This Great Struggle (42 page)

Aside from the increasing brutality of the war due to Confederate reaction to black soldiers and the resulting breakdown of the exchange system, the conflict had a momentum of its own in moving toward increasing destructiveness. Each side would show itself in 1864 and 1865 even more willing to destroy the property of enemy civilians than had been the case the year before, as the citizens of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and Columbia, South Carolina, along with many others, were to experience. Guerrilla warfare was another aspect of the conflict that tended to increase its violence and decrease restraint. As Confederate fortunes waned and more of the South came under Union control, guerrilla activity increased. The guerrillas hid among the civilian population and drew their sustenance from it, thus making it a target of Union retaliation. Guerrillas were also more likely to ignore the laws and customs of war, as when Confederate guerrilla leader William Quantrill and his men massacred the male population of the Unionist Kansas town of Lawrence. By the final weeks of the war, guerrillas and even regular Confederate cavalry harassing Sherman’s advance through the Carolinas were routinely murdering Union soldiers who fell into their hands.

PREPARATIONS AND PLANS FOR THE 1864 CAMPAIGN

Leaders on both sides knew that the coming campaigns would require the largest armies they could possibly raise. For the Confederacy this simply meant continued enforcement of its conscription law, which included the indefinite extension of every serving Confederate soldier’s term of service. On the Union side it was more complicated. The system of raising new troops continued, with local recruiting quotas and the threat of conscription to follow if districts did not make their quotas. The special problem for the Union was that it was still committed to honoring its contracts with the soldiers who in the spring and summer of 1861 had enlisted for three-year terms. Those men’s terms would expire during the campaigning season of 1864, and they made up nearly half the Union army and were among its best and most experienced troops. The Union could not afford to lose all or even most of them, but neither Lincoln nor Congress would ever have approved the Confederate expedient of simply extending all terms for the duration of the war.

The only solution was to persuade the veterans, who could no longer have any illusions about what war and soldiering meant, to reenlist voluntarily. For that purpose, the government offered a number of inducements. Any man who reenlisted received a four-hundred-dollar bounty in addition to whatever bounty his home state and town were offering for recruits at the time. He would also receive a thirty-day furlough as well as an extra chevron on his uniform sleeve, marking him as a “veteran volunteer.” If a specified percentage of a given regiment reenlisted, that regiment could keep its organization and its regimental number. That last provision added group solidarity as a motivating factor and also supplied an additional motivation for officers to encourage their men to reenlist since only through the survival of the regiment could the officers keep their commissions.

Ultimately a very high percentage of veterans in the Union’s western armies—the Army of the Tennessee, the Army of the Cumberland, and the Army of the Ohio, clustered near Chattanooga under Sherman’s command— chose to reenlist. Among these seasoned and confident western soldiers, reenlistment rates approached 100 percent, a testimony to the Union fighting man’s devotion to see the Union preserved and slavery abolished. By this time, Union soldiers clearly understood that preserving the Union and ending slavery were one and the same. Yet, while many may have enlisted in 1861 bent on nothing but preserving the Union, those reenlisting in 1863 and 1864 knew that they were fighting for the cause of emancipation.

Within the Army of the Potomac, where soldiers had experienced a procession of dismal commanders and much less success, reenlistments ran about half that rate. New levies, often composed of the worst offscourings of the slums and dockyards, would have to make up the difference within the Union’s fighting force in Virginia.

When Grant assumed overall command of the Union armies, Sherman urged him to maintain his headquarters in the western theater, correctly pointing out that that region had been and would continue to be the scene of the war’s really decisive fighting. Grant, however, was far more politically astute than Sherman would ever be, and he recognized that politics required him to go east and pitch his headquarters tent with the Army of the Potomac. Northern public opinion expected it, counting on Grant to be the man who would finally whip Lee, and only by staying in Virginia could Grant neutralize political pressures on the operation of the Army of the Potomac, pressures that would, if left unchecked, allow Lee to use the politicians’ fears for Washington to disrupt Union arrangements—as the wily Confederate had done before.

