Terrible Swift Sword (15 page)

In this inhospitable wild tangle, almost exactly a year earlier, at Chancellorsville, Lee and the late Stonewall Jackson had beaten the much larger Army of the Potomac under Major General Joe Hooker, with whom many of the troops now marching with Grant had served. As they made their camps on this night, there
was little levity and no singing. Near the charred ruins of the Chancellor mansion, the soldiers found human skulls and “skeletons in rotted blue” washed by spring rains from shallow graves.
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ON MAY 5, THE battle exploded. Near the junction of Brock Road and Orange Court House Turnpike at Wilderness Tavern, Warren's V Corps crashed into Confederate lieutenant general Richard Ewell's II Corps. Even with Major General John Sedgwick's VI Corps assisting, Warren was unable to break Ewell's lines. At the end of the day, casualties from both armies littered the paths and burning fields.

The story was much the same when Confederate lieutenant general A. P. Hill's III Corps attacked Wilson's cavalry division on the Orange Plank Road three miles to the south. Sheridan sent Gregg to assist Wilson. Together, with the help of their fast-firing Spencer carbines, they slowed Hill's advance until Hancock's II Corps infantrymen got into position. The two corps battered one another throughout the day.
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The armies resumed the carnage on May 6. Hancock attacked with half of Grant's army down the Orange Plank Road, with Sheridan's Cavalry Corps guarding Hancock's left flank and rear against repeated Rebel attacks by Major General Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry. Two brigades from Torbert's division, led by Custer and Colonel Thomas Devin, dismounted and, blazing away with their Spencer carbines, drove Fitzhugh Lee from the field. One of Custer's officers described it as “sulky, stubborn, bulldog fighting, entirely opposed to the brilliant methods by which Custer had gained his reputation, dismounted lines of skirmishers pressing grimly forward through tangled woods, firing at each other like lines of infantry.”

Later in the day, Longstreet's corps reached the battlefield, and Lee immediately sent it up the Orange Plank Road along a belt three-fourths of a mile wide. Bursting shells set the woods afire, and the screams of wounded men burning alive rent the air. Longstreet was severely wounded by his own men. At the day's end, neither army had gained a decisive advantage.

On May 7, as the adversaries waited for one another to make the first move, Jeb Stuart sent Fitzhugh Lee's and Major General Wade Hampton's cavalry divisions to capture the crossroads at Todd's Tavern. Gregg's division and Brigadier General Wesley Merritt's Reserve Brigade battled them there. It was “an exceedingly severe and, at times, fluctuating fight,” wrote Sheridan. The Union cavalrymen finally drove the Rebels nearly all the way to Spotsylvania Court House.

Sheridan was proud of his cavalry's performance during the two-day battle, while acknowledging that its outcome “had not been all that was desired.”
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GRANT PRONOUNCED IT A victory; the Army of the Potomac had crossed the Rapidan and had held its own. The facts pointed to another conclusion: the Yankees
had lost 17,500 men, compared with 11,000 Confederate casualties, and the Union forces, despite their enormous numerical superiority, had been unable to dislodge the Rebels. Still, the Army of Northern Virginia, with its proud tradition of winning battles in that state, had been unable to destroy the Army of the Potomac in the Wilderness, a terrain hostile to the Yankees' advantages in men and firepower. The Confederates had wounded Grant's army, but the Yankees were not beaten.

As the morning of May 7 advanced with neither side launching a major attack, the Union troops gloomily pondered the prospect of yet another retreat. They would surely withdraw across the Rapidan, they believed, just as they had always done whenever Lee had licked them in northern Virginia. And following in the train of their retreat would be the appointment of a new commander with a new scheme for defeating Lee and capturing Richmond.

Orders went out to the Union divisions to prepare for a night march. In low spirits, the Yankees shouldered their packs. At dusk, they moved out.

But they soon realized that something was different this time. They were marching south, not north. They began to cheer and sing. “That night we were happy,” one soldier wrote.
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Lee knew that Grant would not withdraw, and he divined his next objective: Spotsylvania Court House. The macabre dance of the armies of Grant and Lee had begun.

