v1.1.1 / chapter 72 of 93 / 01 sep 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* After the bloody fiasco at Cold Harbor, Grant decided to perform yet another shift, a long one, shuttling his entire army on a long arc from the north of Richmond across the James River to Petersburg. The movement was executed brilliantly and would have been a decisive blow, but it was bungled at the last minute. In the meantime, a Union force under David Hunter was moving down the Shenandoah Valley and towards Lynchburg. Lee dispatched Jubal Early to deal with the intrusion.
* Even as the troops settled into trench warfare around Cold Harbor, Grant was considering his next move. Frontal assaults had proven disastrous, and trading shots between earthworks was literally going nowhere.
Although Sigel had failed in the Shenandoah Valley back in May, there was no good reason not to play the same card again. In fact, Sigel's force had been reconstituted under General David Hunter, who had a poor combat record but was regarded as preferable to Sigel. On 26 May, Hunter had taken his force on the march from their camp at Cedar Creek, telling Crook and Averell in the mountains to the west that he was on the march south and that they should join him when they could. Hunter had no intention of waiting for them. He moved aggressively, terrorizing the locals with his inclination to burn houses and buildings with the slightest provocation.
Hunter was acid-tempered, known to his troops as "Black Dave", and was a person of strong hates, particularly a single-minded hatred of slaveholders and secessionists. As far as Hunter was concerned, the worst he could do to them was better than what they deserved, and in fact his men found his willingness to be harsh on innocent bystanders so excessive that they often refused to obey his orders and destroy the homes of helpless families.
In any case, Hunter definitely wanted to give the Confederates a thrashing. On 5 June, his force reached the village of Piedmont, a few miles north of Staunton in the southern Valley, where the rebels were lined up and waiting. There were about 5,000 Confederates to twice as many Yankees, with the rebels under the command of Brigadier General William "Grumble" Jones. He had been transferred to the Valley after his relations with Jeb Stuart degraded to the extent that the brass had to choose between sending Jones away or court-martialing him.
Jones was a tough and competent fighter, but he was thoroughly outnumbered. After a sharp fight, Hunter crushed the rebels, taking about a thousand prisoners to a loss of 500 men of his own. Jones was hit in the head with a bullet and killed. His fleeing troops left his body on the field.
The next day, 6 June, Hunter marched into Staunton. For the first time, the Yankees had beaten the Confederates in the Valley. One Federal offensive after another had reached for this prize, and now Hunter had succeeded where all the others had failed. Crook and Averell joined Hunter with their 8,000 men on 8 June and assisted in the destruction of the Confederate supply depot in the town. The destruction wasn't entirely focused on military resources: drunken Union troops and local riffraff engaged in a spree of looting and vandalism on their own.
The combined force then marched southeast. Hunter intended to cross over the mountains out of the Valley and fall on Lynchburg, an important Confederate supply base and rail junction. This was to be followed by a march northeast along the mountains to Charlottesville, and then presumably a march towards Richmond.
The news from the Valley was what Grant had been waiting to hear, and on 7 June he had dispatched Sheridan with two of his divisions, with a total of 8,000 men, to link up with Hunter near Charlottesville, leaving behind Sheridan's third division under James Wilson to provide cavalry support for the Army of the Potomac. Sheridan was to wreck the Virginia Central railroad thoroughly in the course of his ride.
Now Robert E. Lee's supply line from the Shenandoah seemed close to being shut down for good. Encouraged by Hunter's efforts in blocking the back door, Grant now wanted to apply greater pressure to the front. More bloody assaults on Lee's lines weren't in the cards, but Grant thought that more could be made of Butler's force, corked up in the Bermuda Hundred peninsula. Reinforcements could be sent to help perform a breakout to the west, resulting in the capture of Petersburg and cutting the rail connection to Richmond.
The more Grant thought about it, the more he liked the idea, and in fact he quickly decided that the best thing to do would be to send the entire Army of the Potomac across the James to do the job. On 6 June, he ordered Meade to begin construction of a secondary line of defenses to cover the move, and the next morning, 7 June, he sent two lieutenant colonels of his staff, Horace Porter and Cyrus Comstock, to relay details of Grant's plans to Ben Butler, as well as scout out a site for a pontoon bridge across the James. The two men were familiar with the area, having accompanied McClellan there two years earlier.
