v1.1.3 / chapter 77 of 93 / 01 sep 11 / greg goebel / public domain
* As the war dragged on inconclusively through the summer of 1864, President Lincoln became worried about his chances for re-election. If things didn't improve before November, he was almost certain to be defeated. However, the President also knew that much could happen before that time. Not only was Sherman methodically tightening his grip on Atlanta, but Grant had appointed Phil Sheridan to take charge of a large force in the Shenandoah Valley, with orders to crush Jubal Early and also ensure that the region was rendered so barren that the Confederacy could never make use of it again. Still, a policy of deliberate brutality against the civilian population of the Valley implied a certain desperation, and for the moment the war was not clearly going in the Union's favor. Repeated pushes against Confederate lines around Petersburg brought no gains, while demonstrating how badly Grant's army had been weakened by the bloodshed of the spring campaign.
* The failure of the Union spring offensive in Virginia, Early's raid into Maryland, and the Battle of the Crater did much to damage the credibility of the Lincoln Administration. The public was sick of the endless fighting and the seeming inability of the Union to bring the struggle to a close. In early August, New York politician Thurlow Weed bluntly told the President that his re-election was impossible. This was devastating, since Weed was a friendly and respected source. The voices for giving up the war against the Confederacy grew stronger, and Judge David Davis, eternally supportive of Lincoln, had to admit: "There is no disguising the fact that some people are getting tired of the war. Some of them can't see a ray of light. I am speaking of good men."
Lincoln had a depressive side, and on 23 August he passed around a sealed letter to his cabinet secretaries, had them sign the envelope, and then put it away, to be opened after the election. The letter read:
BEGIN QUOTE:
This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward.
END QUOTE
However, Lincoln also had a remarkable grasp of the "long view", and as he told a reporter named Noah Brooks, the Democrats were faced with a difficult problem: "They must nominate a Peace Democrat on a war platform, or a War Democrat on a peace platform, and I personally can't say that I care much which they do." The President also understood that the Union held the stronger hand on the battlefield, and the simplest consideration of the odds implied that successes were likely to more than balance setbacks over the mid-term. Certainly the reports from Sherman on his continued and no longer very effectively opposed efforts to capture Atlanta were very encouraging. The election wasn't until November, and a significant victory before that time would restore the Lincoln Administration's fortunes.
Brooks left Washington on 24 August to cover the Democratic convention in Chicago. The President shook his hand and said: "Don't be discouraged. I don't believe that God has forsaken us yet."
* The Democratic convention opened on 29 August 1864. Clement Vallandigham was there, pulling strings and running things from behind the scenes, ultimately putting together a party platform that judged the war effort a failure and called for peace -- while simultaneously stating that peace be "restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States."
There was some talk of nominating Sherman as the Democratic presidential candidate, but when he heard of it he acidly replied: "If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House ... I would say the penitentiary, thank you." The only practical choice was George McClellan, and he got the nomination. Congressman George H. Pendleton, an antiwar Ohio Democrat, was nominated as candidate for the vice-presidency. Lincoln's prediction had come true, since McClellan was for prosecuting the war to its conclusion. Little Mac had no sympathy with the peace platform, such as it was, writing: "I wish they had left Vallandigham down south when they had him there!"
As long as Union war effort remained bogged down, the Democrats could still hope for victory in November. However, Confederate resistance was beginning to weaken. The convention ended on 31 August, and even as the delegates were returning to their homes, the dam was beginning to break.
* One of the most persistent of the Lincoln Administration's embarrassments was the repeated success of the Confederates in the Shenandoah Valley. The Confederate States Army had made it their back yard and had repeatedly handed out humiliating thrashings to Union generals who ventured into it.
