This Great Struggle (49 page)

Throughout the remainder of the day the men of the Seventeenth Corps fought both front and rear, leaping from one side of their breastworks to the other to direct their fire against whichever threat seemed most pressing at the moment. Only when the Confederates succeeded in achieving a simultaneous coordination of their attacks were they able to push the stubborn Federals on the left of the Seventeenth Corps out of their breastworks, while the corps’ center and right held firm. The left pivoted back so that the corps’ line formed an angle with its apex on a key piece of high ground the soldiers called the bald hill. The focus of repeated desperate Confederate assaults, the Union’s hilltop position held.

A mile north of the bald hill, Confederate attackers made use of a brush-choked railroad cut to penetrate and break the lines of the Fifteenth Corps, once again threatening the Army of the Tennessee with destruction. The Federals rallied, however, and Logan himself arrived from the other end of the battlefield at the critical moment to shouts of “Black Jack! Black Jack!” from his men. The Union counterattack swept the Confederates back out of the Union position, securing that sector. The firing continued around the bald hill until nightfall obscured the targets, but Hood’s attack had clearly failed. Casualties in the Army of the Tennessee came to 3,641, including McPherson, while Confederate losses totaled 8,499.

STALEMATES IN GEORGIA AND VIRGINIA

After the Battle of Atlanta Hood’s army drew back into the fortifications ringing Atlanta. Sherman’s turning movement had worked insofar as it had achieved the destruction of the Georgia Railroad east of Atlanta, and it had induced Hood to come out and fight twice. It had not destroyed Hood’s army, though it had resulted in total casualties amounting to about a quarter of his strength. It had also failed to drive Hood out of Atlanta. The Confederates still had a railroad running into the city from the southwest and with it could supply their army in Atlanta.

This railroad Sherman immediately proposed to cut, and he gave the order to his old whiplash, the Army of the Tennessee, though bloodied by its recent fight and having lost a much loved commander in McPherson. The army would pull out of the positions it had fought for in the recent battle and swing around behind Schofield’s and Thomas’s armies in a long, counterclockwise march around the city from its southeast side to its southwest, where Sherman hoped it could cut the railroad somewhere between Atlanta and the hamlet of East Point, where the railroad forked into two diverging lines. During the march the army received a new commanding officer. Sherman appreciated Logan’s fine service, but he believed the commander of the Fifteenth Corps lacked the expertise to handle the entire army. The job therefore went to thirty-four-year-old Major General Oliver O. Howard, who had graduated fourth in the West Point class of 1854. Howard had lost his right arm in the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, commanded the unlucky Eleventh Corps at the Battle of Gettysburg, and more recently had served as a corps commander in the Army of the Cumberland.

Sherman rode with Howard on July 28 as the Army of the Tennessee passed beyond Thomas’s right flank and marched down the west side of Atlanta. As they heard firing flare up near the head of the column, Howard, remembering Hood from their West Point days, observed that the Confederate general was about to attack again. Sherman demurred. Hood would hardly dare to attack them again, he thought. But Howard was right. The Rebels were advancing in force for the third time in eight days. While Sherman rode back to get reinforcements started on their way from his other two armies, Howard quickly got his lead corps, Logan’s Fifteenth, into line along a low ridge that ran roughly perpendicular to his route, crossing the road near a Methodist meetinghouse called Ezra Church. The soldiers had no time to entrench or to build up proper breastworks and had to content themselves with throwing together a few fence rails and whatever else they could find for protection in the few minutes before the Confederate attack struck.

Faced with yet another of Sherman’s turning maneuvers, Hood had indeed chosen fight rather than retreat. After the battles of Peachtree Creek and Atlanta, Hardee’s corps was fought out and needed rest, so Hood gave this attack to his other two corps, both of which had been engaged at Atlanta though less intensely than Hardee’s. The corps commanders, Stephen D. Lee and Alexander P. Stewart, both had good records at lower ranks but were new to the job of directing a corps in battle. Hood’s orders called for them to take up a specified position in front of Sherman, blocking his flanking movement and forcing him to attack. When the Confederates approached their assigned position, however, they found that Howard had just occupied it. Faced with this situation, Stewart urged that they follow the spirit of the orders and take up a different position, farther back, but Lee, who was the senior of the two, insisted that they would just have to attack and drive the Yankees out of the position Hood had assigned to them.

