The Man Who Saved the Union (47 page)

The second great battle of the 1864 campaign was more protracted than the Wilderness, in part because of bad weather, but at times equally brutal. The most intense fighting occurred at the
“Bloody Angle,” where Union troops and Confederates locked at close quarters from before dawn on May 12 till hours past sunset.
Horace Porter, a Grant aide, never saw anything to equal the fighting that day. “
Rank after rank was riddled by shot and shell and bayonet thrusts, and finally sank, a mass of torn and mutilated corpses; then fresh troops rushed madly forward to replace the dead, and so the murderous work went on,” Porter remembered. “Guns were run up close to the parapet, and double charges of canister played their part in the bloody work. The fence rails and logs in the breastworks were shattered into splinters, and trees over a foot and a half in diameter were cut completely in two by the incessant musketry fire. A section of the trunk of a stout oak tree thus severed was afterward sent to Washington, where it is still on exhibition at the National Museum. We had not only shot down an army, but also a forest.”

John Gordon took part in the contest on the Confederate side. “
Firing into one another’s faces, beating one another down with clubbed muskets, the front ranks fought across the embankment’s crest almost within an arm’s reach, the men behind passing up to them freshly loaded rifles as their own were emptied,” Gordon recalled. “As those in front fell, others quickly sprang forward to take their places. On both sides the dead were piled in heaps. As Confederates fell their bodies rolled into the ditch, and upon their bleeding forms their living comrades stood, beating back Grant’s furiously charging columns. The bullets seemed to fly in sheets. Before the pelting hail and withering blast the standing timber fell. The breastworks were literally drenched in blood. The coming of the darkness failed to check the raging battle. It only served to increase the awful terror of the scene.”

The fighting ended only with the eventual exhaustion of both sides. Charles Dana went out the next day with
John Rawlins to inspect the lines. “
The ground around the salient had been trampled and cut in the struggle until it was almost impassable for one on horseback, so Rawlins and I dismounted and climbed up the bank over the outer line of the rude breastworks,” Dana wrote. “Within we saw a fence over which earth evidently had been banked, but which now was bare and half down. It was
here the fighting had been fiercest. We picked our way to this fence and stopped to look over the scene. The night was coming on, and after the horrible din of the day, the silence was intense; nothing broke it but distant and occasional firing or the low groans of the wounded. I remember that as I stood there I was almost startled to hear a bird twittering in a tree. All around us the underbrush and trees, which were just beginning to be green, had been riddled and burnt. The ground was thick with dead and wounded men, among whom the relief corps was at work. The earth, which was soft from the heavy rains we had been having before and during the battle, had been trampled by the fighting of the thousands until it was soft, like thin hasty pudding. Over the fence against which we leaned lay a great pool of this mud, its surface as smooth as that of a pond. As we stood there, looking silently down at it, of a sudden the leg of a man was lifted up from the pool and the mud dripped off his boot. It was so unexpected, so horrible, that for a moment we were stunned. Then we pulled ourselves together and called to some soldiers nearby to rescue the owner of the leg.” The man recovered, but Dana never learned how many other soldiers lay beneath the mud, dead of their wounds or drowned.

The fighting around Spotsylvania stretched over two weeks on account of the mud and the inability of either side to win a decisive victory. Grant sent reports piecemeal to Washington, hesitant to draw premature conclusions and reluctant to record the totals of dead and wounded. “
Our losses have been heavy as well as those of the enemy,” he informed Stanton while the fighting continued. “I think the loss of the enemy must be greater. We have taken over five thousand prisoners in battle, while he has taken from us but few except stragglers.”

Other men—starting with Grant’s predecessors in command of the Army of the Potomac, but including anyone less dedicated to the cause of the Union and the calling of war—would have quailed at the toll the fighting exacted. But Grant remained undaunted. “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer,” he told Stanton.

