Robert E. Lee, page 48
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“Gen. Lee,” wrote Edmund Ruffin in his diary after Cold Harbor, “said that the victory of [June] 3rd was the greatest of all that we had gained during the war.” The doubts that had bubbled up after Gettysburg were long since gone, and the Richmond Dispatch exulted that “confidence in Lee and his army is not confined to the ranks of that army and to our fellow citizens.” It included the entire Confederacy, in “every neighborhood and every family circle.” Captain Charles Blackford enthusiastically agreed: “Grant…has lost fifty thousand men and Lee and his army are before him, full of fight and unconquerable.”
Certainly, it disabused Ulysses Grant of any idea that the Army of Northern Virginia was ready to be walked over. Grant would regret the last attack at Cold Harbor “more than any one I have ever ordered….As it has proved, no advantages have been gained sufficient to justify the heavy losses suffered.” But with his own army wedged against the Chickahominy, Grant had nowhere left to maneuver above Richmond. To pull to his right was, in effect, to backtrack from Cold Harbor toward the North Anna. That would be a catastrophic admission of failure, and Grant, under any circumstances, was a man temperamentally averse to backtracking. He could cross the Chickahominy and fight it out with Lee on McClellan’s old battlefields, but without any assurance of gaining more than he had won anywhere else south of the Rapidan. That left him no real choice but to reconfigure his whole overland strategy—cross the Chickahominy, but ignore another fight with Lee’s army, and keep on moving across the James River, then the Appomattox River (its tributary), and do what he had been told not to do: capture the Confederate railhead at Petersburg and thereby force the evacuation of Richmond.15
This was, whether anyone was noticing, the same overall movement McClellan had wanted to employ in 1862 and an admission that the headlong slugging against the Army of Northern Virginia that the Lincoln administration had long regarded as the only politically acceptable plan had failed. Grant had always suspected that the James River and Petersburg were the real keys to Richmond and that seizing Richmond and its logistical bounty, rather than chasing Lee’s army for some mythical showdown, would be the real means to bringing Lee’s army to its knees. It would, in some perfect world, have been better “to get at Lee in an open battle which would wind up the Confederacy.” But Lee was not offering him perfect opportunities, something that Cold Harbor demonstrated in spades. And anyway, there was no guarantee that more pitched battles might not be just what Lee wanted. “There is nothing I desire now more than a ‘fair field fight,’ ” Lee told Powell Hill. “If Grant will meet me on equal ground, I will give him two to one odds.” Anything, in other words, to keep Grant’s hands away from Richmond’s neck.
So, as Grant explained, even though “my idea from the start had been to beat Lee’s army, if possible, north of Richmond,” the alternative had to be “to transfer the army to the south side and besiege Richmond or follow him south if he should retreat.” No other Union commander could have safely made such a proposition to the Lincoln administration. But by the first week of June, Grant had paid the Army of the Potomac’s dues to the overland strategy. Besides, Grant had carefully cultivated an image, ever since Vicksburg, of political harmlessness to the Lincoln administration, turning away coy suggestions from both Democrats and Republicans that he allow himself to become a presidential candidate in 1864. Lincoln would trust him. “The move had to be made,” Grant wrote, “and I relied upon Lee’s not seeing my danger as I saw it.”16
Actually, Lee did see Grant’s “danger.” He was sufficiently recovered from his bout with dysentery to ride from point to point along the lines, “reconnoitering personally the enemy’s position,” and Grant’s “quietude” after Cold Harbor convinced Lee that the Federals “will cross the Chickahominy.” Lee hoped that, as he had done with McClellan, he could “move down and attack him with our whole force…in the act of crossing.” Otherwise, as he warned Jefferson Davis, Grant would “endeavor to reach the James, breaking the railroads &c as he passes, and probably to descend on the south side of that river.” But day followed day without any noticeable movement, dulling Lee’s expectations. “No troops have left Grant’s army to my knowledge,” Lee reported on June 9, “and none could have crossed the James without being discovered.”
