9. THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

1864: THE SOUTH UNDER SIEGE

In early 1864, Lincoln promoted Grant to Lieutenant General, giving him command of all the Union armies. Grant turned his armies (the armies of the Tennessee and Cumberland now combined) over to General Sherman and headed to Washington to take command of the entire war effort.  His plan was to have Sherman march south into Georgia from his position at Chattanooga, in order to take the vital Confederate heartland at Atlanta.  At the same time Meade's Army of the Potomac would attack Lee's Army of Northern Virginia (with Grant in camp with Meade) from the north and General Benjamin Butler would attack Richmond coming up from the south along the James River (similar to McClellan's Peninsula Campaign two years earlier.)

It would be total war, designed to crush the South's economic and emotional as well as military capacity to wage war.  Under Grant's command the war would be fought very differently, smaller battles, but one immediately after another, with no letup in the hits the Union troops were to make on the Confederate troops.   Grant would continually attempt to swing around Lee's forces, with Lee being forced to give ground little by little in order not to be flanked or surrounded by Grant's forces.

Lee now understood that he was in trouble, with the Union troops unwilling to break off after a battle but instead hanging onto his troops like bulldogs, wearing the Confederates down little by little.

The two sides met near Spotsylvania in a wooded area with dense underbrush, that came to be termed the "Wilderness."  They bloodied each other severely, with no clear victor and with huge losses registered on both sides.  Grant’s intent to swing eastward around Lee was met by Longstreet, who managed to hold off Hancock.  Likewise an effort by Longstreet to reverse the action also failed when he himself was wounded (by his own men).  On the third day of the action Grant broke off the engagement.  But by no means was he in any way dissuaded from his origin plan.

The next day Grant and Lee met in battle as Grant again attempted to swing  southeast around Lee ... who had retreated to the crossroads of the Spotsylvania Court House and had dug in there.  When Grant attacked Lee he found that he could not break the four-mile long Confederate line.  He attacked at one well-defended point in the line (that came to be known as the "Bloody Angle"), losing huge numbers of his troops in the effort.  After 24 hours of brutal hand-to-hand fighting, after which he accomplished no gains, he backed his men off. He did not give up the fight  but attempted several other strategies over the next days none of which yielded him any advantages.  The Confederates attempted a counter assault.  But that too turned out to fail.  Finally Grant broke off and headed his troops southeast in another attempt to swing around behind Lee.

Union cavalry had taken control of the crossroads of Cold Harbor, about 10 miles northeast of Richmond and were soon joined by the bulk of Grant’s army.  The Confederates again dug in, creating a line of defense about 7 miles long.  Union attempts to overrun both the northern and southern extremities of this line failed horribly.

At the Spotsylvania Court House and Cold Harbor, Grant learned a lesson that he would not repeat: do not break off from your adversary long enough to give him a chance to dig in. Grant's attack on Lee's Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania had proven to be very costly to Grant, and at Cold Harbor a dug-in Lee proved impossible to dislodge by direct assault.  From this, Grant learned to never again attempt a direct assault on a well-defended position, as modern arms give the defenders a tremendous advantage.¹

Once again Grant swung his forces east and south, determined not to give up despite the terrible thrashing his men had received at both Spotsylvania Court House and Cold Harbor.  He had lost over 52,000 men in the period since he started his Overland Campaign in early May.  But Lee had lost 33,000 men, a much larger loss proportionately to his total troop size, and thus was much less able to afford such a high loss.

Meanwhile Butler’s campaign in the Peninsula had resulted only in his army being surrounded ... necessitating Grant’s coming to the rescue.  But all the action in Virginia nonetheless tied down Lee in the defense of Petersburg ... preventing him from coming to the aid of the Confederate troops trying to hold off Sheridan’s attacks in the Shenandoah Valley and Sherman’s advance through Georgia.

At this point Grant decided to move his troops south past Richmond and seize the town of Petersburg, a vital rail link to Richmond. But Beauregard was able to hold off Grant long enough for Lee to get his forces in place to protect Petersburg, and a long Union siege set in.  At one point the Union troops dug a long tunnel under the Confederate lines, then exploded it with the intention of rushing troops in through the gap in order to seize the city.  But the Union troops were slow to move forward and found that the crater they had created was so deep that they could not easily move across it, but instead down in it they had become easy targets for the gathering Confederates.  With this failure, the siege of Petersburg settled down to a long stalemate.

¹During World War One (1914–1918) European military strategists failed to learn this same lesson and for four murderous years would throw their troops into the enemy's grinder of breech-loading rifles, machine guns and canister artillery, killing hundreds of thousands of troops without gaining any particular advantage in doing so.  They just could not break themselves free from the habit of designing battles with grand frontal assaults, as in the day of troops possessing only slow-loading muskets, in which direct and quick frontal assault was the best tactic in gaining battlefield victory.  In the days of modern weapons this was now a pointless and murderous tactic to put soldiers through.  But the European generals were slow to figure this out.  Grant, however, was not so dimwitted!