G first day of the battle of the Wilderness. His staff had never seen him wear gloves before, and the officers wondered. White cotton gloves. He was visibly nervous for the first time during the war. Horace Porter says Grant smoked twenty cigars before nightfall, and whittled sticks all day. He kept his coat buttoned, too. Gloves and buttoned coat, and shoes shined. Probably he felt that his first day's appearance on the brilliant stage of Virginia required some sprucing up. On the second day he discarded his cotton gloves, and before a week had passed he looked the same as he had at the siege of Vicksburg-like an Illinois wheat farmer who has come into the village bank to cash a check. The short campaign of the Wilderness stands as the bloodiest military enterprise in American history. It began on May 5, 1864, when the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan and encountered Lee; it ended, properly speaking, six weeks later, when Grant moved his army to the south side of the James and appeared before the entrenchments around Petersburg. At the beginning of this overland movement Grant had 118,000 men. By June 14th the losses in the Union army amounted to a total of 54,926 in killed, wounded and missing-or almost as many men as there were in the whole of Lee's army when the campaign began. Yet reënforcements poured in so steadily Grant Fights expl, 321 that, despite his heavy losses, Grant had as many men at the end of the campaign as he had at the beginning. The North, even as determined as it was at that time on the conquest of the South, was aghast at this enormous destruction of life. Considered from a military standpoint the campaign was a great success for the Union cause. Grant wore Lee's army down to the bone. He held on to it so tightly, and fought so fiercely, that it could hardly breathe. As Grant's army was depleted by losses new men came from the North. But Lee's reënforcements came in little batches, or not at all. In six weeks Grant had pushed Lee, by main strength, across the northern part of Virginia, and finally stood almost in sight of Richmond. § 2 Let us glance at the essential features of the campaign. Grant crossed the Rapidan on May 4, 1864, and turned south. The road, on the south side, leading from the crossing place, runs through a peculiar region called the Wilderness. It is a tract about twelve miles square. At the time of the Civil War the Wilderness consisted of deserted farms-abandoned because of the poor soil-thick and tangled woods, tall weeds, gullies and ravines-a country without vistas. On such a terrain it is impossible to employ either artillery or cavalry effectively. Grant thought that if he was not opposed at Germanna Ford on the Rapidan he would not have to fight at all in the Wilderness, but he was mistaken as to Lee's intentions. The Confederate commander purposely allowed him to cross the Rapidan without hindrance. Lee's plan was to fight Grant in the Wilderness, where the Confederate officers knew the ground, and where Grant's superiority in numbers would be offset by the nature of the battlefield. Lee's eager army struck Grant's long column, and all day long the Wilderness was filled with smoke and a pandemonium of sound. The dry leaves under foot caught fire, and when darkness came the sky was glowing with the reflected light of forest fires. Many of the wounded were burned to death where they fell. At the close of the day the situation of Grant's army seemed appalling. Rawlins said (according to James H. Wilson) that Grant met it "outwardly with calmness and selfpossession, but after he had asked such questions and given such orders as the emergency seemed to call for, he withdrew to his tent and, throwing himself face downward on his cot, instead of going to sleep, gave vent to his feelings in a way which left no room to doubt that he was deeply moved." What does that mean? Does it mean that he wept? I think it does. He did weep at times. When he heard that McPherson had been killed before Atlanta he went into his tent and sobbed for half an hour. At the bottom he was emotional in an epoch when emotion was considered weakness, so he usually concealed his feelings under a mask of wooden-Indian stolidity. Most of the officers of the Army of the Potomac expected to receive orders to retreat across the Rapidan; but the orders, when they came instructed the army to prepare to move on Lee's army at daybreak. The Confederates, too, were up at dawn. Lee had decided to attack Grant as soon as it was light enough to see. So they came together again, head-on, in the second day's fight at the Wilderness . . . and the second day was even more bloody than the first. It was really a drawn battle, with Lee having a shade the better of it. During the night word came fluttering through the somber woods that preparations were to be made at once for abandoning the position. So Grant had decided, after all, to go back across the Rapidan? Men looked at each other with this question on their lips. To retreat-as all his predecessors had done after his enormous losses. . . lives wasted... men left dead on the field and nothing accomplished. Men Cheer Grant 323 These depressing thoughts were in the soldiers' minds as they moved about the uncertain camp fires and got their things together to make a night march. Before day the great army, with all its artillery and trains, rumbled down the broken roads not toward the Rapidan, but southward, toward Richmond. Tired men reeling in moonlight. As Grant himself rode along the marching column a little before daybreak a wave of cheers greeted him. The army realized that here was a man who did not intend to turn back. He had gone around Lee's right and was moving on Spottsylvania a step nearer the heart of the Confederacy. But Lee had anticipated him. His shattered army was up and moving, too. As Grant's columns approached Spottsylvania the advance guard reported that the Confederate army was in front of them. Lee had taken a shorter route. Before long the Federal advance was again brought to a stop, and the drumming guns began to sound on the horizon. At Spottsylvania there was a series of battles, all characterized by the same motif a head-on attack of Union troops, launched against the Confederate works, while Grant felt cautiously around his opponent's right flank. On May 11th he wrote to Halleck: "We have now ended the sixth day of very hard fighting. on this line if it takes all summer.” I propose to fight it out We have observed that Grant had an instinct for slogans and catchy phrases. "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer" became as popular as "I propose to move immediately upon your works." When the ghastly tale of casualties spread through the North the public took heart from Grant's confidence. Something was being accomplished, at any rate, even if the achievement cost an appalling number of lives. It was a matter of common observation at headquarters that Grant and Rawlins were drifting apart. Rawlins was bitterly opposed to Grant's policy of hurling the army against heavily entrenched positions, and he said so. He called it a "murderous policy of military incompetents." He thought that Grant was influenced in adopting this form of attack by Colonel C. B. Comstock of the staff. Comstock was an engineer—a West-Pointer-whose constant refrain was "Smash 'em up! Smash 'em up!" I think Rawlins was mistaken, and that Comstock's views and Grant's merely happened to coincide. The whole of Grant's military history shows that the smashing, head-on attack was his style of warfare. After Spottsylvania there was another flank turning, and another advance toward the Confederate capital. The soldiers of Grant's army saw the nature of this simple strategy, and they called it, "sidling toward Richmond." Lee was ahead of him again, and was again pushed back. The fighting went on steadily, day after day. The opposing armies rolled over each other in the mud and dirt, like two determined wrestlers. At the end of each bout the Confederates had been thrown back a few inches, or a few feet, or a few miles. It was warfare in the rough, without art or strategy. On June 2nd the Union army had got within six miles of the exterior fortifications of Richmond. Grant was on the ground that McClellan had fought over two years before. There could be no more "sidling" movements; Richmond lay straight ahead, toward the southwest; and Lee's army stood squarely across the road, behind a line of formidable breastworks. Grant decided on an assault with his entire army, and it took place at four-thirty on the morning of June 3, 1864. This engagement is known in history as the battle of Cold Harbor. It was the shortest important battle in the Civil War. The main attack on the Confederate works was over in an hour, though intermittent firing was kept up until noon. During that time Grant had lost seven thousand men, while the Confederate casualties were less than a thousand. Grant may not |