The Georgian chose Fort Stedman, a somewhat run-down Federal installation, midway between the Appomattox and the Crater, only 150 yards from the nose of a bulge in his own line known as Colquitt’s Salient. His plan was to use all three of his divisions in a predawn assault, preceded by fifty axmen, whose job it would be to chop a path through the sharp-pointed abatis in front of the objective, and three groups of a hundred men each, who would make their way into the Union rear to seize three open-ended forts Gordon had spotted there, turning their captured guns on the works to the right and left of Stedman, so that the main body could widen the breach in both directions. One beauty in the choice of this location was that it lay in close proximity to the City Point Railroad, a vital supply route leading rearward to Grant’s headquarters and main base; Grant would have little choice, if the operation went as planned, except to withdraw troops from his far left to meet the danger, thus shortening his line in just the direction Lee would be moving when the time came for him to set out on his march to join Joe Johnston.
Lee not only approved, he expanded the operation. Leaving the tactical details to Gordon, much as he had done in the old days with Jackson, he reinforced him with four brigades from Hill and two from Anderson — which lifted the total to about half of his southside infantry — as well as with Rooney Lee’s cavalry division, summoned up from Stony Creek to be used in spreading havoc in the Union rear once the breakthrough had succeeded.
Although he thus would be stripping the Petersburg front practically bare of men except at the point of concentration, he was more than willing to accept the risk for the sake of the possible gain. For one thing, having told his wife some weeks ago that he intended to “fight to the last,” he was going about it in his familiar style: all out. For another, in the nearly three weeks since his talk with Davis in Richmond, the over-all situation had worsened considerably. Sheridan, after disposing of Early, was reported to be moving toward a junction with Grant that would give the besiegers the rapid-fire mobility they had been needing for a raid-in-force around the Confederate right, which would not only menace the tenuous gray supply lines but would also block the intended escape route for the link-up down in Carolina. Moreover, things had gone from bad to worse in that direction too. On March 11 Johnston warned that if Sherman and Schofield combined, “their march into Virginia cannot be prevented by me.” Twelve days and three lost battles later, on March 23, he sent word that the two blue armies had met at Goldsboro. “I can do no more than annoy him,” he said of Sherman, whose 90,000 troops were closer to Grant at Globe Tavern, say — a ten-day march at worst — than Johnston, with scarcely one fifth that number around Smithfield, was to Lee at Petersburg.
Time had all but run out. Lee called Gordon in that night and told him to assemble his force next day for the strike at Fort Stedman before dawn, March 25. Gordon requested that Pickett’s division be detached from Longstreet to strengthen the effort, and Lee agreed, though he doubted that it would arrive in time from beyond the Appomattox. “Still we will try,” he said, adding by way of encouragement to the young corps commander, who at thirty-three was twenty-five years his junior: “I pray that a merciful God may grant us success and deliver us from our enemies.”
Gordon cached his reinforced corps in Colquitt’s Salient the following day, as ordered, and after nightfall had the obstructions quietly removed to clear the way for the attack. Exclusive of Pickett, who was not up, and the division of cavalry en route from Stony Creek, he had 12,000 infantry poised for the 4 o’clock jump-off, an hour before dawn and two hours before sunrise. Lee arrived on Traveller after moonset and took position on a hill just in rear of the trenches; he would share in the waiting, though he would of course be able to see nothing until daylight filtered through to reveal Fort Stedman, out ahead on Hare’s Hill; by which time it should be in Gordon’s possession, along with a considerable stretch of line in both directions. On schedule, the signal — a single rifle shot, loud against the bated silence — rang out, and the skirmishers overwhelmed the drowsy enemy pickets, followed by the fifty axmen and the 300-man assault force, all wearing strips of white cloth across their breasts and backs for ready identification in the darkness.