Grant's plan involved risk. The campaigning since the beginning of May had taught him that Robert E. Lee's reputation, though it had been exaggerated to a godlike status, had a strong basis in reality, and Lee was notorious for taking the initiative whenever an opportunity presented itself. Grant was not intimidated. Lee was without doubt an extraordinary general, but Grant was always much more concerned with what he planned to do to the enemy instead of what the enemy planned to do to him. Grant was betting that the Army of Northern Virginia was in no shape to take the initiative before his own forces could threaten Lee's vital supply lines.
When Halleck was informed of the details of the plan, he protested loudly. Halleck felt it very likely that once Grant's army shifted to the south, Lee would descend on Washington, possibly even capturing the city since the defenses had been stripped of their garrisons. Fortunately, Halleck's power was now only advisory, and Lincoln was of the same mind as Grant concerning the need to emphasize the offensive. Grant replied to Halleck: "We can defend Washington best by keeping Lee so occupied that he cannot detach enough troops to capture it. I shall prepare at once to move across the James River."
* Lee was in fact very thoroughly occupied by the moves of the Federals. On 6 June, having heard that Staunton had been captured by David Hunter, Lee ordered Breckinridge to go back west with his troops, join up with the outmatched Confederate forces in the area, and confront Hunter. Breckinridge had been injured when his horse had been hit by a Federal cannonball on 2 June, but he was eager to give Hunter the same treatment that he had given Sigel. Breckinridge and his troops departed by railroad the next morning, 7 June.
On 8 June, Lee then heard that Sheridan was moving west, obviously to link up with Hunter. Lee had no choice other than to send Wade Hampton and Fitzhugh Lee with their cavalry divisions west to counter Sheridan, with Hampton in overall command. The rebel troopers left on the morning of 9 June. There were about 5,000 rebel cavalry to deal with Sheridan's 8,000 Yankees.
By that time, Lee also knew that Averell and Crook had joined up with Hunter, meaning that their combined command was now more than a match for Confederate forces opposing them. The only way to defeat Hunter was to send a division or two of infantry. That would weaken Lee's own defense considerably, but Lee's current position had been proven to be strong and Grant didn't seem interested in more frontal attacks. Besides, if Lee had to separate a large force from the Army of Northern Virginia, there was no reason that it couldn't be used to play the old and dependable game of cat-and-mouse with the Federals in the Shenandoah Valley, and even crossing the Potomac to threaten Washington. While such a force would not be likely to capture the city, experience suggested that it would produce a lot of a hysteria and force Grant to change his plans.
As Lee was contemplating this notion, he received a distraction. Even as Hampton and Fitz Lee were leading their cavalry west that morning, 9 June, south of the James other events were taking place. Ben Butler wanted to make up for his failures in May and had decided to try to take Petersburg again. Union observers on signal towers had seen Confederate forces going north on trains, meaning that Petersburg was being stripped to reinforce Lee, and Butler organized a force of 4,400 men to make another grab for the city. Butler was on the right track but Gillmore, as his senior officer, insisted on being in charge of the operation. Butler later said: "I was fool enough to yield to him."
Gillmore had led his troops out on the night of 8 June. A pontoon bridge was put across the Appomattox in the dark for the troops to cross, but there was the same pattern of delays and dithering as in May, partly due to the fact that the operation had been planned in haste. The attack didn't begin until well after sunup. There was also the same pattern of timidity and indecision in the assault, with the Federals operating in a disjointed fashion and failing to press the attack, even though they outnumbered the defenders four to one.
The defenders were militia, mostly boys and older men, braced by volunteers
from the city's hospital and jail. If they weren't a professional lot, they
were determined, and blunted all the feeble Yankee attacks. Beauregard had
reinforcements there in the afternoon, but the Federals had already given up
and gone back to where they had came from by then. Beauregard felt, with
plenty of good reason, that this was much too close a shave, and wired Bragg
in Richmond, pressuring him to return the reinforcements sent to Lee.
Beauregard thought the Yankees would be back soon, informing Bragg:
THIS OPERATION MUST BE A RECONNAISSANCE CONNECTED
WITH GRANT'S FUTURE OPERATIONS.
