Never Call Retreat (52 page)

The ins and outs of it were most complicated, and Mr. Lincoln tried to explain them in a somewhat labored letter to General Canby. The blockade, he said, had made the price of cotton six times as high as it used to be, and in spite of the blockade the enemy managed to export at least a sixth as much cotton as he ever did, so that he got a normal income for a fraction of the normal effort. "The effect, in substance," wrote Mr. Lincoln, "is that we give him six ordinary crops, without the trouble of producing any but the first; and at the same time leave his fields and his laborers free to produce provisions. You know how this keeps up his armies at home and procures supplies from abroad. . . . We cannot give up the blockade, and hence it becomes immensely important to us to get the cotton away from him. Better give guns for it than let him, as now, get both guns and ammunition for it."
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Wherever this kind of logic might take a man, cotton certainly gave the Red River expedition a peculiar coloration. Relying on the new Treasury rule, many planters brought cotton to the river as the expedition moved upstream, ready to take the oath and sell the stuff. Porter's naval officers promptly confiscated as much of this as they could get and sent it north as naval prize; they were far from the high seas, but the old high seas prize rule applied and naval officers got a certain percentage of the value of enemy goods seized. Considering this a gross breach of faith, the planters took thought of their innate Southern loyalty and began to burn their cotton. The army managed to buy some of it, turning it over to the quartermasters for shipment north and ultimate transfer to the Treasury; and the ever-present traders (two of them bearing passes signed by Abraham Lincoln) came along and bought whatever cotton had been missed by the navy, the army, and the flames of the indignant planters. An army officer remembered with glee that most of the bales the traders got were piled up at Alexandria and were at last seized by Colonel Bailey and used to build dams.

One thing the operation did accomplish; it created bitter friction between army and navy officers, and it may be that interservice antagonism reached its all-time peak on the Red River. Porter, who used language somewhat loosely, said that "the whole affair was a cotton speculation," and asserted that Banks came upstream in a steamer loaded down with speculators, with ice and champagne, and with bagging and ropes for the baling of cotton. Banks retorted that at Alexandria the navy sent marines inland with wagon trains to get cotton at the source, taking along engine room mechanics to put the cotton gins in operation. Army officers were furious because naval officers collected prize money (and bragged about it) and naval officers held that they almost lost their fleet because the army failed to do its job properly. Banks insisted, doubtless truthfully, that nothing in the way of a military operation was subordinated to a desire to get cotton, and one of his staff officers, Brigadier General William Dwight, said that only a few thousand bales were ever sent north although from 200,000 to 300,000 might have been had if that had been a genuine objective.
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An uncommonly bad odor was created, in other words; yet the trouble had little to do with cotton. The assistant medical director on Banks' staff rendered an indisputable verdict: "It seemed to me that any life lost in battle west of the Mississippi River after January, 1864, was an unnecessary sacrifice, and that the real theater of war was east of the river and the operations west of it only a sideshow."
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3. The Cork in the Bottle

THETRANSPORTS floated up Hampton Roads to the James River in a line ten miles long, sending up more than two hundred pillars of smoke to make a great cloudbank against the clear sky of a May morning. The navy led the way with five ironclads and a swarm of lesser craft, and on the transports there were more than 30,000 soldiers: veterans, armed and equipped with the best their country could provide, moving directly toward a Richmond that was hardly a day's journey away and that was defended now by no more than a totally inadequate handful. The spring breeze was warm and easy, and the air was bright with promise; the soldiers looked on the picture they were making, took pride in it, and saw in their own moving column a display of the Republic's armed might.

The commanding general felt as they felt. His steamer moved at the head of the line, but around mid-day it swung out, turned and went ranging downstream, and the general stood bareheaded on the upper deck and as each transport came abreast he swung his hat in an imperious full-arm gesture toward the west, lunging with his body, as he did so, to give the gesture added emphasis. On transport after transport the soldiers lined the rails and cheered with high enthusiasm. At this moment they believed in this general implicitly, and believing in him they believed also in themselves, and they had never a doubt that he was leading them to a triumph that would win the war and turn all of them into heroes.
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The commanding general was Benjamin F. Butler.