There was no alarm until the first wave started up the rising ground directly under the four guns in the fort. Then suddenly there was. All four guns began to roar, and the force of their muzzle blasts and the wind from passing shells tore at the hats of the attackers. “We went the balance of the way with hats and guns in hand,” one would recall. At the moat, the axmen came forward to hack at the chevaux-defrise, and the charging graybacks went up and over the parapet so quickly that the defenders, some 300 members of a New York heavy artillery outfit, had no time to brace themselves for hand-to-hand resistance. Stedman fell in that first rush, along with its guns, which were seized intact and turned on the adjacent works. Battery 10, on the immediate left, was promptly taken, as was Battery 11 on the right. Gordon was elated. A lean-faced man with a ramrod bearing, long dark hair, and glowing eyes — “as fierce and nearly cruel blue eyes as I ever looked into,” a reporter was to note — he was much admired by his men, one of whom said of him: “He’s most the prettiest thing you ever did see on a field of fight. It would put heart in a whipped chicken just to look at him.” Happy and proud, he sent back word of his success and his intention to enlarge it, left and right and straight ahead.
Dawn had glimmered through by then, and the three 100-man assault teams pressed on beyond the captured works, toward the rim of sky tinted rose by the approaching sun. Trained artillerists were among them, assigned to serve the guns in the three backup forts, once they were taken, and thus bring them to bear on the rear of front-line redoubts north and south of fallen Stedman and its two companion batteries. This unexpected shelling from the rear, combined with pressure from the front and flanks, would assure enlargement of the gap through which the waves of graybacks could push eastward, perhaps within reach of City Point itself, where the wide-ranging cavalry would take over the task of rounding up high-rank prisoners — conceivably including U. S. Grant himself, whose headquarters was known to be in the yard of the Eppes mansion — while setting fire to the main enemy supply base and disrupting the very nerve center of the encircling Union host. Gordon saw that the pressure from the rear had better come soon, though, for the bluecoats in Batteries 9 and 12 were standing firm, resisting all efforts to widen the breach. Then at sunup he got the worst possible news from runners sent back by officers in charge of the assault teams. They could not locate the three open-ended forts on the rearward ridge: for the simple reason, discovered later, that they did not exist, being nothing more than the ruins of old Confederate works along the Dimmock line, abandoned back in June by Beauregard. Meantime the counterbattery fire was getting heavier and more accurate from adjoining redoubts and Fort Haskell, within easy range to the south, as well as from massed batteries of field artillery, brought forward to help contain the penetration. Fort Stedman and its two flank installations were subjected to converging fire from every Yankee gun along this portion of the line; a fire so intense that the air seemed filled with shells whose burning fuzes, one observer said, made them resemble “a flock of blackbirds with blazing tails beating about in a gale.” Pinned down, the stalled attackers huddled under what shelter they could find, waiting for the metallic storm to lift.
Instead of lifting it grew heavier as the red ball of the sun bounced clear of the landline. Gordon saw plainly that without help from the nonexistent forts he not only could not deepen or widen the dent he had made, he would not even be able to hold what he had won by the predawn rush. Accordingly, he notified Lee of his predicament, and word came back, shortly before 8 o’clock, for him to call off the attack and withdraw. The Georgian was altogether willing to return to his own lines, but the same could not be said for hundreds of his soldiers, who preferred surrender to running the gauntlet of fire that boxed them in. As a result, Confederate losses for this stage of the operation c
ame to about 3500 men, half of them captives, as compared to a Federal total of 1044. Nor was that all. Convinced that Lee must have stripped the rest of his southside line to provide troops for the strike at Stedman, Grant ordered a follow-up assault to be launched against the rebel right, where Hill’s intrenched picket line was overrun near Hatcher’s Run, inflicting heavy casualties and taking close to a thousand additional prisoners, not to mention securing a close-up hug on Hill’s main line of resistance. By the time a truce was called that afternoon for collecting the dead and wounded on both sides, the casualty lists had grown to 4800 for Lee and 2080 for Grant. The bungled affair of the Crater — which today’s effort so much resembled, both in purpose and in outcome — had been redressed, although with considerably heavier losses all around.
