The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

  Back up the road, at the scene of the wounding, Field was doing what he could to carry out his orders to “take command, and move forward.” But this was by no means as easy a task as Longstreet seemed to think. Other disruptive accidents, like the one that had just cost the corps its chief, were apt to follow if the main body, still in line astride the plank road, and Sorrel’s flankers, drawn up facing it, were left to fight with their fronts at right angles. Lee ordered a postponement of the follow-up assault until the lines were readjusted. This was done, although the process was a slow one. Not only was the confusion greater than had been thought, it had also been increased by the loss of Jenkins and Old Peter. Four mortal hours, from noon to 4 o’clock, were required to get the troops untangled and into satisfactory positions for attack, and when they went forward at 4.15 they found that Hancock, too, had made good use of the time afforded for adjustments. He had strengthened his breastworks, brought up reinforcements, and posted a secondary line in support of the first. Worst of all (or best, depending on the point of view) he had shored up and realigned his outer flank, which the attackers found no longer dangling in the air. At a couple of points the Confederates achieved a penetration — one, where the log breastworks caught fire, forcing the defenders to abandon them, and Jenkins’s Carolinians came leaping through the flames, intent on avenging the fall of their young brigadier — but in both cases supporting troops came up and restored the line by driving them out again: proof, if any such was needed, that seven divisions, snug behind breastworks and with both flanks secure (Burnside had come up at last, midway through the four-hour lull, and gone into position on Hancock’s right) were not to be driven, or even budged, by three divisions attacking head-on through bullet-flailed brush. An hour of such fighting was quite enough to show that nothing more was going to be accomplished here. It was time — indeed, almost past time — to look elsewhere: meaning in Ewell’s direction, up on the opposite flank.

  All day, though he had had no chance to go in person, Lee had been sending messages to the Second Corps, urging an offensive in that quarter to relieve the pressure on the First or, if that was impracticable, the detachment of reinforcements to strengthen the offensive on the right. Invariably Ewell had replied that he could do neither. There was no fit opening for an attack; he needed all his troops to maintain his position astride the turnpike. When Lee arrived at 5.30 asking, “Cannot something be done on this flank?” Ewell said again that he believed it would be unwise to assault the Federals in their intrenchments, and he was supported in this by Early, who was at corps headquarters when Lee rode up. Gordon was also there, intending to renew his daylong plea that he be unleashed, and when his two superiors finished protesting that there was nothing to be done, he presumed to appeal to the army commander himself for permission to strike at the enemy flank, which he insisted had been wide open to attack for more than eight hours now. Ewell and Early repeated their objections, based on the conviction that Burnside was posted in Sedgwick’s rear to forestall such a move. Lee, who knew that Burnside was in front of Hill, wasted no more time on reproaches, although, as Gordon later wrote, “his silence and grim looks … revealed his thoughts almost as plainly as words could have done.” He simply ordered the attack to be made at once.

  It was launched at straight-up 6 o’clock, and within the limitations of the little daylight time remaining — sunset came at 6.50 and darkness followed quickly in the thickets of the Wilderness — it was altogether as successful as Gordon, for the past nine hours, had been telling Ewell and Early it would be. With the support of the brigade that had arrived that morning from Hanover, North Carolinians under twenty-seven-year-old Brigadier General Robert D. Johnston, the Georgians struck and scattered Ricketts’s unwary flank brigade and captured its commander, Brigadier General Truman Seymour. Seymour had led a division in the ill-starred Florida campaign, and after being whipped at Olustee had returned to Virginia to head a brigade whose members were known in both armies as “Milroy’s weary boys,” a description applied two years ago, after Stonewall Jackson gave them the run-around in the Shenandoah Valley, and confirmed last year when Ewell encountered them near Winchester on his way to Gettysburg. Weary or not, they broke badly again today and spread panic through the rest of the division, as well as through part of Wright’s division, which was next in line and which also had a brigade commander scooped up by the rebels in the confusion. This was Brigadier General Alexander Shaler, a Connecticut-born New Yorker whose capture was especially welcome because he had recently been in charge of the prison for Confederate officers on Johnson’s Island in Sandusky Bay, where winters were cold and blankets few; now he would get a taste of prison life from the inside, looking out, instead of from the outside, looking in. Seymour and Shaler, for all their lofty rank, were only two among some 600 Federals taken captive in the attack, while about as many more were killed or wounded, bringing Sedgwick’s total loss to well over a thousand in one hour. Gordon himself lost only about fifty in the course of what his men referred to, ever afterwards, as their “finest frolic.” The blue right flank was “rolled up” for more than a mile before dusk put an end to the advance and obliged the Georgians and Carolinians, who by then had plunged all the way to the Germanna Plank Road, to pull back with their prisoners, their booty from the overrun camps, and their conviction that an earlier attack, in Gordon’s word’s, “would have resulted in a decided disaster to the whole right wing of General Grant’s army, if not in its entire disorganization.”

