Read The Man Who Saved the Union Online
Authors: H.W. Brands
He pocketed the paper and made for the door of the vessel’s parlor. But his escape was interrupted when Julia, who had joined him at City Point, suggested a dance in her husband’s honor. A military band was conveniently aboard, and a consensus supported the commanding general’s wife. “
The officers soon selected their partners from among the ladies present, and the evening’s entertainment was continued to a late hour,”
Horace Porter recalled. Grant sat awkwardly to the side. Julia tried to get him to waltz with her, and Grant’s staff lightheartedly urged him to please her. He resisted all entreaties until the band struck up a square dance reel. “He went through the cotillion,” Porter observed, “not as gracefully as some of the beaux among the younger officers present, but did his part exceedingly well, barring the impossibility of his being able to keep exact time with the music.”
The party broke up too late for Washburne and the others to leave for Washington. The congressman awoke early the next day—a Sunday—and readied his razor and soap brush for a shave. He looked about for a mirror, only to discover that his guest quarters lacked such amenity. He walked the short distance to Grant’s office, where he found a mirror but not the general. He lathered up and raised his blade for the first stroke. Suddenly a woman burst into the room. “
Save him! Oh, save him!” she cried, throwing herself at Washburne’s feet. “He’s my husband!”
Washburne was so startled that he nearly sliced his neck. “What’s all this about your husband?” he demanded as he regained his composure.
“Oh, General! For God’s sake, save my husband!” she said.
“Why, my good woman,” he said, “I’m not General Grant.”
“Yes you are; they told me this was your room. Oh, save him, General, they’re to shoot him this very day for desertion if you don’t stop them.”
Washburne reiterated that he wasn’t Grant, but he listened to the woman explain how her husband had taken unauthorized leave to visit her, how he had been arrested and court-martialed and how he was to be
executed, all for the love of her. Washburne tried to comfort the woman, who merely cried more loudly than ever.
At this point Grant entered the room. He had heard the commotion and wondered what it meant. “The spectacle presented partook decidedly of the serio-comic,” Horace Porter recalled. “The dignified member of Congress was standing in his shirt-sleeves in front of the pleading woman, his face covered with lather, except the swath which had been made down his right cheek; the razor was uplifted in his hand, and the tears were starting out of his eyes as his sympathies began to be worked upon. The woman was screaming and gesticulating frantically, and was almost hysterical with grief. I entered at the front door about the same time that the general entered from the rear, and it was hard to tell whether one ought to laugh or cry at the sight presented.”
Grant took charge of the situation. He convinced the woman that he, not Washburne, was the commanding general, and he said that her husband would be pardoned. He sent the order and the man was rescued just in time.
S
pring’s arrival brought the war’s end closer. The rains diminished and the roads began to dry out. “
We are now having fine weather and I think will be able to wind up matters about Richmond soon,” Grant wrote his father just before the equinox. “The rebellion has lost its vitality, and if I am not much mistaken there will be no rebel army of any great dimensions a few weeks hence.”
Sherman resurfaced in North Carolina, having extended his track of destruction from Columbia. “
I have never felt any uneasiness for your safety,” Grant wrote Sherman with imperfect candor. “But I have felt great anxiety to know just how you were progressing. I knew, or thought I did, that with the magnificent Army with you, you would come out safely someplace.” Phil Sheridan closed in from the west, and Grant directed him to sever Lee’s last links to other parts of the Confederacy. “
Your problem will be to destroy the South Side and Danville roads,” Grant wrote. Sheridan might incidentally keep an eye out for Joe Johnston’s army, which was between him and Sherman. “This, however, I care but little about, the principal thing being the destruction of the only two roads left to the enemy at Richmond.”
Sheridan’s thrust would shape what Grant did with the rest of the Army of the Potomac. “
When this movement commences I shall move
out by my left with all the force I can, holding present entrenched lines,” he told Sherman. “I shall start with no distinct view further than holding Lee’s forces from following Sheridan. But I shall be along myself”—rather than acting through Meade, whom he didn’t quite trust to handle the endgame—“and will take advantage of anything that turns up. If Lee detaches I will attack, or if he comes out of his lines I will endeavor to repulse him and follow it up to best advantage.”
