THE WAR'S SIDESHOWS
On the ninth of March, 1864, U. S. Grant was made lieutenant general and given command of all Union armies, and the hitherto insoluble military problem of the Federal government was at last on its way to solution. President Lincoln had learned that it took a soldier to do a soldier's job, and he had at last found the soldier who was capable of it: a direct, straightforward man who would leave high policy to the civilian government and devote himself with unflagging energy to the task of putting Confederate armies out of action. There would be no more sideshows: from now on the whole weight of Northern power would be applied remorselessly with concentrated force.
There had been a number of sideshows during the last year, and the net result of all of them had been to detract from the general effectiveness of the Union war effort. An army and navy expedition had tried throughout the preceding summer to hammer its way into Charleston, South Carolina. It had reduced Fort Sumter to a shapeless heap of rubble, but it had cost the North a number of ships and soldiers and had accomplished nothing except to prove that Charleston could not be take by direct assault. In Louisiana, General Banks was trying to move into Texas, partly for the sake of the cotton that could be picked up along the way and partly because the government believed that Napoleon III would give up his Mexican adventure if a Northern army occupied Texas and went to the Rio Grande. The belief may have been justified, but Banks never came close, and his campaign was coming to grief this spring. Early in April he was beaten at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill, Louisiana, far up the Red River, and he retreated with such panicky haste that Admiral Porter's accompanying fleet of gunboats narrowly escaped complete destruction. (The water level in the Red River was falling, and for a time it seemed that the gunboats could never get out; they were saved at last when a backwoods colonel in the Union army took a regiment of lumbermen and built dams that temporarily made the water deep enough for escape.) In Florida a Union expedition in which white and Negro troops were brigaded together attempted a conquest that would have had no important results even if it had succeeded; it had failed dismally, meeting defeat at Olustee late in February. Union cavalry under William Sooy Smith had tried to sweep across Mississippi during the winter and had been ignominiously routed by Bedford Forrest.
All of these ventures had dissipated energy and manpower that might have been used elsewhere. (Banks' Texas expedition had been the chief reason why Grant had not been allowed to exploit the great opportunity opened by the capture of Vicksburg.) They had won nothing, and they would not have won the war even if all of them had succeeded. Now, it was hoped, there would be no more of them. Grant had intense singleness of purpose, and the government was giving him a free hand. He would either win the war or be the man on the spot when the Union confessed that victory was unattainable.
CHANGING OBJECTIVES
Grant considered the military problem to be basically quite simple. The principal Confederate armies had to be destroyed. The capture of cities and "strategic points" and the occupation of Southern territory meant very little; as long as the main Confederate armies were in the field the Confederacy lived, and as soon as they vanished the Confederacy ceased to be. His objectives, therefore, would be the opposing armies, and his goal would be to put them out of action as quickly as possible.
There were two armies that concerned him: the incomparable Army of Northern Virginia, led by Robert E. Lee, and the Army of Tennessee, commanded now by Joseph E. Johnston. Bragg's inability to win had at last become manifest even to Jefferson Davis, who had an inexplicable confidence in the man. Bragg had made a hash of his Kentucky invasion in the late summer of 1862, he had let victory slip through his grasp at Murfreesboro, and he had utterly failed to make proper use of his great victory at Chickamauga. After Chattanooga, Davis removed him - bringing him to Richmond and installing him as chief military adviser to the President - and Johnston was put in his place.
Davis had scant confidence in Johnston and had grown to dislike the man personally, and Johnston felt precisely the same way about Davis. But the much-abused Army of Tennessee, which had fought as well as any army could fight but which had never had adequate leadership, revered and trusted Johnston profoundly, and his appointment had been inevitable. His army had recovered its morale, and it was strongly entrenched on the low mountain ridges northwest of Dalton, Georgia, a few miles from the bloodstained field of Chickamauga. It contained about 60,000 men, and Lee's army, which lay just below the Rapidan River in central Virginia, was about the same size.
These armies were all that mattered. The Confederacy had sizable forces west of the Mississippi, under the overall command of Edmund Kirby Smith, but the trans-Mississippi region was effectively cut off now that the Federals controlled the great river, and what happened there was of minor importance. The Southern nation would live or die depending on the fate of Lee's and Johnston's armies. Grant saw it so, and his entire plan for 1864 centered on the attempt to destroy those two armies.
