v1.1.3 / chapter 68 of 93 / 01 sep 11 / greg goebel / public domain
* While Grant was beginning his spring offensive in northern Virginia, he was counting on two secondary offensives to help make his job easier. Ben Butler was assigned to take a force up the James and move on Petersburg or Richmond, while Franz Sigel was to advance out of the Shenandoah Valley and threaten Richmond from the west. Both of the secondary offensives were complete and embarrassing failures. Grant had no choice but to continue his shifts toward the southwest, though for the moment there were no major clashes as there had been in the Wilderness and Spotsylvania.
* While Grant and Meade moved out towards the Wilderness, a second, in principle cooperative, Federal campaign in Virginia had gone into motion. General Benjamin Franklin Butler, in command of Union forces at Fort Monroe on the end of the James River peninsula, had orders from Grant to take the offensive, moving on Richmond from the south and then joining hands with the Army of the Potomac.
More than 200 vessels brought six divisions, consisting of over 30,000 troops, down Chesapeake Bay to give Butler the forces for the operation. The troops were mostly obtained from the Army of the Ohio, brought East by railroad to Annapolis, Maryland, and then shipped to Yorktown. With Lee preoccupied with stopping the Army of the Potomac, there was good reason to believe Butler would succeed. If he seized Richmond, Lee's supply lines would be cut and he would be forced to flee south out of Virginia.
Butler was a clever politician and a master of sneaky deals, which, however distressing to the proper, had proved extremely useful to the Union cause on occasion. Of course, he had little military ability, Grant and every other Union officer knew it, and since Butler worked at being unpleasant, nobody felt very supportive of him. However, Butler's task seemed much too straightforward to screw up. Grant would still have much preferred someone else -- almost anyone else -- in charge of the operation, but Butler's status as a Democrat conveniently devoted to the present Republican administration and the war effort made him politically irreplaceable.
As insurance against failure, Grant assigned two generals who he believed highly professional to keep Butler on track. One was Major General Quincy A. Gillmore, who was no longer hammering at the gates of Charleston. His campaigns against that city had not gone well, but Grant and others felt with some basis in fact that Gillmore had simply been a victim of circumstances beyond his control. Gillmore commanded Butler's X Corps. The other was Major General William F. "Baldy" Smith, who had thoroughly impressed Grant with his efficiency in planning the relief of Chattanooga. To be sure, Baldy Smith was known to have a quarrelsome streak, but Grant believed that Smith had risen above this limitation. Smith commanded Butler's XVIII Corps.
* The James River meanders south from Richmond, performing a number of twisting loops until turning south near the old Federal campground at Malvern Hill, to then join the Appomattox River, broaden, and finally pour into Chesapeake Bay.
The loops of the James and the Appomattox River formed a two-horned peninsula or "neck" of sorts, about three miles (4.8 kilometers) wide at its base. Just below the neck, on the southern bank of the Appomattox where it flowed into the James, was a landing named City Point, and there was another landing just up the river on the neck named Bermuda Hundred.
On 5 May, Butler began to transfer the "Army of the James", as he referred to his force, from Yorktown up the James in a huge convoy led by five ironclads. Butler, being a good politician, had a theatrical streak, and had his headquarters boat steam up one side the convoy and then down the other while he stood on the hurricane deck and waved them forward with his hat, clearly saying: ON TO RICHMOND! The troops cheered as he steamed past.
One division was dropped off at City Point to establish a base of supplies, while the other five were put down at Bermuda Hundred, only about 18 miles (29 kilometers) from Richmond in a straight line. The move was a complete surprise to the Confederates. Although their intelligence had been aware of the troop buildup, they had been misled into thinking that the force was being created for an invasion of North Carolina. Beauregard had been reassigned from Charleston to command forces in North Carolina and Virginia south of the James, and at the moment he was down in North Carolina with most of his troops, preparing for the expected assault. Beauregard's transfer had been at the suggestion of Robert E. Lee, who had anticipated such a "back-door" attack to coincide with an offensive in northern Virginia.