If Confederate General Jubal Early wasn't quite a Stonewall Jackson, he was for the time being proving a very good substitute. Like Jackson, he had little sympathy with the failings of his men. When an infantry regiment failed to perform in battle as he expected them to, he bitterly denounced them and vowed he'd send them into the thick of the battle in the next fight where they would all be killed and "burn in Hell for eternity." That wasn't just talk, since he did exactly as he had promised; the regiment was badly cut up. Also like Jackson, Early was a fighter. Even though his force was never larger than 15,000 men, they had been more than a match for Union forces sent against them to date. Even one of the survivors of the unlucky infantry regiment said that although Early was a "queer fish", he was "no humbug".
Robert E. Lee had good reason for satisfaction with Early's performance, which had provided all the distraction to the Union that Lee could have hoped for, and also allowed the collection of another year's harvest from the Shenandoah Valley. However, Lee's intelligence began to tell him that the Yankees had put up with all they were going to take from Early, and were determined to put a stop to the Shenandoah Valley game once and for all. If they did, the Confederacy would lose the Valley along with Early and his little army. On 6 August, Lee ordered Richard Anderson to leave at once for Culpeper with Joseph Kershaw's infantry division and Fitz Lee's cavalry division. From Culpeper, they would be able to move in support of Early or be pulled back to the defense of Richmond as events demanded.
* Lee's assessment of Federal intentions toward Early was entirely correct; in fact, it was an understatement. Grant was fed up with seeing Union forces pushed around by an insolent band of ragtag Confederates, and he was also disgusted with the War Department's bumbling attempts to deal with Early by sending columns marching there and back again.
The runaround had been largely due to tangled lines of military command in Washington. Grant felt that putting someone clearly in charge would help matters, and so in late July he ordered Major General William B. Franklin from off the shelf to take the job. How anyone could have regarded Franklin as credible at that late date is now very hard to understand, but fortunately Halleck told Grant that Franklin was an old McClellan man and unacceptable. Halleck was actually doing Grant a big favor in this case, but there was a dark cloud inside the silver lining. Halleck tended to turn with the wind, and it was easy to see that the wind was blowing from Secretary Stanton. Grant was now getting a full load of the sort of political interference in military strategy that had entangled McClellan.
McClellan had characteristically whined about it; Grant characteristically pushed on. He appealed to the President for the authority to appoint a single officer to straighten out the command tangle and smash Early. Lincoln immediately went to Fortress Monroe to talk to Grant, with the two men chatting at length on 31 July. What they said was not recorded, but on 1 August, Grant ordered Phil Sheridan to go up to western Maryland and take charge of the troops there. Grant wired Halleck to say that Sheridan's instructions were to PUT HIMSELF SOUTH OF THE ENEMY AND FOLLOW HIM TO THE DEATH.
Grant saw, as Lincoln did, that any rebel force that went on excursions into the North was vulnerable to isolation and destruction, and that vulnerability was an opportunity that should be energetically exploited. In contrast, War Secretary Stanton could only see that there was a dangerous enemy force on the loose, and that Washington should be protected at all costs. Stanton also felt that Sheridan was too young for such an important position, and apparently was put off by Sheridan's aggressive personality. Stanton was overruled by his boss. Lincoln wrote a letter to Grant giving complete approval, but suggested that Grant should not simply issue orders and think things would be done. The President asked Grant to look over his accumulations of messages from the War Department "and discover, if you can, that there is any idea in the head of anyone here of 'putting our army south of the enemy' or of 'following him to the death' in any direction."
It is obvious to anyone at the bottom of a big and clumsy bureaucracy how poorly things get done; it is not so obvious to someone at the bottom that the person at the top might see things in exactly the same way. Lincoln concluded his message to Grant bluntly: "I repeat to you it will neither be done nor attempted, unless you watch it every day and hour and force it." Grant took the message to heart. Two hours after the President's message came ticking in over the telegraph wire on 3 August, Grant was on a steamer to Washington. When he arrived, he went straight through the city to Monocacy Junction to confer with General Hunter.
