Terrible Swift Sword (36 page)

Grant had unbounded confidence in Sheridan, and he did not wish to damage their excellent relationship. His intimates knew that he admired Sheridan as a man who “would fight—always” and as “incomparably the greatest general our civil war produced.” Sheridan, in the words of one observer, had now become “the left-hand man of Grant the left-handed.” The Rebels had begun referring to him as “Sheridan the inevitable.”
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Sheridan's status assured, there remained the question of what role he would play, and herein lay a major problem. Still on the table was Grant's expectation—proposed by Sherman but unacceptable to Sheridan—that he lead the Cavalry
Corps into North Carolina, replace the erratic Hugh Judson “Kill Cavalry” Kilpatrick as Sherman's cavalry chief, and support Sherman's infantrymen as they marched north to join Grant in Virginia.

Sheridan would have none of it, and in forcefully articulating his objections, he cast his arguments in a light that he knew would appeal strongly to Grant. If he left Grant to join Sherman, Sheridan argued, the Army of the Potomac would remain stalemated before Petersburg, just as it had been these past nine months. Consequently, it would be Sherman's army, with Sheridan's cavalry in support, and not Grant's that would finally tip the scales against Robert E. Lee, driving him from Petersburg and receiving an unfair share of the credit for ending the war. But if Sheridan remained with Grant, together they could beat Lee before Sherman reached Virginia.
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Grant ended the discussion by suddenly reversing himself and telling Sheridan that he had intended all along for Sheridan to remain at Petersburg. The order to march to North Carolina had only been a “blind”—to deceive peace advocates in Washington. If Grant's planned operation against Lee's right flank failed, the peace group would make a case for negotiations. However, if the maneuver were seen simply as an attempt to close the gap with Sherman, there would be no ground for criticism. Viewed objectively, Grant's explanation strains credulity.

The upshot was that Grant wished to keep Sheridan close at hand, according to Colonel Adam Badeau, a Grant aide who witnessed the conversation. “I mean to end this business here,” Grant said. Sheridan slapped his leg and replied, “That's what I like to hear you say. Let us end the business here.” During their conversation, wrote Badeau, “the two natures struck fire from each other in the contact.”
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SHERMAN LEFT HIS ARMY in North Carolina to confer with Lincoln and Grant at City Point. At army headquarters, Sherman lobbied Grant to send Sheridan's Cavalry Corps to North Carolina.

Sheridan was with his men at their camp near the James River when he learned that Sherman was with Grant. Fearing that Grant would change his mind again and send him south, he boarded a military train to City Point. He didn't reach headquarters until nearly midnight—the locomotive jumped the rickety tracks, causing a long delay—but when he got there, Sherman and Grant were still discussing strategy.

As aggressively forthright as Sheridan, Sherman instantly proposed to Sheridan that he join his army; Sheridan just as vigorously argued against the plan. “My uneasiness made me somewhat too earnest, I fear,” Sheridan confessed, “but Grant soon mollified me” by reassuring Sheridan that the Cavalry Corps would remain with Grant.

Sherman did not give up easily. Early the next morning, he entered the sleeping Sheridan's tent and renewed his arguments. Sheridan remained unmoved; he intended to stay with the Army of the Potomac.
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THE COMBATANTS FACED ONE another across a thirty-seven-mile-long maze of Rebel trenches and breastworks sprawling across Petersburg's eastern and southern approaches. Filth and a scarcity of food had spawned appalling conditions. The cold winter weather, along with the rats, disease, and short rations in the trenches, had carved gaps in the Confederate ranks due to disability and desertion; of the 57,000 troops listed on unit rosters, no more than 35,000 were present.

After a midnight meeting with Robert E. Lee in late March, Major General John Gordon wrote that Lee recognized that his army was starving and must soon evacuate Petersburg and attempt to join Lieutenant General Joseph Johnston's army in North Carolina. But horses were dying at such a rate that the army would be unable to move half of its artillery, ammunition, and supply trains during a breakout. The alarming situation had fostered “a deep and sincere religious feeling” in Lee's army; whenever they could, the Confederates held prayer meetings.