Beauregard was wrong about the motive but correct about future events. Bragg
gave back a brigade that had been taken from Beauregard for the defense of
Richmond, and Lee ordered Hoke to stand by to recross the James if an
emergency arose. However, Lee thought Butler's move was just a feint. Who
would be foolish enough to entrust a major operation to the inept Butler any
more?
Butler was rightly angry over the bungled attack, with the repercussions playing themselves out in a mean-spirited comedy over the next few weeks. There was another round of recriminations, with Butler removing Gillmore from command and even having him arrested. Gillmore demanded a court of inquiry. Grant, seeing the matter as a screwup all around, ordered Gillmore released and transferred him elsewhere to keep the peace.
* While Lee was considering his options, Wade Hampton and his two cavalry divisions were moving west to intercept Sheridan. Although the Yankee cavalry had a two-day head start, the rebels, traveling light and on a shorter path, were able to catch up in two days.
On the morning of 11 June 1864, Sheridan's men were moving up on the Virginia Central railroad, near a place named Trevilian Station a few miles east of Gordonsville. Sheridan intended to wreck the station, but ran into Hampton's skirmishers. Hampton was hoping to stall Sheridan's force with his division while Fitz Lee flanked the Yankees with his, but nothing seemed to go according to anyone's plan that day.
Fitz Lee's troopers found the Union men thoroughly alert and the rebels were driven back, leaving open a hole that Custer and his brigade were quick to exploit. They got into Hampton's rear and attacked his headquarters, forcing him to pull back with his division. However, Custer's troopers became too excited, with some of them chasing off after fleeing wagons and giving little thought to possible rebel counterstrokes. The Yankees were then attacked by three rebel brigades and forced to pull back to their own lines, suffering heavy casualties. Custer's personal cook was even captured, a black woman named Eliza, known to the men as the "Queen of Sheba" for the dignified way she rode along with the columns in an old carriage.
That was only the start of the confused actions that went on for the rest of the day and which have never really been sorted out to anyone's satisfaction. The fighting was finally ended by nightfall. Sheridan was unsettled to find his way west blocked by a substantial force of rebels that he could imagine was about to be reinforced. Custer's men were unhappy at their losses, though they were cheered up a bit when their mascot Eliza came back to them in the dark hours of the morning, having snuck away from the rebels with Custer's valise in her hand.
* Sheridan's men spent the next day, 12 June, wrecking the small stretch of the Virginia Central in their hands and trying to drive Hampton and his men back towards Gordonsville. The rebels had dug in and they weren't about to budge. Sheridan was beginning to feel vulnerable, since his supplies and ammunition were running low, and he had heard nothing from Hunter. He also had a large number of wounded in need of attention. Sheridan decided to give up and return to the Army of the Potomac, the Federals moving out under the cover of darkness and reaching the White House landing nine days later, on 21 June.
That wasn't quite the end of the matter. Grant had ordered Sheridan to load up everything at the White House base on wagons and then burn the place. He did as he was ordered, and on 24 June the wagon train was headed south towards the James when Hampton and his troopers fell on it near Charles City Court House. The result was another nasty, confused fight that went back and forth in the woods until it wore everyone out. The battle was pretty much a draw, but the wagon train was not seriously threatened again.
Sheridan linked back up with Grant on 28 June. The exercise had been a bust, Sheridan had suffered over 1,500 casualties during the whole exercise to Hampton's 1,100, and the Confederates quickly repaired the damage to the rail line.
Lee was pleased to hear of Hampton's good work, but there was bad news as well. Hunter had gone on the move on 10 June and struck out south over the mountains, falling the next day on Lexington, Virginia, home of the Virginia Military Institute. The Federals spent the 12th and 13th trashing the place, destroying the VMI campus and also burning the mansion of ex-Virginia governor John Letcher, who had issued a proclamation inciting civilians to wage guerrilla war on Union troops. Letcher was fortunately absent at the time; Hunter was inclined to hang rebels who promoted bushwhacking.
George Crook had protested against the burning of the VMI campus, but was overruled. Even the statue of George Washington on the VMI campus was carted off to the North, since the rebels had desecrated the memory of the "father of the country". The statue it would find its way back again after the war.
Breckinridge had been expecting Hunter to march east towards Charlottesville and had occupied Rockfish Gap to block such a move, but Hunter had outmaneuvered him, and now Breckinridge was in danger of being caught at a disadvantage by a much superior force. Hunter could move from Lexington towards Lynchburg in the southeast or Charlottesville in the northeast, both of which were vital rail centers.
