Never Call Retreat (53 page)

Next day, May 7, the army had been ashore for thirty-six hours, and Butler tried again. This time he managed to get 8000 men sent forward, but these men accomplished nothing; they ran into 2600 Confederates under a determined general named Bushrod Johnson, skirmished until they had 339 casualties, held the railroad briefly without harming it, and before sunset were recalled to their entrenchments. That night the Federal soldiers began to circulate a wry joke: How long will it take to get to Richmond if you advance two miles every day and come back to your starting point every night?

At-this distance it all seems rather unbelievable, but the surface of the incredible had barely been scratched. On May 9 Butler at last came to the front in person, and this time he got most of his army in motion. On the right Gillmore reached the railroad at Chester Station and actually tore up a little of the track. Four miles to the south of him Smith marched on Port Walthall Junction, but his skirmishers ran into a spatter of musket fire before they got there and Smith immediately called a halt and sent couriers off to Gillmore with an urgent request: if Gillmore would at once march south along the turnpike, his force and Smith's together, could pinch off and capture the Confederates who held the junction. Gillmore complied, suspending most of his railroad-destroying activities, and the whole thing was quite logical except for the fact that there were hardly any Confederates at the junction to be captured. Johnson had moved out the night before, and today he was dug in two miles to the south, behind an inconsequential stream known as Swift Creek; he had left no more than a few platoons behind to annoy the Yankees.

In the end, 14,000 Federal soldiers spent the afternoon trying to capture a hundred Confederates, who got away; and eventually Smith and Gillmore learned where Johnson was, made as if to attack his position, concluded that it was too strong to be taken by storm, and advised Butler that he had better attack Petersburg, if at all, from the east. Unhappily, they who so advised him were then due north of the place, unable to get at Petersburg from the east unless they went all the way back to Bermuda Hundred and got on the steamboats or bridged the Appomattox with pontoons.

Butler was furious, a fatal quality when it is blended with complete impotence. Undeniably, he had been poorly served by his lieutenants; but he was in addition utterly lacking in any military insight of his own, and so he never realized that he ought at least to keep his army on the Richmond & Petersburg Railroad, now that he had it there. He climaxed this day of errors by ordering everybody to come back once more to the fortified lines between the James and the Appomattox.