Well they might. At least 125,000 Union troops—perhaps as many as 150,000—were arrayed against them. They were well fed, generously supplied, and growing stronger by the week. And with the arrival of spring, active operations would soon resume after a long winter of probing, indecisive actions.
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The siege had begun in June 1864, and little had changed since the bungled mine explosion and calamitous Union attack of July 30. A peace conference held on February 3 aboard a steamer anchored off Hampton Roads had yielded no agreement. The Confederates had continued to insist on independence, while Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward had not budged from demanding full restoration of the Union.
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On March 25, the day after Lincoln arrived at City Point, Gordon, whose II Corps had rolled up Sheridan's army at Cedar Creek at dawn on October 19, attacked the Union right flank at Fort Stedman. Lee had carefully planned the attack, hoping to puncture the Union lines so that he could send troops to Johnston in North Carolina.

Gordon's assault achieved complete surprise initially. His men drove the Yankees from the fort and threw the Union right flank into disarray. But Major General John Parke's IX Corps quickly closed the gap with infantry and a punishing artillery barrage that repulsed the Confederates with more than 4,000 killed, wounded, or captured, compared with 1,000 Union losses. Lee's gamble had only weakened his army.
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Lincoln had sailed to City Point to nudge things forward, as had become his habit after years of enduring generals who were seemingly loath to take the offensive.
But Grant, the antithesis of inertia, had shown the president his plan to force the Rebels from their citadel so that he could destroy them and end the war. He and his generals were cleared for action on March 29.

 

GRANT PLANNED TO SHIFT his army westward to compel Lee to further stretch his defensive lines and perhaps tempt him to send troops out of Petersburg to attack the Yankees. To achieve the latter, he would dangle Sheridan's cavalry as bait. Lee's response to these movements could offer new opportunities for Grant's army to break his lines.

V and II Corps would march westward on March 29 to Dinwiddie Court House along with Sheridan's three mounted divisions. “Push round the enemy if you can and get onto his right rear,” Grant's orders to Sheridan said, and “force him out if possible.” If the Rebels left their fortifications to attack Sheridan's 9,000 troopers, he was to “move in with your entire force in your own way,” the orders continued, while the two infantry corps marched on the enemy's rear. But if the Rebels remained in their fortifications, the Cavalry Corps would seize or destroy the last viable supply routes into Petersburg and Richmond: the Southside and Danville Railroads and the Boydton Plank Road, which passed through Dinwiddie Court House.
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The plan looked better on paper than it did on March 29, when the tens of thousands of soldiers, horses, wagons, and artillery caissons ventured onto the atrocious roads south of Petersburg. Winter frosts and spring rains had transformed them into “almost bottomless” morasses—forcing the column into adjoining fields that were even worse, pitted with “bogs and quicksands.”

“In the face of these discouragements we floundered on, however,” wrote Sheridan. Two of his cavalry divisions—commanded by Brigadier General Thomas Devin and, in a new role, Major General George Crook, recently liberated from captivity—managed by day's end to reach Dinwiddie and the Boydton Plank Road, thirteen miles south of Petersburg. George Custer's division lagged with the wagon train, which proceeded at a crawl from mudhole to mudhole, with the men sometimes having to unload and lift the wagons out of thigh-deep liquid mud.
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That night, torrential rain lashed southern Virginia. It poured down without letup for the next thirty-six hours. Brigadier General Horace Porter of Grant's staff wrote that by daylight on March 30, the roads were “sheets of water.” Pioneer units corduroyed the roads with logs and fence rails, but the wagons still sank two feet into the mire. It took fifty-six hours for a train of six hundred wagons, aided by 1,000 pioneers, to travel five miles.