  Lee was inclined to think so, too, especially if the attack on this flank, against Sedgwick, had been delivered at the same time as Longstreet’s against Hancock, on the other; in which case the indications were that Grant would have been overwhelmed and routed, not merely discomfited and bled down another one percent. An earlier visit to the left by the army commander would no doubt have resulted in an earlier attack, but Lee had come as soon as he felt he could leave the critical right, where the contest had been touch-and-go since sunrise. The trouble was that he could not be everywhere at once, despite the need for him to do just that. Although this impossible need had grown more pressing ever since the death of Stonewall Jackson, today it had become downright acute. Longstreet’s departure left his corps in the hands of a newly promoted major general who had been with it less than three months, none of the time in combat, and whose deskbound year in Richmond seemed to have made him utterly inflexible at a time when flexibility was among the highest virtues. Hill’s failing health, worse today than yesterday, and likely to be still worse tomorrow, obviously required him to take a sick leave that would deprive the army, however briefly, of the most aggressive of its corps commanders. It was harder, even, to think of Lee without A. P. Hill than it was to think of him without Longstreet, for Hill had never been detached. As for Ewell, although by ordinary standards he had done well today and yesterday, holding his own against the odds, he seemed incapable of doing one whit more than was required by specific orders; Ewell in the Wilderness, unable to bring himself to unleash Gordon despite repeated pleas from headquarters that something be attempted in that direction, was disturbingly like Ewell at Gettysburg, where his indecisiveness had cost the army its one best chance for a quick victory in what, instead, turned out to be a bloody three-day battle that ended in retreat.… All this might well have been heavy on Lee’s mind as he rode southward, three miles through the twilight, to the Tapp farm. He was faced, at this most critical juncture, with a crisis of command: a crisis that would have to be resolved if the Army of Northern Virginia — at the close of only the second day of fighting, in what promised to be the longest and grimmest of its campaigns — was to survive the continuing confrontation, here in the depths of the Wilderness, with an enemy force roughly twice its size, superbly equipped, and still in possession of the main artery leading southeast, through the thickets and beyond into open country, where the tactical odds would lengthen and the capital itself would be in danger of being taken, either by sudden assault or ine
xorable maneuver.

  All around him, as he dismounted in front of his tent in the Tapp farmyard, was confusion. East and north, out in the jungle where the battle had raged for two incredibly savage days, the moans of the wounded, blue and gray, were heightened to screams of terror when a brisk wind sprang up, shortly after dark, and fanned random smouldering embers into flames that spread faster through the underbrush than an injured man could crawl. Dead pines, their sap long dried to rosin, burned like twenty-foot torches, and the low clouds took on an eerie yellow cast, as if they reflected the glow from molten sulphur on the floor of hell. The roar of wind-whipped flames through crackling brush was punctuated from time to time by a clatter resembling the sudden clash of pickets, as groups of disabled men from both sides, huddled together against a common danger, were engulfed by the inferno and the paper-wrapped charges in their pockets or cartridge boxes caught fire and exploded. While stretcher bearers and volunteers did what they could to rescue all the wounded they could reach, others along the Confederate line of battle — including those Third Corps veterans who had thought they were too tired for such exertion the night before — worked hard to strengthen their defenses for a renewal of the contest at first light tomorrow. They expected it, and so did their commander. Less soundly beaten, tactically, and with no greater losses, Hooker had pulled back across the river. But neither Lee nor his soldiers thought it likely that Grant would do what Fighting Joe had done; at least not yet. Judging their new opponent by his western reputation, as well as by his aggressive performance over the past two days, they believed he would stay and fight.

  Next to a retreat, which he did not expect, Lee preferred a Federal attack, and that was what he had his men prepare for. If Grant was to be beaten further, to and beyond the point at which he would have no choice except to pull back across the river, it would have to come as the result of a bloody, morale-shattering repulse. In any case, the next move was up to the invader. Today’s abortive follow-up assault by the First Corps, launched after the long delay occasioned in part by the fall of its commander, had shown only too clearly that the Confederates, whatever their successes when they caught the enemy off balance, lacked the strength to drive an opponent who was not only twice their size but was also braced for the shock in well-prepared intrenchments — and there could be no doubt that the Federals were as hard at work on their defenses, left and right and center, as the graybacks were on their side of the line. Obliged as he was, now that all chances for surprise had been exhausted, to rule out a resumption of the offensive by his badly outnumbered army, Lee’s decision not to attack amounted to a surrender of the initiative. This was a dangerous procedure against an adversary as nimble as Grant had shown himself to be in the campaign that brought Vicksburg under siege, but Lee had no choice. His hope, as he turned in for the night, was that Grant, despite his freedom to maneuver, would continue to forget his Vicksburg method and hold instead to the pattern of headlong assault he had followed so far in Virginia. That might lead to his repulse, and another repulse, if decisive enough, might lead to his destruction. The alternative for Lee, who had no such freedom to maneuver, was stalemate and defeat.