Lee was also distracted by other Union movements. At the same moment, Grant’s expedition into the Shenandoah Valley under David Hunter was chewing up the resources there that fed Lee’s army. There was only one Confederate division in the valley, and it was handily beaten at Piedmont on June 5, leaving Hunter a free hand to occupy Lee’s old base at Staunton and then Lexington, where Hunter torched the Virginia Military Institute on June 11. The Richmond papers huffed that there was little “that Gen. Hunter can do in that part of Virginia” to “contribute…towards the success of the movement against Richmond,” but anyone could see that Hunter’s position in the valley opened a direct road to Lynchburg, and Lynchburg was a direct feeder to Richmond.
Lee was reluctant to detach any of his own troops to recover the valley, knowing that if “Grant cannot be successfully resisted here we cannot hold the Valley,” whereas if Grant was defeated on the Chickahominy, the valley “can be recovered.” But that logic made little progress with frantic politicians, including Jefferson Davis. Lee finally conceded that Hunter “will do us great evil & in that event” he split off Ewell’s old corps, only 8,000 strong and now under Jubal Early, for the valley on June 13. It was just possible that Early might be able not only to save the valley but to create the same kind of panic in Washington that Stonewall Jackson had produced in the spring of 1862 and force Grant to break off his campaign.17
And then, almost on cue, Grant slid into motion. On the night of June 12, the Army of the Potomac, in four huge columns, melted away from its lines at Cold Harbor, crossed the Chickahominy, and then swept down to the James, where Grant’s engineers threw a massive twenty-one-hundred-foot-long pontoon bridge, using 101 pontoon boats, across the river at Weyanoke Point. Lee’s “scouts and pickets” picked up Grant’s movement “for the fords of the Chickahominy” by the morning of the fourteenth. Yet Lee hesitated, unsure whether Grant meant “to place his army within the fortifications around Harrison’s Landing” or to get “possession of Petersburg before we can reinforce it.” With only Powell Hill’s corps and Richard Heron Anderson’s corps at hand, he could not afford to misplace whatever shield he would use to protect Richmond.
Grant had the advantage, too, that there were already Union troops lodged on the James River—26,000 of them under the dubious oversight of Benjamin Butler on the Bermuda Hundred Peninsula. In Grant’s original plans for the 1864 campaigns, Butler was to have landed on the James in May and knocked down the back door to Richmond while Grant grappled Lee along the Rappahannock. But Butler had thrown away the substantial advantage he had in numbers over Richmond’s small defensive garrison and its commandant, the perennial Pierre Beauregard, and allowed himself to be bottled up at Bermuda Hundred. Butler made only token threats to cover Grant’s crossing of the James, but his very position there clouded Lee’s vision of what and where Grant was moving. Even as late as the afternoon of the sixteenth, when Grant already had two corps south of the James and headed for Petersburg, Lee was still plaintively asking Beauregard, “Has Grant been seen crossing [the] James River?”18
The same demon of hesitation that had befogged so many other movements of the Army of the Potomac saved Lee and saved Petersburg. Butler’s failure to break into Richmond in May should have been a sign that the defenses of both Richmond and Petersburg were more formidable than they seemed from the small number of Confederate soldiers detailed to guard them. As indeed they were: Lee had overseen the construction of the first generation of Richmond fortifications in 1861, and an “inner line” of small bastions and artillery batteries was constructed to cover the east side of the city. An “intermediate line” was then built around the northern and western approaches to the city and then finally in 1862 an “outer line” to reinforce the eastern side, ending with a naval battery at Chaffin’s Bluff on the James River (commanded, in this case, by Lee’s brother Smith). Fortifications to protect Petersburg began in the summer of 1862 under the eye of Captain Charles Dimmock, with fifty-five batteries sited to cover a wide half circle with both ends tied to the Appomattox River and connected by rifle pits, trenches, and parapets.19
Grant’s lead corps struck the Dimmock Line on June 15. It was defended by only 2,200 Confederates, but no one seemed quite capable of coordinating federal movements against them. After a series of ill-directed and fruitless Union attacks, Lee finally became convinced that “Grant’s whole force has crossed to the south side of the James River,” and “hurried up” the bulk of the Army of Northern Virginia into the Dimmock Line in “a free race for Petersburg.” Grant had now to settle into a siege of both Petersburg and Richmond, and although he was not able to form a tight encirclement of the two cities as he had at Vicksburg, his lines wound close enough to Petersburg’s vulnerable southward railroads that Lee was forced to rely more and more on wagons and turnpikes to get supplies into his army’s hands, which brought matters to just the conclusion Lee had most dreaded.
