The Man Who Saved the Union (46 page)

Benjamin Butler would worry Lee’s right. Grant ordered that the
Army of the James be reinforced with units drawn from the coast. “
What I ask is that with them, and all you can concentrate from your own command, you seize upon City Point”—on the James River below Richmond—“and act from there looking upon Richmond as your objective point,” he told Butler. He and Meade would keep Lee busy to the north of the Confederate capital, creating an opportunity for Butler. “If it should prove possible for you to reach Richmond, so as to invest all on the south side of the river, and fortify yourself there, I shall have but little fear of the result.” As with Sherman, Grant furnished Butler only an outline. “I do not pretend to say how your work is to be done but simply lay down what, and trust to you and those under you for doing it well.”

By late April he had made his decision about the Rapidan. He characteristically opted for directness in ordering that the
Army of the Potomac cross above Lee and force him to fight or retreat toward Richmond. “
I will move against Lee’s army, attempting to turn him by one flank or the other,” Grant told Halleck. “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.” Until then the Army of the Potomac would be self-sufficient. “The Army will start with fifteen days’ supplies. All the country affords will be gathered as we go along. This will no doubt enable us to go twenty or twenty-five days without further supplies, unless we should be forced to keep in the country between the Rapidan and Chickahominy, in which case supplies might be required by way of the York or the Rappahannock River.” Halleck should see to those. “I would like to have about one million rations, and two hundred thousand forage rations, afloat to be sent wherever it may prove they will be required.”

“T
his is my forty-second birthday,” Grant wrote Julia on April 27. “Getting old, am I not?” Yet he remained steady and calm. “
Before you receive this I will be away from Culpepper and the Army will be in motion. I know the greatest anxiety is now felt in the North for the success of this move, and that the anxiety will increase when it is once known that the Army is in motion.” But he wasn’t worried. “I feel well myself. Do not know that this is any criterion to judge results, because I have never felt otherwise. I believe it has never been my misfortune to be placed where I lost my presence of mind—unless indeed it has been when thrown in strange company, particularly of ladies.”

Lincoln was more nervous than Grant but nonetheless supportive. “
Not expecting to see you again before the spring campaign opens, I wish to express, in this way, my entire satisfaction with what you have done up to this time, so far as I understand it,” the president wrote Grant on April 30. “The particulars of your plan I neither know or seek to know. You are vigilant and self-reliant; and, pleased with this, I wish not to obtrude any constraints or restraints upon you. While I am very anxious that any great disaster, or the capture of our men in great numbers, shall be avoided, I know these points are less likely to escape your attention than they would be mine. If there is anything wanting which is within my power to give, do not fail to let me know it. And now with a brave Army, and a just cause, may God sustain you.”

“
The confidence you express for the future, and satisfaction with the past, in my military administration is acknowledged with pride,” Grant responded. “From my first entrance into the volunteer service of the country, to the present day, I have never had cause of complaint, have never expressed or implied a complaint, against the Administration or the Secretary of War for throwing any embarrassment in the way of my vigorously prosecuting what appeared to me my duty.” And since his promotion to command of the armies the administration had been especially helpful. “I have been astonished at the readiness with which everything asked for has been yielded without even an explanation being asked.” The burden was now on him. “It will be my earnest endeavor that you, and the country, shall not be disappointed.”

“T
he movement of this Army will commence at 12 o’clock tomorrow night,” Grant ordered on May 2. “The attempt will be made to turn the
right flank of the enemy—that is, to cross the Rapidan east of or below the railroad. Ely’s Ford, Germanna Ford, and Culpeper Mine Ford will be the crossing places.” The early start was to surprise Lee; the three crossings would allow Grant’s army to get over the Rapidan before Lee could react.

The first phase of the operation went well. Grant’s cavalry seized the fords in the dark and captured or dispersed the Confederate pickets on the south bank. At dawn his engineers began building pontoon bridges, which were helpful to the infantry and indispensable to the artillery and supply trains.

