A Quick and Dirty Overview of the Virginia Campaign, May - June 1864

Most of this is lifted from Chapter 14 of Robert A. Doughty and Ira Gruber (eds.), Warfare in the Western World.
  (Since I wrote the chapter I don't feel too badly about borrowing it here.)
The maps are from the West Point Atlases.

INTRODUCTION

The final year of the Civil War witnessed the full bloom of total war. No western state in centuries had waged a military contest more comprehensively than did the Union and Confederacy. Determined national efforts the world had seen: during the Napoleonic Wars the Spanish and Russian people had made fought relentlessly against the French invaders; and in 1813 the Russians had pursued the retreating French for nearly a thousand miles. Yet neither the Spanish nor the Russians had mobilized their populations and economies as systematically as did the North and South. Neither had carried the war into France, and neither had made a sustained effort to destroy the French people's capacity to make war. By 1864, however, the North was not only bringing pressure against the Confederate field armies, but was also striking powerfully at the material and psychological resources of the South.

In strictly military terms, the South now had little chance to win the war. With Gen. Robert E. Lee's offensive power blunted by his defeat at Gettysburg, the Trans-Mississippi region isolated, and the rail center of Chattanooga, Tennessee,  in Union hands, the Confederacy's strategic situation was bleak. Moreover, the battles of previous years had bled rebel manpower so heavily that by early 1864 the rebel Congress was forced to pass a new conscription law which abolished substitutes and "robbed the cradle and the grave" in an effort to secure more troops. Even this did not help. In desperation, a few Confederate leaders began to ponder the previously unthinkable option of using slaves as soldiers--and, in exchange, to emancipate those slaves who agreed to fight for the South.

Most, however, continued to regard this last step as anathema. Instead they pinned their hopes on the fact that in November 1864, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln faced reelection. If the South could only hold out until then, the war weariness of Northerners might result in his losing the White House. "If we can break up the enemy's arrangements early, and throw him back," noted one Confederate general, "he will not be able to recover his position or his morale until the Presidential election is over, and then we shall have a new President to treat with." Presumably this new president would be receptive to a compromise peace.

Lincoln, of course, understood the rebel hope as well as anyone, and he had no intention of permitting a prolonged stalemate. Instead he did what most observers had assumed he would do since the triumph at Chattanooga: he gave Ulysses S. Grant command of all the Union armies. With the new job went the three stars of a lieutenant general, a rank not held by any U.S. officer (except honorifically) since George Washington. In March 1864 Grant came to Washington, met Lincoln for the first time, received his promotion, and settled down to win the war.

PLANS FOR THE 1864 CAMPAIGN

Now installed as General-in-Chief (with Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck retained as Army chief of staff), Grant began planning at once for the 1864 campaigns. The content of those plans and the way in which he devised them provide a good lens through which to examine the salient features of his generalship.

To begin with, Grant saw the war as a whole. Until that time most Union generals had viewed the conflict in terms of separate theaters; no one placed much premium on cooperative effort. As a result, the outnumbered Confederate forces had been able to shift troops from one place to another, shoring up one threatened point by diverting strength from quiet sectors. In this way Johnston had gathered over 30,000 soldiers for his vain but bothersome effort to relieve Vicksburg; in this way as well, troops from all over the Confederacy had gathered to administer the near-crippling blow to Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans at Chickamauga. To prevent this Grant planned for a simultaneous advance along the entire front.
 

Second, Grant was less interested in occupying "strategic points" than with destroying the enemy's main forces. He believed that when no armies remained to defend them, the strategic points would fall as a matter of course. Important cities like Richmond and Atlanta were useful chiefly because the main Confederate armies would fight for them, and in the course of fighting they could be destroyed. Grant put this concept succinctly in a letter to Major General George Gordon Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac: "Lee's army is your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also."

Third, Grant wanted the 1864 spring offensive to be as strong as possible. He regretted the detachment of so many Union troops on passive occupation duty. Some of this could not be helped--by this period of the war the Federal armies had to contend with well over 100,000 square miles of captured hostile territory--but it struck Grant that all too often the passive stance was unnecessary. At an April conference with Lincoln, Grant expressed the view that these detachments could do their jobs "just as well by advancing as well as by remaining still; and by advancing they would compel the enemy to keep detachments to hold them back, or else lay his own territory open to invasion." Lincoln grasped the point at once. "Oh, yes!" he said. "I see that. As we say out West, if a man can't skin he must hold a leg while somebody else does."
 
Finally, Grant expected to combine destruction of Southern armies with destruction of Southern war resources. Although Sherman would become the general most identified with this policy, Grant had a profound understanding of the fact that Civil War armies had become too large and too powerful to destroy in battle. Their annihilation required not only military defeat but also the elimination of the foodstuffs, forage, ammunition and equipage necessary to maintain them in the field. His instructions to his chief lieutenant, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, reflect this: "You I propose to move against [Joseph E.] Johnston's army, to break it up, and to get into the interior of the enemy's country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources."