On 3 May, observing the stirrings of the Union Army of the Potomac, Lee warned Richmond that such a back-door move seemed imminent. On the 5th, Jefferson Davis, never given to panic, calmly wired Lee about Butler's action. Lee, preoccupied with Grant, replied with equal calmness that Beauregard could deal with Butler.
As Union troops poured ashore at Bermuda Hundred, the opportunities for the Federals seemed wide open. All they had to do was march out of Bermuda Neck and then turn north on Richmond, or south on Petersburg. It didn't matter much which, since the primary rail lines ran from Petersburg to Richmond, and once the Yankees took Petersburg, they would have a stranglehold on Richmond.
There were about 750 Confederate troops in Petersburg under George Pickett to oppose Butler, with few prepared defenses to block the Federals. There was a sturdy fortification named Fort Darling at Drewry's Bluff that was an obstacle to moving north, but there were only about 3,000 Confederate troops in Richmond, plus a few thousand War Department clerks and staffers who could be pressed into the line if need be.
Butler was enthusiastic as his men went ashore and wanted to move forward immediately, even if night had fallen. Gillmore and Smith advised against it, saying that it would be wiser to wait for daylight. That was probably not bad advice in itself, but the Federals had achieved surprise, and surprise was only useful if it was quickly exploited. Butler actually understood this, but in the face of advice from professionals, for once he went meek and listened to them.
On 6 May, Butler's forces moved west along the Bermuda Hundred Neck, with Gillmore's X Corps to the north and Smith's XVIII Corps to the south. At midday, they reached the neck of the peninsula and began to dig in. This was being too cautious, but Grant had specified it in his orders so that Butler's base of supplies would be protected from a rebel counterstroke. Butler was still trying to move fast, and sent a brigade to the west on reconnaissance to see how vulnerable the rail line was. They ran into resistance, but reported that a good push was all that was needed. Butler decided to send out four brigades to do the job the next day.
* In the meantime, the US Navy was having some problems. On hearing a report from a runaway slave that the Confederates had sown torpedoes in the river, particularly at Deep Bottom, upstream from Bermuda Hundred, the Navy decided to investigate.
The investigation was not conducted with sufficient care. At about 2:00 PM, the big "double-ender" COMMODORE JONES steamed over a 2,000 pound (900 kilogram) torpedo, which was electrically detonated by two rebels hidden in the brush on shore. The effect was spectacular, one witness reporting: "It seemed as if the bottom of the river was torn up and blown through the vessel itself. The JONES was lifted almost entirely clear of the water, and she burst in the air like an exploding firecracker. She was in small pieces when she struck the water again."
69 crew were killed, with bodies, whole or in pieces, found floating downstream for the next few days. The two rebels who had detonated the torpedo were captured. They were interrogated about the whereabouts of other torpedoes, but refused to cooperate until one was placed in the bow of the lead ship, which then started upstream. The prisoner then became much more talkative, and the torpedoes were found and disposed of.
* On 7 May, the four brigades went out from Bermuda Neck to drive across the railroad line. In the early afternoon, they came upon a whistle-stop named Port Walthall Junction, where they encountered rebels who put up a stubborn fight. They were commanded by Yankee-hating Daniel Harvey Hill.
After Hill returned from Georgia he found himself in the doghouse, having been judged with some good reason as being quarrelsome and insubordinate. Hill finally offered his services to Beauregard as an aide, and Beauregard had taken him onto his staff. Beauregard was ailing for the moment and unable to come to Pickett's aid, but he had ordered reinforcements north and told Hill to get there as fast as possible to help. Pickett had put Hill on the line and had reason to be pleased with the results. The Federals lost 289 men to 184 rebels in the clash, and at about 4:00 PM the Yankees decided to call it quits for the day and pull back to their lines. They could come back in greater force later and do the job right.
The Navy also had another setback that day, when the sidewheel gunboat USS SHAWNEEN was bushwhacked by a hidden Confederate battery at midday. The rebels peppered the vessel with rifle fire and put a shot into its boiler, enveloping the gunboat in scalding hot steam and driving most of the crew over the rails. The captain surrendered in order to protect his wounded. The Confederates took them off and then blew the ship up.