Grant thus would accompany the Army of the Potomac, which would remain under Meade’s command, somewhat to that general’s own surprise. As Grant explained to Meade before the campaign started, his army’s objective was to be Lee’s army—not Richmond or any other strategic location. “Wherever Lee goes, you will go also.” In Grant’s reckoning, once Lee’s army was destroyed, he could have all the strategic locations he wanted. Yet the Army of the Potomac would march toward Richmond nevertheless not because the city itself was Grant’s chief objective but in order to force Lee to stand and fight. In Grant’s scheme of things, Richmond was to serve the purpose of an anvil. The Army of the Potomac would be the hammer that would pound Lee’s army.

But Grant’s plan for the spring and summer of 1864 called for much more than just another On-to-Richmond campaign. While the Army of the Potomac advanced to hammer Lee against Richmond, two smaller Union armies would threaten the Rebel capital simultaneously from both east and west, forcing Lee to divide his attention and possibly his army. To the northwest of Richmond, Grant’s orders called for General Franz Sigel to lead a new Army of the Shenandoah up the valley of that name, threatening the breadbasket of Virginia and potentially its direct line of communications with the trans-Appalachian states. At the same time, Grant wanted General Benjamin Butler to lead his Army of the James up the river of that name to approach Richmond from the east, posing an immanent threat to that city both directly and by threatening its rail connections to the Deep South through the town of Petersburg, twenty-five miles to the south.

Nor were Grant’s plans for success in 1864 limited to the narrow and perennially deadlocked fringe of the continent between the Appalachians and the Atlantic. West of the mountains lay Grant’s old command, the Military Division of the Mississippi, now under Sherman. Grant’s most trusted lieutenant was to lead the combined armies of the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Ohio, one hundred thousand strong, in a campaign across north Georgia from Dalton toward Atlanta with the assigned goal of hammering the Confederacy’s Army of Tennessee in the same way Meade, under Grant’s direct supervision, would be pounding the Army of Northern Virginia. As in Virginia, Grant planned for the trans-Appalachian theater a secondary campaign that could distract and weaken the Confederate army there while Sherman went in for the kill. General Nathaniel P. Banks, commanding the Department of the Gulf, was to lead his army, including two corps of Grant’s old Vicksburg veterans, in a drive to capture the Confederacy’s last major Gulf Coast port at Mobile, Alabama. When Grant explained to Lincoln his plans for the coming summer’s campaign, the president grasped the concept at once and summed it up in one of his colorful midwestern expressions: “Those not skinning can hold a leg.”

The great nineteenth-century Prussian general Helmut von Moltke once quipped that no plan survives contact with the enemy but is said to have added that luck is the residue of good planning. So it turned out for Grant in 1864, but not before a number of disappointments altered his plan and made his task more difficult. Banks, Butler, and Sigel were the purest of political generals, chosen by Lincoln at the outset of the war not so much because he thought they could win victories—though he hoped they might—as because he believed he needed to secure the support of their constituencies. Those constituencies were northeastern Republicans, northeastern Democrats, and German immigrants, respectively.

Hitherto in the war each of these three political generals had given ample evidence of his military incompetence, but Grant, always sensitive to Lincoln’s political needs, chose to try to work with them. He hoped that Sigel would finally make good use of his prewar training in the Prussian army to wage a successful campaign that would at least neutralize the Shenandoah Valley, but the hapless German general blundered to defeat there in the May 15 Battle of New Market, at which the corps of cadets of the Virginia Military Institute fought as a battalion in the victorious Confederate army commanded by former U.S. vice president and 1860 southern Democratic presidential candidate John C. Breckinridge.