In the West everything would be up to Sherman. Grant had put him in control of the whole Western theater of the war, with the exception of the Banks expedition, which was flickering out in expensive futility. Sherman was what would now be called an army group commander. In and around Chattanooga he had his own Army of the Tennessee, under Major General James B. McPherson; the redoubtable Army of the Cumberland, under Thomas; and a small force called the Army of the Ohio - hardly more than an army corps in actual size - commanded by a capable regular with pink cheeks and a flowing beard, Major General John M. Schofield. All in all, Sherman had upwards of 100,000 combat men with him. When he moved, he would go down the Western and Atlantic Railroad toward Atlanta; but Atlanta, important as it was to the Confederacy, was not his real objective. His objective was the Confederate army in his front. As he himself described the mission after the war, "I was to go for Joe Johnston."
Grant, meanwhile, would go for Lee.
Although he was general in chief, Grant would not operate from headquarters in Washington. The demoted Halleck was retained as chief of staff, and he would stay in Washington to handle the paper work; but Grant's operating headquarters would be in the field, moving with the Army of the Potomac. General Meade was kept in command of that army. With a fine spirit of abnegation, Meade had offered to resign, suggesting that Grant might want some Westerner in whom he had full confidence to command the army; but Grant told him to stay where he was, and he endorsed an army-reorganization plan which Meade was just then putting into effect. Grant made no change in the army's interior chain of command, except that he brought a tough infantry officer, Phil Sheridan, from the Army of the Cumberland and put him in charge of the Army of the Potomac's cavalry corps. But if Grant considered Meade a capable officer who deserved to retain his command, he himself would nevertheless move with Meade's army, and he would exercise so much control over it that before long people would be speaking of it as Grant's army.
Grant's reasons were simple enough. The Army of the Potomac had much the sort of record the Confederate Army of Tennessee had - magnificent combat performance, brought to nothing by repeated failures in leadership. It had been unlucky, and its officer corps was badly clique-ridden, obsessed by the memory of the departed McClellan, so deeply impressed by Lee's superior abilities that its talk at times almost had a defeatist quality. The War Department had been second-guessing this army's commanders so long that it probably would go on doing it unless the general in chief himself were present. All in all, the Army of the Potomac needed a powerful hand on the controls. Grant would supply that hand, although his presence with the army would create an extremely difficult command situation.
This army was in camp in the general vicinity of Culpeper Court House, on the northern side of the upper Rapidan. (A measure of its lack of success thus far is the fact that after three years of warfare it was camped only a few miles farther south than it had been camped when the war began.) Facing it, beyond the river, was the Army of Northern Virginia. Longstreet and his corps were returning from an unhappy winter in eastern Tennessee. When the spring campaign opened, Lee would have rather more than 60,000 fighting men. The Unionists, who had called up Burnside and his old IX Corps to work with the Army of the Potomac, would be moving with nearly twice that number.
The mission of the Army of the Potomac was as simple as Sherman's: it was to head for the Confederate army and fight until something broke. It would move toward Richmond, just as Sherman was moving toward Atlanta, but its real assignment would be less to capture the Confederate capital than to destroy the army that was bound to defend that capital.
Grant was missing no bets. The irrepressible Ben Butler commanded a force of some 33,000 men around Fort Monroe, dominated the Army of the James, and when the Army of the Potomac advanced, Butler was to move up the south bank of the James River toward Richmond. At the very least his advance would occupy the attention of Confederate troops who would otherwise reinforce Lee; and if everything went well (which, considering Butler's defects as a strategist, was not really very likely), Lee would be compelled to retreat. On top of this there was a Union army in the Shenandoah, commanded by the German-born Franz Sigel, and this army was to move down to the town of Staunton, whence it might go east throughout the Blue Ridge in the direction of Richmond. All in all, three Federal armies would be converging on the Confederate capital, each one with a powerful numerical advantage over any force that could be brought against it.
Everybody would move together. Sherman would march when Grant and Meade marched, and Butler and Sigel would advance at the same time. For the first time in the war the Union would put on a really coordinated campaign under central control, with all of its armies acting as a team.
On May 4, 1864, the machine began to roll.
THE BATTLE OF WILDERNESS
Public attention on both sides was always centered on the fighting in Virginia. The opposing capitals were no more than a hundred miles apart, and they were the supremely sensitive nerve centers. What happened in Virginia took the eye first, and this spring it almost seemed as if all of the fury and desperation of the war were concentrated there.
The Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan and started to march down through a junglelike stretch of second-growth timber and isolated farms known as the Wilderness, with the hope that it could bring Lee to battle in the open country farther south. But one of Lee's distinguishing characteristics was a deep unwillingness to fight where his opponent wanted to fight. He liked to choose his own field, and he did so now. Undismayed by the great disparity in numbers, he marched straight into the Wilderness and jumped the Federal columns before they could get across. Grant immediately concluded that if Lee wanted to fight here, he might as well get what he wanted, and on May 5 an enormous two-day battle got under way.
