A Youth's History of the Great Civil War
Van Evrie, Horton & Co., ©1866
Revised edition, ©2006 www.ronie-mooney-encs.us
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CHAPTER XLII, GENERALS GRANT'S "ON TO RICHMOND"
GENERAL GRANT,who was now Lieutenant-General, had formed his plans for a grand advance of all his armies during the first week in May,1864. He had concentrated nearly all his troops into two grand armies. One under his own command to march on Richmond, and the other under General Sherman to advance to the capture of Atlanta.
His first move was to send off various supporting expeditions. One, under General Sigel, was sent down the Shenandoah Valley against Lynchburg, and another, under General Butler, was sent by way of Fortress Monroe, to take Petersburg. If these expeditions had been successful, General Grant might have had an easy time of it. But we shall see they were not. His forces numbered nearly two hundred thousand men of all arms; General Lee's army numbered about fifty-two thousand.
On the 3d of May, General Grant set his tremendous army in motion. A train of 4,000 wagons was a proof of the vast host on the march. Grant's intention was to cross the Rapidan River, and march his army directly to Gordonsville, which, if once accomplished, would place his army between the army of Lee and Richmond. The fact that General Lee offered no objection to his passage of the river, impressed General Grant with the idea that the Confederate commander would at once retreat with his whole army to Richmond.
When, therefore, on Thursday morning, the 5th of May, Grant found a Confederate force in his front, at a place known as the Wilderness, he imagined it to be a movement of the retreat of Lee's army. It was not, however, long before he found his fatal mistake. In Lee's initial movement, before the real battle commenced, Grant lost 3,000 men. And when the darkness of the night put a stop to the fierce conflict that raged for hours, Lee's forces occupied the same ground they did at the beginning. Grant had been manfully repulsed at every point; and his men slept on their arms that night to be ready to renew the engagement in the morning. Lee was also waiting to open the battle in the morning. Both generals were,therefore, determined to open the fiery ball the next day. But Lee was ahead of his antagonist; and while Grant was preparing to strike, he dealt the first terrible blow. Then followed one of the most deadly and terrible battles which occurred during the whole war. General Lee here inflicted a terrible chastisement upon General Grant. Grant lost 15,000 men,and Lee about 7,000. It was a great victory for so small an army to win over one so vastly its superior in numbers.
The historian of the Army of the Potomac speaking of the battle, says, that General Grant "avowedly despised maneuvering. His reliance was exclusively on the application of brute masses, in rapid and remorseless blows, or as he himself phrased it, 'in hammering continuously.'" But in this instance the hammer itself was broken by Lee's superior generalship.
After this fatal experiment of "hammering" in the Wilderness, where he had hammered so many thousand of his own men to death, General Grant withdrew as secretly a possible with a view of reaching Spottsylvania Court House, where he would be between Lee's army and Richmond--that is, provided Lee would remain where he then was, in order to accommodate him. But to General Grant's very great surprise and disconfiture, when he arrived in the neighborhood of Spottsylvania, he found Lee was there before him. So without any attempt at maneuvering, he here set to work again to hammer his way through Lee's lines. But everywhere was he thrown back with fearful slaughter. And thus he hammered away for twelve days and nights, without making the least impression upon Lee's lines, and only getting his own men killed. The ground was literally covered and heaped up with the dead.
The result of this hammering on the two battlefields of the Wilderness and Spottsylvania was a loss of forty thousand men, who were ignominiously slaughtered by incompetent generalship. General Meade's official report admits a loss of thirty-nine thousand seven hundred and thirty-one; and his report does not include the losses of Burnside's corps.
The soldiers of the Army of the Potomac were not very secret in their denunciations of General Grant. They called him a "butcher," and but for the popularity of several of the division commanders there would have been very great difficulty in persuading the army to fight under Grant. So terribly had his army been cut to pieces in these battles of the Wilderness and Spottsylvania that he was obliged to send for reinforcements before attempting a further march towards Richmond.
On the night of the 20th of May, General Grant set his army on the march again towards Richmond. The next day brought him to the banks of the North Anna River, where he found a portion of Lee's army in his front. But Lee made just opposition enough at this point to impress Grant with an idea of his weakness, and then retreated to the South Anna. To this point General Grant marched with the fullest confidence that he would meet with no serious check. But he was doomed to a very sad disappointment; for he soon discovered that Lee had so maneuvered as to place the very centre of his army between the two wings of Grant's army,thereby cutting the abolition army in two in the middle.
Out of this trap into which he had so proudly marched, Grant beat a very hasty retreat. He was forced to re-cross the North Anna River, and take a circuitous and tedious route in another direction. The only thing he had accomplished in six days of painful marching was to get a great many of his men killed.