 

NO ONE IN BLUE or gray slept that night. Dust hung over the moonlit roads, choked with columns of soldiers, the Yankees marching southeast to envelope Lee's army, the Rebels racing to thwart the movement. The creak of wagons and wheeled artillery and the tramp-tramp of thousands of troops and horses coalesced into an ominous rumble that set the silvery air trembling like an angry bass chord.

As the Union infantrymen crowded Brock Road, which connected Wilderness Tavern and Spotsylvania Court House to the southeast, Sheridan made a bold plan. Hoping to prove the Cavalry Corps's worth as an independent arm of the Army of the Potomac, Sheridan planned to capture Spotsylvania and the three nearby bridges over the unfordable Po River before either army got there. But he consulted neither Meade nor Grant beforehand.

At 1 a.m., he ordered Wilson's division, operating near Sheridan's headquarters, to ride immediately to Spotsylvania Court House and to capture Snell's Bridge three miles to the south. Torbert's division, commanded by Wesley Merritt in Torbert's absence, and Gregg's division were awaiting orders at Todd's Tavern on Brock Road, midway between Wilderness Tavern and Spotsylvania Court House. Sheridan sent them instructions to capture Corbin's Bridge, six miles up the Po from Spotsylvania. While Gregg remained at the bridge to bar the enemy, Merritt's division would ride three miles downstream and seize the Blockhouse Bridge. With all three bridges in
Union hands, Lee's army would be unable to reach Spotsylvania Court House, and Grant's army could then occupy the town.

Wilson's troopers rode into Spotsylvania and expelled Brigadier General Thomas Rosser's cavalry brigade, sent ahead by Lee. The Union cavalry division had made a splendid beginning in seizing the strategic town. Had everything else gone according to Sheridan's plan, the Army of the Potomac would have occupied Spotsylvania Court House without the bloodletting for which the town is now remembered.

The Confederate infantry, too, was marching through the night toward the town, on a woodland road being hewed by pioneers. The Rebels hoped to interpose themselves between Spotsylvania and the Yankees advancing toward it on Brock Road.

 

MEADE WAS WITH THE leading regiments of Gouverneur Warren's V Corps when they arrived at Todd's Tavern at about 1 a.m. He was annoyed to find Sheridan's two cavalry divisions at the crossing—and in the path of the infantry. The cavalrymen were momentarily without orders, because Sheridan's instructions to seize the Po bridges had not yet reached them.

Not informed of Sheridan's plan, Meade ordered the two cavalry divisions to move out ahead of Warren's corps and sent a courier to inform Sheridan of what he had done. In the darkness, Warren's infantrymen and Sheridan's troopers became hopelessly tangled up on Brock Road. Grant's plan to steal a march on Lee to Spotsylvania began to unravel as the advance slowed to a maddening crawl.
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AS THE EASTERN SKY turned gunmetal gray, Wilson and his 4,000 veteran cavalrymen, still at Spotsylvania Court House, anxiously watched Brock Road for signs of the infantry bluecoats approaching from the northwest. But the column was still two or more miles away. It had been delayed at least an hour, maybe two, by the colossal traffic jam of men, wagons, horses, apoplectic teamsters, and bellowing officers. And there was no sign of Gregg's or Merritt's divisions either.

Leading the march toward Spotsylvania, Sheridan's troopers were facing a new problem: dismounted Rebel cavalrymen shooting at them from the northern approaches to the town. Stopping to return fire, Gregg's and Merritt's divisions encountered Fitzhugh Lee's two cavalry brigades, entrenched behind piled fence rails in the middle of the road. The Rebels had crossed the Po River at Blockhouse Bridge—the bridge that Sheridan had wanted Merritt to occupy but that instead remained wide open.

Moreover, thousands of Rebel infantrymen were near Fitzhugh Lee's embattled cavalrymen. Working through the night, Confederate pioneers had cut a five-mile road through the woods west of Todd's Tavern. I Corps, led by General Richard
Anderson in the place of the wounded Longstreet, had stopped for a quick breakfast just a mile from Fitzhugh Lee.