The Wilderness was a bad place for a fight. The roads were few, narrow, and bad, and the farm clearings were scarce; most of the country was densely wooded, with underbrush so thick that nobody could see fifty yards in any direction, cut up by ravines and little watercourses, with brambles and creepers that made movement almost impossible. The Federal advantage in numbers meant little here, and its advantage in artillery meant nothing at all, since few guns could be used. Because a much higher percentage of its men came from the country and were used to the woods, the Confederate army was probably less handicapped by all of this than the Army of the Potomac.
The Battle of Wilderness was blind and vicious. The woods caught fire, and many wounded men were burned to death, and the smoke of this fire together with the battle smoke made a choking fog that intensified the almost impenetrable gloom of the woods. At the end of two days the Federals had lost more than 17,000 men and had gained not one foot. Both flanks had been broken in, and outright disaster had been staved off by a narrow margin. By any indicator one could use, the Army of the Potomac had been beaten just as badly as Hooker had been beaten at Chancellorsville a year earlier. On May 7 the rival armies glowered at each other in the smoldering forest, and the Federal soldiers assumed that the old game would be repeated: they would retreat north of the Rapidan, reorganize and refit and get reinforcements, and then they would make a new campaign somewhere else.
That night, at dusk, the Army of the Potomac was pulled back from its firing lines and put in motion. But when it moved, it moved south, not north. Grant was not Hooker. Beaten here, he would sideslip to the left and fight again; his immediate objective was a crossroads at Spotsylvania Court House, eleven miles southwest of Fredericksburg. It was on Lee's road to Richmond, and if Grant got there first, Lee would have to do the attacking. So the army moved all night, and as the exhausted soldiers realized that they were not retreating but were actually advancing they set up a cheer.
Grant had made one of the crucial decision of the war, and in retrospect the Battle of the Wilderness became almost a Federal victory. This army was not going to retreat, it was not even going to pause to lick its wounds; it was simply going to force the fighting, and in the end Lee's outnumbered army was going to be compelled to play the sort of game which it could not win.
THE BATTLES OF SPOTSYLVANIA AND COLD HARBOR
It was not going to be automatic, however. Lee saw what Grant was up to and made a night march of his own. His men got to Spotsylvania Court House just ahead of the Federals, and the first hot skirmish for the crossroads swelled into a rolling battle that went on for twelve days, from May 8 to May 19. No bitterer fighting than the fighting that took place here was ever seen on the American continent. The Federals broke the Southern line once, on May 12, at a spot known ever after as "Bloody Angle," and there was a solid day of hand-to-hand combat while the Federals tried unsuccessfully to enlarge the break and split Lee's army into halves. There was fighting every day, and Grant kept shifting his troops to the left in an attempt to crumple Lee's flank, so that Federal soldiers who were facing east when the battle began were facing due west when it closed. Phil Sheridan took the cavalry off on a driving raid toward Richmond, and Jeb Stuart galloped to meet him. The Unionists were driven off in a hard fight at Yellow Tavern, in the Richmond suburbs, but Stuart himself was killed.
Elsewhere in Virginia things went badly for the Federals. Sigel moved up the Shenandoah Valley, was met by a scratch Confederate force at New Market, and was routed in a battle in which the corps of cadets from Virginia Military Institute greatly distinguished itself. Ben Butler made his advance up the James River most ineptly and was beaten at Bermuda Hundred. He made camp on the Bermuda Hundred peninsula, the Confederates drew a fortified line across the base of the peninsula, and in Grant's expressive phrase Butler was as much out of action as if he had been put in a tightly corked bottle. He would cause Lee no worries for some time, and from the army which had beaten him, Lee got reinforcements that practically made up for his heavy battle losses thus far.
There were brief lulls in the campaign but no real pauses. From Spotsylvania the Army of the Potomac again moved by its left, skirmishing every day, looking for an opening and not quite finding one. It fought minor battles along the North Anna and Totopotomoy Creek, and it got at last to a crossroads known as Cold Harbor, near the Chickahominy River and mortally close to Richmond; and here, because there was scant room for maneuver, Grant on June 3 put on a tremendous frontal assault in the hope of breaking the Confederate line once and for all. The assault failed, with fearful losses, and the Union and Confederate armies remained in contact, each one protected by impregnable trenches, for ten days more. The Grant made his final move - a skillful sideslip to the left, once more, and this time he went clear across the James River and advanced on the town of Petersburg. Most of the railroads that tied Richmond to the South came through Petersburg, and if the Federals could occupy the place before Lee got there, Richmond would have to be abandoned. But General William F. Smith, leading the Union advance, fumbled the attack, and when the rest of the army came up, Lee had had time to man the city's defenses. The Union attacks failed, and Grant settled down to a siege.