However, Lee was already planning to deal with Hunter. On 12 June, Lee spoke with Jubal Early, ordering him to take Second Corps west, link up with Breckinridge's force, and then move south rapidly to drive off Hunter and his troops before they could do more damage. That done, Early was to move up the Shenandoah Valley, cross the Potomac, and threaten Washington. This was a big order, since Second Corps was now down to about 8,000 men and even after combining with Breckinridge's troops, Hunter would still have the superior force. Furthermore, Early was no Stonewall Jackson.
There was no alternative. Second Corps moved out in the dark hours of the morning on 13 June.
* While Early and Second Corps were on the move in the dark, so was the Army of the Potomac, having begun a big shift to cross the James at twilight on 12 June. Porter and Comstock had returned from their mission, having passed on Grant's plans to Ben Butler and scouted out a good place to cross the James. Grant interrogated the two lieutenant colonels about the details in a surprisingly excited fashion. Porter said later: "We could hardly get the words out of our mouths fast enough to suit him, and the numerous questions he asked were uttered with much greater rapidity than usual." Grant told them at the end of the interview that he intended to move out that night. This was not Grant the Butcher, throwing his men obstinately at Confederate defenses, but the fast-moving, hard-hitting Grant of the Vicksburg campaign.
Hancock's II Corps and Wright's VI Corps fell back to the new secondary line of defense to protect the move. Smith then moved his XVIII Corps to the White House landing on the Pamunkey, where they loaded up into transports to take them back to Bermuda Hundred. There they would join with Butler's forces for another push against Petersburg like that performed on 8 June, but on a larger scale. Burnside's IX Corps followed the XVIII Corps, but turned off and marched south towards the James, just before they reached the White House landing.
Wilson took his troopers down to the Chickahominy to the "Long Bridge". The Long Bridge had been destroyed in the fighting two years before, but the cavalrymen splashed across the river at midnight, securing both banks so that a pontoon bridge could be laid down. Warren's V Corps had been moved forward towards the Chickahominy a few days earlier in preparation for the shift, and they went across the Long Bridge in the dark, skirting White Oak Swamp to give the rebels the impression of a direct move on Richmond. Finally, Wright's VI Corps moved out on the road behind Burnside's IX corps, while Hancock's II Corps followed Warren's V Corps over the Long Bridge crossing.
It was smartly done. Not only had an entire army been packed up and put on the road overnight, but even the soldiers had no real clue that it was coming. This was astonishing, since traditionally the average soldier on the line had a better grasp of tactical realities than the generals at the top. One veteran commented that "it was not now the custom to inform the rank and file, and the newspapers and the enemy, of intended movements." This was encouraging, as was the fact that they had given up the dusty, hot, God-forsaken Cold Harbor battlefield. An old-timer who had fought with McClellan on the same roads two years before recalled how the men had then marched off the field of battle like they were beaten. Now they felt confident that they would win.
* Rebel scouts, investigating the disturbing silence from the Union trenches, found them empty as the sun came up on 13 June. The scouts managed to confirm that Baldy Smith's XVIII Corps had indeed departed from the White House landing on transports, but where those vessels were going was anybody's guess.
Warren's V Corps was moving around menacingly in front of Richmond, though it withdrew to the Charles City landing on the James that afternoon. Wilson's cavalry was professional and aggressive, ensuring that no rebel troopers were able to penetrate Federal screens. All Lee could do was shift his forces, depleted of Second Corps, southward to the old defenses at Malvern Hill and Glendale, to block a direct move on Richmond; he would then have to wait on developments. With characteristic self-assurance, Lee did not recall Early and Second Corps. Lee told Richmond: "I do not know that the necessity for his presence today is greater than it was yesterday. His troops would make us more secure here, but success in the Valley would relieve our difficulties that at present press heavily upon us."
Grant's offensive campaign through Northern Virginia was over. The action was now shifting to another front. Since the beginning of May, both armies had been in motion from one battleground to another, clashing violently at intervals in a way that could have hardly been imagined in the days when the overly confident could claim that all the blood spilled by secession could be cleaned up with a single handkerchief. There had been separate battles in this campaign -- the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor -- but they were only incidents in weeks of pain and misery. Soon that interval of time would be given a name: the Forty Days.