The fighting began in mid-afternoon, and the Confederates launched wave after wave of assaults against Logan’s line without making any gains at all. By evening when the fighting sputtered out, the Confederates had lost some three thousand men, while Logan’s corps, the only one engaged on the Union side, had suffered little more than one-sixth that many. The skill of the Union generals and their soldiers, the inexperience of the Confederate generals, and Hood’s inability to supervise personally the movements of his army had all combined to produce one of the most lopsided battles of the entire campaign.

Hood had accomplished at least one thing by the movement that resulted in the Battle of Ezra Church: he had compelled Howard to stop short of Atlanta’s last railroad lifeline. Over the days and then weeks that followed, Sherman tried to stretch his line far enough down the west side of Atlanta to reach the railroad southwest of the city, while Hood extended his entrenchments and stretched his lines farther and farther to counter him. In some ways the situation was similar to what Sherman had faced when his armies were stalled in front of Johnston’s mountaintop positions north of Marietta. The stout fortifications of Atlanta now served the place of Brush, Pine, and Kennesaw mountains. Without letting go his grip on his railroad supply line, Sherman could not extend his lines far enough to get to the railroad behind Hood, who, having the inside position, always had a shorter distance to cover. Both sides were unwilling to assault the other’s breastworks, and Sherman, with his three armies stretched to the utmost, could not make another turning movement that might force Hood into a fourth stand-up fight. As July gave way to August, the situation around Atlanta was a stalemate.

Back in Virginia the situation around Richmond and Petersburg looked much the same, as Grant strove to stretch his own lines around the south side of the latter city, reaching for the rail lines that fed Lee’s army. A late-June probe toward the Weldon Railroad, easterly of the two leading into Petersburg, ended disastrously when Lee aimed a counterstrike and the Union troops in the operation fought poorly, ran away, or simply surrendered. The loss of fighting spirit and leadership in the Army of the Potomac was more obvious than ever. Some divisions had taken more casualties than they had had members when they marched into the Wilderness scarcely four weeks before. They continued to exist thanks to the steady influx of replacements, many of them draftees, bounty jumpers, or other poorly motivated recruits, but they were not the same fighting forces they had been.

Late July saw another Union effort to break the deadlock around Petersburg. A colonel who had been a mining engineer in civilian life hatched a plan to run a mine shaft more than five hundred feet to reach a Confederate fort and blow it up from below, opening a gap that attacking Union troops could exploit. Military engineers were familiar with the concept but judged the distance to be wildly impractical. To their surprise, the colonel and his regiment, with minimal support from army headquarters, succeeded in building their tunnel and planting four tons of gunpowder under the Confederate fort.

The mine lay within the sector of Burnside’s Ninth Corps, and Grant ordered Burnside to follow up the explosion of the mine with an all-out assault. Burnside selected and trained one of his divisions, composed entirely of black troops, to lead the attack. When Meade learned of the plan, he insisted that another division lead the way. If the blacks went first, he thought, they might take heavy casualties, and northern public opinion might think the former slaves had been deliberately sacrificed. Burnside appealed to Grant, who backed Meade. So Burnside had his other division commanders draw straws for the honor. The worst of them drew the short straw, made no effort to prepare his troops or instruct his officers, and spent the morning of the attack getting drunk in a bomb shelter in the rear.

While he did, the mine blew with spectacular effect, and then his division advanced and dissolved into confusion. The Confederates recovered and launched a counterattack, which proved successful despite the advance of Burnside’s other divisions, including the black one, to join the attack. Driven back into the crater itself, the attackers suffered appalling casualties before some of them could escape back to Union lines. As at Fort Pillow and other places during the last year and a half of the war, the incident degenerated into a racial massacre, as Confederate troops refused to take black prisoners and instead shot down or bayoneted men who had ceased to resist. Grant later sadly described the event, known as the Battle of the Crater, as “the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war.”

