Terrible Swift Sword (37 page)

As he was leaving, Sheridan encountered the V Corps commander, Major General Gouverneur Warren, who, evidently disheartened by the rainy weather, began “speaking rather despondently of the outlook.” Sheridan was not favorably impressed.
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WHILE SHERIDAN WAS PERSUADING Grant to countermand his suspension of the offensive, Rebel forces were massing between Dinwiddie Court House and Five Forks. Lee's scouts had observed Grant's slip-slide to the left. To thwart the obvious attempt to flank his right, Lee had created a task force with all of his available cavalry,
five infantry brigades scattered throughout the Richmond-Petersburg area, and some artillery batteries. The 11,000 men were all that Lee could spare without seriously weakening his defenses.

In the same miserly spirit, Lee begrudged the task force any of his first-rate generals from the Petersburg lines. Instead, he assigned the command to Major General George Pickett, the war's embittered doyen of futility. Since his division's suicidal attack at Gettysburg, Pickett had served in relatively quiet sectors. Now, with midnight about to toll for the Confederacy, the job of foiling possibly the war's decisive flanking movement had fallen to the jaded career officer.

Under Pickett's command were 5,500 cavalrymen from the divisions of William H. F. “Rooney” Lee and Fitzhugh Lee—Robert E. Lee's son and nephew, respectively—and Thomas Rosser. Absent was Wade Hampton, inheritor of Jeb Stuart's mantle, who had gone to South Carolina with a division of dismounted cavalrymen to find fresh horses. The 5,000 infantrymen belonged to five brigades, three from Pickett's division and two from Major General Bushrod Johnson's division. About five hundred artillerymen completed the contingent.

Half starved, rail thin, and many of them barefoot, the Rebels hardly seemed a match for Sheridan's well-equipped troopers and two nearby infantry corps—comprising more than 40,000 Union troops.
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THE RAIN STOPPED DURING the night, and a brilliant spring day dawned on March 31. Neither Sheridan nor Pickett had an opportunity to enjoy it.

Major Henry Young's scouts reported enemy troops massing at Five Forks. Sheridan sent Brigadier General Wesley Merritt toward the crossroads with Devin's division and a brigade from Crook's division—in all, about 4,000 troopers. Pickett's troops attacked and drove Crook's and Devin's cavalrymen back over the muddy fields toward Dinwiddie.

Sheridan reacted by launching a counterattack that stopped Pickett before he could reach the rear of nearby V Corps. Rallying his milling cavalrymen, Sheridan led them to new defensive positions on the Courthouse Road a few miles north of Dinwiddie. Sheridan's dismounted troopers slowed Pickett's advance while falling back to a succession of barricades.

All day long, Sheridan and Pickett battled, with first one side and then the other gaining temporary advantage, but with the Rebels steadily driving back Sheridan's cavalrymen. Weirdly, Union bands on a nearby hill serenaded the combatants “with gay and patriotic airs” as they slaughtered one another. Horace Porter of Grant's staff encountered a band “playing ‘Nellie Bly' as cheerfully as if furnishing music for a country picnic” as bullets whistled by and exploding shells sprayed shrapnel.

Sheridan summoned Custer's division from its thankless duty of prodding the Cavalry Corps's wagon train through endless quagmires. Custer responded with his customary “vim,” wrote Sheridan's adjutant-general, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Newhall. While a brigade of Crook's division held off the Rebels, Custer's men threw up breastworks of rails on a hill and brought up the field artillery—just in time to repel an enemy lunge toward Dinwiddie.

Sheridan ordered new fieldworks thrown up just three-quarters of a mile north of Dinwiddie. Here he would make his stand defending the crossroads.

“All was life, activity, and industry,” as the men dug in, wrote Major Henry Tremain of Crook's staff. “Sheridan seemed to have infused his own indomitable spirit among his subordinates. . . . . If the enemy could not be conquered today at least he must be overawed.”