40

Y
ET HE DIDN’T THINK IT WOULD TAKE ALL SUMMER
. “I
AM SATISFIED
the enemy are very shaky and are only kept up to the mark by the greatest exertion on the part of their officers,” Grant wrote Halleck. To Julia he declared, “
The world has never seen so bloody or so protracted a battle as the one being fought, and I hope never will again. The enemy were really whipped yesterday.… Their situation is desperate beyond anything heretofore known. To lose this battle, they lose their cause.” After several additional days of fighting, interspersed by spring downpours, Grant suggested that ultimate victory was nigh. “
Lee’s army is really whipped,” he told Halleck. “The prisoners we now take show it, and the actions of his army show it unmistakably. A battle with them outside of entrenchments cannot be had. Our men feel that they have gained morale over the enemy and attack with confidence. I may be mistaken but I feel that our success over Lee’s army is already ensured.”

Charles Dana detected the same good omens. “
One of the most important results of the
campaign thus far was the entire change which had taken place in the feelings of the armies,” Dana remembered. “The Confederates had lost all confidence, and were already morally defeated. Our army had learned to believe that it was sure of ultimate victory. Even our officers had ceased to regard Lee as an invincible military genius.” Lee looked slower to attack and more tentative than Dana had known him, even when circumstances favored the Confederates. The prisoners Dana talked to seemed discouraged, almost defeated. “Rely upon it,” he wrote Stanton by his special channel, “the end is near as well as sure.”

Grant’s confidence initially disposed him to conserve his resources. By the last week of May, Lee had retreated across the North Anna
River; Grant’s forces confronted him, but the terrain strongly favored the defenders. A swamp secured Lee’s right and three streams his left. His center was well entrenched. “To make a direct attack from either wing would cause a slaughter of our men that even success would not justify,” Grant concluded to Halleck. Consequently and uncharacteristically, he disengaged and headed farther south.

He aimed for
Cold Harbor, which was neither a harbor nor cold; the name originally indicated a crossroads tavern that didn’t serve hot meals. Lee again anticipated him, and by the time Grant’s army was ready for battle, Lee’s had dug itself in. The forces collided on June 1. “
There has been a very severe battle this afternoon,” Grant informed Julia. “And as I write, now 9 o’clock at night, firing is still continued on some parts of the battle line. What the result of the day’s fighting has been I will know little about before midnight and possibly not then. The rebels are making a desperate fight and I presume will continue to do so as long as they can get a respectable number of men to stand.”

Grant intended to renew the attack the next day. But the unusual heat of the early summer and the weariness of his men from a month of marching and fighting caused him to postpone the second assault until June 3.
Horace Porter walked among the troops on the night of the 2nd and saw something that was, in his opinion, later misinterpreted. “
In passing along on foot among the troops at the extreme front that evening while transmitting some of the final orders, I observed an incident which afforded a practical illustration of the deliberate and desperate courage of the men,” he recounted. “As I came near one of the regiments which was making preparations for the next morning’s assault, I noticed that many of the men had taken off their coats and seemed to be engaged in sewing up rents in them. This exhibition of tailoring seemed rather peculiar at such a moment, but upon closer examination it was found that the men were calmly writing their names and home addresses on slips of paper, and pinning them on the backs of their coats, so that their dead bodies might be recognized upon the field, and their fate made known to their families at home.” Some persons who later heard of this interpreted the soldiers’ actions as demoralization and defeatism, but Porter judged it otherwise. “They were veterans who knew well from terrible experience the danger which awaited them.… Their minds were occupied not with thoughts of shirking their duty, but with preparation for the desperate work of the coming morning. Such courage is more than heroic—it is sublime.”