Another difference was that the southern commander could ill afford what his opponent had shrugged off, eight months ago and less than a mile down the line, with no more than a brief loss of temper. Riding rearward, Lee met Rooney coming forward in advance of his division. With him was his younger brother Robert, now a captain on his staff. Both greeted their father, who gave them the news that there would be no cavalry phase of the operation. The assault had failed, and badly, at great cost. “Since then,” Robert declared long afterwards, “I have often recalled the sadness of his face, its careworn expression.”
Lee’s depression was well founded. On no single day since the Bloody Angle was overrun at Spotsylvania had he lost so many prisoners, and these combined with the killed and wounded had cost him a solid tenth of his command, as compared to Grant’s loss of less than a sixtieth. “The greatest calamity that can befall us is the destruction of our armies,” he had warned Davis eleven days ago, while Gordon was planning the Stedman operation. “If they can be maintained, we may recover from our reverses, but if lost we have no resource.” Today marked a sizeable step toward the destruction of the first army of them all. Moreover, it had gained him nothing, while costing him Hill’s outer defenses, now occupied by Grant, who could be expected to launch a swamping assault from this new close-up position — a sort of Stedman in reverse — in just the direction Lee would be obliged to move when he tried for a breakout west and south: no longer for the purpose of combining with Johnston for a lunge at Sherman before the red-head crossed the Roanoke, but simply as the only remaining long-shot chance of postponing the disaster he foresaw. Notifying Breckinridge of the failed attack, he made no complaint of Gordon’s miscalculations; he merely remarked that the troops had “behaved most handsomely.” But next day, in following this with a report to the President, he confessed himself at a loss as to his next move, except that he knew he had to get away, and soon. “I fear now it will be impossible to prevent a junction between Grant and Sherman,” he frankly admitted, “nor do I deem it prudent that this army should maintain its position until the latter shall approach too near.”
He was warning again that Richmond would have to be given up any day now, but what would follow that abandonment he did not say; perhaps because he did not know. All he seemed to have in mind was a combination with Johnston for the confrontation that was bound to ensue. “I have thought it proper to make the above statement to Your Excellency of the condition of affairs,” he concluded, “knowing that you will do whatever may be in your power to give relief.”
But the power was Grant’s, and Grant knew it. When Lincoln came to headquarters, shortly after the Confederates began their withdrawal from Fort Stedman — those of them, that is, who did not choose surrender over running the gauntlet of fire — the general observed that the assault had been less a threat to the integrity of the Union position than it was an indication of Lee’s desperation in regard to the integrity of his own. Accordingly, he rescheduled the V Corps review, which would be staged in rear of a sector just south of the one where Gordon’s attack had exploded before dawn, and decided as well that the President would be safe enough in taking a look at the ground where the struggle had raged between 4 and 8 o’clock that morning.
So it was that Lincoln, going forward on the railroad to the margin of that field, saw on a considerably larger scale what he had seen at Fort Stevens eight months earlier, just outside Washington. Mangled corpses were being carted rearward for burial in the army cemetery near City Point — which incidentally, like everything else in that vicinity, had been much expanded since his brief visit in June of the year before — and men were being jounced on stretchers, writhing in pain as they were lugged back for surgeons to probe their wounds or remove their shattered arms and legs. There was pride and exhilaration in statements that Parke, cut off from communication with Meade and Grant while the fighting was in progress, had used only his three IX Corps divisions to contain and repulse the rebels without outside help. But for Lincoln, interested though he always was in military matters, the pleasure he would ordinarily have taken in such reports was greatly diminished by the sight of what they had cost. He looked “worn and haggard,” an officer who accompanied him declared; “He remarked that he had seen enough of the horrors of war, that he hoped this was the beginning of the end, and that there would be no more bloodshed.”