* Butler did get some good news the next day. On the same day as the landings at Bermuda Hundred, 5 May, a division of 3,000 cavalry under Brigadier General August Kautz had set out from Suffolk, on the southern bank of the James near Norfolk. Kautz descended on the railroad line linking Petersburg to North Carolina, torching bridges and delaying the movement of reinforcements.
Butler heard of this accomplishment on 8 May, and it encouraged him in his plans to move west again. On 9 May, he got Smith and Gillmore to advance with 14,000 men. The soldiers did manage to get astride the turnpike and the railroad, but Smith became confused and turned the operation into an attempt to box in a Confederate force that ended up giving the Federals the slip. The Yankees pursued, but reported back to Butler that the rebel position was protected by an unfordable creek and too strong to be taken by a direct assault.
Butler pondered this for two days, and then decided to order his troops back to Bermuda Neck on 11 May, planning to give up on Petersburg and move on Richmond instead. By this time the troops were becoming very skeptical, posing their actions as an exercise in arithmetic: "How long will it take to get to Richmond if you advance two miles every day and come back to your starting point every night?"
Relations between Butler, Smith, and Gillmore became increasingly strained. They quarreled when they even bothered to speak to each other. Smith described Butler "as helpless as a child on a field of battle and as visionary as an opium eater in council." Butler, on his part, said that Smith and Gillmore "agreed upon but one thing and that was how they could thwart and interfere with me" and added that neither "really desired that the other should succeed".
* On 12 May, the Federals moved out yet again, this time advancing north toward Fort Darling and Richmond beyond that. The advance was glacially slow, only progressing four miles (6.4 kilometers) in two days, with the Federals digging in just south of Fort Darling.
Although Baldy Smith had done much to contribute to this dismal state of affairs, the part of his military sensibilities that was still working suggested to him that this sort of fumbling around in front of the Confederate States Army was asking for trouble, since the rebels rarely failed to notice and exploit vulnerabilities. Taking a note from Burnside's defense of Knoxville, he had his people twine a network of salvaged rebel telegraph wire in front of his lines, looping it around stumps, fence-posts, and timber.
Beauregard had arrived on 10 May, taking over from George Pickett, who then promptly collapsed and had to take to bed with well-earned nervous exhaustion. Beauregard had an obnoxiously high opinion of his own abilities, but it was partly based on fact, and he had an aggressiveness that Butler and his two lieutenants seriously lacked. Assisted by Braxton Bragg, Beauregard had managed to scrape up a surprisingly formidable army of almost 20,000 experienced troops. He also proposed a wild scheme where Lee would send him enough troops to destroy Butler completely, followed by a coordinated counterstroke that would crush Grant. With these inconveniences out of the way, the Confederacy would have all but won the war. Nobody could ever accuse Beauregard of thinking small.
Bragg visited Beauregard's headquarters to hear out the plan, and then went back to Richmond to relay Beauregard's proposal to Jefferson Davis. Unsurprisingly, Bragg added his own extensive criticisms of the plan, and suggested that Beauregard had enough troops to deal with Butler without assistance from Lee. Davis, taking account of the long-strained relationship between himself and Beauregard, rode down to Beauregard's headquarters to reject the proposal as gently as he could.
Beauregard was disappointed, but it was not in his nature to stay gloomy for long, and he did have a substantial force at his disposal. He threw himself into battle plans. When the sun started to light up the fog on the morning of 16 May, he sent his troops forward from Drewry's Bluff with the intent of wiping Butler and his Army of the James off the face of the Earth.
It didn't quite work out that way. Smith handled his troops well, and the network of telegraph wire that his men had strung out proved lethally effective, throwing the men in the advance waves of the rebel assault on their faces, to be "slaughtered like partridges", as Smith put it, when they tried to get up again.
Beauregard had also ordered a division under Major General W.H.C. Whiting to move up from Petersburg and fall on Butler's exposed rear, but much to his fury Whiting failed to press his attack, even though D.H. Hill, now Whiting's aide, protested loudly. However, Smith hadn't had enough telegraph wire to protect the entire Union line, and even though the rebel attack was confused and uncoordinated, the Confederates still hit the Federals hard, inflicting about 4,100 casualties to about 2,500 of their own. By the afternoon Butler was pulling his men back to Bermuda Neck. Beauregard moved up in the vacuum, and had his men quickly begin to build a line facing the Federal works. Within days, the Confederate defense was all but unbreakable.
