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

So Grant imperturbably sat down and informed Halleck that he intended to change his line of operations from the Fredericksburg-Richmond line to the James River, “transfer the army to the south side” of the James, and either barge into Richmond from below or “besiege Lee in Richmond.”33

This, of course, was what Halleck and Lincoln had always been sure they must prevent their generals from doing. Lincoln’s methodology, ever since McClellan, had been to push his generals after Lee, not Richmond. However, Grant merely observed that Lee’s men had acquired a considerable knack for entrenching themselves and making head-on attacks a very costly proposition. By June, he and the Army of the Potomac had paid enough for George McClellan’s sins, and Grant was ready to do what he had suspected in the first place needed to be done: strike directly at Richmond and the Army of Northern Virginia’s vital depots and rail links, then force the Confederates out into the open country, where they would be compelled to fight, starve, or both.

This was, of course, essentially the same thing he had done at Vicksburg. And with the memory of Vicksburg in mind, Grant aimed to pull back secretly from the Cold Harbor lines, steal a march down to the James, cross the river over a 2,100-foot-long pontoon bridge that is still one of the greatest wonders of military engineering, and wind up on the south side of the James below Richmond while Lee was still in his lines above the city. He would then cross the Appomattox River and seize the vital rail junction at Petersburg, twelve miles below Richmond, where all the major rail lines from the rest of the South—Norfolk & Petersburg, Weldon, Southside, Richmond & Danville—came together to form the logistical lifeline of the Army of Northern Virginia. Cut those lines at Petersburg, and both Richmond and the Army of Northern Virginia were doomed to die on a withered vine.34

Coming from any other general, not a syllable of this plan would have been even remotely acceptable to Lincoln. But Grant had Lincoln’s confidence to a degree that no other general had in this war, and Lincoln was inclined to give Grant his head. Lincoln remarked in the spring of 1864 to one of his White House secretaries, William O. Stoddard, that “Grant is the first general I’ve had” who “hasn’t told me what his plans are. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. I’m glad to find a man who can go ahead without me.” That, of course, was not literally true: Grant had telegraphed all the details to Halleck, Halleck had passed them on to Lincoln, and Lincoln had taken the whole plan in at once. “Have just read your despatch,” Lincoln wired Grant while Grant was already on the road. “I begin to see it. You will succeed. God bless you.”35

On June 12, Grant quietly evacuated his Cold Harbor lines, moving so swiftly and unobtrusively that Lee knew nothing of the withdrawal until the next morning. Lee “was in a furious passion” when he discovered that Grant had slipped away under his nose. It was “one of the few times in the war” when Lee completely lost his temper, and as Eppa Hunton, who commanded a brigade in George Pickett’s division, warned, “when he did get mad, he was mad all over.” Grant then proceeded to execute the biggest turning movement of the war, quick-marching his men, corps by corps, down to the James and across the marvelous pontoon bridge, and then across the Appomattox, while Lee was still trying to decide where they had gone. The first of Grant’s troops to arrive hurled a preliminary attack against the Confederate defenses, capturing one and a half miles’ worth of the thinly manned lines (which had only been built as a precaution in 1862). By the sixteenth, three Federal army corps with more than 50,000 men were poised at the gates of Petersburg, with no more than 10,000 Confederates, some of them merely “transient forces” called out for the emergency, to bar the way. “The city is ours. There is not a brigade of the Army of Northern Virginia ahead of us,” shouted the jubilant men of Frank Wilkeson’s battery. “On all sides I heard men assert that Petersburg and Richmond were ours; that the war would virtually be ended in less than twenty-four hours.”

But the Federal assaults were uncoordinated and cautious, as if unable to believe that they faced little more than an unlocked door. By the time Grant and Meade were able to sort matters out and throw their full weight against Petersburg on the seventeenth, Lee had frantically moved enough divisions down to Petersburg to make resistance too stiff. Both armies began digging in, and Grant reluctantly conceded that the opportunity for a quick capture of Petersburg and Richmond had been lost.36

Grant continued to experiment with ways of breaking the impasse at Petersburg, but none of them really worked. On July 30, with Grant’s blessing, a regiment of Pennsylvania coal miners exploded an immense mine under the center of the Confederate entrenchments. The mine blew what a staff officer, William H. Powell, described as “an enormous hole in the ground about 30 feet deep, 60 feet wide and 170 feet long, filled with dust, great blocks of clay, guns, broken carriages, projecting timbers, and men buried in various ways—some to their necks, others to their waists, and some with only their feet and legs protruding from the earth.” The plan had been for a division of black Federal soldiers to rush into the crater created by the mine, peel back the twisted ends of the Confederate line, and allow the rest of the Army of the Potomac to pour through the gap toward Petersburg. At the last minute, however, the black division was replaced with a white division that had no training or preparation for the assault, and when the new division rushed