Terrible Swift Sword (21 page)

Grant's second recommendation was George Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac. “With General Meade in command . . . . I would have every confidence that all the troops within the military division would be used to the very best advantage,” Grant wrote to Lincoln. If Meade were appointed, Grant proposed that Major General Winfield Scott Hancock be given Meade's present command.
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When Meade learned that Sheridan was on his way to Washington to command the new army, he demanded to know why he had not been accepted; Grant had promised him the position. Grant told him that Lincoln feared the public might misconstrue Meade's selection to mean the administration disapproved of his management of the Army of the Potomac. “I believe Grant is honest and would not deceive me, but I think there is something more than is acknowledged,” Meade wrote to his wife.
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War Secretary Stanton believed that Sheridan, at the age of thirty-three, was “too young” to command an army. To allay Stanton's concerns, Grant proposed that General Hunter, a robust sixty-two years old, become the division's titular commander and administrator, while Sheridan led the troops in the field. General William Sherman, campaigning in Georgia, applauded Sheridan's appointment. “He will worry Early to death,” Sherman told Grant. “Let us give those southern fellows all the fighting they want, and when they are tired we can tell them we are just warming to the work.”

On August 5, Sheridan met with Lincoln and Stanton in Washington. Lincoln told Sheridan that since Grant had “ploughed around” his and Stanton's reservations about Sheridan's appointment by selecting him to command the “boys in the field,” they now “hoped for the best.” Stanton did not speak during their meeting with Lincoln, but when he and Sheridan left the White House, he freely discussed what he expected Sheridan to accomplish and warned him that failure would have not only military but major political consequences. It went without saying that Lincoln's reelection hung in the balance.

The next day, at the Union camp outside Frederick, Maryland, Hunter met with Grant, and the shared command arrangement ended before it began. Probably recognizing that it would prove too cumbersome when decisions must be made quickly, Hunter graciously bowed out. Sheridan should be able to communicate directly with army headquarters and not through an intermediary, said Hunter, adding that he also suspected that Halleck questioned his fitness for such an important command.

At their meeting hours later, Grant informed Sheridan that he was now the sole commander of the new Middle Military Division. Grant handed Sheridan the instructions he had prepared for Hunter, ordering him to concentrate his forces at Harper's Ferry. If the Rebels have moved north of the Potomac, the instructions said, cut them off and attack their rear; if they have gone south of the river, push them up the Shenandoah Valley. “Follow him [Early] to the death,” Grant wrote, while driving Confederate partisans operating in the area from their homes.

Grant raised one additional issue of surpassing importance. He ordered Sheridan to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia's primary source of food—the Shenandoah Valley's grains, produce, and livestock. As he pushed Early's army southward, Sheridan must ensure “that nothing should be left to invite the enemy to return. Take all provisions, forage, and stock wanted for the use of your command. Such as cannot be consumed, destroy.” Civilian homes must be spared, “but the people should be informed that so long as an army can subsist among them recurrences of these raids can be expected.”

Grant told Halleck that he had instructed Sheridan to relentlessly harry Early's army. “Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also. Once started up the Valley they ought to be followed until we get possession of the Virginia Central Railroad.”

Lincoln, who had seen too many generals arrive with great fanfare and depart under a cloud, insisted that Grant personally oversee the operation that he had described. The president invited Grant to look over recent dispatches from the War Department “and discover, if you can, that there is any idea in the head of any one here of . . . . or of ‘following him to the death' in any direction. I repeat to you it will neither be done nor attempted, unless you watch it every day and hour and force it.”

Lincoln was telling Grant to communicate directly with Sheridan, bypassing the War Department, which sometimes rewrote orders before sending them on.
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SHERIDAN'S NEW ARMY OF the Shenandoah, wrote Grant's biographer, William McFeely, was an “elite corps”—no green troops, no laggards. The army totaled nearly 40,000 men, the largest Union army force ever assembled in the Valley. There were three divisions of VI Corps under Major General Horatio Wright; a division of the XIX Corps, commanded by Brigadier General William Emory; Major General George Crook's West Virginia Army, along with a cavalry division under Brigadier General William Averell; and, from the Cavalry Corps, the 1st and 3rd Divisions, commanded, respectively, by Brigadier Generals Alfred Torbert and James Wilson. Brigadier General David Gregg's 2nd Division had remained with the Army of the Potomac.