General Grant withdrew as secretly as possible from the North Anna, on the night of the 26th of May. His direction was south-east towards the Chickahominy River. It was on the banks of this river that the next great battle was fought, at a point called Cold Harbor. This place proved to be another of Grant's slaughter-pens, where he hammered his own gallant men to sure destruction without making the least visible impression upon the enemy. In a single assault of Lee's lines, he lost thirteen thousand men, while Lee did not lose as many hundreds. And when General Grant gave the order for another assault, the whole army, as one man, refuse to obey his order.
The historian of "The Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac," who was a spectator of the events he describes, says of the order for another assault: "The order was issued through these officers to their subordinate commanders, and from them descended through the wonted channels; but no man stirred, and the immobile lines pronounced a verdict, silent yet emphatic, against further slaughter."
It is, perhaps, the only instance on record where a whole army of such vast numbers refused to obey orders. But the soldiers knew that by obeying the order they simply devoted themselves to destruction. They had ceased to feel any respect for General Grant, and although they were brave and gallant men, they positively refused to be further slaughtered by what they believed to be incompetent generalship.
In this short march from the Rapidan to the Chickahominy, Grant had lost between sixty and seventy thousand men. It is safe to say that a skillful general would have accomplished the same march with one-fifth of that loss. In these battles Grant lost twenty thousand more men than Lee's whole army numbered. The reinforcements he received between the Rapidan an the Chickahominy amounted to more than Lee's whole army.
The history of these battles affords a very striking illustration of the very great difference between good and bad generalship. Grant's theory was that he could afford to slaughter three of his men to kill one Confederate. But in these battles the proportion of his slaughtered was greater than that. It was more than three to one. And all he had gained was a position in front of Richmond, which, after a few days, he was obliged to abandon for the precise spot adopted by McClellan two years before.
On the night of the 12th of June, Grant began to withdraw from the region of Cold Harbor, in front of Richmond, and commenced his march across the Peninsula to the James River. The distance was fifty-five miles, which brought him to the James a little below Harrison's Landing, the scene of General McClellan's operations. This march was completed, without opposition on the part of Lee, in two days. On the 18th of the month Grant's whole army was on the south side of the James, and prepared to take the same steps for the capture of Richmond which McClellan had fixed upon at the time he was ordered from Washington to withdraw his army from the Peninsula.
In an effort to take Richmond from this point, the first thing to be done was to take the city of Petersburg, which is twenty-two miles south of Richmond, and was the outer line of the defences of Richmond. The Lynchburg Railroad, James River Canal, and Danville Railroad connected this place with the west and south-west sections of the country from which Richmond largely drew its supplies.
Grant felt sure that he would be able to seize this city before Lee's army would be there to defend it. In this calculation he was doomed to another bitter disappointment, for no sooner did he begin his "hammering" process than he found the same invincible anvil of Lee's army was there to throw back his blows. After "pegging away" two days, during which time he lost six or seven thousand of his men, on the morning of the 18th of June he ordered a general assault of Lee's lines, which resulted in his complete repulse everywhere, with a terrible loss of life. The failure was such a disastrous one that even Grant gave up, for the time, his favorite "hammering" process, and fell to entrenching his army before the city of Petersburg, and began to attempt something like maneuvering.
The first effort, however, made after completing his entrenchments, proved a very disastrous one; as Lee, by a bold dash, swept down through a portion of his lines and captured several entire regiments and one of his most powerful batteries
General Grant exhausted two weeks in fruitless raids and assaults, in every one of which he was indeed greatly the loser. In this way he lost between 15,000 and 20,000 men, without inflicting any considerable damage upon Lee. Indeed he had literally worn his own army out again. Swinton says: "Indeed the Union army, terribly shaken as well in spirit as in material substance, by the repeated attacks on entrenched positions it had been called on to make, was in a very unfit moral condition to undertake any new enterprise of that character."
Grant was at last convinced that it was impossible for him to carry the city by assault. So there was no resource left him but to give up again his "hammering" system and to go to digging. So he kept busy for five or six weeks in constructing and arming defensive works. Among other things an extensive mine was dug under a portion of Lee's works, which was to be exploded, as it was thought, with the most disastrous consequences to the Confederates.
Grant fixed upon the morning of the 30th of July, for the exploding of this mine, and for a general assault upon Lee's lines through the opening which the exploded mine was to make. The explosion of the mine took place at half-past four in the morning. The shock was terrible, and vast masses of earth were thrown more than two hundred feet into the air. The only damage done was to surprise the Confederates for a few minutes, when they made the best possible use of what turned out to be a great folly on the part of General Grant.