Beauregard was disappointed in the battle, writing that "we could and should have captured Butler's entire army." For once, that didn't seem like an exaggeration, but despite this failure he had still saved Richmond and completely frustrated Butler's plans, such as they were. In fact, a few days after the Battle of Drewry's Bluff, Beauregard was able to send about 6,000 badly-needed troops north to help Lee. Beauregard did so reluctantly, since he was still hanging on to his earlier plan for cooperation with Lee to crush Butler and then turn on Grant. Richmond, balancing Beauregard's history of grand plans with Lee's record of success in battle, insisted, and Beauregard had to comply.
Butler admitted no fault, blaming Smith and Gillmore. There was much to blame there, but the exercise still demonstrated Butler's determined blindness to his own failings. He tried to gloss over the fiasco, writing to Secretary Stanton, saying that his own position was impregnable and that his presence prevented reinforcements from being sent to Lee. The first statement was true but irrelevant; the second was simply false.
Although Butler would have his defenders, the final nail in the coffin of his Bermuda Hundred campaign was hammered in by Grant in his memoirs, saying that Butler's force had been "as completely shut off from further operations directly against Richmond as if it had been in a bottle strongly corked." Grant did not hesitate to grind an axe when he had the chance, and many people had good reason to sharpen the edge for Ben Butler. But fair or not, the phrase "the cork in the bottle" has persisted ever since as a summary of Butler's Bermuda Hundred campaign.
* As the third part of the grand Federal plan, another offensive operation against Virginia was set in motion in early May. While Grant and Meade were moving out to the east, on 30 April 1864 General Franz Sigel took a force of 8,000 troops down the Shenandoah Valley from Winchester to seize the town of Staunton and cut the Virginia Central Railroad. This would eliminate the Valley as a significant source of supplies for Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.
Sigel's force was in principle cooperating with a second force of roughly similar size moving from the mountains to the west towards the southern end of the Valley. This force consisted of two columns under Brigadier General George Crook, with one column under his personal direction that consisted of about 6,000 infantry, and the other consisting of 2,000 cavalry led by Brigadier General William W. Averell. The general goal of Crook's force was to cut the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad, which ran southwest out of the Valley and in the mountains, and also to seize Saltville and Wyethville, sites of salt and lead mines of strategic importance to the Confederacy. Once the two columns achieved these objectives, they would move northeast and meet Sigel at Staunton, and then the combined force would move east across the mountains to help finish off Robert E. Lee.
That was the plan. Crook's force let Sigel and his men get a head start to distract the Confederates. Crook took his infantry on the march on 2 May, while Averell set out with his cavalry on 5 May.
On 9 May, Crook's men encountered a rearguard force of about 3,000 green rebel troops under Brigadier General Albert Jenkins at Cloyd's Mountain. The Confederates were routed, with one of Crook's brigade commander, Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes, putting on a fine show that would later help win him the presidency. The rebels lost 538 men, the Yankees 643. Jenkins was wounded and captured, dying of his wounds a week later. Crook aggressively sent his men eastward that evening, towards the vital railroad bridge across New River and the nearby town of Dublin. The Federals torched the bridge the next morning.
Crook had demonstrated considerable aggressiveness to this time, but on reaching Dublin he received news that took all the wind out of his sails. Captured telegrams indicated that Grant had been decisively defeated by Lee and was retreating. Whether these telegrams simply reflected excessive Confederate optimism over the Battle of the Wilderness or were a ruse is unclear, but given the past history of Federal campaigns in northern Virginia Crook found them only too believable. He decided that Lee was likely to descend on his force and destroy it, and immediately began a retreat back up into the mountains to make camp and wait on developments.
In the meantime, Averell's column had pushed on towards Saltville, only to encounter on 8 May formidable opposition in the form of John Morgan. Morgan was finally back in the field after his imprisonment and escape. He only had about 750 of his own troopers, but they were very good at their work, and he was backed up by local militia units.