Butler’s failure was even more disappointing because his campaign had offered so much more potential. The approach from the east via the James River had always been the best way to get an army to the vicinity of Richmond. Even McClellan, obtuse as he could be, had seen that much, although he had missed the political and strategic problems that could beset a Union general who made that route his main approach to the Rebel capital. Grant hoped that with Sigel taking the Shenandoah Valley away from Confederate strategists and Meade, under Grant’s direct supervision, keeping Lee busy, Butler could strike a blow at the seat of both the rebellious government and Confederate supplies in Virginia that would at least hamstring Lee in the midst of his fight to the death against the Army of the Potomac. Grant also hoped that Butler might turn out to be the kind of politician in uniform that he had encountered in the western theater with his Army of the Tennessee, where Democratic politician John A. Logan and Republican politician Frank Blair were competent and hard-hitting military commanders, and, just in case Butler lacked military expertise, Grant made sure his two top subordinates, Tenth Corps commander Quincy Gillmore and Eighteenth Corps commander William F. Smith, were highly regarded professionals to whom Grant hoped Butler would leave much of the direction of the operation.

Each of Grant’s hopes for the James River Campaign was dashed in succession. Butler seemed to see the campaign as his ticket to military glory and insisted on being a hands-on commander. In that role he performed as ineptly as top brass on both sides had every reason to fear from their political generals by this stage of the war, and Gillmore and Smith were no help with their hesitant, confused, and conflicting counsels.

After throwing a serious scare into the Confederate government by approaching an almost defenseless Richmond and then threatening what would have been an equally devastating blow against Petersburg, Butler hesitated long enough to allow the Rebels to pull together a scratch force scarcely more than half the size of his own thirty-thousand-man Army of the James. This force was under the command of Pierre G. T. Beauregard, recently transferred to Virginia after successfully defending Charleston, South Carolina. Beauregard attacked Butler’s army and drove it back into a peninsula called Bermuda Hundred, formed by the confluence of the Appomattox and James rivers. Butler was safe there, only a few miles from Richmond and its vital southern rail connection, and his army could receive its supplies via the river, but the Confederates were able to build a relatively short line of fortifications across the neck of Bermuda Hundred and keep Butler bottled up there, where his army had no chance for further offensive operations and posed relatively little threat to the Confederacy.

In the western theater Grant’s plan to get his subordinate generals either to skin or to hold a leg, as Lincoln put it, met with even more complete failure. Early that spring, before Grant became general in chief, Banks, with the approval of Lincoln and Halleck, had taken his army up the Red River into the heart of Louisiana. The authorities in Washington hoped Banks’s expedition would present the French emperor Napoleon III with the sobering prospect of an impending Union presence in Texas and thus prompt him to curtail his current expansionist adventure in Mexico, where French troops were working on establishing a puppet regime. The Union government also hoped that Banks would be able to liberate large amounts of cotton, for lack of which the textile mills of the Northeast faced the prospect of idleness.

As it turned out, cotton was the only thing the expedition gained. After a slow progress up the Red, Banks blundered to defeat at the Battle of Mansfield and then retreated back down the river, nearly losing Porter’s gunboat fleet to falling water levels as the Confederates diverted much of the river’s flow for that purpose. A resourceful army officer with experience moving felled logs down Wisconsin streams designed wing dams that raised the river’s depth in the channel enough to allow the valuable ironclads to escape, but by the time Banks returned to the Mississippi it was too late to launch a campaign against Mobile or to return the corps of Sherman’s army that he had borrowed. Grant and Sherman were not impressed, and neither, presumably, was Napoleon III.

GRANT AND LEE IN THE VIRGINIA WILDERNESS

The failures of the political generals left Grant and Sherman to carry out the spring offensive with the Union’s two major armies without the help of the peripheral operations Grant had planned. Fortunately Grant and Sherman enjoyed a warm rapport and complete and well-founded trust in each other. Sherman later wrote to Grant describing his confidence during this campaign, “I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place, you would come, if alive.”
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On May 4, 1864, both Sherman’s army group in Georgia and Meade’s Army of the Potomac marched out of their camps, Grant accompanying the latter. The two campaigns that began that day took different shapes both because of the differing approaches of Grant and Sherman and because of the differing personalities of their opponents. Lee, combative as ever, met Meade’s army almost immediately. Grant had hoped to push rapidly through the tangled second-growth thickets of the Wilderness before making contact, but Lee met him there on May 5, not far from where the wily Rebel and Stonewall Jackson had humbled Hooker the year before. Jackson was not in the Wilderness this May, however, and neither was Hooker.