* The advance guard of the Army of the Potomac reached the James on the evening of 13 June. Engineers promptly began to set up a pontoon bridge across the river. This was a pontoon bridge like they'd never built before, almost a half mile (800 meters) long, supported by a hundred pontoon boats, and anchored by three schooners. It even had a swinging section to allow ships to pass through. Soldiers began to chop down cypress trees to lay a causeway to the bridge, and others rebuilt wharves to support transports bringing in material.
The Navy was there to greet them. One of Meade's staff found the Navy men strange and suspicious for some reason, and quickly realized it was because they weren't dressed in dirty rags. He was used to soldiers, and "the more they serve, the less they look like soldiers and the more they resemble day-laborers who had bought second-hand military clothes."
John Gibbon's division of Hancock's II Corps went into camp nearby, at the plantation of ex-President Tyler, to await the next move. Many of the men took advantage of the river to take the first bath they'd had in weeks. They were all told that the enemy was far away, that they wouldn't be there long, and so there was no need to fortify their camp. They took little faith in such assurances, and by the time they went to bed the camp was an effective fortress. A Union officer observing their work concluded that a rifle pit "was a good thing to have in a family in which there are small children."
* Things seemed to be going well for the Federals. Grant steamed ahead of the advance to arrive in Bermuda Hundred, well upstream of the pontoon bridge, and confer with Butler. Baldy Smith's troops were arriving on transports behind him. After surveying things, Grant sent orders down to Smith, to tell him to move on Petersburg.
Beauregard was in charge of the rebel defense in the area, and his force was not only relatively small, numbering about 7,000 in all, but most of them were manning the earthworks, known as the "Howlett Line", that corked Butler into the Bermuda Hundred peninsula. Grant had good intelligence about the situation and knew that Petersburg was all but undefended. If Smith moved quickly, the war would almost be won. Unfortunately, Smith was in a sullen mood. He had felt poorly treated in his there-and-back visit to the Army of the Potomac, and with the wastage of fighting and moving around, his corps was badly understrength. He was also ailing, which did nothing to improve his disposition or clarity of mind.
A division of black troops under Brigadier General Edward W. Hincks had been holding down City Point, on the south bank of the Appomattox near where it flowed into the James from the west. They had been under XVIII Corps before Smith had gone north to fight at Cold Harbor, but had been left behind. They were now reattached to XVIII Corps, but Smith was by no means happy with them, since he had the common mindset that black men could not make good soldiers.
On the morning of 15 June, Smith's troops crossed south over the Appomattox to City Point on a pontoon bridge that Butler had set up, joined up with Hincks' black soldiers and Butler's cavalry division under Brigadier General August Kautz, and started out for Petersburg, 8 miles (13 kilometers) directly to the west. There were about 10,000 men in the Union force in all. Although the defenses of Petersburg were strong, there were only about 2,200 men manning them. They would not be able to stand up to a determined attack. Furthermore, Robert E. Lee was still unaware of the immediate threat to Petersburg.
Smith's troops reached the Confederate lines in front of Petersburg at about noon that day, and Smith spent about two hours lining them up for assault. The defenses were obviously formidable, and Smith spent two more hours inspecting them carefully for weaknesses. He quickly realized the defenders were spread thin and that the defense was necessarily relying on artillery. Smith determined that the best thing to do would be to send the troops forward in a series of skirmish lines rather than in solid masses. Using artillery against skirmishers was something like trying to hit mosquitoes with a sledgehammer: those that got hit were obliterated, but hitting them was difficult.
At about 4:00 PM, Smith decided to go ahead, ordering an attack in an hour, but there was a problem. Smith's chief of artillery hadn't been told that a fight was imminent, and so he had sent off the horses to be watered. Without the horses, guns could not be brought up to support the attack, and Smith, who was conscientious with the lives of his men, wanted the attack supported by artillery. This meant a further two-hour delay.
Hancock's II Corps was coming up to support him, and Smith was tempted to wait further to ensure overwhelming superiority. However, Smith was getting impatient with the delays, and also didn't want Hancock to share the glory of leading the battle that would win the war.