Averell mistakenly calculated Morgan's numbers as twice his own. Morgan's force had moved into Saltville, and so Averell decided to give up on that objective and its strategic salt mines, to focus on Wyethville and its lead mines instead. The Federal cavalry feinted at Saltville on 9 May, then turned northeast towards Wyethville.
Morgan wasn't fooled. Averell and his troopers found Morgan and his men blocking their route at a place named Crockett's Cove. The rebels held a good defensive position, but Morgan wanted to go at the Yankees and not just wait for them to come to him. The rebels repeatedly charged the Yankees and drove them back in confusion. Averell suffered about 114 casualties and decided, like his boss Crook, that it was time to give it up. Morgan, satisfied at the work he had done, then turned his attention to performing another raid into Kentucky. Averell and his cavalry finally caught up with Crook on 15 May, with the combined force, hungry and tattered, finally making camp up in the mountains on 19 May.
* In the meantime, Sigel had been having problems of his own. Like Butler, Sigel owed his position to his political importance, in this case with the German-American community. Unlike Butler, he had the makings of a good general, with substantial personal dash in battle and possessing a formal military education -- but he somehow lacked the recipe.
There were the usual confusions of military operations, compounded by heavy rains that bogged down the advance and the hit-and-run resistance of about 1,500 rebel cavalry under Brigadier General John D. Imboden. Sigel's command ended up stretched out along the roads, and when he finally met solid Confederate resistance on 15 May, at the town of New Market, he couldn't get his men together to put up a good fight.
He was opposed by a force of 5,000 Confederates soldiers under Major General John C. Breckinridge, previously of the rebel Army of the Tennessee. Breckinridge had marched 2,500 men over the mountains and then doubled his numbers by sweeping up everyone he could find. This included cadets of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). The cadets went into battle to the jeers of raggedy and tough Confederate veterans, who found the youngsters in their prim cadet uniforms laughable, calling them "katydids".
Sigel committed his men piecemeal and became excited under fire, shouting out orders in German at men who did not understand it. Breckinridge got the advantage and kept it, driving the Yankees off the field of battle in a rout. He captured six guns and a large haul of prisoners, and the Valley's wheat crop reached the Army of Northern Virginia that year without serious interference. The derided VMI cadets fought like tigers, and those who had mocked them then couldn't praise them enough. Ten cadets were killed, and from that time on, every 15 May, VMI would add their names to the daily roll call, with a cadet stepping forward to announce: "Died of the field of honor, sir!"
Sigel withdrew to Strasburg, 25 miles (40 miles) north, to collect his
bruised and bloodied army. He had suffered 831 casualties to 577 for the
Confederates, but he intended to go back and continue his offensive once he
got things sorted out. He didn't get the opportunity. Grant sent a telegram
to Halleck emphasizing the importance of Sigel's operation, and Halleck
replied that Sigel was beaten, concluding in the telegram:
HE WILL DO NOTHING BUT RUN. HE NEVER DID ANYTHING ELSE.
That was arguably an exaggeration, but Sigel's progress was clearly
unsatisfactory, and he was relieved of command on 21 May. On 24 May, Grant
sent orders to Major General David Hunter to take over and try again where
Sigel had failed.
Unlike Butler, at least Sigel did not try to cover up his defeat, though that was almost irrelevant in the bigger scheme of things. Both Butler and Sigel had real opportunities to do the Confederate cause serious harm. In failing to do so, they allowed reinforcements to be sent to shore up Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. Now the full burden of the war in the east fell on Grant, Meade, and the Army of the Potomac.
* The failures of Butler and Sigel had much to do with Grant's evacuation of the Spotsylvania battlefield on 20 May. Grant had hoped that he could keep Lee pinned down to give Butler and Sigel freedom of movement, but they had failed, and Grant knew that there was no further point in smashing his troops against well-prepared and hotly defended rebel fortifications.
However, a shift had problems as well. Lee could move a shorter distance over better roads to block any Federal move, and in fact Lee was looking forward to catching the Army of the Potomac in the open, where the Army of Northern Virginia's superior agility might give the Confederates the upper hand.
The focal point of both armies was Hanover Junction, just south of the North Anna river, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) in a straight line from Spotsylvania and about the same distance from Richmond. Lee had ordered the 8,500 reinforcements from Beauregard and Breckinridge to join him there, so they could contest a Federal crossing of the North Anna, or hopefully even catch the Yankees while they were trying to cross.