Thirty thousand of the men were taken from Grant's Army of the Potomac. This surely pleased Robert E. Lee, who had counted on Early's raids forcing just such a drawdown of Union forces outside of Richmond and Petersburg. While it would not assure victory, it would buy Lee more time to counteract Grant.

 

THE CAVALRY CORPS HAD been idle during most of July, but during the last week of the month, the 1st and 2nd Divisions, cooperating with Major General Winfield Scott Hancock's II Corps, had threatened Richmond. It was a massive feint designed to lure most of Lee's army north of the James River and east of Richmond, thinning Petersburg's defenses so that Grant could attack that city. To reinforce the illusion that Richmond was the real target, Sheridan had marched his divisions back and forth over a bridge—muffling the nighttime return crossing by spreading hay and recrossing in broad daylight in full view of the Rebels—in order to create the impression of a troop buildup. The deception worked: Lee transferred all but three infantry divisions and one cavalry division north of the James to defend Richmond from the anticipated attack.

On July 27 at Darbytown outside Richmond, Sheridan's dismounted troopers repelled a combined Rebel cavalry and infantry attack as the last preparations were being made for the surprise attack at Petersburg. The assault would be preceded by the detonation of 320 kegs of gunpowder in a mine secretly dug beneath the Confederate works.

On July 30, the gunpowder kegs were ignited, killing hundreds of Confederate soldiers. But instead of pouring into Petersburg, the attacking Union troops careered into the enormous crater made by the bomb. The Rebels, after recovering from the shock of the blast, ringed the crater's rim and slaughtered the Yankees trapped in the crater. The armies settled in for a long siege.
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THE TROOPS THAT GRANT sent from eastern Virginia to rid the Shenandoah Valley of enemy units and sustenance welcomed the change of scene. They gladly left behind the hot, war-wasted lowland countryside for the cooler Shenandoah and its well-kept farms, scarcely touched by the war—at least, so far. Henry Lewis of the 6th Michigan Cavalry wrote, “To say we are pleased with our change of base would be too dull an expression—we are more than pleased.” George Stevens, a surgeon with the 77th New York Infantry in VI Corps, wrote, “The air was delightfully cool and refreshing, and it seemed as though each particular breath was laden with health and strength.” Before the troops stretched miles of orchards, fields of grain, and overflowing barns. It was indeed a land of plenty.
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Sheridan was a new, unknown quantity for everyone except Torbert's and Wilson's men. During their first weeks under his command, the West Virginians and
the VI and XIX Corps infantrymen watched him closely to form an impression of what kind of leader he would be. With his high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes, he bore a striking resemblance to a Cossack chief. His men noticed the large bump on his head behind the ears that made nearly every hat a bad fit; he found a small-brimmed civilian porkpie hat that stayed on his head.

“Nothing superfluous about him, square-shouldered, muscular, wiry to the last degree,” noted Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Newhall, Sheridan's adjutant general, “and as nearly insensible to hardship and fatigue as is consistent with humanity.” Stevens observed that the men appreciated Sheridan's visibility. “Wherever we went he was with the column, inhaling the dust, leaving the road for the teams, never a day or two days behind the rest of the army, but always riding by the side of the men.” The men also liked the simplicity of Sheridan's headquarters, with its single wall tent and three other, smaller tents, as compared to that of the Army of the Potomac, where “more than eighty six-mule teams were required to haul the baggage for the head-quarters of the army.”
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SINCE HIS JUNIOR OFFICER days in Oregon and Mississippi, Sheridan had been a devoted student of topography. Now, he had the great fortune to have as his chief engineering officer twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant John Meigs, son of Montgomery Meigs, the Union army's quartermaster general. Young Meigs, who had graduated at the top of his 1863 West Point class, was one of the army's foremost topographical experts. He had made a study of the Shenandoah's roads, landmarks, and river and stream crossings. Just as Stonewall Jackson had had the renowned cartographer Jedediah Hotchkiss as his topographical engineer, Sheridan had Meigs.

