant decided to make an all-out attack on the Confederate position, choosing as his centre of effort a salient known to the defenders as the Mule Shoe for its shape; its apex would become known as the b.l.o.o.d.y Angle. During May 12-13, a ghastly eighteen-hour, close-quarters battle ensued, neither side giving ground. Huge quant.i.ties of ammunition were expended at close range, the trenches filling up with the bodies of those killed and wounded and the soil turning red with blood. Not until darkness fell did the Confederates withdraw. In the week which ended on May 12, Grant"s army had lost 32,000 killed, wounded, and missing, more than in any previous single week of fighting throughout the war. The Confederates, despite defending and from behind entrenchments, had lost over 18,000. Grant was accused by some of adopting the strategy of attrition-not yet a word in use-but that was not his intention. He was still striving to find a direct route to Richmond or open country in which to force Lee to fight in conditions where superior Union numbers would carry the day. Because Lee had skilfully met all his manoeuvres with counter-manoeuvres, he had been forced instead into pitched battles on Confederate terms. The frightful casualties of the second week of May 1864 were the inevitable consequence. It was not only the rank and file that paid the price. Lee lost twenty general officers in the twenty days that culminated at the b.l.o.o.d.y Angle. James McPherson observes that the episode visibly marked those who survived to stay in the ranks. They looked thin and pale; many exhibited the symptoms of what would be called sh.e.l.l shock in the First World War and combat fatigue in the Second.
Spotsylvania did not end the terrible ordeal of the Overland Campaign. More anxious than ever to reach Richmond, Grant sent his army onward from Spotsylvania to the North Anna River, a tributary of the Pamunkey, which flows round Richmond"s northern approaches. Its meanders provided firm support for Lee"s flanks; when Grant, following up Lee"s retreat from Spotsylvania, appeared on May 23, Lee easily repelled his attacks. Grant"s purpose in disengaging at Spotsylvania and marching southward was to bring Lee to battle in the open or, if battle was refused, to find his way round Lee"s right flank and press forward towards Richmond down the narrow corridor between the Chesapeake and the James River. To start this episode in the Overland Campaign going, he sent Hanc.o.c.k"s Second Corps, the strongest and best in the Army of the Potomac, forward along the highway known as the Telegraph Road. His calculation was that, once Lee became aware that a single Union corps was acting in detachment from the main body, he would bring his troops out of their earthworks, which, as was now standard, the Confederates had begun to dig along the far bank of the North Anna, and risk an encounter in the open. As soon as Lee got word of Grant"s movement, he did indeed order the Army of Northern Virginia to leave Spotsylvania and start for the North Anna. He remained confident of his own and his army"s ability to get the better of the enemy. He was too sanguine. His army"s strength was dwindling and now amounted, after the awful losses at Spotsylvania, to only 40,000, though he was expecting reinforcements of 13,700 from Richmond. He had lost his trusted cavalry commander, J. E. B. Stuart, while his best subordinate, James Longstreet, was still recovering from wounds suffered at the Wilderness; worse, Lee himself was now showing signs of strain and exhaustion, unsurprisingly in view of the burden laid on him by the frequency of battle in this campaign, and anxieties about supply and manpower losses.
By the afternoon of May 22, 1864, the whole of the Army of Northern Virginia had taken station on the southern bank of the North Anna. That was not what Grant had hoped. He now had to drive the Confederates out of their position if he was to resume the advance on Richmond. During May 23 the Union troops, though at considerable cost, succeeded in crossing the North Anna at several points, but left much of the southern bank in Confederate hands. Unfortunately for Grant, Lee"s chief engineer, General Martin Luther Smith, now persuaded him that a deteriorating situation could be saved if entrenchments were hastily dug along the river and across the Telegraph Road. The Army of Northern Virginia was now expert at rapid entrenchment and dug itself in during the night of May 23 so that on the morning of May 24 Grant was confronted by a new and difficult situation. Both Lee"s flanks were refused, that is, turned away from the main line of the front on the river. Lee and Smith planned to inflict defeats on the Federals as they manoeuvred to attack the separate focus of the Confederate position and in so doing lost cohesion. The final stages of the battle of May 24 did indeed go badly for the Union. Units were thrown back and heavy losses suffered. The front became disorganised. On the afternoon of May 24, an opportunity was offered for the Confederates to deliver a concentrated counter-strike and halt the Union advance in its tracks. Regrettably for his army, Lee now succ.u.mbed to the strains of the campaign and retired to his sickbed. From it he railed at his subordinates, "We must strike them a blow ... We must strike them a blow." He, however, was quite incapable of mustering the powers of command which would have made that possible, while none of his subordinates had the ability to do so. The battle began to flicker out. The rest of May 24 and the whole of May 25 was spent by the Confederates in mounting local counter-attacks at the positions taken by their much stronger enemy, while Grant organized probing movements to get around the Confederate earthworks to the east and resume the advance down the Telegraph Road. On May 27 Lee, still in a weakened physical condition, recognized that he had lost the chance of inflicting serious damage on Grant"s army, and that his own could no longer hold the North Anna position. He ordered it to march out of its entrenchments and seek a new position, farther south, and ominously nearer Richmond, where he could stand across Grant"s advance. The route chosen ran towards the crossroads of Cold Harbor.
The battle of the North Anna, though not costly by comparison with most of those in the Overland Campaign (2,100 Union casualties, 1,250 Confederate) was nevertheless crucially damaging to the South. By his failure to hold the river and inflict a serious reverse on the enemy, Lee had surrendered his last chance of keeping the Union at a distance from the defences of Richmond. At Cold Harbor, he would be fighting again on the terrain of the Seven Days" Battles of 1862.