Union soldiers were somewhat discouraged by the move. They had been hammering away at the rebels since the beginning of the month and had nothing to show for it but casualties. Surely with their superior numbers they should have been able to overwhelm the Confederates, but for some reason nobody could make it happen. They were somewhat encouraged by the fact that they were moving forward, as well as sideways, and Lee was falling back. If they couldn't break through the Confederates, they could at least force them to give ground.
The Federals reached the North Anna above Hanover Junction on the afternoon of 23 May 1864. Confederate forces were already arrayed around Hanover Junction, though Lee had not given orders for them to dig in until he could determine what Grant intended to do. Lee was not sure whether the Federals would try to fight it out there or continue downstream to another crossing, but by 4:30 that afternoon, Union General Warren had his V Corps across the river at an upstream crossing named Jericho Mills. The Federals had showed their hand.
The crossing was not contested and Warren's troops marched through the woods towards the rebel concentration. A.P. Hill, still sick but by his insistence back in command, sent a division under Major General Cadmus Wilcox to block the move, with a division under Major General Henry Heth as backup.
Wilcox sent his division against a Federal division under Brigadier General Lysander Cutler. This division had been commanded by the late lamented General Wadsworth, had been badly chewed up in the Wilderness, and was thrown back on Warren's other two divisions by the rebel attack. The Union advance fell into confusion. However, Wilcox's men became confused in turn by their own success, and when Warren's troops rallied and counterattacked, they threw the rebels back in the direction from which they had come. The Confederates managed to make the cover of woods at about sundown, and falling darkness and a driving rainstorm finally stopped the fighting. The rebels had lost about 642 men, the Federals about the same.
Under cover of the same cloudburst, Hancock had sent two brigades of his II Corps against a downstream crossing, Chesterfield Bridge. The Federals sent its guard running before the bridge could be torched. Over a hundred Confederates were captured or killed.
* The rebels had taken the worst of the engagements so far, and the Yankees now had two river crossings. Lee was undiscouraged. These were minor actions, and now he was certain that Grant planned to attack the Army of Northern Virginia around Hanover Junction the next day. Lee ordered his troops to dig in to receive an attack, though he also told General Richard Anderson to be prepared to move his First Corps downstream in case all of the Federal actions threatening Hanover Junction turned out to be feints.
On the morning of 24 May, Hancock took II Corps across the North Anna undisturbed at Chesterfield Bridge, and Wright took the VI Corps across at Jericho Mills, backing up Warren's V Corps. Burnside was supposed to move his IX Corps across the North Anna between these two extremes, at a place named Ox Bend. IX Corps was now formally a part of the Army of the Potomac, Grant having decided that a clear chain of command outweighed any slight to Burnside in having him report to Meade, who Burnside technically outranked. Burnside reported back to Grant that there were massed Confederate batteries on the south bank of the river, and so crossing at Ox Bend was suicidal. Grant inspected the situation himself and agreed. One of Burnside's divisions was left in place to perform a demonstration. One of the other divisions was sent downstream, the other upstream, to help with the two wings of the main assault.
Grant was very puzzled by the lack of Confederate resistance so far. He had expected the crossings to be contested, but so far the rebels had hardly put up a fight. Lee was ailing at the time, having come down with bowel troubles. He was irritable enough to publicly light into A.P. Hill that morning for having committed his forces piecemeal against Warren the afternoon before. Hill was not the sort of person to take criticism quietly, but he knew he had done poorly and also that Lee was out of sorts. However, Lee hadn't contested the crossings because it didn't make much sense to do so. Except at Ox Bend, the higher ground was on the north side of the river, held by the Yankees, and if the Confederates made a fight of it there, Federal gunners would have chewed them up.
Lee had more devious plans. There was high ground running back from the river southeast and southwest from Ox Bend, and he would have his troops dig in strongly. Since the Army of the Potomac was split in half for what Grant hoped would be a "pincers" movement, Lee could then hold one half of the line while he threw most of his forces at the Federals on the other half at good odds. It almost didn't matter which way Lee struck. He could shuttle forces between the two sides of his defenses at short notice, while the two halves of Grant's army would be unable to assist each other.