Grant refused to direct operations from Washington and decided to make his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac. He had good reason for doing so. That army formed one of the two primary concentrations of Union force; as such it would play a decisive role in the campaign to come. But except for its single defensive victory at Gettysburg the Army of the Potomac had a depressing record of stalemate or defeat; in its entire existence it had never won a clear-cut offensive victory. Worse, the army had traditionally suffered from its close proximity to Washington, which made it strongly susceptible to political pressures and even to factionalism among the officer corps. In short, the Army of the Potomac seemed to need firsthand attention far more than the other reservoir of Federal striking power--the combined armies of the Cumberland, the Tennessee, and the Ohio--which Sherman had assembled at Chattanooga. Sherman, in any event, enjoyed Grant's entire confidence.

Even so, Grant also thought a good deal of General Meade, leader of the Army of the Potomac. He had never met Meade before his arrival in Virginia and did not know what to expect, but Meade impressed him by offering to step aside immediately if Grant wished to put someone in his place. Grant declined the offer and Meade remained in command; even so, Grant exerted such close supervision over the Army of the Potomac that it quickly became known, erroneously but enduringly, as "Grant's army."

Grant's final plan for the great 1864 campaign pressed the Confederacy on all sides. In the eastern theater, the Army of the Potomac would advance against General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Two smaller forces would "hold a leg": Major General Franz Sigel would advance up the Shenandoah Valley while Major General Benjamin F. Butler would conduct an amphibious operation against the Richmond-Petersburg area. Unfortunately, Sigel and Butler were political generals, men of little or no military ability who held important commands exclusively because they had strong influence with constituencies important to the Union war effort. (Sigel was a hero among the German-American community, Butler an important Democrat.) Grant would have been justified in expecting nothing at all from these men. Instead he pinned many of his hopes for the upcoming Virginia campaign on the belief that both would perform capably. Grant gave Butler an especially significant role: he anticipated that Butler's army would be able to seize the important railroad town of Petersburg and perhaps even capture Richmond itself.

Out west, Sherman's three armies would move upon Johnston's Army of Tennessee. Grant had hoped that yet another force, under General Nathaniel P. Banks, might advance from Louisiana against Mobile, Alabama, but for political reasons Banks marched up the cotton-rich but strategically irrelevant Red River valley. Except for Banks, who had already made--and lost--his campaign by early April, the remaining operations were timed to jump off simultaneously in early May 1864.

THE WILDERNESS AND SPOTSYLVANIA

Grant, of course, paid closest attention to the offensive against Lee. On May 4 the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River into the Wilderness, the same region where Hooker had come to grief the year before. Some miles to the west lay Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. By crossing here, Grant hoped to turn Lee's right flank and compel him to retreat. But that same day Lee got his troops in motion and came thundering east; early the next morning he hurled them into action against two Union corps as they struggled along the narrow lanes of the Wilderness.

Outnumbered nearly two to one (64,000 men against Grant's 119,000), Lee wanted to force a battle in the Wilderness where thick woods would dilute the Union numerical advantage and make it difficult for the Federals to use their numerous and well-trained artillery. During the next two days he savaged the Union army with a sustained intensity Grant had never experienced in his previous campaigns. Those who had experienced it were not slow to offer advice. On the second day of the fighting one Union general told him, "General Grant, this is a crisis that cannot be looked upon too seriously. I know Lee's methods well by past experience; he will throw his whole army between us and the Rapidan, and cut us off completely from our communications." Usually phlegmatic, Grant permitted himself a rare show of annoyance. "Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command," he snapped, "and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do."

This kind of thinking brought something new to the Army of the Potomac. The fighting in the Wilderness cost the Union nearly 17,000 casualties; Lee, by contrast suffered no more than about 10,000. In earlier days the Army of the Potomac would have retreated after such a battle to lick its wounds. Grant, however, decided simply to disengage and continue his effort to get around Lee's flank. After suffering for years from a chronic sense of inferiority, the Army of the Potomac found itself led by a man who never thought in terms of defeat and who did not lose his will to fight when confronted by casualties.

The army began moving during the evening of May 7, heading for Spotsylvania Court House, an important crossroads, ten miles southeast of the Wilderness, whose swift possession would allow the Union forces to interpose between Richmond and Lee. Confederate troops got there first, however, and in a series of sharp little engagements held the crossroads long enough for Lee's army to arrive in strength. For twelve days (May 9-21), the two armies grappled inconclusively in the fields north and east of Spotsylvania.

Unlike the Wilderness, where Lee had counterattacked early and often, at Spotsylvania the Army of Northern Virginia fought almost entirely behind entrenchments. Grant viewed this as a confession of Confederate weakness. At the same time, however, he found it very difficult to crack the rebel line. On May 10, for example, an imaginative young West Point graduate named Emory Upton managed to break into the Confederate entrenchments using a new tactical scheme of his own devising. His division advanced in column formation, without pausing to fire en route--Upton took the precaution of having his men charge with muskets uncapped except for the leading rank. The attack indeed broke the rebel line, but supporting Federal troops failed to arrive and Upton reluctantly withdrew.