Grant wanted to make sure Hunter wasn't in a position to interfere with Sheridan's efforts, but Grant still didn't want to humiliate Hunter, preferring instead to kick him upstairs to nominal command in the rear, where he could handle the paperwork while Sheridan did the fighting. However, Hunter had all he wanted of being jerked around by the War Department. He flatly told Grant that he wanted to simply get out of the situation and let Sheridan deal with it. Grant agreed on the spot. It was a rare circumstance to sack a general and have both parties be happy about it. Grant ordered all the Union troops in the vicinity to move to Halltown, just south of Harper's Ferry, where they would wait for Sheridan's arrival. Early was certain to find Union troops massing in the Shenandoah Valley an annoyance and provocation.
Sheridan arrived at Monocacy Junction the next morning, 6 August. Grant briefed him, then departed back to City Point, while Sheridan took a special one-car train to Harper's Ferry to take command at Halltown. Grant was back in Petersburg on the morning of 9 August.
* It was an indication of the importance Grant gave to the trip north that in his absence command at City Point fell to Ben Butler, the ranking officer in the area. There was no telling what kind of trouble Butler might get into if left unsupervised for any length of time.
There was in fact a big and nasty surprise waiting for Grant when he got back, but Butler had nothing to do with it. At about noon that day, there was a terrific explosion along the waterfront that rained debris all over the headquarters area. When the smoke cleared, at least 200 men were dead, many hundreds more injured, and about two million dollars' worth of damage had been done. The number of dead was never precisely determined; many of them had been simply obliterated.
It wasn't until after the war that the incident was proven from Confederate records to be an act of sabotage. A report by a Confederate agent named John Maxwell described how he had built a "horological torpedo", or in modern terms a simple time bomb, a box loaded with 12 pounds (5.5 kilograms) of black powder and a clockwork detonating mechanism, and then sneaked through Union lines on the night of 8 August. The next morning Maxwell set the mechanism, then asked a crewman from an ammunition barge to take the box on board and leave it for the barge's skipper, who Maxwell had seen leave earlier. The crewman obliged, and Maxwell went off to wait. Even he was shocked by the size and power of the explosion, but he was uninjured and managed to get back to Confederate lines that night.
Although the Confederacy could not match the mechanical skills of the Union, the South did have its fair share of technical cleverness. In late November 1864, another rebel agent would manage to sneak a "coal torpedo", a hollow chunk of cast iron filled with ten pounds (4.5 kilograms) of black powder and painted to look like a lump of coal, into the coal bunker of Ben Butler's flagship, the GREYHOUND. The bomb was dutifully shoveled into the furnace on 27 November and blew up as per design, though compared with Maxwell's gadget the coal torpedo caused little damage. In fact, at first the whole incident was thought to have been an ordinary boiler-room accident. Butler was on board at the time, but was unhurt. It might well have crossed Grant's mind, at least for an instant, that the rebels should have used a bigger charge.
That was somewhat later, and for the moment Butler was actually being more or less constructive. Confronted by rebel batteries blocking movement of Union vessels up one of the meandering loops in the James, he decided to dig a canal to bypass about 5 miles (8 kilometers) of the river. The digging began on 10 August, with Federal engineers excavating a deep cut across 175 yards (160 meters). It was a major project, with the digging continuing to the end of the year and the finishing touches not in place until spring. By that time Butler's canal was of no real military use, but it would become the default route for river traffic after the war.
* Back in the Shenandoah Valley, Sheridan was settling in to command of a force of about 48,000 men. He retained leadership of his three old cavalry divisions, the remaining two having been brought north to join the first. That was the action that had caused Lee enough concern to send Richard Anderson to Culpeper with two rebel divisions. Sheridan also took command of three army corps. Hunter's old force had been reorganized under General George Crook as VIII Corps. Crook was a fine commander, but the men were exhausted, demoralized, ill-clothed, and poorly equipped. It was clear that they needed rest, refit, and drilling before they would be an effective fighting force again.