By midday, the Confederate defenses were as strong as needed for Lee's plans, but his illness had grown worse. He was so snappish that an aide finally told him: "You are not fit to command this army!" That was not the sort of thing anyone in the Army of Northern Virginia, least of all someone on Lee's staff, would have said were it not entirely obvious, and Lee finally had to reluctantly lie down and get some rest.
* There was nobody present who could really take Lee's place, and the counterstroke was not delivered. It might not have been delivered anyway, and if it had it might not have turned out well.
That afternoon, the Federals probed the rebel defenses, with John Gibbon's division getting into an inconclusive fight that went on until about midnight. Another probe was launched by Brigadier James H. Ledlie of Burnside's IX Corps, who was such a glory hound that he sent his brigade against a very tough section of the Confederate line even though he had been ordered to remain on the defensive. The only thing accomplished by this rash act was the loss of 220 soldiers. Witnesses reported that Ledlie was stumbling drunk through the whole thing, but no disciplinary action was taken against him -- an oversight that would have disastrous consequences later.
The probes showed Grant how formidable the rebel defenses really were, and so he sat down to think of what to do next. Both sides remained in place on 25 May, continuing to reinforce their defenses until neither could take action against the other.
Grant was frustrated. Persistence had paid off in the West, since he could usually count on some failure of the rebels to eventually give him the edge, but Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia were made of sharper stuff.
Grant's soldiers were frustrated, too. One of them said later: "The men in the ranks did not look as they did when they entered the Wilderness. Their uniforms were now torn, ragged, and stained with mud; the men had grown thin and haggard. The experience of those twenty days seemed have added twenty years to their age." They had been fighting almost continually for those 20 days and Lee was always one step ahead of them.
Since there was really nothing more to be gained by staying in the Hanover Junction area, on 26 May the Army of the Potomac began demonstrations in hopes of covering another shift. Lee thought they would shift back upstream, since going downstream led the Federals to cross the Chickahominy, whose meandering path and swampy environs helped confound McClellan in 1862. Going upstream would keep the Yankees driving towards Richmond, and also cut Lee's line to the Shenandoah Valley.
In reality, Grant decided to go downstream, following the North Anna beyond where it met the South Anna and became the Pamunkey River. Supply transports could reach up the river to provide food and ammunition. As far as the Shenandoah Valley went, Grant believed that David Hunter could deal with that problem. The troops began to move out in the night of 26 May.
Although Grant had taken almost 2,000 casualties in the confrontation above Hanover Junction, compared to about a thousand rebel casualties, he was upbeat. The fact that the Confederates hadn't tried to strike at him convinced him that they were wearying. "Lee's army is really whipped," Grant wrote Halleck on 26 May, concluding: "I may be mistaken, but I feel our success over Lee's army is already assured."
Had Grant known that the Confederate inactivity was mostly due to Lee's intestinal problems, he might not have been so cocksure. In fact, Lee was at least as upbeat, saying of Grant on the morning of 26 May: "If I can just get one more pull at him, I will defeat him."
* When the sun came up on 27 May, the Federals were gone from their camp on the North Anna, and it was obvious they were moving downstream. Lee had the inside route and had no trouble staying ahead of them, despite the delay. He marched the Army of Northern Virginia to Atlee, about two-thirds of the way between Hanover Junction and Richmond, to see what the Yankees were going to do next.
The Federal march was in two columns, one consisting of Hancock's II Corps and Wright's VI Corps, the other of Warren's V Corps and Burnside's IX Corps. Sheridan's troopers, back with the Army of the Potomac, screened the move. At midday on 28 May, the two columns began to cross the Pamunkey on pontoon bridges. Warren and Wright made the crossing just short of Totopotomoy Creek, which flowed into the Pamunkey from the southeast, about 18 miles (29 kilometers) from the Hanover Junction confrontation, and only ten miles (16 kilometers) from Richmond itself. Warren and Burnside crossed a few miles upstream.