THE COSTLY NEW CAMPAIGN
The campaign thus far had been made at a stunning cost. In the first month the Union army had lost 60,000 men. The armies were never entirely out of contact after the first shots were fired in the Wilderness; they remained in close touch, as a matter of fact, until the spring of 1865, and once they got to Petersburg they waged trench warfare strongly resembling that of World War I. Across the North people grew disheartened. Lee's army had not been broken. Richmond had not been taken, and no American had ever seen anything like the endless casualty lists that were coming out. At close range the achievement of the Army of the Potomac was hard to see. Yet it had forced Lee to fight continuously on the defensive, giving him no chance for one of those dazzling strokes by which he had disrupted every previous Federal offensive, never letting him regain the initiative. He tried it once, sending Jubal Early and 14,000 men up on a dash through the Shenandoah Valley into Maryland. Early brushed aside a small Federal force that tried to stop him on the Monocacy River and got clear to the Washington suburb of Silver Spring, less than a dozen miles from the Capitol building; but at the last minute Grant sent an army corps north from the Army of the Potomac, and after a skirmish at Silver Spring (witnessed by a worried Abraham Lincoln, in person) Early had to go back to Virginia. No longer could a threat to Washington induce the administration to recall an army of invasion. Early's march had given the government a severe case of nerves, but it had been barren of accomplishment.
Sherman's campaign in Georgia followed a different pattern from Grant's. Sherman had both the room and the inclination to make it a war of maneuver, but Johnston was an able strategist who could match paces with him all the way. Maneuvered out of his lines at Dalton, Johnston faded back, Sherman following. Often the Confederates would make a stand; when they did, Sherman would confront them with Thomas' Army of the Cumberland, using McPherson's and Schofield's troops for a wide flanking maneuver, and while these tactics usually made Johnston give ground, they never compelled him to fight at a disadvantage, and Sherman's progress looked better on the map than it really was. He had been ordered to go for Joe Johnston, and he could not quite crowd the man into a corner and bring his superior weight to bear. There were several pitched battles and there were innumerable skirmishes, and both armies had losses, but there was nothing like the all-consuming fighting that was going on in Virginia. Johnston made a stand once, on the slopes of Kennesaw Mountain, and Sherman was tired of his flanking operations and tried to crack the center of the Confederate line. It refused to yield, and Sherman's men were repulsed with substantial losses; then, after a time, the war of movement was resumed, like a formalized military dance performed to the rhythmic music of the guns.
By the middle of July Sherman had crossed the Chattahoochee River and reached the outskirts of Atlanta, but he by no means had done what he set out to do. Johnston's army, picking up reinforcements as it retreated, was probably stronger now than when the campaign began, and Sherman for the moment was at a standstill. Grant and Meade were stalled in front of Petersburg, and Sherman was stalled in front of Atlanta. The Confederate strongholds were unconquered, and Northerners began to find the prospect discouraging.
They became even more discouraged in late July, when Grant's army failed in a stroke that should have taken Petersburg. Frontal attacks on properly held entrenchments were doomed to failure, and even Grant, not easily convinced, had had to admit this. But at Petersburg a new chance offered itself. A regiment of Pennsylvania coal-miners dug a five-hundred-foot tunnel under the Confederate lines, several tons of powder were planted there, and at dawn on July 30 the mine was exploded. It blew an enormous gap in the defensive entrenchments, and for an hour or more the way was open for the Federal army to march almost unopposed into Petersburg.
Burnside's corps made the attempt and bungled it fearfully; the assault failed, and Grant's one great chance to end the war in one day vanished.
The people of the North were getting very war-weary as the month of July ended. Grant did not seem to be any nearer the capture of Richmond than he had been when the campaign began; Sherman was deep in Georgia, but he had neither whipped the Confederate army which faced him nor taken Atlanta. The pressure which the Confederacy could not long endure was being applied relentlessly, but it was hard for the folks back home to see that anything was really being accomplished. They only knew that the war was costing more than it had ever cost before, and that there seemed to be nothing of any consequence to show for it; and that summer President Lincoln privately wrote down his belief that he could not be reelected that fall. If the electorate should repudiate him, the North would almost certainly fall out of the war, and the South would have its independence.