The explosion produced a huge crater one hundred and fifty feet long, sixty feet wide, and thirty feet deep. Through this opening in Lee's works Grant undertook to push his assaulting column. In this assaulting column was a brigade of negroes under Burnside, which led the van, and which, on meeting a fierce fire from Lee's works, fled wildly back, and doubled up upon the white troops behind them in such a manner as to produce a scene of fright and confusion, that would have been laughable if it had not been so terrible. An army correspondent, who witnessed the whole affair, said, "blacks and whites tumbled pell-mell into the hollow of exploded earthwords-- a slaughter-pen, in which shells and bombs rained from the enemy's lines, and did frightful havoc. Failing to advance, it soon proved almost equally difficult to retreat, though parties of tens and twelves, crawling out, ran back as best they could. Above four thousand were killed or captured."
Such was General Grant's first attempt at strategy against Lee. With herculean labor, he produced an immense hole in the earth, which served no other purpose than a frightful slaughter-pen for his own men. In September, he made an attack with a portion of his army on the defences of Richmond north of the James River. But here he met with another decided repulse. This ended General Grant's offensive movements for some months.
It will be remembered I stated, that when General Grant started for Richmond, in May, he sent off General Sigel to take Lynchburg, and General Butler to take Petersburg. Both of these expeditions signally failed. General Sigel got severely whipped by General Breckinridge, and General Beauregard, who had came up from Charleston, soon disposed of Butler. Butler, as usual, made himself the laughing-stock of all sensible people. At one time he telegraphed that "he held the key of Richmond." But no one ever saw "the key," except Butler, and he only in imagination.
Grant, however, did not give up his design of capturing Lynchburg. So he sent General David Hunter to take it; but Hunter not only got badly whipped, but seems to have become awfully frightened. He not only ran away, but did not stop until he got into Western Virginia, where he arrested two editors for speaking disrespectfully of his campaign. He found time, however, in his flight, to burn the Virginia Military Institute, with its library, &c Governor Letcher's dwelling-house, and to commit several other outrageous and fiendish acts.
The defeat of Hunter opened the Shenandoah Valley again; and General Jubal Early, who now commanded on Stonewall Jackson's old battle fields, came rushing down the valley, capturing Winchester, Martinsburg, Harper's Ferry, and, crossing the Potomac, started another panic in the North. Some people thought General Lee was coming again with his whole army.
General Lew. Wallace, a bitter abolition general, who commanded at Baltimore, went out to whip Early, and met the Confederates at a place called Monocacy, but was so badly beaten, that he did not stop running until he got safely back to Baltimore, here he barricaded the city.
The troops under Generals Early and Breckinridge now scoured over Maryland, capturing railroad trains, the cavalry, under the daring Harry Gilmore, coming almost to the Pennsylvania line. For a few days General Early threatened Washington, some of his troops actually firing shots into the city. He burned the houses of Governor Bradford and Montgomery Blair of Maryland, in retaliation of Hunter's devastations in the valley, and then started off with his stores across the Potomac.
General Grant now resolved upon savage measures, the like of which had never been known in civilized warfare. He entrenched his army before Petersburg, and then detaching two corps,sent them, with a heavy force of cavalry, all under General Philip Sheridan, to the Shenandoah Valley. These troops, with the remains of Hunter's army, made a force that it was impossible for General Early to contend against. He was driven out of the valley with heavy losses of guns and men.
And now General Sheridan, with the instincts of savage warfare, determined to utterly devastate this beautiful valley. He therefore set his troops at work, and all the way from Staunton to Winchester was soon one scene of desolation. He burned every house, every barn, every mill, all the corn cribs, hay-stacks, and the entire food crops of all kinds for the year. Not only this, but he seized all the ploughs, harrows, spades, and every description of farm implement, and putting them into piles, made his soldiers burn them. He then drove off all the cows, horses, oxen, cattle, sheep, pigs, and every living animal for the use of man in all that wide valley. In fact nothing that devilish ingenuity could invent was left undone to transform the loveliest and most fertile valley in the world into a desolate and howling wilderness.
General Grant himself stated that he had burned two thousand barns; but the half is not yet told, for not less than ten thousand innocent women and children were by this savagery reduced to starvation, and thrown, in the fall of the year, out of comfortable homes, to perish in tents and eaves by the cold of the winter.
General Early and his troops incensed by the brutal devastation of the valley, made superhuman efforts to chastise Sheridan, and in one engagement severely defeated him. But they could not hold their ground. Sheridan's greatly outnumbered them, and falling upon them again, drove them to Staunton. This, I believe, closes the chapter of military movements in the sadly stricken and impoverished Shenandoah Valley.
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