Grant continued to edge his own siege lines slowly westward, cutting the Weldon Railroad in August and also probing weaknesses in Lee’s lines north of the James. On September 29, Fort Harrison (one of the forts in the outer line protecting Richmond) fell to a surprise attack. This was so close to Richmond that in the city “you could see the smoke, and you could hear the cannon and rifle fire very clearly.” But not even Lee’s personal supervision of a counterattack could recover it. Once more, Lee forgot all about allowing his subordinates to run the machinery and tried to take charge of recapturing Fort Harrison. “With his silvery head uncovered, hat in hand,” Lee reminded “the men how important Fort Harrison was to our line of defense, and that he was sure they could take it if they would make another earnest effort.” But they could not, even after “cheering their beloved general.” Lee “exposed himself very much in the assault, so much as to cause a thrill of alarm throughout the field,” wrote the indefatigable War Department clerk John Jones, “but it all would not do.” Lee could hardly have agreed more.20
Yet Northern public opinion did not see any of this as a cause for congratulation. “These are signs which indicate that gradually a disposition for peace is making itself felt throughout the great mass of the people of the United States,” rejoiced the Richmond Enquirer. “The war spirit is on the wane.” Grant’s companion campaigns likewise spluttered with all the appearance of defeat. The expedition to capture Mobile never left New Orleans; Sherman’s campaign from Chattanooga to Atlanta was frustrated over and over again by the wily defensive maneuvers of Joe Johnston and the Army of Tennessee. Above all, Jubal Early not only raised the specter of Stonewall Jackson by driving David Hunter from the Shenandoah but crossed the Potomac in July, brushed aside a Union-covering force at the Monocacy River, and lapped up to the outer ring of Washington’s defenses on July 11. (Lee even meditated a plan using Early to attack the Union prisoner-of-war camp at Point Lookout and freeing 20,000 Confederate prisoners there.)
The worst embarrassment for the Federals came at the end of July. In an effort to break up the Petersburg siege, Grant authorized the digging of a spectacular 510-foot-long mine, packed with four tons of gunpowder, under the Confederate defenses. The crater the mine would blow in the Dimmock Line was supposed to offer an easy opening for a Union attack. But when the mine was exploded on July 30, an equally spectacular display of military bungling held back two divisions of U.S. Colored Troops specially trained for the assault and sent in ahead white units who milled aimlessly around the crater until the dazed Confederates cleared their wits and turned the attack into a bloody fiasco. The siege went on with no lasting disturbance.