Still another shock was in store for him before the day was over, this one involving his wife. For some time now, particularly since the death of her middle and favorite son, eleven-year-old Willie, Mary Lincoln had been displaying symptoms of the mental disturbance that would result, a decade later, in a medical judgment of her case as one of insanity. Her distress, though great, was scarcely greater than her family misfortunes — exclusive of the greatest, still to come. Four of her five Kentucky brothers had gone with the South, and three of them died at Shiloh, Baton Rouge, and Vicksburg. Similarly, three of her four sisters were married to Confederates, one of whom fell at Chickamauga. Such losses not only brought her grief, they also brought on a good deal of backhand whispering about “treason in the White House.” All this, together with Lincoln’s lack of time to soothe her hurts and calm her fears, combined to produce a state in which she was quick to imagine slights to her lofty station and threats to all she valued most, including her two surviving sons and her husband.
It was the latter who was in danger today, or so she conceived from something she heard as she rode with Mrs Grant and Lieutenant Colonel Adam Badeau, Grant’s military secretary, in an ambulance on the way to the review that had been rescheduled for 3 o’clock. Badeau happened to remark that active operations could not be far off, since all army wives had recently been ordered to the rear: all, that is, but the wife of Warren’s ranking division commander, Mrs Charles Griffin, who had been given special permission by the President to attend today’s review. The First Lady flared up at this. “What do you mean by that, sir? Do you mean to say that she saw the President alone? Do you know that I never allow the President to see any woman alone?” Speechless with amazement at finding her “absolutely jealous of poor, ugly Abraham Lincoln,” the colonel tried to assume a pleasant expression in order to show he meant no malice; but the effect was otherwise. “That’s a very equivocal smile, sir,” Mrs Lincoln exclaimed. “Let me out of this carriage at once! I will ask the President if he saw that woman alone.”
Badeau and Mrs Grant managed to persuade her not to alight in the mud, but it was Meade who saved the day. Coming up to pay his respects on their arrival, he was taken aside by Mrs Lincoln for a hurried exchange from which she returned to fix the flustered staffer with a significant look. “General Meade is a gentleman, sir,” she told him. “He says it was not the President who gave Mrs Griffin the permit, but the Secretary of War.” Badeau afterwards remarked that Meade, the son of a diplomat, “had evidently inherited some of his father’s skill.”
Unfortunately, the Pennsylvanian was not on hand for a similar outburst the following day, when the troops reviewed were Ord’s, beyond the James. Arriving late, again in an ambulance with the staff colonel and Mrs Grant, Mrs Lincoln found the review already in progress, and there on horseback beside her husband, who was mount
ed too — he wore his usual frock coat and top hat, though his shirt front was rumpled and his strapless trouser legs had worked up to display “some inches of white socks” — was Mrs Ord. She was neither as young nor as handsome as Mrs Griffin, but that was no mitigation in Mary Lincoln’s eyes. “What does the woman mean by riding by the side of the President? And ahead of me! Does she suppose that he wants her by the side of him?” She was fairly launched, and when Mrs Grant ventured a few words of reassurance she turned on her as well, saying: “I suppose you think you’ll get to the White House yourself, don’t you?” Julia Grant’s disclaimer, to the effect that her present position was higher than any she had hoped for, drew the reply: “Oh, you had better take it if you can get it. ’Tis very nice.”
Mrs Ord, seeing the vehicle pull up, excused herself to the dignitaries around her. “There come Mrs Lincoln and Mrs Grant; I think I had better join them,” she said, unaware of the tirade in progress across the way, and set out at a canter. It was not until she drew rein beside the ambulance that she perceived that she might have done better to ride in the opposite direction. “Our reception was not cordial,” an aide who accompanied her later testified discreetly. Badeau, a former newsman, gave a fuller account of Mrs Ord’s ordeal. “Mrs Lincoln positively insulted her, called her vile names in the presence of a crowd of officers, and asked what she meant by following up the President. The poor woman burst into tears and inquired what she had done, but Mrs Lincoln refused to be appeased, and stormed till she was tired. Mrs Grant tried to stand by her friend, and everybody was shocked and horrified. But all things come to an end, and after a while we returned to City Point.”