The other two corps were Emory's XIX Corps, brought up from Louisiana to meet Early's incursion, and Wright's VI Corps, which had been brought up from Petersburg for the same reason. XIX Corps was understrength, consisting only of two small divisions, but they were experienced troops from Western campaigns, more used to beating rebels than being beaten by them. Wright's VI Corps was of course built up of solid veterans, but they had been chewed by the spring campaigning and were feeling slack and unhappy. In particular, they had never got over the loss of their beloved John Sedgwick.
Sheridan was known to the ranks as a driver and a fighter, which for all they knew meant he was another windy John Pope or swaggering Judson Kilpatrick. They soon found out there was more to Sheridan than that. Sheridan led from the front, quick to take charge himself to straighten out problems, impatient with the sort of petty nonsense that armies tend to burden themselves with, and ran a spartan field headquarters with no guards or officers in fancy uniforms. Sheridan could praise men or curse them as needed, had a good head for the details of running an army, and in general was very effective at getting things done. VI Corps men began to say that Sheridan was almost as good as Sedgwick.
Sheridan quickly began to push south down the Valley. The conduct of the campaign would have been inconceivable a few years earlier. The destruction of Jubal Early's force was only part of the job; the other was to render the Shenandoah Valley useless to the Confederacy.
The Valley was generally populated by devout and pacifist Christian groups, mostly Dunkers, plus some Quakers and other sects, many of whom despised slavery and were generally Unionist in their sympathies. The Confederate authorities had originally been less than pleased to have citizens of doubtful loyalty who refused to fight -- in fact would resist with religious zeal any attempt to compel them to do so -- but after a time, Richmond had thrown up their hands and allowed the locals to avoid the draft by paying a $500 fee.
That turned out well for the Confederacy, because the land in the Valley was not merely pretty but fertile. With plenty of hands in the fields, it provided a regular supply of food for Lee's army. More to the point, when Confederate forces took advantage of the shelter of the mountains lining the Valley for their incursions into the north, there was never any problem obtaining food and fodder from the land itself.
Grant was aware that the agricultural productivity of the Valley was worth divisions to the Confederate cause, and he had the solution. Grant had written Halleck a few days before that Union forces should advance up the Valley and "eat out Virginia clear and clean as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender with them." Grant got down to more specific details in his instructions to Sheridan, saying that he "should make all the Valley south of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad a desert as high up as possible. I do not mean that houses should be burned, but all provisions and stock should be removed, and the people notified to get out."
These instructions filtered down to the men in the ranks in very explicit terms: "You will seize all mules, horses and cattle that may be useful to our army. Loyal citizens can bring in their claims against the government for this necessary destruction. No houses will be burned; and officers in charge of this delicate but necessary duty must inform the people that the object is to make this Valley untenable for the raiding parties of the rebel army."
David Hunter had been destructive in his advance through the Valley, but his actions were mostly driven by malice, making them scattered and inconsistent. Sheridan was to follow an entirely different policy, based on cold calculation, utterly methodical in operation, and monstrous in scope. From the point of view of the people who had to watch their crops and barns burned, things were now to go from bad to vastly worse. A trooper of the 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry described it:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Previously the burning of supplies and outbuildings had been incidental to battles, but now the torch was applied deliberately and intentionally. Stacks of hay and straw and barns filled with crops harvested, mills, corn-cribs; in a word, all supplies of use to man or beast were promptly burned and all valuable cattle driven off ...
The work of destruction seemed cruel and the distress it occasioned among the people of all ages and sexes was evident on every hand. The officers and soldiers who performed the details of this distressing work were met at every farm and home by old men, women, and children in tears, begging and beseeching those in charge to save them from the appalling ruin. These scenes of burning and destruction, which were only the prelude to those which followed at a later day farther up the Valley, were attended with sorrow to families and added horrors to the usual brutalities of war, unknown to any other field operations in the so-called Confederacy.