Lee didn’t contest the crossing, leaving Grant to wonder whether he would oppose the advance at all or retreat to Richmond. “
The crossing of Rapidan effected,” Grant informed Halleck in the late morning of May 4. “Forty-eight hours now will demonstrate whether the enemy intends giving battle this side of Richmond.” Grant hoped for a fight, as his advantage in numbers would have greater effect in the open field than if Lee’s army fought from the fortifications of the Confederate capital.

Lee might well have fallen back had the ground been different. But the Wilderness, as the region south of the Rapidan was called, was hardly an open field. “
It was uneven, with woods, thickets, and ravines right and left,” one of Grant’s generals, Alexander Webb, explained. “Tangled thickets of pine, scrub-oak, and cedar prevented our seeing the enemy, and prevented anyone in command of a large force from determining accurately the position of the troops he was ordering to and fro.” Lee knew the Wilderness better than Grant did, and he counted on its confusing nature to work to his advantage. He would hit Grant hard; if Grant recoiled, the way his predecessors had, Lee would emerge the winner. If Grant kept coming, Lee would make him pay for each mile he gained. By the time they got to Richmond the odds would be more nearly even. And even odds favored the defender.

As Grant’s columns pressed south from the river to the Wilderness Tavern, a local landmark, Lee brought up his forces to attack him from the west. The Federals turned to face the Confederates and on May 5 the serious fighting began. The overall clash took the apparent form of discrete engagements as the vegetation and terrain often prevented both Grant and Lee from knowing where their own units were, let alone those of the enemy. The fighting was heavy, lethal and utterly disorienting. “
My command had cut its way through the Union center,” Confederate John Gordon recalled, “and at that moment it was in the remarkably
strange position of being on identically the same general line with the enemy, the Confederates facing in one direction, the Federals in the other. Looking down that line from Grant’s right toward his left, there would first have been seen a long stretch of blue uniforms, then a short stretch of gray, then another still longer of blue, in one continuous line. The situation was both unique and alarming.” Gordon had never experienced, or read of, such a position, and he didn’t know how to get out of it. “Further movement to Grant’s rear was not to be considered, for his unbroken lines on each side of me would promptly close up the gap which my men had cut through his center, thus rendering the capture of my whole command inevitable.” Retreat was almost as fatal. “Those same unbroken and now unopposed ranks on each side of me, as soon as such retrograde motion began, would instantly rush from both directions upon my retreating column and crush it.” So Gordon improvised. He ordered half his line to file right and the other to file left, thereby arraying each half perpendicular to the flank of the corresponding segment of the Union line. He then ordered a double charge, with his twin lines surging away from each other but wreaking havoc on the Federal flanks.

The fighting continued throughout the day, with both sides taking satisfaction. “
By the blessing of God, we maintained our position against every effort until night, when the contest closed,” Lee reported to
Jefferson Davis. Grant was equally, if paradoxically, upbeat. “
We have engaged with the enemy in full force since early yesterday,” he wrote Halleck on the morning of May 6. “So far there is no decisive result, but I think all things are progressing favorably.”

The paradox persisted through the second day. Each general brought up reinforcements, which swelled the casualty count without materially changing the balance of battle. “
The enemy advanced and created some confusion,” Lee acknowledged of the morning’s fighting. But the Confederates quickly regrouped. “The ground lost was recovered as soon as the fresh troops got into position, and the enemy driven back to his original line. Afterward we turned the left of his front line and drove it from the field, leaving a large number of dead and wounded.… Every advance on his part, thanks to a merciful God, has been repulsed. Our loss in killed is not large.”

Grant again saw things differently. “
Yesterday the enemy attacked our lines vigorously first at one point and then another, from right to left,” he wrote on May 7. “They were repulsed at all points before reaching our lines, except once during the afternoon on Hancock’s front, and just after
night on Sedgwick’s.… Our losses to this time in killed, wounded and prisoners will not probably exceed 12,000, of whom an unusually large proportion are but slightly wounded.” The slightness of the wounding reflected the fact that the nature of the battlefield prevented either side from using much artillery, which normally inflicted the heaviest wounds. “I think the loss of the enemy must exceed ours,” Grant continued. “But this is only a guess, based upon the fact that they attacked and were repulsed so often.” Grant was willing to call the contest a draw. “At present we can claim no victory over the enemy; neither have they gained a single advantage.”

