Terrible Swift Sword (38 page)

When three hours passed without any gunfire coming from the Rebel left signifying that V Corps was attacking, Sheridan rode out to find Warren. The head of Warren's column was just then appearing at Gravelly Run Church, a half mile from the Confederate left flank—and just two miles from its starting point. Sheridan found Warren sitting under a tree making a sketch in the dirt. “I was disappointed that more of the corps was not already up,” Sheridan wrote, “and as the precious minutes went by without any apparent effort to hurry the troops on to the field, this disappointment grew into disgust.”

Sheridan told Warren that his cavalrymen might run out of ammunition before Warren's men attacked. He added that “the sun would go down before the battle could be begun,” giving Lee time to send troops from Petersburg, just three miles away, to strike Sheridan's rear. Warren displayed “decided apathy,” Sheridan angrily observed, “and he remarked with indifference that ‘Bobby Lee was always getting people into trouble.'”

It took every ounce of self-restraint for Sheridan to refrain from giving Warren a tongue-lashing. But he did break protocol by complaining to his staff that Warren, fearing defeat, evidently did not want to fight.
²⁶

Sheridan's staff officers watched Warren's show of coolness with raised eyebrows. “We remarked to each other that there would be a deuce of a row if the Fifth Corps was not ready to move out soon,” Newhall wrote.
²⁷

More time passed. Porter watched Sheridan's impatience grow. “He made every possible appeal for promptness, dismounted from his horse, paced up and down, struck the clenched fist of one hand against the palm of the other, and fretted like a caged tiger,” wrote Porter. At one point Sheridan exclaimed, “This battle must be fought and won before the sun goes down.” At 4 p.m., V Corps was finally ready.

 

“HOLD FIVE FORKS AT all hazards,” read Lee's orders to Pickett. “Protect road to Ford's Depot and prevent Union forces from striking the Southside Railroad.” Pickett's five infantry brigades were bookended by the two Lees' dismounted cavalrymen and supported by ten guns. Pickett was as ready to meet a Union attack as he would ever be.

But as the hours passed without a Yankee assault on his entrenchments, Pickett became convinced that there would be no attack that day. Fitzhugh Lee thought the same, believing that the Dinwiddie fight had disrupted Sheridan's plans. And so Pickett and Fitzhugh Lee decided to go to a shad bake.
²⁸

Major General Thomas Rosser had invited Pickett and Lee to his camp a mile and a half north of Five Forks at Hatcher's Run, where Rosser's cavalry division was in reserve. The shad were running, and Rosser had caught a mess of them on the Nottoway River with a borrowed seine. At 2 p.m. the officers sat down to feast on the shad prepared by Rosser's commissary officer and to imbibe some of Rosser's choice spirits.

Couriers brought Pickett updates from Five Forks, where no attack had yet occurred but where enemy movements appeared to be pointing toward one. Pickett, however, elected to remain at the shad bake. Sergeant J. B. Flippin, carrying a message from Colonel Thomas Munford to Fitzhugh Lee, found Pickett and Lee sitting under a tent fly with a bottle of whiskey or brandy. Pickett instructed Flippin to tell Munford “to do the best [he] could.”
²⁹

About 4 p.m., Pickett handed one of Rosser's couriers a note to carry to Five Forks. The messenger was still in sight when bluecoats suddenly appeared and captured him. Then, a line of Union infantry emerged from the woods and crossed the road. The party was over.
³⁰

 

WARREN'S 12,000 MEN IN three divisions—his effective force down 3,000 from three days earlier—advanced on Pickett's left flank in double and triple battle lines. The 1,000 cavalrymen from the Army of the James led by Mackenzie, who was as lethally aggressive as Sheridan and Custer, roved V Corps's right flank and scattered Brigadier General William Roberts's Rebel cavalry brigade on White Oak Road.

A shower of artillery fire and the zip-zip of musket balls greeted Ayres's Yankee infantrymen as they advanced on the Rebels' upturned left flank through dense woods laced by ravines. To Ayres's right, Crawford's division neared the Confederate rear, where it was to make a sharp left turn after crossing White Oak Road, remaining in contact with Ayres's right. Behind the two divisions was Griffin's division in reserve. Crawford's division, however, mistakenly pushed several hundred yards past White Oak Road before wheeling left. A gap opened up between his men and Ayres's.