In short order, the Yankees repelled a cavalry attack, and Sheridan, confident that “we were now in good shape,” believed his men could drive away whatever the Confederates threw at him.
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It wasn't long in coming. Just before sunset, Pickett's infantrymen emerged from the woods.

Sheridan, Merritt, Custer, and Sheridan's staff officers rode along the barricades, encouraging the men. “Our enthusiastic reception showed that they were determined to stay,” Sheridan wrote.

The advancing Rebels soldiers showed their appreciation by firing on Sheridan's party with their far-ranging muskets, emptying several saddles and wounding a
New York Herald
correspondent. “Mud and bullets flew,” wrote Newhall. Meanwhile, Sheridan's troopers lay behind the barricades, holding their fire until the Confederates entered the killing range of their Spencer rifles.

As Custer galloped away from Sheridan's side, he was summoned back by shouts. “General! General!” Sheridan called. “You understand? I want you to
give
it to them!” Custer replied, “Yes, yes, I'll give it to them,” before riding to his men.

The waiting Yankees were impressed by the Rebel infantrymen's “air of abandon, a sort of devil-may-care swing in their long stride as they advanced over the field, that was rather disheartening to men that did not want to get shot,” wrote Merritt.

“Then they opened,” Sheridan wrote, “Custer's repeating rifles pouring out such a shower of lead that nothing could stand up against it.” The repeaters were “puffing out their cartridges like Roman candles,” Newhall observed.

The Rebels retreated to the woods but did not withdraw toward Five Forks. The two veteran forces stubbornly fought on, neither willing to give way. Pickett's determined infantrymen pushed Sheridan's troopers backward, almost to the courthouse in Dinwiddie, but they did not break through.
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BELIEVING THAT PICKETT WOULD remain on the field and resume his attempt to capture Dinwiddie the next morning, Sheridan saw “a rare opportunity,” as did Grant when he received Sheridan's report: Lee's men had ventured outside Petersburg's defenses and were now vulnerable to attack. “If I am cut off from the Army of the Potomac, [Pickett's force] is cut off from Lee's army, and not a man in it ought ever be allowed to get back to Lee,” Sheridan told Porter. “We at last have drawn the enemy's infantry out of its fortifications, and this is our chance to attack it.”

Sheridan sent Porter to Grant to request VI Corps once more. VI Corps was too far away to assist Sheridan, Grant told Porter. He telegraphed his aide's report to Major General George Meade. The possibilities excited Meade, who recommended that V Corps move quickly to “smash up” Pickett's rear. Grant agreed. Warren's corps was to report to Sheridan, along with Brigadier General Ranald Mackenzie's 1,000 cavalrymen from the Army of the James. Sent at 10:05 p.m., Grant's message to Sheridan added that V Corps ought to reach him by midnight.

There being no sign of Warren's men at midnight, or at 3 a.m. on April 1, Sheridan began to doubt that V Corps would arrive at Dinwiddie in time to be of any use. Sleepless and chafing at the delay, Sheridan sent a message to Warren, whom he believed to be behind the Rebels and practically on their flank. “I will hold on here. Possibly they may attack Custer at daylight; if so, attack instantly and in full force; attack at daylight anyhow.”
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At daybreak, as fog hugged the ground, a division from Warren's V Corps, commanded by Major General Romeyn Ayres, reached Sheridan. Hoping that during the night Warren's other two divisions had gotten behind the Rebels, Sheridan ordered Devin's and Custer's divisions forward. The Yankee cavalrymen discovered that Pickett's men were already falling back toward Five Forks. Sheridan, however, continued to believe that Warren's two other divisions would attack Pickett's rear at any moment.

But there was no attack, because the rest of V Corps was miles away. When he received Grant's order, Warren had immediately sent Ayres's division to Sheridan. Warren's other two divisions, under Major Generals Charles Griffin and Samuel Crawford, did not reach Pickett's left rear until 7 a.m.—when the Rebels had already gotten past them and were streaming into Five Forks.
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WHILE SHERIDAN'S CAVALRYMEN WERE struggling to stop Pickett's task force from overrunning them and capturing Dinwiddie on March 31, V Corps was having an even worse day. Leading the Army of the Potomac's march westward toward the right flank of Lee's Petersburg defenses, Warren's corps tried to seize White Oak Road, one of the highways that met at Five Forks.