It was desperate work indeed for the soldiers the next day. “
The Second Corps assaulted the enemy’s position at 4:45 this a.m., the enemy in entrenchments,” Winfield Scott Hancock, the corps commander, reported. “After a desperate and bloody fight
Barlow and Gibbon both penetrated the enemy’s works; Brooke’s brigade of Barlow’s division capturing 4 guns and 1 color. The enemy, however, rapidly threw fresh troops (
Bushrod Johnson’s division) upon our forces and compelled them to return with terrible slaughter.” Hancock’s troops maintained good discipline even as they fell back. “They did not retreat in any disorder but gallantly held on and entrenched themselves by throwing up the sand with their bayonets, hands, etc., under a scathing fire of musketry.” The effort was to no avail. The Confederates were too well protected and the Federals too exposed. “By 6 a.m. the battle on our front was over, and the brave old Second Corps had lost over 3,000 of its bravest and best.”

The story was similar for much of the rest of Grant’s army that day. “It is understood that our whole line has been repulsed, from the right to the left of our army, wherever we attacked,” Hancock wrote. “If so the loss must be grievous indeed.” Hancock didn’t know that the total loss would come to seven thousand, but he understood the implication. “Altogether this has been one of the most disastrous days the Army of the Potomac has ever seen.”

Grant at first acted as though nothing unusual had happened. “
Our loss was not severe,” he wrote Halleck that afternoon. Perhaps he didn’t initially appreciate the extent of his losses; doubtless he indulged his habit of putting the best face on things lest the resolve of his men or of the administration weaken.

But Cold Harbor haunted him the rest of his life. “
I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made,” he wrote in his memoirs, referring to the bloody morning of June 3. “No advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained.” On the contrary, the advantage was all to Lee. “Before that, the
Army of Northern Virginia seemed to have acquired a wholesome regard for the courage, endurance, and soldierly qualities generally of the Army of the Potomac. They no longer wanted to fight them ‘one Confederate to five Yanks.’…They seemed to have given up any idea of gaining any advantage of their antagonist in the open field. They had come to much prefer breastworks in their front.” Cold Harbor—in particular the tragic final charge—shifted the psychological balance again. “This charge seemed to revive their hopes.”

I
n April 1864 Sherman received a letter from his brother John, the Ohio senator, regarding “
the very bad news from
Fort Pillow, not so bad from the loss of men, but from the question of retaliation raised by the massacre of negro troops.” A Confederate force under Nathan Bedford Forrest had attacked the Union garrison at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, north of Memphis, on April 12, 1864; after driving the defenders from the fort, the Confederates killed hundreds of them. Negro troops, who constituted about half the garrison, suffered especially, with reports indicating that many had been killed after surrendering. “
The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards,” Forrest explained unapologetically in his battle report. He noted that his own casualties were light and added: “It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro troops cannot cope with Southerners.”

Grant heard about Fort Pillow from William Sherman. “
Three hundred blacks murdered after surrender,” Sherman telegraphed. The incident outraged Grant but also put him and the Union government in a quandary. “
We all feel that we must disband negro troops or protect them,”
John Sherman explained from Washington. “It is fearful to think about the measures that may be necessary, but what else can we do?” Lincoln reflected, to an audience at Baltimore: “
Having determined to use the negro as a soldier, there is no way but to give him all the protection given to any other soldier. The difficulty is not in the principle, but in practically applying it.”

Lincoln consulted his cabinet and received advice that ranged from executing Forrest and the others responsible for the killings, should they be caught, to executing prisoners randomly chosen from Confederates previously captured, should
Jefferson Davis not disavow Forrest’s action.
Lincoln drafted an order that an unspecified number of Confederate officers in Union custody be held as hostages against future massacres. But the order was never sent, and amid the larger slaughter of the Wilderness campaign, the subject was pushed aside.

41

T
HE BLOODLETTING AT
C
OLD
H
ARBOR CAUSED
G
RANT TO RECONSIDER
his strategy for cornering Lee and capturing Richmond. “
I now find, after more than thirty days of trial, the enemy deems it of first importance to run no risks with the armies they now have,” he wrote Halleck. “They act purely on the defensive, behind breastworks, or feebly on the offensive immediately in front of them and where, in case of repulse, they can instantly retire behind them. Without a greater sacrifice of human life than I am willing to make, all cannot be accomplished that I had designed outside of the city.”