  This second day of battle in the Wilderness had been Grant’s hardest since the opening day at Shiloh, where his army and his reputation had also been threatened with destruction. Here as there, however — so long, at least, as the fighting was in progress — he bore the strain unruffled and “gave his orders calmly and coherently,” one witness noted, “without any external sign of undue tension or agitation.” Internally, a brief sequel was to show, he was a good deal more upset than he appeared, but outwardly, as he continued to sit on his stump atop the knoll in the Lacy meadow, smoking and whittling the critical hours away, he seemed altogether imperturbable. When word came, shortly before noon, that Hancock’s flank had been turned and the left half of his army was in imminent danger of being routed, his reaction was to send more troops in that direction, together with additional supplies of ammunition, followed at 3 o’clock by orders for a counterattack to be launched at 6 to recover the lost ground and assure the holding of the Brock Road leading south. As it turned out, Hancock was himself assaulted a second time, nearly two hours before that, and had to use up so much of the ammunition in repelling the attack that not enough was left for compliance with the order. Besides, Grant by then was faced with an even graver crisis on his right. Sedgwick too had been flanked and was being routed, he was told, by a rebel force that had penetrated all the way to the Germanna Plank Road, cutting the army off from its nearest escape hatch back across the Rapidan.

  Meade was a steadying influence, in this case as in others. “Nonsense,” he snorted when a pair of flustered staffers came riding in from the crumpled flank after sundown to report that all was lost in that direction, including all hope of deliverance from the trap the rebels had sprung on Sedgwick and were about to enlarge in order to snap up everything in blue. “Nonsense! If they have broken our lines they can do nothing more tonight.” He had confidence in John Sedgwick, the least excitable of his corps commanders, and he showed it by sending reinforcements from the center to help shore up the tottered right. Grant approved, of course, and had an even stronger reaction to an officer of higher rank who came crying that this second flank assault meant the end of the northern army unless it found some way to get out from under the blow about to fall. “This is a crisis that cannot be looked upon too seriously,” he declared. “I know Lee’s methods well by past experience. He will throw his whole army between us and the Rapidan, and cut us off completely from our communications.” Grant was not a curser, but his patience had run out. He got up from the stump, took the cigar out of his mouth, and turned on this latest in the series of prophets of doom and idolators of his opponent. “Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do,” he said testily. “Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault and land in our rear and on both our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.”

  Further reports of havoc on the right were received with the same firmness, the same quick rejection of all notions of defeat, although — as Rawlins told a friend who rode over to headquarters to see him later that evening — “the coming of officer after officer with additional details soon made it apparent that the general was confronted by the greatest crisis in his life.” By nightfall, however, Meade’s assessment was confirmed; Sedgwick established a new and stronger line, half a mile south and east of the one he had lost to Gordon’s flankers, who withdrew in the twilight from their position astride the road leading back to Germanna Ford. Then, and not until then, did the general-in-chief show the full effect of the strain he had been under, all this day and most of the day before. He broke. Yet even this was done with a degree of circumspection and detachment highly characteristic of the man. Not only was his personal collapse resisted until after the damage to both flanks had been repaired and the tactical danger had passed; it also occurred in the privacy of his quarters, rather than in the presence of his staff or gossip-hungry visitors. “When all proper measures had been taken,” Rawlins confided, “Grant went into his tent, threw himself face downward on his cot, and gave way to the greatest emotion.” He wept, and though the chief of staff, who followed him into the tent, declared that he had “never before seen him so deeply moved” and that “nothing could be more certain than that he was stirred to the very depths of his soul,” he also observed that Grant gave way to the strain “without uttering any word of doubt or discouragement.” Another witness, a captain attached to Meade’s headquarters — Charles F. Adams, Jr, son and namesake of the ambassador — put it stronger. “I never saw a man so agitated in my life,” he said.

  However violent the breakdown, the giving way to hysteria at this point, it appeared that Grant wept more from the relief of tension (after all, both flanks were well shored up by then) than out of continu
ing desperation. In any case it was soon over. When Rawlins’s friend, Brigadier General James H. Wilson — a friend of Grant’s as well, formerly a member of his military family and recently appointed by him to command one of Sheridan’s cavalry divisions — reached headquarters about 9 o’clock, less than an hour after the collapse Rawlins presently described, he found the general “surrounded by his staff in a state of perfect composure,” as if nothing at all had happened. And in fact nothing had: nothing that mattered, anyhow. Unlike Hooker, who broke inside as a result of similar frustrations, Grant broke outside, and then only in the privacy of his tent. He cracked, but the crack healed so quickly that it had no effect whatever on the military situation, then or later. Whereas Hooker had reacted by falling back across the river, such a course was no more in Grant’s mind now than it had been that morning, before sunup, when he was accosted by a journalist who was about to leave for Washington to file a story on the first day’s fighting. Asked if he had any message for the authorities there, Grant, whose usual procedure was to hold off sending word of his progress in battle until the news was good, thought it over briefly, then replied: “If you see the President, tell him, from me, that, whatever happens, there will be no turning back.”