Confederate major general Bushrod Johnson's division was ready for him and launched a furious attack—under the eyes of Robert E. Lee, who had come from Petersburg to watch—that broke two of Warren's three divisions, commanded by Ayres and Crawford.

Shocked by the sight of his corps in full retreat, Warren had seized the colors of a Pennsylvania regiment and, aided by his staff officers, rallied them behind his only intact division, Griffin's. Griffin held, and with the aid of II Corps, regained the ground lost earlier in the day. Johnson's Rebels ran out of steam and withdrew. Warren made his camp at the place where the fighting stopped, five miles east of Five Forks—near the left rear of Pickett's force.

That night, Grant, in a note to Meade, questioned Warren's management of his troops that day. “I don't understand why Warren permitted his corps to be fought in detail when Ayres pushed forward. He should have sent other troops to their support.”
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Grant had been dissatisfied with what he perceived to be Warren's dilatoriness since Spotsylvania Court House, when he had instructed Meade, “If Warren fails to attack promptly, send Humphreys to command his corps and relieve him.” It hadn't been necessary. In his
Personal Memoirs
, Grant said that while Warren was intelligent and perceptive, he anticipated every conceivable threat and prepared to meet them all.
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No one doubted Warren's intelligence and peculiar genius. At sixteen, he had entered the US Military Academy, graduating second in the Class of 1850. During the decade before the war, Warren became one of the army's top cartographers; among his accomplishments was a map conflating all the transcontinental railroad surveys.

Warren's talent for identifying key terrain features may have saved the Union army at Gettysburg, where, as chief engineer for the Army of the Potomac, he recognized the tactical importance of Little Round Top and rushed troops there minutes before the Rebels arrived. Meade rewarded him with temporary command of II Corps when Winfield Scott Hancock was wounded, then gave him permanent command of V Corps during the Overland Campaign.
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APRIL I, 1865–FIVE FORKS—Grant assigned Porter to ride with Sheridan all day, ordering him to send Grant updates every half hour or so. This April Fool's Day promised to be a memorable one, with Sheridan and Warren seemingly poised like millstones to crush Pickett's army between them. If all went according to plan, Lee would have no choice but to abandon Petersburg.

Porter met Sheridan at about 11 a.m. Sheridan had slept little but was sharp and active. The Rebels had withdrawn to their entrenchments at Five Forks, he told Porter, irritably adding that two of Warren's divisions had finally reached the area, though not Warren himself, who had been expected since midnight but had stopped to rebuild a bridge. As if on cue, Warren rode up a few minutes later and reported to Sheridan.

Never one to waste time lamenting a lost opportunity, Sheridan sketched a new battle plan in the dirt with his saber. While Sheridan's dismounted cavalrymen blazed away at the Rebel front line with their Spencer repeaters and harried the Confederate right flank, Warren would move his corps into position near Pickett's left flank. When Warren's men were ready, V Corps and the Cavalry Corps would both attack. If the plan worked, Pickett's force would be trapped and destroyed.
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Sheridan urged Warren to move quickly. But Warren lived up to his reputation for acting at his own deliberate pace. He further annoyed Sheridan by sending his staff officers to inform his division commanders of the battle plan rather than seeing to the task personally—as Sheridan would have done. Warren rode off.
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After observing Warren's conduct the day before on White Oak Road, Grant, too, was beset by fresh doubts about his general. About an hour after Sheridan and Warren met, Lieutenant Colonel Orville Babcock of Grant's staff—later, President Grant's private secretary—rode up to Sheridan with a remarkable message from the general in chief. Sheridan was authorized to relieve Warren if, said Grant, V Corps would be better served by one of its division commanders. Sheridan remarked that he hoped he would not have to take that action.
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