In the meantime, Beauregard was stripping the Howlett Line of troops, rushing them to Petersburg, and calling to Lee for reinforcements. All that was left on the Bermuda Hundred defenses was a skeleton force that put up a bluff, with Beauregard operating on the desperate assumption that Butler would not react quickly enough to exploit his window of opportunity before Lee arrived with his troops and shut the window again.
Smith had a window of opportunity of his own, since none of the rebel troops pulled from the Bermuda Hundred line would arrive in Petersburg until midnight. Smith's assault did get rolling at 7:00 PM, and despite further bungles, bloody ones this time, by 9:00 PM the Federals had punched a hole through the toughest part of the Confederate defenses, suffering relatively light casualties.
General Hincks was pleased by the performance of his black troops in the battle. They had fought with determination, moving forward aggressively with the cry: "REMEMBER FORT PILLOW!" Hincks was even more excited by the fact that if they pushed a little bit more, Petersburg would be Union hands. In this belief he was unarguably correct, since even Beauregard wrote later: "Petersburg at that hour was clearly at the mercy of the Federal commander, who had all but captured it." True, it was dark, but the night was clear and the Moon was bright. However, when Hincks spoke to Smith about what to do next, Smith went cautious. He felt that if he sent his men in to Petersburg, they would be overwhelmed by the Confederate reinforcements that were now moving as fast as they could to relieve the city.
In hindsight, this was a groundless concern, since Smith had well more troops than Beauregard could scrape up, and though the Army of Northern Virginia was moving up fast behind them, by the time Lee could bring his full force to bear Grant would be there in force. Lee would have few options but to attack a larger Union force operating on the defensive, with very high odds of a crushing rebel defeat.
It is a little unfair to judge Smith after the fact without knowing his precise circumstances or the intelligence available to him, but in any case, Smith decided not to press his advantage, assuming that he could pick up where he left off in the morning with reinforcements to back him up. In fact, at that time Hancock was bringing in two divisions, under Generals Birney and Gibbon, to back up Smith's troops. Hancock would have been there much sooner, but he had been delayed by the typical sort of bumbling that can afflict an armed force in the field: missing rations, muddied instructions, bad maps. When he arrived, Smith told him they would attack in the morning.
This was not the same Hancock who had reputedly roared: "Send in all your men!" -- at Abner Doubleday at Gettysburg, and in fact Hancock's Gettysburg wound had opened during the march, seriously troubling him. Although Hancock's troops had observed Hincks' black soldiers dragging captured rebel guns back from the front lines and had concluded that Petersburg was wide open, Hancock simply relayed back the command to tell the men to set up camp for the night.
The soldiers howled. They knew they had the opportunity they'd been waiting for all these years, and it was being thrown away. A witness wrote: "The rage of the enlisted men was devilish. The most bloodcurdling blasphemy I ever listened to I heard that night, uttered by men who knew they were to be sacrificed on the morrow."
* The pause was not fatal in itself, since by the next day, 16 June, Grant had Warren's V Corps, Hancock's II Corps, and Burnside's IX Corps across the James with 50,000 men to reach out and take Petersburg. Once they were across the James, the pontoon bridge was removed, with City Point established as the supply base for the army.
Grant inspected the Petersburg defenses and was enthusiastic about his chances. As he rode back down towards City Point, he ran into Meade, who had just crossed the river. Grant told him: "Smith has taken a line of works stronger than anything we have seen in this campaign. If it is a possible thing, I want an assault made at six o'clock this evening."
Hancock's II Corps and Burnside's IX Corps went forward that evening. They made some progress, but the Confederates had been able to build a fairly stout rear defensive line, and Beauregard pushed them back with desperate counterattacks that spooked Meade into believing Beauregard was stronger than he really was. When the sun went down, the fighting died out, to be resumed in the morning.
Although the delays were now starting to become critical, Grant was still optimistic. Meade sent an officer to Grant's tent that evening to report on the fighting, and Grant commented: "I think it is pretty well to get across a great river, and come up here and attack Lee in the rear before he is ready for us." The Army of Northern Virginia was on the move, but the clock was against them. They did manage to arrive in time to halt tentative probes by Butler through the Howlett Line, blocking the Federal threat from that direction, but the real threat lay to the south, in front of Petersburg.
* When the sun came up on the morning of 17 June, the Yankees had about 80,000 men available for the assault, with four corps present in part or all. The Confederate line was strong, but although there were earthworks to the south of Petersburg, Beauregard's lack of manpower had forced him to concentrate his forces to the east of the town, where the Federals were.