When they heard V Corps go into action, 7,000 of Sheridan's dismounted cavalrymen rose up and launched their frontal assault. Ayres's regiments charged into a swarm of Rebels, whose musketry shredded the Yankees' ranks. Not fully recovered from their drubbing by Bushrod Johnson's Rebels the previous day, Ayres's men began to waver.

Fearing that the attack might stall, Sheridan snatched up his two-starred, swallow-tailed standard and rode into the midst of Ayres's flagging division, swinging his clenched fist and shouting, “Smash 'em! Smash 'em!” He rode along the front of the lines, encouraging each regiment. Rebels poured gunfire into the attackers from an angle in their earthworks.

The Rebels turned their firepower on Sheridan and his escort. A ball pierced Sheridan's flag. A color sergeant went down, dead. A quartermaster was wounded, and staff officers tumbled to the ground when their horses were shot. “Come on, men!” Porter heard Sheridan cry. “Go at 'em with a will! Move on at a clean jump, or you'll not catch one of them!”
³¹

In the woods, Sheridan encountered Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain, whose brigade of Griffin's division had stormed Bushrod Johnson's positions the day before when Johnson routed Ayres's and Crawford's divisions. Chamberlain had been sent from Griffin's reserve division to plug the gap between Ayres and Crawford.

Sheridan was pleased to see Chamberlain leading his men. “By God, that's what I want to see—general officers at the front!” Sheridan exclaimed to the hero of Little Round Top, who was in great pain from recent battle wounds. Sheridan told Chamberlain to take charge of all the infantrymen scattered throughout the area and to fill the space between Ayres and Crawford. Chamberlain rode among the men, firing them up.
³²

Porter saw a man struck in the neck by a bullet fall to the ground, blood spurting from his jugular. “I'm killed!” he yelled. Sheridan rode up and said, “You're not hurt a bit! Pick up your gun, man, and move right on to the front.” Incredibly, his words inspired the soldier to snatch up his musket. He rushed forward a dozen steps before falling dead.
³³

Sheridan spurred Rienzi over the angled earthworks on the Rebel left and landed amid a group of startled Confederates, who threw down their muskets in surrender. They asked Sheridan where they should go.

He pointed to the rear. “Get right along now,” Sheridan said. “Drop your guns; you'll never need them any more. You'll all be safe over there. Are there any more of you? We want every one of you fellows.”

 

ALONG PICKETT'S FRONT LINE, Devin's and Custer's cavalrymen poured over the Rebel earthworks and seized the enemy's guns.

Pickett's task force crumbled and broke, although some Rebels valiantly attempted to re-form on Ford's Road to bar the Yankees from going around Robert E. Lee's right flank and entering Petersburg. Correspondent Alfred Townsend of the
New York Herald
described the desperate charge of a shattered Rebel regiment that came on “like the surge from the fog, depleted, but determined.” Repulsed and forced into a hollow square, the Confederates fought until most of them fell. The survivors fled.

Custer's and Devin's men rounded up prisoners on the front line, as Ayres's troops collected captives on the Confederate left flank. Griffin, Crawford, and Mackenzie tried to intercept the retreating Rebels flowing westward through the woods.

More than 5,000 Confederates were captured, on top of Pickett's losses of several hundred killed or wounded. Just half of Lee's task force escaped. As the “drones of silent ‘Johnnies'” were led into captivity, the jubilant Yankees badgered them with shouts and catcalls.

 

SHERIDAN'S DISSATISFACTION WITH WARREN now reached its acme. Sheridan had rallied Ayres's division of Warren's corps when it lost heart, and he had ordered Chamberlain's brigade of Griffin's division to fill a gap, but nowhere had he seen Warren. Was he even in the battle? Sheridan wondered. Two staff officers sent by Sheridan to tell Warren to collar the wayward Crawford and send him to Ayres's aid could not find him. Sheridan had to instead bring up the rest of Griffin's reserve division.