Grant spent the rest of May trying to outflank Lee from the Tidewater side. Lee, though forced to surrender territory, fell back from one secure position on the Pamunkey to another on the Totopotomoy.
These two little waterways would support Lee"s flanks in the next, almost last stage of the Overland Campaign. Grant had fixed on a road junction known as Cold Harbor as the site of his next action. It lies close to Mechanicsville on the northeastern outskirts of Richmond, scene of one of the earliest of the Seven Days" Battles of 1862. Lee was ahead of him and, despite heavy skirmishing by Sheridan"s cavalry, managed to entrench a position on a front of seven miles between the Pamunkey and the Totopotomoy. He had made good his losses but so had Grant, partly by remustering some heavy artillery regiments as infantry. Lee appealed to Richmond for reinforcements, but despite the failure of Sigel"s campaign in the Shenandoah Valley and Butler"s confinement in the Bermuda Hundred, none could be spared. Lee had to defend the Cold Harbor position with the troops on hand, now numbering, after receiving all available reinforcements, about 60,000. Grant had over 100,000 troops but his attack was disjointed. He shrank from ordering a frontal attack on what he recognised to be a very strong enemy position but he believed-wrongly-that the Army of Northern Virginia was nearly at the end of its tether and he hoped for a clear-cut victory to clinch the outcome of the impending presidential election. Grant began the attack in darkness on June 1, it was then broken off for the day. At dawn of June 3, 1864, three corps of the Army of the Potomac attacked. The result was calamity, worse than Fredericksburg. What thwarted Grant"s hopes of victory were the preparations Lee"s men had made to render their positions impregnable. The fighting in the first days of June had been so intense that the events of the battlefield had concealed from both Grant and Meade how skilfully the Army of Northern Virginia had prepared the ground it held. Heavy skirmishing at Haw"s Shop, along the Totopotomoy, on the Matadequin, at Bethesda Church, and at Cold Harbor itself, skirmishes that might realistically have been denoted proper battles in their own right, had not only checked Grant"s advance upon Richmond but had solidified the grip of the Confederates on highly defensible ground, a muddle of marshland, thickets, and ravines which had allowed them to dig in along a concave front, a curve including two subordinate concavities, all covered by thousands of rifles and dozens of artillery pieces; the front was about seven miles long, resting at its ends on the Totopotomoy and the Chickahominy, and so not susceptible to being turned. It could only be attacked frontally, though where to attack baffled the Union commanders seeking to glimpse what lay behind the screen of vegetation their troops faced. At the beginning of the Cold Harbor engagement a week before June 1, a Union soldier in the 110th Ohio Regiment had referred to the scene of action as "this wilderness looking place;" the poor worked-out farmland of Richmond"s environs did readily recall that of the Wilderness, farther north, and though the line running across it had been dug largely with bayonets, mess plates, and drinking cups-spades were not a general issue in either army and the entrenching tool had not yet been invented-the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia had made themselves experts at sinking beneath the surface whenever serious battle threatened. Although Grant did not know what lay to the front, his orders for June 3 were that the Eighteenth, Sixth, and Second Corps were to advance at half past four in the morning and attack along the entire front.
The plan was for the whole of the seven-mile front to be attacked simultaneously, but because of its concave form the Union line was unable to exert an equal pressure at all points. The attack diverged. What made it even less concentrated was that the attackers could not see the enemy clearly, they being concealed by breastworks or by standing vegetation. Even the defenders lacked a clear view; Lee worked by hearing rather than sight. As the attack swelled in force, he remarked to a subordinate when the rattle of musketry swelled that that was what killed rather than the artillery, the roar of which was joining in. Confederate fire began to beat down the Union efforts to get onto the enemy position, efforts renewed in some places as many as fourteen times. The heavier and more frequently repeated a.s.saults were made at the extreme right of the Confederates" line, delivered by Hanc.o.c.k"s Second Corps against Marylanders and Alabamans dug in along Boatswain Creek. Defensive fire was so heavy that by six o"clock the ground in front of the Confederate earthworks was covered with the bodies of dead and wounded and the survivors were scratching the earth with spoons and fingernails to raise the slightest shelter. In places the Union troops got onto the enemy parapet and drove the Confederates out; but Lee, fearing weakness at this point, had positioned his only reserve to the rear, and the lost ground was recaptured, at even heavier loss to the Union. It was here that General Evander Law framed his later celebrated remark that the battle was "not war but murder." Union soldiers not killed or disabled took shelter behind the bodies of dead comrades and tried to wriggle their way backwards, but signs of movement attracted sharpshooter fire. Meade issued orders at quarter-hourly intervals for the attacks to be pressed but they could not be obeyed, if they even reached the men pressed to the ground by the weight of Confederate fire, and he had no fresh troops to reinforce the front. By ten o"clock it had become clear that the attack was a disastrous failure, clear to the tortured troops at the front, and dawningly so to Meade and other superiors in the rear. Meade continued to order an advance but it had no effect, and in some cases met flat refusals to obey. An estimated 3,000 to 7,000 Union soldiers had been killed and wounded, including a disproportionate number of officers; most of the losses had been suffered in the first hour of the Union a.s.sault. Four days after the battle opened, days spent in skirmishing and sniping, Lee and Grant at last agreed on terms for a truce to bring in the wounded and bury the dead. The Confederates, though so much better protected, had suffered 1,500 fatalities. In the interval a large number of the untended wounded had died of shock, loss of blood, or thirst.
Grant decided to terminate the offensive. He wrote later in his memoirs that he "always regretted the last a.s.sault on Cold Harbor." In truth, the whole battle was regrettable, since it hurt the Union