In a war where the pressures of politics were always strong and at times irresistible, Butler was getting a final, dazzling chance to win the military distinction which he always wanted and never got. Of military capacity, to be sure, he possessed not a trace, but he was a lifelong Democrat who had wholeheartedly defected to the radicals, and so in this election year he had to be used; and it was sheer bad luck that he held a spot that was pivotal to Grant's whole Virginia campaign. Compelled to use him in a role that demanded a first-rater, Grant was trying to make the best of him; he had at least been able to encase him between two solid professional subordinates, on the hopeful theory that these lieutenants could steer him into competent behavior. Anyway, the odds favored this expedition so powerfully that ordinary incompetence could hardly spoil it.

Butler's expedition up the James was in fact a blow at the almost unguarded rear of Lee's army. It was the vitally important other half of the Federal campaign in Virginia, and the plans for Meade's army had been drawn up on the assumption that Meade's job would be made easier by what was done on the James.

On the afternoon of May 5, while Butler was sending hand-signals to fame from the hurricane deck of a steamboat, Grant and Meade were taking 120,000 men across the Rapidan to attack Lee's 65,000. Meade's army and Butler's were a hundred miles apart, but they were engaged in one operation. To Halleck, before the campaign opened, Grant was explicit: "Should Lee fall back within his fortifications at Richmond, either before or after giving battle, I will form a junction with Butler and the two forces will draw supplies from the James River. My own notions about our line of march are entirely made up, but as circumstances beyond our control may change them I will only state that my effort will be to bring Butler's and Meade's forces together." To Butler he was equally definite: "That Richmond is to be your chief objective point, and that there is to be co-operation between your force and the Army of the Potomac, must be your guide." Grant hoped that Butler could invest Richmond on the south side, with the left of his army touching the James just above the city; in that case, Grant would bring Meade's army down so that its right could join hands with Butler's left across the river. He emphasized that Butler was to "use every exertion to secure footing as far up the south side of the river as you can, and as soon as you can."
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If Butler did what he was supposed to do Meade's success would be almost certain, because if Richmond were closely invested from the south Lee's army would face quick starvation. The capital city produced quantities of munitions, but the food it sent to the Army of Northern Virginia came from the west and south, and the approach Grant called for would cut the railroads by which this food came to Richmond. At sunset on May 5, when the head of the line of transports drew up at the Bermuda Hundred landing on the James, Butler's opportunity was as bright as any general could wish.

Coming down from Richmond to the sea, the James goes due south for seven miles, swings east past the height of Drewry's Bluff, where the Confederates had built Fort Darling, drifts southeast in a series of aimless hairpin turns, makes a final loop at Turkey Bend, with Malvern Hill lying a mile to the north, and then flows south past Bermuda Hundred. Here the river broadens, beginning to look more like an arm of the sea than a river, and two miles below Bermuda Hundred it is joined by the Appomattox River, which comes in from the west and south. The flat country enclosed by the two rivers is irregularly shaped, from west to east it is seven or eight miles long, and its western neck measures three miles, north and south, from one river to the other.