As Fitzhugh Lee's men held off Sheridan's cavalrymen, couriers raced to exhort the Rebel infantry to please hurry up. Behind the attacking Union cavalry, Fitzhugh Lee now knew, were dense formations of Yankee infantry, against which he would stand little chance if the Rebel infantry did not reach him in time.

The courier's message spurred Anderson's infantrymen to pack up their cooking gear hastily and set out at a quick march. When they heard heavy firing coming from the Brock Road, they broke into a run.

 

WITH RISING ANGER, SHERIDAN read the message informing him that Meade had ordered Gregg and Merritt to march down Brock Road ahead of Warren's corps—frustrating his plan to seize the two bridges. He was also just learning about the Rebel cavalry blocking the road to Spotsylvania.

Sheridan realized that he must immediately recall Wilson from Spotsylvania before the Confederates trapped him there. Sending a courier by way of the Fredericksburg Road, Sheridan ordered Wilson, whose division had been the only one to carry out Sheridan's plan, to withdraw. Confederate infantry, however, were already driving Wilson out of Spotsylvania.

Grant had lost his chance to seize the strategic town without a battle. In Sheridan's
Personal Memoirs
, written more than twenty years later, his disappointment over Meade's inadvertent frustration of his plan to seize the three bridges remains palpable: “Had Gregg and Merritt been permitted to proceed as they were originally instructed, it is doubtful whether the battles fought at Spotsylvania would have occurred.” Instead, the Confederates' approach to the town was “entirely unobstructed, while three divisions of cavalry remained practically ineffective by reason of disjointed and irregular instructions.”
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SHERIDAN JOINED THE DEVELOPING battle north of Spotsylvania. Warren complained to him that the cavalry was blocking his infantry columns. Sheridan removed his divisions from Brock Road to open the way for Warren's corps to attack.

Warren's men were advancing steadily on Fitzhugh Lee's barricade when Anderson's foot soldiers dashed up Brock Road, flung themselves down breathlessly beside Lee's dismounted cavalry behind the piled fence rails, and unleashed a devastating fire on the bluecoats when they were just sixty yards away. Warren's infantrymen recoiled.
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Meade was livid. He knew that, by just a minute or two, he had lost the race to occupy Spotsylvania Court House. And it was the fault of Sheridan's Cavalry Corps,
which had clogged Brock Road all night and then had obstructed Warren when his V Corps might have easily overrun Fitzhugh Lee before the arrival of the Confederate infantry. Meade summoned Sheridan to his headquarters.

The ensuing donnybrook was arguably the most portentous event in the Cavalry Corps's history and possibly in Sheridan's career. This day had been coming since Sheridan took command of the Cavalry Corps and began agitating to make the cavalry an independent strike force rather than a handmaiden of the infantry.
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When Sheridan appeared, wrote Colonel Horace Porter, a Grant aide-de-camp who witnessed the tempest, Meade “went at him hammer and tongs, accusing him of blunders, and charging him with not making a proper disposition of his troops, and letting the cavalry block the advance of the infantry.” Sheridan, with his notoriously hot Irish temper, retorted that Meade had caused the problems by countermanding his orders. Because of Meade's interference, Sheridan charged, the troops had gotten mixed up on Brock Road, and Wilson's division had been exposed to great danger.

The men were shouting at one another. Sheridan burst out, “[I] could whip [Jeb] Stuart if [you] would only let me, but since [you] insisted on giving the cavalry directions without consulting or even notifying me, [you] could henceforth command the Cavalry Corp himself”; Sheridan would not issue another command. At that, he stormed out of Meade's tent.

Outraged by Sheridan's insubordination, Meade stalked over to Grant's headquarters, where he heatedly recounted the argument. Observing Meade's and Grant's respective demeanors, Porter noted, “The excitement of the one was in singular contrast with the calmness of the other.” When Meade repeated what Sheridan had said about whipping Stuart if given the chance, Grant replied, “Did Sheridan say that? Well, he generally knows what he is talking about. Let him start right out and do it.”
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Grant's reaction undoubtedly disappointed Meade, who was weary of Sheridan's stubborn insistence on a larger role for his Cavalry Corps. But Meade understood that he had lost this battle and that Grant had taken Sheridan's side. An hour later, Sheridan received his orders: