Terrible Swift Sword (14 page)

 

SHERIDAN'S FIRST VISIT TO Washington was dizzying. “I was an entire stranger, and I cannot now recall that I met a single individual whom I had ever before known.” Sheridan, Forsyth, and Moore checked into the Willard Hotel, where Union officers stayed when returning to duty in Virginia after furloughs. At the War Department, Halleck briefed Sheridan on his new duties, described the military situation in Virginia, and introduced Sheridan to War Secretary Edwin Stanton. Stanton looked Sheridan up and down with open skepticism. “I could feel that Mr. Stanton was eyeing me closely and searchingly, endeavoring to form some estimate of one about whom he knew absolutely nothing,” Sheridan wrote, certain that Stanton had never heard of him until his appointment to the Cavalry Corps.

Under Stanton's searching gaze, Sheridan uncomfortably felt every deficiency, real or imagined, in his education, his character, and even his appearance. He was a youthful-looking thirty-three years old, stood five-foot-five, and weighed a “thin almost to emaciation” 115 pounds. Sheridan was nearly tongue-tied during the interview. “If I had ever possessed any self-assertion in manner or speech, it certainly vanished in the presence of the imperious Secretary, whose name at the time was the synonym of all that was cold and formal.”

Sheridan never learned what Stanton really thought of him that day. After they became better acquainted and Stanton warmed to him, Sheridan concluded that the secretary's reputation for coldness was “more mythical than real.”
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When Sheridan met Lincoln, the president offered both hands in greeting. Lincoln said the cavalry had not yet lived up to its potential. He repeated an old joke from the war's early years: “Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?” Sheridan refused to read any hidden meaning into the jest.
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Afterward, a War Department official remarked to Grant, “The officer you brought on from the West is rather a little fellow to handle your cavalry.” Grant replied, “You will find him big enough for the purpose before we get through with him.”
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On April 5, Sheridan left Washington on an army train bound for the Army of the Potomac's camps in northern Virginia. He reached the Cavalry Corps headquarters at Brandy Station that night.

 

INITIALLY, THE CAVALRY CORPS was as unimpressed with Sheridan as the wags at the War Department. After getting a look at him, a young Wisconsin officer concluded there were probably officers in the ranks who could do a better job. Some of the veterans watched with interest as Sheridan prepared to mount his horse. “We wondered how he was going to do it,” said one of them, “and expected to see him shin up his long saber.”
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After formally reviewing his corps, Sheridan remarked that it “presented a fine appearance,” while noting that the horses were thin and looked worn. He learned that the cavalry had been constantly employed, even when the army was in winter camp. It scouted, hunted guerrillas, guarded firewood details and cattle herds, escorted officers, and rode the sixty-mile picket line around the Army of the Potomac for three days at a time. On the picket line, the mounted troops usually encountered only enemy infantry; the Rebel cavalry was excused from picketing. Parades, reviews, inspections, classes, and regular drill occupied the cavalrymen much of the rest of the time.
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Sheridan's senior aide-de-camp, Captain Newhall, conducted a closer inspection of the 1st and 3rd Divisions and was dismayed by their weapons and clothing. Their arms were inferior—mostly single-shot Joslyn and Smith carbines. Some of the men had only sidearms. Their clothing was “used-up,” their horses desperately needed rest, and the camps were badly located and policed. Newhall concluded that between the two divisions, 5,000 men might be combat ready. Sheridan later found identical conditions in the 2nd Division.
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Sheridan sought an interview with General Meade. Their conversation began with the condition of the Cavalry Corps but then proceeded to the cavalry's mission and duties. Sheridan and Meade discovered that they disagreed sharply.

It is unclear when Sheridan conceived his ideas on the strategic use of mounted troops. It might have happened when he was a cavalry commander in Mississippi. Perhaps he formulated them between his appointment and arrival at Brandy Station, or after reviewing his corps and reflecting on the poor condition of its mounts. Whatever their provenance, Sheridan now bluntly articulated his ideas to Meade.

Dispersing the cavalry for its current manifold duties was “burdensome and wasteful,” he said, and needlessly hard on horses. “In name only was it a corps at all,” and in actuality it was just a subordinate arm of the infantry. The cavalry, Sheridan asserted, should be employed as a concentrated, independent force to fight and destroy the enemy's cavalry.

Sheridan's notions challenged the Union army's doctrine of placing the cavalry at the infantry's disposal. The Confederate cavalry, he noted, often operated autonomously, and with success. Jeb Stuart was revered in the South, but the Union army had no one comparable.

“My proposition seemed to stagger General Meade not a little,” wrote Sheridan. Meade wanted to know who would protect the wagon trains and artillery reserve. Sheridan replied that the trains and artillery would not need guarding against Rebel cavalry raids if the Union Cavalry Corps were unleashed against the enemy cavalry.

“With a mass of ten thousand mounted men . . . . I could make it so lively for the enemy's cavalry that . . . . the flanks and rear of the Army of the Potomac would require little or no defense,” Sheridan told Meade. The infantry could provide what protection might be needed. After defeating the Rebel cavalry in combat, he said, the Cavalry Corps would play havoc with Confederate communications and supply lines.

Sheridan's proposals only annoyed Meade and would later lead to trouble between them. Yet, when Sheridan on April 19 formally requested that his men's picket lines be shortened, Meade surprised him by relieving the corps of nearly all picket duty. The horses' condition immediately improved.

Sheridan remained fixated on winning for the Cavalry Corps “the same privileges and responsibilities that attached to the other corps—conditions that never actually existed before.”
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AS HIS CORPS REFITTED for the upcoming offensive, Sheridan met individually with his division and brigade commanders. When he sat down with Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer, commander of the 1st Brigade of the 1st Division, the men established an instant rapport. “I remained . . . . last night and to-day until nearly 4 o'clock. . . . . Major-General Sheridan impressed me very favorably,” Custer wrote to his wife, Libbie. Both men of action, Sheridan and Custer would remain friends and comrades until Custer's death.
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ON PAPER, THE CAVALRY Corps's three divisions and eight horse artillery batteries totaled 35,000 men in thirty-one regiments. In reality, Sheridan could field 12,500 fully equipped veteran cavalrymen and 863 gunners.
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Division commanders Alfred Torbert, David Gregg, and James Wilson were critical to any success that the corps might win. Sheridan had personally chosen only Torbert, successor to the late Major General John Buford, who had selected the battleground at Gettysburg that had proved so advantageous to the Union.

Sheridan's choice of Torbert, an 1855 West Point graduate with impressive mutton chops, was somewhat puzzling, because Torbert had never commanded cavalry. But he had competently led the 1st New Jersey Infantry and later a brigade of VI
Corps through the Peninsula Campaign, Second Manassas, South Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Sheridan probably gave Torbert command of the 1st Division because of his combat experience and familiarity with Virginia.
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Sheridan was lucky to have Gregg, the full-bearded, basset-eyed incumbent 2nd Division commander. Modest and popular, Gregg had led a mounted brigade at Fredericksburg and the 2nd Division at Chancellorsville, Brandy Station, and Gettysburg.
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Wilson, just twenty-six years old, had never led troops. He was Grant's choice to replace Kilpatrick, whom Grant had transferred to Sherman's army. An engineering officer, Wilson had served with distinction on Grant's staff during the Vicksburg and Chattanooga campaigns, and he had briefly directed the Cavalry Bureau. There, his lasting contribution was designating the Spencer repeating rifle as the cavalry's standard-issue weapon.

Christopher Spencer's innovative weapon was a “force-multiplier” and one of the great technological advances of the Civil War. While essentially a single-shot rifle, the Spencer's tube magazine, inserted into the butt stock, enabled a cavalryman to fire seven shots successively, ejecting the fired cartridge and chambering a new round by working the lever action. By replacing empty tube magazines with preloaded ones, a trooper might fire twenty-one rounds in one minute—the time in which a skilled infantryman might fire a musket four times. A cavalryman's cartridge box might contain up to a dozen preloaded firing tubes.

Brigadier General Horace Porter, one of Grant's staff officers, once overheard a Rebel prisoner remark about the Spencer, “You can load it up on Sunday and fire it off all the rest o' the week.” While no match for the Rebels' Enfield musket at long range, at distances under one hundred yards, the Spencer endowed dismounted cavalrymen with enormous firepower.
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The Spencer was well suited to Sheridan's evolving ideas about the cavalry as a highly mobile unit able to reach critical points quickly. Upon dismounting, it could unleash overwhelming firepower. While the cavalry still fought enemy horsemen with sabers and pistols on horseback, in late 1863, both armies had begun using dismounted cavalry as skirmishers and sometimes to support infantry. Sheridan wanted the cavalry to break away from the infantry's supervision altogether and to operate independently, whether on horseback or dismounted.
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MAY 4, 1864–THE WILDERNESS, VIRGINIA—At midnight, the death-haunted landscape appeared as a dark, featureless mass looming over the Rapidan River's south bank. Sheridan's cavalrymen efficiently secured the Ely and Germanna fords,
six miles apart and a few miles west of where the Rapidan merged with the Rappahannock. Engineers began laying down wood-canvass pontoon bridges for the vast army that followed—120,000 men and 50,000 mules and horses.
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Waiting on the river's north bank behind the cavalry and engineers, and winding northward for miles, was the Army of the Potomac, with its infantrymen and gunners, artillery batteries, and endless wagon trains. The march to Richmond had begun.

While elements of Torbert's division guarded the crossings and the army wagon trains north of the river, Sheridan's two other divisions rode south. Wilson's marched in advance of Major General Gouverneur Warren's V Corps, and Gregg's division traveled ahead of Major General Winfield Scott Hancock's II Corps. They rode down roads that tunneled through the living mountain of vegetation known simply as “the Wilderness.” The Rapidan described the north rim of the province of bogs and jungle growth whose one hundred square miles could easily swallow up an army without leaving a trace. The dense second-growth woods, brakes, and tangled undergrowth—underlain by innumerable knolls and ravines—muffled the noise made by thousands of hooves and clinking harnesses.

Because of the terrain and Meade's orders, Sheridan knew his cavalrymen would be limited in their operations. “There would be little opportunity for mounted troops to acquit themselves well in a region so thickly wooded, and traversed by so many almost parallel streams.”

He, like Grant, believed that if General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia did strike the Yankees, it would be here or at the river crossings, where they were most vulnerable. If the army emerged from the claustrophobic perpetual twilight of the Wilderness, the relatively open areas beyond would provide maneuvering room. As the dawn of May 4 approached and Sheridan's cavalrymen rode down the narrow, snaking dirt roads with trees and vines arching overhead, they tensed to receive the expected blow, but none fell.
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THERE WAS SKIRMISHING ON May 4 but no major fighting. Lee, whose army had been in winter quarters near Orange Courthouse southwest of the Wilderness, permitted Grant to cross the Rapidan unmolested as he waited for Longstreet's 12,000 men to reach him. But Lee did not plan to let Grant emerge from the Wilderness unscathed. The woods and underbrush would not just hide Lee's movements; they would conceal the fact that when Longstreet's troops arrived, Lee's army would number just 65,000, little more than half of Grant's force.