Grant, however, was sufficiently impressed with the new tactic to try it again, this time using an entire corps. Shortly after dawn on May 12 the corps struck a prominent salient in the Confederate position known as "the Mule Shoe." As in Upton's charge, the Federals broke through the enemy trenches, this time capturing more than 4,000 prisoners. Lee was forced to counterattack in a desperate attempt to restore the breach, resulting in some of the most ferocious combat of the entire war. In many places the fighting was hand-to-hand, and at one point the bullets flew so thick that an oak tree nearly two feet in diameter was completely cut in two. By evening Lee managed to complete a new line of entrenchments across the base of the Mule Shoe, and the surviving Confederates withdrew. In a pattern that would be repeated endlessly during the First World War, the defenders had managed to repair a breach in their fortified line faster than the attackers could exploit it.

TO THE BANKS OF THE JAMES RIVER

Initially Grant was determined to break the Confederates at Spotsylvania--he wired Washington, "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." But by mid-May it had become obvious that both secondary offensives in Virginia had failed. A hastily-assembled Rebel force defeated Sigel on May 15 at the Battle of New Market. Butler landed at the tip of a peninsula formed by the James and Appomattox Rivers, advanced a short distance inland, then stalled. A much smaller Confederate detachment soon sealed off the neck of the peninsula with entrenchments. This left Butler's force, in Grant's scornful words, "as completely shut off from further operations against Richmond as if it had been in a bottle strongly corked." Designed to place additional pressure on Lee and siphon troops from his army, these efforts to "hold a leg" wound up having the opposite effect: with Sigel beaten and Butler neutralized, Lee received 8,500 reinforcements from the forces that had opposed them.

Lee's increased strength made "fighting it out" at Spotsylvania no longer such a good idea. Unable to dislodge the Confederate commander, Grant attempted once again to slide past Lee's right flank and continue his advance southward. The formula he had given Meade before the campaign--"Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also"--became reversed: wherever Grant went, Lee went also, and Lee invariably got there first. Yet in every previous campaign, Lee had found a way to wrest the initiative from his opponent. Grant gave him no such opportunity. The Union General in Chief had both the military strength and the moral determination to keep moving on.

The campaign in progress resembled nothing that had come before. Previous Civil War operations had usually followed a fairly classic pattern: long periods of preliminary maneuver, careful sparring as the opposing forces located one another, then a major battle that ended in clear-cut victory or defeat. Grant's campaign, on the other hand, amounted to a six-week brawl in which the armies seldom broke contact for more than a few hours and from which no clear decision emerged. The losses it generated horrified the Northern population. In the long months since Shiloh the North had grown used to casualty lists on the same scale as those of that bloody struggle; but the fighting in May and early June 1864 produced 55,000 Union dead, wounded, and missing--about five times the cost of Shiloh. Confederate losses exceeded 30,000: fewer than those of the Federals, but about the same in proportion to the forces engaged.

The campaign differed in one other respect as well. Both sides had learned the value of field fortifications; indeed, the soldiers had gotten so that they would dig in without orders and practically every time they halted for more than a few minutes. "It is a rule," wrote one Union officer, "that when the Rebels halt, the first day gives them a good rifle-pit; the second, a regular infantry parapet with artillery in position; and the third a parapet with abatis [sharpened stakes] in front and entrenched batteries behind. Sometimes they put this three days' work into the first twenty-four hours." These entrenchments had the effect of making it almost impossible to carry a defensive position; those who attempted it generally got slaughtered, while their killers found almost total protection behind rifle pits and earthen parapets.

Though the generals did not quickly grasp the full significance of this, the Battle of Cold Harbor provided a final, chilling lesson. By early June Grant's army had gotten within seven miles of Richmond, but it had not yet beaten Lee's army and it had nearly run out of room to maneuver: further efforts to turn the Confederates would run into the tidal estuary of the James River. Partly because of this, and partly because Grant thought he discerned a weakness in Lee's line, he ordered a frontal assault against Lee's entrenched defenses. The attack jumped off at about 4:30 a.m. on June 3. It was really nothing more than a succession of charges made along different parts of the line, most of which collapsed within minutes, smashed beneath an annihilating storm of rifle and artillery fire. The abortive and bloody attack cost nearly 7,000 Union casualties. Grant later called it one of two attacks during the war he wished he had not ordered.

With no prospect whatever of breaking through to Richmond, Grant then went forward with an operation he had pondered even while the armies were still fighting at Spotsylvania. He would shift the Army of the Potomac south of the James River, use the river as his line of supply, and try to get at Petersburg, a city about twenty miles south of Richmond through which the Confederate capital--and Lee's army--received most of its supplies. Between June 12 and 16 the Union forces made the crossing, with Grant managing the feat so adroitly that for several days Lee did not know what was being done. As a result the Army of the Potomac almost seized Petersburg before an adequate Rebel force could arrive to hold the city. Through misperception and bad management on the part of Meade's subordinates, however, the fleeting opportunity vanished. Lee's army scrambled down to Petersburg, entered fortifications already in place to defend the city, and once again forced a stalemate. The Army of the Potomac settled in for a siege; for the next ten months, Lee and Grant faced one another across a trench-scarred landscape.

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