Lee himself came up to observe the destruction wrought by the crater, irritated at “certain officers of high rank” for having failed to detect the mine and directing artillerymen who “rained a pitiless fire into the Crater.” The attackers sustained almost 4,000 casualties, a suspiciously large percentage of them among the two black divisions, most of whom were probably executed after surrendering and after Lee had left the scene of the fighting. “It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war,” Grant admitted. “I am constrained to believe that had instructions been promptly obeyed that Petersburg would have been carried with all the artillery and a large number of prisoners without a loss of 300 men.” Lee, for his part, never acknowledged the massacre of black prisoners, and even though there is no evidence that he ordered or witnessed it, he also reproved none of his officers for participating in it. Like so much that governed his attitude toward slavery, he could look and still not see.21
Still, the challenge of dealing with black Union soldiers did not entirely go away, especially for those who survived massacre and were in Confederate hands. On the terms laid down the year before by Jefferson Davis and James Seddon, any former slaves were to be returned, through Southern state officials, to their owners. (The criteria of determining who had been a “slave” and who had been an “owner” were left opportunistically vague; in October 1864, the Mobile Advertiser & Register listed the names of 575 black prisoners from three of the U.S. Colored Troops regiments who had been put to hard labor on the port’s defenses, and invited “the owners” to claim “the pay due them” for the use of their “property.”) In October 1864, Lee gingerly proposed a local exchange to Grant; Grant promptly replied that he would only sanction an exchange if “you propose delivering these men the same as white soldiers.” Surprisingly, Lee was willing to “include all captured soldiers of the United States of whatever nation and color under my control.” But he could not include “negroes belonging to our citizens”—Davis and Seddon had seen to that—and Grant simply shrugged uncooperatively: “I have to state that the Government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers,” and so no such exchange was possible. That brought Lee up to the political line, and he was not willing to cross it. As far as Lee was concerned, “there is no just cause of further responsibility” on his part.22
The breakdown of the exchange system, however, paid no useful political dividends for Lincoln, who now had to explain to white Northerners why thousands of white Union prisoners were dying, immobilized, in Southern prisons that had never been designed as permanent camps. Groaning under the weight of these failures, the chairman of the Republican National Committee had to warn Lincoln that the likelihood of his reelection in November was slipping away. “The tide is setting strongly against us,” wrote Henry J. Raymond to Lincoln on August 22. “Were an election to be held now in Illinois we should be beaten….Pennsylvania is against us. Gov. Morton writes that nothing but the most strenuous efforts can carry Indiana.” Lincoln was powerless to disagree. “The people promised themselves when General Grant started out that he would take Richmond in June,” Lincoln told a New York politician. “He didn’t take it, and they blame me.” Even the Army of the Potomac appeared to have reached past the point of exhaustion. “It was the bravest and most enterprising officers, the bravest and most enduring soldiers, who had fallen” in the Overland Campaign, wrote one senior Union staffer, and those who were left “had almost ceased to expect victory when they went into battle.”23
Now, finally, Lee’s long, wearisome plan to win the war, not by battle, but by grinding out Northern patience, seemed to be bearing fruit. On August 31, the Democratic National Convention, meeting in Chicago, nominated no one less than George McClellan as its candidate for the presidency. And though McClellan himself protested that his object, if elected, would be “the preservation of the Union, its Constitution & its laws,” and not a surrender to Confederate independence, the party platform—and the party’s de facto leadership—called for an immediate armistice and an end to the war, regardless of the result. McClellan, for all his talk about the necessity of restoring the Union, was not the man to resist them. “After four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war,” no one imagined that an armistice would end except with a complete concession to Confederate demands for independence.
Back in the early spring, James Longstreet had predicted that “if we can break up the enemy’s arrangements…he will not be able to recover his position nor his morale until the Presidential election is over, and we shall then have a new President to treat with.” That now seemed to be on the cusp of realization. Walter Taylor remembered how eagerly “the political dissensions at the North” made Lee’s headquarters giddy “about everything that was calculated to have any effect upon the approaching election.” Writing to his fiancée, Taylor hoped that McClellan’s nomination alone “may lead to a temporary cessation of hostilities.” “Lincoln and his party are now environed with dangers rushing upon them from every direction,” wrote the diarist John B. Jones on August 21. “The next two months will be the most interesting period of the war; everything depends upon the result of the Presidential election in the United States.”24
But then the political balloon burst. On August 7, Grant assigned Philip Sheridan to the Shenandoah with orders to track down and destroy Jubal Early, which he did incrementally at Winchester on September 19 and then at Cedar Creek on October 19. Jefferson Davis, fearful that Joe Johnston’s endless tick-tacking in the face of Sherman’s advance toward Atlanta would end with the surrender of the city (as it almost had with Richmond two years before), replaced Johnston (against Lee’s advice) with John Bell Hood on July 18. (Hood was “a bold fighter,” Lee warned Davis, “but I am doubtful as to [the] other qualities necessary.”) Aggressive in ways Johnston would never have dreamed of, Hood threw the Army of Tennessee at Sherman in repeated—and futile—attacks in front of Atlanta in July, then slumped back into a protective siege that ended when Sherman maneuvered Hood out of the way and occupied Atlanta on September 2.