Thereafter Grant continued to slug at Lee’s positions, alternating right jabs direct at Richmond north of the James with roundhouse swings beyond his left flank aimed at taking and holding a section of the Weldon Railroad, which he succeeded in doing late in August. Confederates subsequently carried supplies around the breach via a thirty-mile detour in wagons. It was a painfully slow and difficult way to get the cargoes to the city, but what it did bring in helped to eke out what the single remaining railroad, the Southside, could carry. Meanwhile, the drumbeat of Grant’s operations continued, another every few weeks, each testing the remaining strength of Lee’s lines or stretching them a little farther in the direction of the final railroad.

WAR ON THE POLITICAL FRONT

While Grant strove to tighten his grip on Richmond and Petersburg and Sherman did the same with Atlanta, Lincoln was fighting a war on a different front. This was an election year, and the Union cause could lose at the polls much more easily than on the battlefield. Even within his own Republican Party the president did not enjoy unanimous support. Radical Republicans, the party’s vanguard on issues of emancipation and civil rights for the newly freed slaves, were dissatisfied with Lincoln’s caution about the potential political and legal pitfalls that lay in the path of goals that he largely shared with them.

Those among the Radicals who were most dissatisfied with Lincoln but despaired of denying him the Republican nomination for another term chose instead the quixotic alternative of launching a third party. A convention of the most discontent of the Radicals met in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 29, styling itself the Radical Democracy Party. On May 31 the four hundred or so delegates in attendance gave their presidential nomination to the 1856 Republican candidate and more recently failed general John C. Freémont. In his June 4 letter of acceptance, Freémont stated that he would step down as candidate if the Republicans nominated someone other than Lincoln.

The Republican convention met in Baltimore that same first week of June, styling itself the National Union Party in hopes of attracting the votes of war Democrats. To strengthen the appeal to members of the Democratic Party who supported at least the war to restore the Union, the Republicans set aside Lincoln’s first-term vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, in favor of Tennessee senator and occupation governor Andrew Johnson, the only senator from a seceding state to keep his seat in the Senate and remain loyal to the Union. Johnson was a lifelong Democrat and admirer of Andrew Jackson. Lincoln was, of course, renominated by a resounding majority, drawing 494 of 516 votes on the first ballot. The rest went for Grant but promptly switched to Lincoln to make the nomination unanimous. In his own acceptance letter, written June 9, while Grant’s army still lay before Cold Harbor, Lincoln wrote, “I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that ‘it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams.’ ”
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The part of the Democratic Party that the Republicans did not succeed in drawing into the National Union Party—and it was much the larger part— was increasingly dominated by the so-called peace Democrats, who had never sympathized with the war or its purposes, least of all emancipation, and were now more determined than ever to bring it to an end at once, without freedom for the slaves and, perhaps, without even the preservation of the Union. They met in their own convention that August in Chicago, where the Republicans had joyously nominated Lincoln four years before, and adopted a platform, written by Clement Vallandigham, that called the war a failure and demanded an immediate cease-fire along with the opening of negotiations with the Confederate government. Some of their prominent leaders advocated that the reunion negotiations should include a constitutional convention to make whatever changes might be needed in that venerable document to satisfy slaveholders that their peculiar institution would be safe forever under a new Union and constitution. Whatever followed in the wake of a Democratic victory would almost certainly not be “the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was.”

In a stroke of cynical political genius, the Democratic delegates chose as their presidential nominee George B. McClellan. The general was still tremendously popular with the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac and perhaps with other elements of the population as well. As a general, he would, by his presence at the top of the ticket, somewhat counteract the impression the platform would naturally create that the party was lacking in patriotism, fortitude, or both. Indeed, upon accepting the nomination McClellan wrote a public letter, more or less repudiating the platform on which he had just agreed to run. The political professionals who ran the Democratic Party were not concerned. Once elected, McClellan would be politically beholden to them and compelled to adopt at least some of their policies, even if his protestations against the platform were more than just campaign rhetoric. The convention that nominated him had announced that Vallandigham would be his secretary of war.