END QUOTE
The only silver lining to the dark clouds of smoke that rolled up from the Valley's farms was the evident fact that the huge, lumbering Federal war machine was now becoming the remorseless juggernaut that it had to be to destroy the Confederacy. The Union was going to win this war, and if the innocent and helpless had to be crushed underfoot to do it -- so be it.
* Many Union soldiers had no real heart for destroying the life's work of some poor farmer struggling to make a living, but others were enthusiastic. The war in Virginia in general and the Valley in particular had led to the emergence of bands of Confederate guerrillas, who played as farmers by day and raised hell by night.
Some of these guerrillas, such as Mosby's Rangers, fought like real soldiers. Most were little more than bandits, shooting, lynching, or cutting the throats of Yankee soldiers who became careless in enemy territory, and making off with whatever loot they could steal. Their ranks were full of Confederate deserters and other riffraff, and they did no real fighting if they could avoid it. If captured, they were shown little mercy. One Federal officer said the only time he wanted one brought to him was for burial.
They did the Confederacy little good, and did much to provoke Union soldiers marching through the country. It is an unfortunate but unavoidable equation that if civilians make war on soldiers, soldiers quickly make war on civilians, leading to the cycle of vicious reprisals and counter-reprisals characteristic of irregular warfare. The end result of most guerrilla actions was to do little harm to the Union Army and much to make life more miserable for the civilians caught in the middle. Robert E. Lee despised the guerrillas. He took a dim view of the talk coming out of Richmond of taking up irregular warfare if all else failed, writing the Confederate Secretary of War: "I regard the whole system as an unmixed evil."
Interestingly, Sheridan himself embraced the idea of irregular warfare. His command included about a hundred mounted scouts, an offshoot of the 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry, who dressed in Confederate uniforms and spent much of their time behind rebel lines, mingling with the ranks and obtaining intelligence. They were not merely passive spies, attacking vital rebel targets when need be, and in a certain exercise in rough justice, killed Confederate guerrillas who were trying to bushwhack Union soldiers. In general, the scouts combined a certain coolness with recklessness, since they knew perfectly well they would be hanged if caught, and were also likely to be shot by nervous Union troops when they tried to return to their own lines. They had little interest in formal military discipline and little respect for the self-importance of rear-area officers, but Sheridan made them his own boys, and they were a common sight around the headquarters tents.
* Sheridan's push south quickly ran out of steam. In mid-August, just as the work of destruction was getting under way in earnest, Sheridan received reports that Early had been heavily reinforced, bringing the Confederate force to about the same size as his own. Grant suggested that Sheridan exercise caution. The Valley had proven a dangerous trap to Federal forces, where fast-moving rebels could take advantage of the terrain to strike where least expected; if Sheridan were defeated, Early would be free to move north and threaten Washington again.
In reality, even with Richard Anderson's two divisions, Early's force was only about half the size of Sheridan's. Despite that, Sheridan gave up his push south and pulled back to the northern end of the Valley. Early followed, judging Sheridan another weak Union general who could be easily intimidated. Early's troops attacked Sheridan's lines on 21 August, resulting in a nasty fight that ended with the Confederates driven back. Early then tried to outflank Sheridan and cross the Potomac to raise hell and confusion again, but Sheridan got wind of the move and sent his cavalry to find the rebels. Early's men clashed with the Union troopers on 25 August, sending the Yankees packing after a tough fight. However, Early realized that Sheridan now knew where he was and could easily cut him off, so he withdrew south again.
There was another clash between the two forces on 3 September. So far, all the fighting between Sheridan and Early was inconclusive, with Early generally taking the initiative and feeling cocky. The real fighting was yet to begin.