“By evening of the 30th,” wrote Porter, “whole fields had become quicksand, in which the troops waded in mud above their ankles, horses sank to their bellies, and
wagons threatened to disappear altogether.” The wagon train inched along with the help of men who, using rails and poles, repeatedly lifted the wheels from the mud-holes, “the atmosphere blue with the Curses issuing from men and officers alike.” In an attempt at levity, soldiers called out to passing officers, “I say, fetch along the pontoons” and “When are the gunboats coming up?”
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Dinwiddie Court House, where Sheridan's mounted troops were to offer themselves as bait, lay near the junction of five roads that included the critical Boydton Plank supply road and the Courthouse Road, which ran north to another important crossroads at Five Forks. Sheridan and most of his staff stayed in the town's ramshackle hotel and tavern, the temporary lodgings of two young women who had fled Charleston for Petersburg and thence made their way to Dinwiddie. They asked the Yankees to fight their battle someplace where the women would not have to witness the carnage. The officers promised not to bring “red war to the doorstep of the Dinwiddie Hotel.”

As the rain poured down, the women made coffee for the Union officers, who gathered around the out-of-tune piano and belted out popular songs, munching berries. Later, they wrapped themselves in their cloaks and slept on the wood floor, using “chairs for pillows.”
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ON THE NIGHT OF March 30, Sheridan received a troubling dispatch from Grant, who had made his field headquarters in a waterlogged cornfield at Gravelly Run. “The heavy rains of today will make it impossible for us to do much until it dries up a little or we get roads around our rear repaired.” Grant instructed Sheridan to hold his position and send unneeded cavalry back to the Union right for hay and grain.
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The message acted on Sheridan like a fire bell; suspending operations was out of the question. Sheridan did not bother writing a response but called for his gray horse, Breckenridge. Plunging almost to its knees in mud at each step, Breckenridge carried Sheridan through the rainy night to Grant's headquarters. He was determined to change his commander's mind and prevent him from making “a serious mistake.”

At Gravelly Run, Sheridan found Grant's staff officers gathered around a fire. He stuck his head into Grant's tent, where Grant and his chief of staff, General John Rawlins, were discussing Grant's decision. Sheridan overheard Grant say gloomily, “Well, Rawlins, I think you had better take command.”

Sheridan beat a hasty retreat, and Grant's staff officers gathered around him, quizzing him about the situation on the left. According to Porter, who was there, Sheridan cheerfully described what he proposed to do: “I can drive in the whole cavalry force of the enemy with ease, and if an infantry force is added to my command,
I can strike out for Lee's right, and either crush it or force him to so weaken his entrenched lines that our troops in front of them can break through and march into Petersburg.”

Another officer asked him where he would obtain forage for his horses if the rain continued. “I'll haul it out, if I have to set every man in the command to corduroying roads, and corduroy every mile of them from the railroad to Dinwiddie.

“I tell you, I'm ready to strike out tomorrow and go to smashing things,” he said, pacing up and down, Porter wrote, “like a hound in [
sic
] the leash.”

Sheridan's fighting talk buoyed Grant's staff officers. “We told him that this was the kind of talk we liked to hear,” wrote Porter, and they suggested that Grant should hear it too. One of them informed Grant that Sheridan had made some interesting remarks, and Grant invited him into the tent. When the other officers attempted to follow Sheridan inside, Grant told them that he wanted to have a private conversation.

Sheridan got right to the point, urging Grant not to stop the operation. His cavalry was already in motion, Sheridan said. If the suspension took effect, Grant would “surely be ridiculed,” he said, reminding him of the scorn heaped upon Ambrose Burnside and his army when Burnside called off his “mud march” offensive in January 1863—and soon afterward was relieved of command.

Sheridan sensed that Grant was wavering and that he might have acted in haste after listening to a host of complaints about the impossibility of moving trains through the mud. He encouraged Grant to stick to his battle plan. “It needed little argument to convince him,” Sheridan wrote. His arguments and cheerful demeanor restored Grant's confidence.

“We will go on,” Grant told Sheridan and rescinded his order. Later, Grant wrote that “the spirit of confidence with which [Sheridan] was imbued” had inspired him, and “I determined to make a movement at once.”

Sheridan requested the services of VI Corps, his favorite infantry unit from the Army of the Shenandoah, for his movement on Five Forks. No, said Grant, VI Corps was needed on the right. Five Forks would have to be taken with cavalry alone.