The blind were being led by the blind, and because nothing at all had been accomplished so far the unlimited opportunity that had been so obvious on May 5 was beginning to disappear entirely. During the next forty-eight hours some quiver of concern about this fact seems to have disturbed Butler, and on May 12 he got his army on the road once again, turning north this time to move up to Fort Darling and Drewry's Bluff and the immediate approaches to Richmond. The first part of the movement was unopposed, but it was made with great caution, and two days saw a total advance of approximately four miles; and at last the army entrenched, facing north, a mile short of the Confederate works that ran west from Fort Darling. Some dim premonition of on-coming trouble led Smith on May 15 to bring up a bale of telegraph wire and weave a cunning network of it, from stump to fence-post to felled timber, a foot off the ground, along the front of his corps.
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Among them, the leaders of this army had given away altogether too much time, and they had given it to men who knew how to use it—chiefly to General P. G. T. Beauregard, who was given to bombast but who underneath it all was an extremely able general. By the end of the second week in May Beauregard had had just time to get to the scene himself, and, with the aid of Braxton Bragg, to assemble close to 20,000 Confederate soldiers. He conferred hastily with President Davis and then, on May 16, he struck savagely at Butler's advance, trying to break Butler's right loose from the bank of the James, drive the Federal force inland, and capture it entire. Ten days after Butler had disembarked the tale of lost opportunities had come down to this: he no longer had any chance to do what he was supposed to do, and the only question remaining was whether his army would simply be defeated or would be destroyed outright.
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The Confederate attack came on a foggy dawn in a wet gray twilight that hid the rival lines from each other until they were at point-blank range. It struck Smith's corps, drove his right brigade away from the James, and seemed likely to crumple the whole line; but Smith partly atoned for his wretched performance down to date by handling his part of the battle with unflustered competence, and his network of telegraph wire threw the Confederate attack into confusion at the right moment. Men running forward through the fog never saw the wires until they fell over them, and when they got up and tried to get realigned the Federals shot them down; in Smith's expressive phrase, the attacking Southerners "were slaughtered like partridges." However, this did no more than stave off disaster. After half a day of hard fighting the Federal army had to retreat, and by late afternoon it was back in those entrenched lines on Bermuda Hundred neck once more. It had lost more than 4100 men, killed, wounded and missing, and although Beauregard's own losses had been severe the one fact that mattered was that the Yankee blow at Lee's rear had been completely frustrated. Beauregard felt that his victory would have been complete if a division which he had ordered up from Petersburg had pitched vigorously into Butler's rear, as instructed, while everybody else was assailing him in front, and he wrote that "we could and should have captured Butler's entire army." Considering the way Butler's army was commanded, this was probably correct, but even so Beauregard had accomplished a good deal. Half of Grant's plan for the Virginia campaign had been disrupted, and something like ten additional months of life had been won for the Confederacy. Generals have fought larger battles to win less.
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Butler's lines on the Bermuda Hundred neck were strong, and once he got his army back in them he was safe. Reflecting on this he felt that he had done all that could have been expected of him, and he revealed his glassy inability to understand either his responsibilities or the fate that had befallen him by assuring Secretary Stanton that "we can hold out against the whole of Lee's army," adding that "Grant will not be troubled with any further reinforcements to Lee from Beauregard's force." Half of this statement was irrelevant, inasmuch as Lee's army never had any intention of attacking Butler, and the other half of it was dead wrong, because Beauregard did reinforce Lee, promptly and substantially. If the Confederates could not break through Butler's lines, he could not now break out of them: it was simple enough for Beauregard to entrench an opposing line as invulnerable as Butler's, and Grant described the situation perfectly by remarking that as soon as Butler's army had withdrawn to the Bermuda Hundred position "it was as completely shut off from further operations directly against Richmond as if it had been in a bottle strongly corked." Shortly after the battle of Drewry's Bluff a good 6000 of Beauregard's troops joined Lee, who needed more troops desperately just then, on the dismal battlefields around Spotsylvania Courthouse.
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As a matter of fact, these 6000 were not the only reinforcements Lee received. He also got 2500 from the Shenandoah Valley, where Major General Franz Sigel became involved in a fiasco fully as humiliating as Butler's, although it was on a smaller scale. Like Butler, Sigel was politically important, because he had a devoted following among the German-Americans, who if left to themselves had a tendency to line up with the Democrats. Unlike Butler, he had had solid military training, in Germany, although it does not seem to have done him much good; he was a fretful, intellectually wizened sort who knew war by the books but could not handle it when he met it in person. Sigel took 6500 men up the Shenandoah early in May, intending to capture the town of Staunton and break the Virginia Central Railroad, and nothing went right. There were heavy rains, his little force got stretched out along fourteen miles of muddy roads, and at New Market on May 15 his advance guard met some 5000 Confederates led by Major General John C. Breckinridge, who had once run for President of the United States against Abraham Lincoln.

Breckinridge had brought 2500 veterans in from the western mountain country, had picked up such other units as were available in the upper valley, and from Lexington had drawn a spirited battalion that won part of the battle and almost all of the headlines—the corps of cadets from Virginia Military Institute, spruce and trim in parade-ground uniforms.

The cadets are about all many people remember of the battle of New Market, and some accounts make it appear that they beat Sigel all by themselves, with the rest of the army looking on in admiration. It was not quite that way— after all, there were only 247 of them, and Sigel probably would have been beaten if they had stayed at the Institute— but they did fight extremely well, and more than fifty of them got shot, making their ratio of casualties to numbers engaged something any combat outfit could be proud of; and they earned their right to the praise they got. When they joined Breckinridge's troops before the battle the veterans greeted them with tolerant derision. Some band struck up a tune which a cadet remembered as sounding like "Rockabye Baby," one lean foot soldier came around with a pair of scissors offering to cut off lovelocks, to be forwarded to next-of-kin after the battle, and others inquired whether the boys wanted their remains sent home in rosewood coffins lined with satin; and the muddy roads soon turned the trim uniforms into something that would never be tolerated on any parade ground. After the battle the cadets were made much of, and ever since then the anniversary of New Market has been a great day at the Institute.
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Sigel rode to the front when the firing began, and unwisely accepted battle without waiting for all of his troops to come up. He became boisterous, under fire, and rode about snapping his fingers at shell-bursts and shouting orders to his staff in German—unfortunate, since most of the staff spoke nothing but English—and Breckinridge drove back the advance, pounded the supporting regiments with artillery, and finally swept the Federals away in complete rout, capturing six guns and a number of prisoners, and compelling Sigel to retreat to Strasburg, twenty-five miles to the north.