* Grant's worries about Lee performing yet another back-door offensive into the North led him to take actions to discourage the transfer of rebel forces from eastern Virginia. On 14 August 1864, Hancock sent II Corps and one of Butler's corps against the Richmond defenses north of the James. It was more like a strong demonstration than a determined assault, but even by that standard it didn't go well for Hancock. After three days of fighting, he ended up with almost 3,000 casualties, over three times those of the rebels. His troops fought poorly and with little enthusiasm.
Hancock's push to the north end of the rebel lines had been performed partly as a diversion for an alternate push to the south. On the morning of 18 August, Warren took four divisions forward to cut the Petersburg & Weldon Railroad, focusing his attack on Globe Tavern, next to the railroad four miles (6.5 kilometers) south of Petersburg.
Warren's attack encountered only moderate opposition and went well at first, obtaining lodgements around the railroad, but that afternoon Beauregard threw reinforcements under Henry Heth against the Union positions and put them under pressure. The pressure increased greatly the next morning, 19 August, when A.P. Hill arrived with two divisions; the Yankees were forced back. Warren consolidated his position with the spade and reinforcements of his own. The rebels pressed them for two days, found the Federal lines too stout to budged, and decided to call it quits for the moment. The fight around Globe Tavern was a Union success, if not a very impressive one, Warren having lost 4,500 men, mostly captured, to about 1,600 rebels. However, Lee was now forced to shuttle supplies around the Federal lodgement using mule-drawn wagons, increasing the pressure on rebel supply lines.
Hancock had come back across the James on 21 August, and was immediately given orders to take two of his own divisions and Gregg's cavalry about five miles (eight kilometers) south of Warren's new position and make a second drive against the railroad. Hancock moved against the railroad at Reams Station on 23 August, and managed to tear up a few miles of track before A.P. Hill's troops, then under the command of Cadmus Wilcox since Hill was down sick again, hit him at about noon on the 25th.
The Yankees simply rolled over. Large numbers of Federals surrendered, and an entire reserve brigade flatly ignored orders to move forward and get into the fight. Hancock tried desperately to rally them, without success: "We can beat them yet! Don't leave me, for God's sake!" Hancock lost about 2,750 men, most of whom threw down their rifles and threw up their hands, to Hill's 720 casualties. Hancock threw accusations at John Gibbon, Gibbon submitted his resignation, Hancock apologized, and Gibbon withdrew the request. Gibbon soon transferred out of II Corps anyway. Hancock couldn't get out of it quite that easily, and those around him said that he never forgot the disgrace. Grant concluded that the entire II Corps was no longer capable of offensive action.
The rebels got little satisfaction out of the affair. If it the Yankees were proving easier to beat than ever before, at least in some cases, they weren't either giving up or going away, and Confederate resources were now at their limit. Food was short and new recruits all but nonexistent, and Robert E. Lee wrote Confederate Secretary of War Seddon: "Without some increase in our strength, I cannot see how we are to escape the natural military consequences of the enemy's numerical superiority."
Grant understood this perfectly well. Despite the limitations of his troops,
he had the upper hand and intended to take advantage of it. In mid-month,
Halleck had fussed at Grant about the potential for draft riots, and
suggested that troops in readiness to be sent north and keep order. Grant
replied that state militias should be called out to deal with that problem;
he was going to stay where he was and push on. Lincoln followed the exchange
of messages, and wired Grant on 17 August:
I HAVE SEEN YOUR DISPATCH EXPRESSING YOUR
UNWILLINGNESS TO BREAK YOUR HOLD WHERE YOU ARE.
NEITHER AM I WILLING. HOLD ON WITH A BULLDOG
GRIP, AND CHEW AND CHOKE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.
Grant actually laughed out loud when he got the President's message, which
was such an uncommon thing for him to do that his staff came over to see what
was going on. He showed them the telegram and said: "The President has more
nerve than any of his advisers." Whatever problems the Union Army had,
things had come a long way from the days when McClellan talked down his nose
about Lincoln's excursions into the rough art of warmaking.
