Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

the army and give all the orders that mattered). In some cases, though, Grant was facing problems that political savvy had no way of addressing. This particular army was largely composed of three-year volunteers, and in the spring and summer of 1864, many of those enlistments were due to expire. The constant defeats the army had suffered had slowly undermined the veterans’ enthusiasm for another term of service, and only about half of the Army of the Potomac’s veterans would be persuaded to reenlist. Unless he could win some kind of smashing victory soon, Grant was liable to see a large part of the Army of the Potomac legally desert him.15

Staggering as these problems were, Grant managed to stay on his guard about letting the Army of the Potomac eat up all his attention and resources. He still believed that the really decisive blows that would win the war were going to have to land somewhere outside the old battlefields north of Richmond. To that end, Grant also provided for three other simultaneous offensives to begin in the West and below Richmond. Intended to help realize much of the original plan Grant had proposed to Halleck, those three offensives would depend largely on the men designated to lead them. First and foremost, there was William Tecumseh Sherman. Grant proposed to combine George Thomas and the Army of the Cumberland with Grant’s old Army of the Tennessee from the Vicksburg campaign and put them both under the command of Sherman. At the same time as Grant’s overland campaign would open in Virginia, Sherman would advance south toward Atlanta with a view toward taking the city by the end of the summer.

In addition to Sherman, Grant also looked to Nathaniel Banks for help. Banks was supposed to finish his Red River expedition in time to launch a combined army-navy operation against Mobile in tandem with Grant and Sherman’s advances. With Sherman occupying the rebel Army of Tennessee, there would be little at hand to defend Mobile, and when the port fell into his hands, Banks could then move his men north through Alabama without serious opposition, wrecking Selma in his path, and then turn east and meet Sherman at Atlanta.

Lastly, Grant was looking for help from Major General Benjamin F. Butler, the Massachusetts politician who had outraged New Orleans and made the “contrabands” the beginning of a new Federal policy on slavery in 1861. Butler was to take command of two Federal army corps (about 33,000 men) and deposit them on the old James River peninsula, below Richmond. While Grant and the Army of the Potomac would clinch Lee in battle along the Rappahannock line, Butler and his men could slip past the thin Confederate defenses on the James and capture Richmond or at least cut Richmond’s rail communications with the rest of the South. Lincoln aptly summed up the plan in one phrase: “Those not skinning can hold a leg.”16

Grant was less forthcoming about his reservations concerning the overland path across the Rapidan and the Rappahannock that Halleck and Lincoln insisted had to be taken en route to the climactic battle they wanted fought with Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. McClellan’s temptation to play at politics had tainted with halfheartedness the idea of using the navy’s command of the Chesapeake waterways to outflank the Confederates, push up the James River, and besiege Richmond. Surprisingly, that was exactly what Lee dreaded the most. “I considered the problem in every possible phase,” Lee told one of his division commanders in 1863, and unless he could carry the war onto Northern soil and make the North pay the price the South was paying, then taking a defensive stance would only end with him being pushed back into a siege of Richmond, and a siege—as the sieges of Sevastopol and Kars had shown during the Crimean War—had only one end in modern warfare, that of surrender. Nothing about the results of the Gettysburg campaign had changed Lee’s mind. “We must destroy this army of Grant’s before he gets to the James River,” Lee told Jubal Early. “If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.” This was also what Grant was convinced would be the inevitable outcome of affairs in the east, for the simple reason that armies had become too big to defeat in a single, cataclysmic battle, and too dependent on railroads and cities as supply centers to survive in the field if those cities were locked up and captured. His intention, Grant wrote, was to “beat Lee’s army north of Richmond if possible.” But no amount of beating was liable to put the Army of Northern Virginia permanently out of commission; at least, none so far had done that. Instead, Grant mused, “after destroying his lines of communication north of the James River,” it would be better to “transfer the army to the south side and besiege Lee in Richmond or follow him south if he should retreat.”17

Almost from the first, things began to go wrong with Grant’s big strategic picture. For one thing, Banks’s expedition up the Red River turned into an unpleasant little fiasco that tied up those forces (along with 10,000 of Sherman’s men who had been sent to reinforce him) until the end of May. By that time, Banks would have been a month late just starting for Mobile, and in fact, he never even got going at all, and spent the rest of the war in New Orleans. Sherman would have to take Atlanta himself, and without any helpful distractions at Mobile by Banks. Meanwhile, Butler and his “Army of the James” made a brave landing below Richmond on the James peninsula on May 5, 1864. Butler actually got within five miles of Richmond on May 11, only to be turned back by a desperate Confederate defense at Drewry’s Bluff on May 16. Butler withdrew back to the James River and entrenched himself in the