He subsequently revised his estimate of the battle of the Wilderness. “
More desperate fighting has not been witnessed on this continent than that of the 5th and 6th of May,” he wrote after the war. “Our losses in the Wilderness were very severe.” Still, he believed the results repaid the cost. “Our victory consisted in having successfully crossed a formidable stream, almost in the face of an enemy, and in getting the army together as a unit.… As we stood at the close, the two armies were relatively in about the same condition to meet each other as when the river divided them. But the fact of having safely crossed was a victory.”

H
ow many more such victories the Union could endure was the central question of the late spring and summer of
1864. The tragedy of that season was that the fighting, sanguinary as it was, suited both sides. Lee calculated that by bleeding Grant he could slow or stall the Union advance to Richmond, wearing out Northern patience if not Grant himself. Grant reasoned that every soldier Lee lost made one less Confederate to fight, while every soldier he himself lost could be replaced. Equal losses favored the more populous North.

Charles Dana witnessed the implications of Grant’s thinking. Lincoln and Stanton weren’t getting information from the front as quickly as they desired. “
We are very much troubled, and have concluded to send you down there,” the president told Dana, who thereupon rode off to Grant’s headquarters. He discovered that the officers and men of Grant’s command were just getting used to their new leader. “The previous history of the
Army of the Potomac had been to advance and fight a battle, then either to retreat or lie still, and finally to go into winter quarters,” Dana recounted. “Grant did not intend to proceed in that way. As soon as
he had fought a battle and had not routed Lee, he meant to move nearer to Richmond and fight another battle.” And so he informed his army shortly after the Wilderness. Grant’s order to press ahead surprised the troops but also pleased them. “As the army began to realize that we were really moving south, and at that moment were probably much nearer Richmond than was our enemy, the spirits of men and officers rose to the highest pitch of animation. On every hand I heard the cry: ‘On to Richmond!’ ”

But Lee was quicker than Grant’s army guessed. Lee thought he understood Grant, and he related his understanding to John Gordon. “
He discussed the dominant characteristics of his great antagonist,” Gordon recalled: “his indomitable will and untiring persistency; his direct method of waging war by delivering constant and heavy blows upon the enemy’s front rather than by seeking advantage through strategical maneuver. General Lee also said that General Grant held so completely and firmly the confidence of the Government that he could command to any extent its limitless resources in men and materials, while the Confederacy was already practically exhausted in both. He, however, hoped—perhaps I may say he was almost convinced—that if we could keep the Confederate army between General Grant and Richmond, checking him for a few months longer, as we had in the past two days, some crisis in public affairs or change in public opinion at the North might induce the authorities at Washington to let the Southern States go.”

Gordon also remembered Lee’s predicting what Grant would do next. In a conversation with Lee, Gordon transmitted intelligence reports indicating that Grant was preparing to retreat, as his predecessors had retreated in the face of stiff resistance. Lee waved the reports aside. “
General Grant is not going to retreat,” he said. “He will move his army to Spotsylvania.” Gordon asked Lee if he had particular intelligence to that effect. “Not at all, not at all,” Lee said. “But that is the next point at which the armies will meet. Spotsylvania is now General Grant’s best strategic point.” Gordon later accounted for Lee’s foresight: “This notable prophecy by General Lee and its fulfillment by General Grant show that the brains of these two foemen had been working at the same problem. The known quantities in that problem were the aims of Grant to crush Lee and capture Richmond, to which had been added the results of the last two days’ fighting. The unknown quantity which both were endeavoring to find was the next movement which the aggressor
would probably make. Grant stood in his own place and calculated from his own standpoint; Lee put himself in Grant’s place and calculated from the same standpoint; and both found the same answer—
Spotsylvania.”