Grant did not get the news for two or three days, and before it reached him he asked Washington to urge Sigel to speed up his advance on Staunton, pointing out that Lee was drawing supplies from that point and saying that "if Sigel can destroy the road there it will be of vast importance to us." Halleck replied that Sigel was in full retreat, adding: "He will do nothing but run. He never did anything else." Years afterward Douglas Southall Freeman summed it up: "Seldom did a small victory have so large an effect. Had Sigel not been driven back when he was, the Valley of Virginia might have been occupied by the Federals before the wheat crop was harvested. Hunger would have come sooner."
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About all that can be said for Sigel is that he spent little time afterward trying to explain away the disaster. Butler did. Butler came to see, at last, that his expedition might perhaps have done more than it did do, but he never could see that he himself was at fault in the least degree. He pointed out that Grant, after all, did not get Meade's army down to the James promptly so that the two armies could co-operate in an assault on Richmond, and he had bitter words for his subordinates. Smith and Gillmore, he asserted, "agreed upon but one thing and that was how they could thwart and interfere with me," and he went on to say that when they were not thwarting him they were trying to thwart each other, because "neither . . . really desired that the other should succeed."
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Neither failure is worth extended study: Sigel's defeat is self-explanatory, and Butler's military operations defy rational analysis. All that matters is that a great opportunity had been missed.

4. However Bold We Might Be

THEWILDERNESS was lonely, with few roads and fewer clearings, lying under a shadow so heavy that most of its unproductive acres never saw sunlight. Armies operating here moved blindly and took their fighting where they found it, and in the spring of 1863 Lee and Stonewall Jackson came into the eastern fringe of this area to defeat Joe Hooker in a savage and confused battle around the weedy Chancellorsville crossroads. In May of 1864, exactly a year later, Lee's army was drawn up near Orange Court House, west of the Wilderness, astride the turnpike that went east to Fredericksburg, and eighteen miles to the northeast Grant and Meade had their host in camp above the Rapidan. On May 5 the rival armies marched into the heart of the Wilderness and began a fight that lasted until the end of the war. Except for part of a week in June, when there was a short break in contact, these two armies remained at close quarters for eleven months, with men killed every day—a great many of them on some days, only a few on others, but some every day, month after month, all the way to the end.

When May began Lee had probably 65,000 effectives, of all arms. The corps led by Ewell and Hill were on the turnpike, and Longstreet with two divisions was ten miles southwest, near Gordonsville. (Longstreet's third division, Pickett's, had been sent to North Carolina in the fall, when Longstreet went to Chickamauga, and had not yet been brought back.) Lee suspected that the Federals were likely to try to move past his right flank, and by May 3 he became virtually certain. His patrols reported smoke clouds by day and bonfires by night all along the Federal front—sure sign that the men were burning the winter's accumulation of wood and "fixings," always an army's last act when it broke up a winter camp; and then there were moving banks of dust beyond the forests, and occasional glimpses of white wagon tops and the glint of sunlight on musket barrels, to show that Grant's force was marching down to the lower fords of the Rapidan.
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Grant had 120,000 men; probably close to 100,000 foot soldiers, of whom 84,000 were in the Army of the Potomac, which Meade had recently regrouped into three corps—II Corps under Hancock, V Corps under Warren, and VI Corps under Sedgwick. Attached to this army, but answerable then to Grant rather than to Meade, was Burnside with the IX Corps, perhaps 15,000 infantry. On May 4 this vast array crossed the Rapidan and headed south, and Grant telegraphed Halleck that FORTY-EIGHTHOURS NOW WILL DEMONSTRATE WHETHER THE ENEMY INTENDS GIVING BATTLE THIS SIDE OF RICHMOND.
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