Warren, however, had chased after Crawford's division when he saw that it had gone off course and had managed to turn it and attack the Rebel rear. During the fight, Warren's horse was shot, and two officers near him were killed. Crawford's division rolled over a Rebel brigade and captured hundreds of Confederates as they streamed west.

Warren sent Colonel H. C. Bankhead, his inspector general, to inform Sheridan of his whereabouts and to tell him that Crawford's division had gotten between Pickett and Petersburg. But by then, Sheridan was livid.

“By God, sir, tell General Warren he wasn't in that fight!” Sheridan exploded to Bankhead. The shocked colonel asked Sheridan if he could write down what he had just said. “Take it down, sir!” Sheridan snapped. “Tell him by God he was not at the front.”

A short time later, Sheridan informed Warren that he was relieved from duty and that he must report to Grant's headquarters for new orders. Sheridan appointed Griffin to command V Corps.

Warren rode to Sheridan's headquarters to request that Sheridan reconsider his decision. Sheridan retorted, “Reconsider? Hell! I don't reconsider my determinations.”
³⁴

 

IN HIS BATTLE REPORT, Sheridan asserted that Warren “did not exert himself to get up his corps as rapidly as he might have done, and his manner gave me the impression that he wished the sun to go down before dispositions for the attack could be completed.” This was unfair; Warren might have been slow in joining Sheridan and getting into position, but he never exhibited an unwillingness to fight.

Warren also “did not exert himself to inspire” Ayres's division when it appeared to lose heart, claimed Sheridan. Warren said that his presence was never requested, and that he thought it best to remain where couriers from all of his divisions could easily find him. For his part, Grant was “very sorry” that Warren had to be relieved and “regretted still more that [he] had not long before taken occasion to assign him to another field of duty.”
³⁵

During the years that followed, when Grant was commanding general and then president, Warren's requests for a court of inquiry were routinely denied. The question of whether Sheridan was justified in dismissing Warren, a man with an otherwise unblemished record, remained unanswered. No longer deemed a fit combat leader, Warren returned to the Army Corps of Engineers, where he built bridges and wrote prolifically. Finally, in 1879, Warren got his hearing.

After sifting through shelves of testimony and depositions, the military court in November 1882 exonerated Warren of the principal charge against him—that he had neglected his duties at Five Forks. But the court also found that he had not managed his command effectively, either at Five Forks or during the White Oak Road battle the previous day. The verdict satisfied no one. Warren had died three months before the findings' release. And Sheridan grumpily described the findings as “more in the nature of apologies than in the annunciation of the facts as shown in the evidence.”
³⁶

 

JOSHUA CHAMBERLAIN, WHO HAD never served with Sheridan before Five Forks, wrote, “We had had a taste of his style of fighting, and we liked it. . . . . Sheridan
does not entrench. He pushes on, carrying his flank and rear with him—rushing, flashing, smashing. . . . . He shows the power of a commander—inspiring both confidence and fear.”
³⁷

After the battle Porter told Sheridan that he had exposed himself more than Porter believed a corps commander should—to which Sheridan replied, “I have never in my life taken a command into battle, and had the slightest desire to come out alive unless I won.”
³⁸

Exhausted by the day's fighting, Sheridan stretched out on the ground before a fire, his head propped on a saddle. Sylvanus Cadwallader of the
New York Herald
sat beside him, writing his newspaper report of the battle—with Sheridan's editorial assistance.

When Porter rode off to Grant's headquarters, he observed that along the clogged roads, corduroyed in places with captured muskets, “everybody was riotous over the victory.” Arriving at Grant's headquarters, Porter discovered that Grant and his staff had not yet learned of Sheridan's great triumph.

Grant and most of his staff were sitting before a blazing fire when Porter began shouting that Pickett had been beaten. Everyone “but the imperturbable general-in-chief” began exclaiming with joy. “For some minutes there was a bewildering state of excitement, and officers fell to grasping hands, shouting and hugging each other like schoolboys. It meant the beginning of the end, the reaching of the ‘last ditch,'” Porter happily noted.

Forgetting army etiquette, Porter clapped Grant on the back, “to his no little astonishment.” Grant disappeared into his tent and began writing out dispatches. He emerged to announce that he had just issued orders for an immediate all-out assault on Petersburg.