The crossing was complete by midnight. Cavalry had preceded the infantry across the river, probing for Confederates. That afternoon they had found them, in the form of troopers from Wade Hampton's and Fitz Lee's brigades, near a hamlet named Haw's Shop. A bitter seven-hour fight followed, the biggest cavalry engagement in the East since Brandy Station. Sheridan's troopers were initially driven back on their infantry support, then rallied and drove the rebels off the field. There were substantial casualties on both sides, but the Confederate troopers were able to report back to Lee on the movements and makeup of the Union force.
The rebel cavalry out of the way, the two Federal columns continued their advance south on 29 May. The Totopotomoy curved in front of their march, and Lee was unsure whether Grant intended to move directly south over the creek or loop around to the east around its end.
Lee did know that Grant had been reinforced with 40,000 troops, which roughly made good Union losses. Lee had received 10,000 reinforcements, or about half his losses. He didn't like this arithmetic, and said as much to Jefferson Davis, who had ridden from Richmond for a conference. Davis, always sympathetic to Lee, understood the issue, but was hard-pressed to figure out where fresh troops might be found. Beauregard had been protesting against any further depletion of his force, feeling he was already almost too weak to stop Butler if the Yankee general decided to force the rebel lines, and came out to Atlee that evening to argue his case. The conference ended that night with the issue of reinforcements unresolved.
The next day, 30 May, Grant's army moved to the southern line of the Totopotomoy, with two of his four corps crossing and taking up positions to advance on the Army of Northern Virginia from the west. Lee believed that the Yankees would repeat the same exercise they had conducted above Hanover Junction, forcing a confrontation and then moving East again.
Lee was still feeling poorly. In fact, Dick Ewell had come down with the same intestinal complaint, hit hard enough to require that he be relieved from command of Second Corps, to be replaced by Jubal Early. However, Lee was still feeling very aggressive and ordered Early to lead Second Corps in an attack the two Federal corps that had crossed the Totopotomoy, with Richard Anderson backing up the assault with his First Corps.
Lee wanted to hit the Federals hard because he knew that time was on the side of the Union. The relative strength of the Yankees would increase in time, and they were also gradually boxing in the Army of Northern Virginia, eliminating the rebel's main advantage, their superiority at maneuver. Lee told Early: "We must destroy this army of Grant's before he gets to James River. If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time."
Early went forward, but in the end he was lucky not to be destroyed himself. He committed his forces piecemeal, sending in one division and failing to commit his other two to exploit initial success, with the end result that Second Corps was thrown back on the defensive by a strong Federal counterstroke. Anderson arrived with First Corps in time to help brace the Confederate defense and prevent a Federal breakthrough.
* Lee said nothing to the two corps commanders about this reverse, because he had obtained new intelligence that made it was the least of his worries. A few days earlier, Grant, realizing that the Federal troops bottled up in Bermuda Hundred were not doing the Union cause much good, had ordered General Baldy Smith to put the 16,000 men of his XVIII Corps on steamers; port them down the James and up the Pamunkey to the White House, the old base on the north bank of the James Peninsula that was now the Federal supply depot; and get them on the battlefield as fast as possible.
Lee now learned that what was apparently an entire Federal corps was landing off to the east, while he had both hands full on the Totopotomoy. He had almost nothing to stop this new threat. He ordered Fitzhugh Lee to take his cavalry to Cold Harbor, a vital crossroads in the gap between the Totopotomoy and the Chickahominy, and do what he could to slow down any Federal advance.
Robert E. Lee, violating the chain of command, wired Beauregard directly to tell him to send one of his two divisions immediately. Beauregard was not happy with having his command looted to support Lee, and replied that Lee would have to go through the War Department. Lee wired the War Department, commenting that: "The result of this delay will be disaster." That was very strong language from Lee, and it got immediate attention. Jefferson Davis told Braxton Bragg to get one of Beauregard's divisions on the rails immediately, and at midnight Bragg wired Lee to tell him that he should be receiving a full division in the morning.
Lee's worries were far from exaggerated. Grant had no intention to trying to force the Totopotomoy, having taken over 2,000 casualties in this latest move with the only satisfaction of inflicting about the same on the rebels, and was already beginning a shift of the Army of the Potomac towards Cold Harbor.