There was a country lane named the Jerusalem Plank Road that ran into Petersburg from the south, and Beauregard later wrote that if the Federals had put an army corps into the area to march north along that road, he "would have been compelled to evacuate Petersburg without much resistance." Grant had an instinct that Petersburg might be vulnerable from the south. Warren's V Corps was holding the southern end of the Union line, and the evening before Grant had wired Meade to tell him to get Warren over to the Jerusalem Plank Road as quickly as possible in the morning. Warren did as he was ordered, but the few rebels in front of him acted as aggressive as they could, and he didn't try to push forward.
Burnside's IX Corps, north of Warren's V Corps on the line, moved forward aggressively into the rebel defenses, but the attack was poorly coordinated. One of Burnside's divisions hadn't even been informed that it was to make an attack, and was still sleeping when the fighting started. Hancock's II Corps was next on the line but they were all but leaderless, since Hancock was down with pain from his old wound. General Birney was in charge, but communications had largely broken down.
There was savage fighting all up and down the line. The Federals had breached the rebel defenses at two locations by noon, and established a third handhold a few hours later. Beauregard later wrote that it seemed as though "the last hour of the Confederacy had arrived." However, despite the great determination and aggressiveness of some of the Union troops, the battle was completely out of control, and the Federals were unable to exploit any of their breakthroughs. By the evening, when the fighting died down, Beauregard had retreated to back-to-the-wall positions right in front of the town, holding on by his fingernails.
* Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was moving as fast as it could to relieve Petersburg, but it could not arrive before midmorning on 18 June. There was one last chance for Grant to grab Petersburg before the opportunity was lost for good. Grant's men went forward immediately that morning, only to find the trenches in front of them empty, Beauregard's men having pulled back to their final line of defense. This was good news because it spared the Federals bloodshed for the moment, but it threw off Federal plans. The entire command system seemed confused and nobody pressed on.
Meade's bad temper grew continuously worse as he tried to get people to move, only to find his orders garbled, lost, or simply ignored. He finally told them: "Finding it impossible to effect co-operation by appointing an hour for attack, I have sent an order to each corps commander to attack at all hazards and without reference to each other."
In the meantime, the Army of Northern Virginia was coming up. Beauregard was so ecstatic that he suggested to Lee that they go on the offensive, but Lee immediately rejected the idea, since his men were tired from a forced march and wouldn't have the steam for it. They kept busy enough driving off the Federal attacks, which by the afternoon were getting under way in earnest. The only result of this was to make Yankee casualties greater, since now there was no hope of pushing the rebels out.
General Birney sent up II Corps, with rows of veterans in front of two green "heavy" regiments. The troops moved up to the jump-off line and lay there. When the order came to go forward, the veterans refused to get up. The men of the heavies did, but the veterans called out to them: "Lie down, you damn fools, you can't take them forts!" One of the heavies, the 1st Massachusetts, promptly lay down again, but the other, the 1st Maine, went forward. They were promptly cut down by canister and musket fire, losing 632 of their 850 men.
In another part of the II Corps front, a gunner watched infantry move forward through his battery and asked the troops if they were going to make a charge. One of the soldiers replied: "No, we are not going to charge. We are going to run toward the Confederate earthworks, and then we are going to run back. We have had enough of assaulting earthworks."
Not all the troops were this wise. Burnside's IX Corps and Warren's V Corps went forward in mid-afternoon and were badly cut up. Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who had led the Federal defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, was leading a brigade of V corps forward when he was hit by a Minie ball that went into one hip and out the other, nicking his bladder on the way. He leaned on his sword to encourage his men until he finally fell. Nobody thought he would live, but he cheated the devil, returning to duty a few months later with the rank of brigadier general.
The only thing the afternoon's fighting proved was that the Petersburg defenses were thoroughly solid. Meade wired Grant that "our men are tired and the attacks have not been made with the vigor and force that characterized our fighting in the Wilderness; if they had been, I think we should have been more successful." Grant ordered that there be no more assaults: "Now we will rest the men and use the spade for their protection until a new vein has been cut." It was a bitter disappointment, with over 11,000 men killed and wounded in total for the entire effort. General Wright described the whole affair as conducted "without brains and without generalship". It appears that he meant Meade in particular.