Grant confessed he couldn’t quite fathom Lee. “It is most difficult to understand what the rebels intend to do,” he told Sherman. “So far but few troops have been detached from Lee’s army. Much machinery has been sent to Lynchburg, showing a disposition to go there.” Lee himself remained at Richmond.
On March 24 Grant issued detailed orders for his leftward movement, to begin on the 29th. He prescribed provisions, the route, the order of march—and the duty of those who wouldn’t be making the march. “
A large part of the armies operating against Richmond are left behind,” he explained. “The enemy, knowing this, may, as an only chance, strip their lines to the merest skeleton in the hope of advantage not being taken of it, whilst they hurl everything upon the moving column.… It cannot be impressed too strongly upon commanders of troops left in the trenches not to allow this to occur without taking advantage of it. The very fact of the enemy coming out to attack, if he does so, might be regarded as almost conclusive evidence of such a weakening of his lines.”
Lee did what Grant anticipated, only sooner. On March 25 Lee launched a surprise attack on Grant’s right wing, against a part of the Petersburg line covered by
Fort Stedman. Lee’s purpose was to compel Grant to send reinforcements from his left, which was Lee’s real target. He agreed with Grant that Richmond had become untenable; he wanted to break out of the city and head southwest. Grant’s weakened left would be his escape route.
The attack on Fort Stedman began by stealth. Confederate troops slipped silently across the narrow gap between the lines and surprised the Union defenders. Before Grant could react, the Confederates had captured the fort and turned its guns against the Union positions nearby. But there the attack stalled. Grant’s gunners returned the fire, and the Confederates in Fort Stedman found themselves bombarded from left and right. Their only hope was to press forward and get to the Union rear. This the Confederate rank and file refused to attempt. Rather than risk their lives in what appeared an ultimately hopeless task, they huddled
in Fort Stedman and allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. “
In the fight today we captured 2700 of the enemy and killed and wounded a great number,” Grant reported matter-of-factly that afternoon.
The plans for Grant’s own operation unfolded on schedule. He brought Sherman and Sheridan to City Point for a last-minute conference. The three generals met with Lincoln, who had come down from Washington. “
The President was not very cheerful,” Sheridan recalled. “In fact he was dejected, giving no indication of his usual means of diversion, by which (his quaint stories) I had often heard he could find relief from his cares.” Lincoln had been informed of the broad outline of the move to the left, and he worried that Lee would hit once more at Grant’s right, perhaps taking City Point. “I answered that I did not think it at all probable that General Lee would undertake such a desperate measure to relieve the strait he was in,” Sheridan recounted. “General Grant would give Lee all he could attend to on the left.”
Sherman and Sheridan possessed strong wills, which became evident in their meeting with Grant. Sherman thought Sheridan, after destroying the Confederate railroads, should bring his cavalry south to help him crush Johnston; then they would move north together and join Grant for the destruction of Lee’s army. Sheridan objected strenuously and profanely. His soldiers belonged to the
Army of the Potomac, he said, not to Sherman’s
Army of the Tennessee. The former, having fought Lee for three years, deserved the right to defeat him without the help of Sherman’s westerners. And he—Sheridan—should be in at the kill.
Grant let Sherman present his case and Sheridan rebut, and he proceeded to split the difference, with some misdirection. He wrote Sheridan an order that concluded: “
After having accomplished the destruction of the two railroads which are now the only avenues of supply to Lee’s army, you may return to this army selecting your road further south, or you may go into North Carolina and join General Sherman.” He let Sherman think that Sheridan would choose the latter course, while he told Sheridan that the suggestion of a rendezvous between him and Sherman was a ploy. “
This portion of your instructions I have put in merely as a blind.” He explained that he didn’t want to advertise the move to the left as the final stroke of the war before it merited such a description. Even now defeatists in the North would take any misstep as an excuse to resume their peacemongering. But his true aims were bolder. “I told him that, as a matter of fact, I intended to close the war right here, with this
movement, and that he should go no farther,” Grant recalled. “His face at once brightened up, and slapping his hand on his leg he said, ‘I am glad to hear it, and we can do it.’ ”
O
n March 29 Grant began moving. The rain had stopped and roads begun to dry. But the army was scarcely in motion when the skies opened again. “
The heavy rains and horrid roads have prevented the execution of my designs, or attempting them,” Grant wrote Lincoln on the 31st. To Julia he was more philosophical: “
The weather is bad for us but it is consoling to know that it rains on the enemy as well.”
