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

of attacks and counterattacks through the dense underbrush and burning woods, little of it with any sense, produced a total of 18,000 casualties for the Army of the Potomac and another 10,000 or so for the Army of Northern Virginia. By midnight on the evening of May 6, both armies had lapsed into an uncomfortable quiet, too exhausted and confused to carry the fight on further.23

Almost exactly one year before, Fighting Joe Hooker had found himself in the same situation and at the same location near the old Chancellorsville House, and he had elected to retreat. Much of the Army of the Potomac must have expected that Grant would make the same move, following the dingy and depressing pattern they had known for three years—attack, stall, withdraw across the Rappahannock. But Grant was not Hooker, and he was not like anything else the Army of the Potomac had ever seen. In the early morning hours of May 7, Grant arose, wrote out his orders, ate breakfast, and then moved out onto the road in the predawn darkness with his headquarters staff, past the burning wreck of the Wilderness and the long lines of Winfield S. Hancock’s 2nd Corps standing by the roadside—and headed south.

For the first time since his arrival among them, the Army of the Potomac began to cheer Grant. “No doubt it was inspired by the fact that the movement was south,” wrote Grant with characteristic detachment. “It indicated to them that they had passed through the ‘beginning of the end’ in the battle just fought. The cheering was so lusty that the enemy must have taken it for a night attack.”24 Frank Wilkeson recalled that “Grant’s military standing with the enlisted men this day hung on the direction we turned at the Chancellorsville House.”

If to the left, he was to be rated with Meade and Hooker and Burnside and Pope—the generals who preceded him. At the Chancellorsville House we turned to the right. Instantly all of us heard a sigh of relief. Our spirits rose. We marched free. The men began to sing. The enlisted men understood the flanking movement. That night we were happy. 25

Sixty miles away, in Washington, Lincoln and Stanton had heard nothing from Grant after the last of the Army of the Potomac had disappeared into the maw of the Wilderness, and an aide noticed that the tension was so great for Stanton that he could not even reach for a piece of paper without twitching. But on May 8 Grant finally had an official dispatch to send to Lincoln, and John Hay noticed that, despite the punishing losses, for the first time Lincoln was happy with what one of his generals was doing in Virginia. Lincoln remarked to Hay, “How near we have been to this thing before and failed. I believe if any other general had been at the head of that army it would have not been on this side of the Rapidan. It is the dogged pertinacity of Grant that wins.” Two days later, Grant sent Halleck a letter that had an ever larger measure of “pertinacity” to it: “I am now sending back… all my wagons for a fresh supply of provisions and ammunition, and purpose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”26

Grant suspected that, as badly hurt as his own army was, Lee’s was probably weakened even more. So, shaking off the blow he had received in the Wilderness, Grant began feeling to his left, seeking to move southward around the battered flank of Lee’s army and out onto the open ground between the Rappahannock and Richmond. His first objective was Spotsylvania Courthouse, a little country crossroads eleven miles southeast of the Wilderness. If he could get there before Lee, the Army of the Potomac would lie at right angles to Richmond and the Army of Northern Virginia, and Lee would have no choice but to attack him there or abandon the Confederate capital. Once again, the roads were poor and the maps unreliable, and as a result, Lee managed to beat Grant to Spotsylvania Court House by the afternoon of May 8.

The Confederates had only a little time to build up their defenses before Grant’s army arrived, but by this point in the war, all but the greenest volunteers knew how to scratch up effective entrenchments by the rule of the minute. By the time Grant was ready to attack on May 10, the Army of Northern Virginia was dug into a five-mile-long line, featuring a prominent horseshoe-shaped bulge that easily fended off repeated headlong Federal attacks. For one moment that evening, a carefully selected division of twelve regiments under Colonel Emory Upton was allowed to try something different—a swift dash in column with bayonets only, no firing, no deploying into line of battle. Upton’s column waited under cover of a woodline until 6:35 that evening, then at a signal sprinted 200 yards to strike a point on the western side of the Confederate bulge. The rebels hardly had time to look up. “They came on us with a yell and never made any halt,” wrote a Georgian, “We were simply overwhelmed and forced to retire, every man for himself.” Unhappily, the success of Upton’s attack surprised the Army of the Potomac, too, because the orders for supports to come up behind Upton went astray. Upton’s men were left dangling and had to withdraw. 27

Two days later, on May 12, Grant tried Upton’s tactic again, only with Winfield Hancock’s 2nd Corps and Horatio Wright’s 6th Corps, and this time the results were an exercise in military horror. At one point on the Confederate bulge, in a trench known as the “Bloody Angle,” attackers and defenders grappled in vicious hand-to-hand, rifle-to-rifle combat, like two crowds of enraged beasts. The commander of the Vermont Brigade remembered that “it was not only a desperate struggle but it was emphatically a hand-to-hand fight.”

Scores were shot down within a few feet of the death-dealing muskets. A