In a rundown hotel in Harper's Ferry, Meigs began tutoring Sheridan in the Valley's land features. Determined not to fail as so many of his predecessors had, Sheridan buckled down and learned what Meigs had to teach. “It has always come rather easy to learn the geography of a new section, and its important topographical features as well; the region in which I was to operate would soon be well fixed in my mind,” Sheridan wrote.
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From Harper's Ferry at its north end, where the Shenandoah River empties into the Potomac, the Valley rises 110 miles to the southwest, all the way to Staunton. Bordering it on the east are the Blue Ridge Mountains and, on the west, the Alleghenies. At its widest near Martinsburg, West Virginia, where its breadth measures forty-five miles, the Valley narrows to twenty-five miles as one travels southward on the numerous good roads. At Strasburg, forty miles south of Harper's Ferry, the broad brow of Massanutten Mountain divides the Valley into two valleys: the Luray Valley to the east and the Shenandoah to the west.

Sixteen families from York, Pennsylvania, first settled the Valley in 1732, and Quakers later followed them there. Unlike eastern Virginia's farmlands, where excessive tobacco cultivation had exhausted the soil in places, the Shenandoah, comparatively cool and temperate with soil resting on limestone beds, remained robust, producing fruit and grain and forage for the area's abundant livestock. While the Northern and Southern armies had waged war up and down the Valley, its inhabitants had largely escaped the ravages visited upon wide swaths of eastern Virginia.
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From Meigs and his maps Sheridan learned that the armies operating in the Shenandoah were highly vulnerable to flank attacks through the many gaps that honeycombed the Blue Ridge Mountains: Snicker's, Ashby's, Manassas, Chester, Thornton's, Swift Run, Brown's, and Rockfish. Through these gaps Rebel reinforcements from Richmond might enter the Valley after riding up the Virginia Central Railroad to Gordonsville.
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FOR HIS LAST ACT as West Virginia Department commander, Hunter had concentrated his troops at Halltown, near the Potomac River. Early reacted by recalling his detached units from the north side of the river, fearing that they might be cut off.
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In mid-August, Brigadier General George Custer reported the approach of about 8,000 Rebel troops toward Front Royal—reinforcements sent by Robert E. Lee to Early when he learned of the Yankee troop buildup. The new arrivals were Major General Joseph Kershaw's infantry division and Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry division, both commanded by Lieutenant General Richard Anderson. Torbert's division attacked the reinforcements and captured two battle flags before withdrawing.

Sheridan deliberately left unguarded some nearby Potomac River crossings, inviting Early to cross into Maryland so that Sheridan could attack his rear, prevent him from recrossing, and destroy his army. But Early was too savvy to fall for the ploy.
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On August 25, Early feinted toward Maryland in the hope of drawing out some of Sheridan's troops and pinning them against the Potomac River. Torbert took the bait and ran into Confederate infantry and cavalry. The Rebel force backed up Custer's Wolverine Brigade against the Potomac. Only by skillfully leapfrogging his regiments across the river under fire was Custer able to wriggle out of the tight spot.

Early's army abandoned its positions at Charlestown, south of Halltown, and pulled back to Winchester. Sheridan's troops occupied the former Rebel positions. The armies maneuvered for the next three weeks, with Opequon Creek near Winchester serving as the unofficial dividing line between them.
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HEEDING STANTON'S WARNING TO not risk battle until he was certain that he would win, Sheridan proceeded cautiously. “I could not afford to risk a disaster,”
he wrote. He moved his seven divisions like chess pieces in the lower Valley, attempting to position them to deliver a crushing blow against Early's army, while also guarding against Rebel raids into Maryland and Pennsylvania. But Early proved as adept at this game as Sheridan.