Once he landed at Bermuda Hundred, Butler's immediate job was to march straight west for about ten miles. Doing this, he would strike both the railroad and the turnpike that connected Richmond with the city of Petersburg, which lay on the south side of the Appomattox ten miles upstream from the James. Then he would have two options: turn right, as his orders directed him to do, and move on Richmond, or turn left and move on Petersburg. It did not matter much which he did, because if he took Petersburg either he or Meade would inevitably get Richmond shortly afterward. Of the railroads that connected the capital with the south, all but one came up to Petersburg, and the capital could not be held without them.
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The way was all but wide open, because the Confederate authorities had been deceived. All spring it had been known that Burnside's army corps, brought east from Tennessee, was being built up at Annapolis, and it was believed that the Federals planned to invade North Carolina with this force as a nucleus—exactly the move, as a matter of fact, that Grant had proposed early in the winter, before he became lieutenant general. Beauregard had been detached from Charleston and given command of Confederate forces in North Carolina and in Virginia below the James, and he had his headquarters and most of his troops in North Carolina. Butler had kept his cards well concealed, and not until May 3 was Lee able to warn the War Department that in his belief this Federal force was preparing to move against Richmond. To defend Richmond south of the James there was Fort Darling, at Drewry's Bluff, manned by heavy artillerists, and several thousand War Department clerks and munitions workers could be called up in an emergency to hold the fortifications immediately around the city; but of regular field troops to come out in the open and prevent the kind of investment Grant was demanding there were at that moment only two brigades of infantry, perhaps 3000 men in all. To defend Petersburg there were at most 2000 more. Against these, Butler (who detached a division of 5000 men to hold City Point, at the mouth of the Appomattox) could put at least 25,000 men into action. In addition he had sent 3000 cavalry on a long swing to the southwest to cut the railroads below Petersburg, and he had half as many more riding up the north side of the James. For a few days there was no way on earth for the Confederates to keep him from carrying out his orders.

On the night of May 5 Butler seems to have had an awareness of this fact, and as his troops began to disembark at Bermuda Hundred he called in his two corps commanders and proposed that they take the men who had already gone ashore and march forthwith on Richmond, midnight or no.

These corps commanders were the professional soldiers on whom Grant relied to keep Butler from folly. As far as Grant could see they were well chosen. The commander of Butler's X Corps was Major General Quincy A. Gillmore, who had conducted the siege of Charleston. He had failed there through no especial fault of his own. The experience had left him highly distrustful of any operation that involved attacking entrenched Confederates, but there was no way to know that it had left him very reluctant to make any attack at all. The other man, leading the XVIII Corps, was Major General William F. Smith, who had greatly impressed Grant by his handling of the engineering assignment at Chattanooga. Like Bragg's lieutenants at Chickamauga, Smith was capable but difficult: difficult in an erratic way that finally became altogether incomprehensible. At the beginning of May, Grant thought him one of the best generals in the army; by July, he considered him one of the worst.
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Anyway, these two professionals naturally advised Butler to curb his enthusiasm. To march that night would be to take no more than 10,000 men off through unfamiliar country, in pitch darkness, against no one knew how many Confederates; better wait for daylight and move with everybody. This advice was good, and Butler accepted it, and yet it seems a pity, somehow: this was the last time in the campaign that Butler showed a spark of initiative, and it was the only time these two generals gave him the kind of help Grant expected them to give. Immediately after this the expedition ran hard aground.

On May 6 the troops were ready and the march began, Gillmore's corps on the right and Smith's on the left. At noon the men reached the base of the Bermuda Hundred peninsula, where instead of going on with the advance they stacked arms and began to entrench. As good engineers, Gillmore and Smith laid out an excellent defensive line three miles long, facing west, right flank touching the James, left flank on the Appomattox; a good idea, no doubt, except that the army was supposed to be on the offensive. From the middle of this line the advance guards could just see the spires of Petersburg, seven miles to the south. Richmond lay fifteen miles to the north; two or three miles directly west of the Federal line were the turnpike and the railroad that linked those cities; and within fifty miles there were fewer than 10,000 armed Confederates, counting everybody. While his 25,000 industriously dug in, Butler forwarded orders: let each corps commander advance a brigade to seize the railroad and the turnpike.

To do even this might have insured success, as it would have broken Richmond's principal railroad connection with the south, but that did not happen. Gillmore for some reason made no advance at all. Smith dutifully sent one brigade forward; it marched two miles, sparred lightly with a thin Confederate skirmish line, and presently went back to its starting point. Smith reported that to try to carry the railroad would have risked loss of his entire force (which was opposed that day by no more than nine companies of infantry); and Butler, the commanding general, instead of riding to the front to see to it that his orders were carried out, followed his political orientation and wrote an indignant letter to Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, demanding that Gillmore's recent nomination to the grade of major general be rejected.