Grant directed his men to lay corduroy roads, and the march resumed. His goal was to reach
Five Forks, on Lee’s extreme right. Sheridan would attack Lee there, forcing the Confederate commander to pull troops from the center of his line or risk letting Sheridan get behind him. Grant would then hit the weakened center and carry Petersburg and perhaps Richmond.
Grant’s aide
Horace Porter was riding with Sheridan, and he reported to Grant how the general and his men wanted a showdown and likely would carry it off. “
General Sheridan will attack the enemy with everything,” Porter wrote. “Our men have never fought better. All are in excellent spirits and anxious to go in. The enemy is said to be fighting badly, giving way constantly before our dismounted cavalry.”
Sheridan took Five Forks and much besides. His infantry hit the Confederate flank while his cavalry charged the front. “
The result of this combined movement was the complete rout of the enemy, with the loss of five pieces of artillery and caissons, a number of their wagons and ambulances, and I think at least 5,000 prisoners and several battle flags,” Sheridan wrote Grant. “After the enemy broke, our cavalry pursued them for six miles down the White Oak road.”
Grant immediately ordered attacks on the center of the Petersburg line. His corps commanders answered that it was getting dark and the men couldn’t see to attack; Grant accepted the argument and settled for artillery barrages overnight. Yet by five o’clock on the morning of April 2 his troops were in motion, and they quickly drove the rebels back upon the inner defenses of Petersburg. Lee counterattacked and hard fighting followed. But the weight of the Federals gradually told. “
We are now up and have a continuous line of troops, and in a few hours will be
entrenched from the Appomattox below Petersburg to the river above,” Grant reported to the War Department and Lincoln that afternoon. “The whole captures since the army started out gunning will not amount to less than 12,000 men and 50 pieces of artillery.” The surrender of Richmond was a matter of time and probably not much at that. “I think the President might come out and pay us a visit tomorrow.”
49
“I
SEE NO PROSPECT OF DOING MORE
THAN HOLDING OUR POSITION
here till night,” Lee wrote
Jefferson Davis the same morning. “I am not certain that I can do that. If I can I shall withdraw tonight north of the Appomattox, and, if possible, it will be better to withdraw the whole line tonight from James River. The brigades on Hatcher’s Run are cut off from us; enemy have broken through our lines and intercepted between us and them.… Our only chance, then, of concentrating our forces is to do so near the Danville railroad, which I shall endeavor to do at once. I advise that all preparation be made for leaving
Richmond tonight.”
Davis objected that the Confederate government couldn’t evacuate the city on a moment’s notice. “
To move tonight will involve the loss of many valuables, both for want of time to pack and of transportation,” he told Lee.
Lee refused to let Davis dictate the future of the
Army of Northern Virginia. “
It is absolutely necessary that we should abandon our position tonight or run the risk of being cut off in the morning,” Lee rejoined. The army would leave whether the Confederate government did so or not. “I have given all the orders to officers on both sides of the river, and have taken every precaution I can to make the movement successful. It will be a difficult operation, but I hope not impracticable.”
LaSalle Corbell Pickett was the wife of Confederate general George Pickett and a resident of Richmond. “
On the morning of Sunday, April 2, in the holy calm of St. Paul’s Church, we had assembled to ask the great Father of Heaven and earth to guard our loved ones and give victory to the cause so dear to us,” she remembered. Jefferson Davis was
there along with other Confederate leaders, and it was during the service that Davis received Lee’s evacuation order. “Suddenly the glorious sunlight was dimmed by the heavy cloud of disappointment,” Sallie Pickett said, “and the peace of God was broken by the deep-voiced bells tolling the death-knell of our hopes.”