Lincoln's Autocrat: The Life of Edwin Stanton (Civil War America) by William Marvel

Author:William Marvel [Marvel, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2015-04-14T21:00:00+00:00

14: MINISTER OF PROPAGANDA

A lack of concert among far-flung Union armies had abetted the rebellion for three years. The summer campaigns of 1861 had flourished and flickered out independently, while hesitation, mishap, and disagreement prevented the largest army from taking the field with its smaller counterparts the following February. Two major offensives did begin together late in April of 1863, coinciding more by default than by design, but it was Ulysses Grant who introduced the concept of multiple, simultaneous incursions that would prevent Confederates from shifting their own forces.

Grant opened the 1864 campaign with coordinated offensives in nearly every theater. By the first of May Franz Sigel occupied Winchester, on his way up the Shenandoah Valley, while William Averell led a cavalry column out of Charleston, West Virginia, for a raid on the salt mines of southwestern Virginia. The following day George Crook started a division of infantry on a parallel course from West Virginia to cut the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad, and as Crook’s men shouldered their knapsacks Ben Butler feinted up the York River toward Richmond. On May 4 Butler pulled that punch and began transporting his troops up the James River on steamers to City Point and Bermuda Hundred, ten miles above Petersburg and fifteen miles below Richmond. That same day the Army of the Potomac, with Burnside’s recruit-heavy Ninth Corps in tow, crossed the Rapidan and swung west, hoping to cut Lee off from Richmond as Meade had tried at Mine Run. Two days later, in north Georgia, Sherman started maneuvering against Joe Johnston, who had taken over the shaken fragments of Bragg’s Army of Tennessee.1

Meade ran into trouble when the head of his columns failed to clear the Wilderness by nightfall of the first day. This dense second-growth forest bordered both sides of the Orange Turnpike and Orange Plank Road west of Chancellorsville, where Joe Hooker had met his match. With an army barely half the size of Meade’s, Lee struck the Yankees on both roads, holding them fast and even driving them back here and there on May 5 while he waited for Longstreet’s corps, just back from Tennessee. The next day Longstreet launched a powerful assault on Meade’s left, at the intersection of the plank road and the Brock Road, and the fighting turned as fierce as any the Eastern armies had ever seen. At the Brock Road, the Vermont brigade of the Sixth Corps was cut nearly in half: a man from the 2nd Vermont described his regiment’s front line melting like wax, claiming that his regiment lost 364 men in less than half an hour. Longstreet’s own men wounded him—the luckiest bullet of the battle, for the Yankees, and their line held.

Grant, who was traveling with Meade’s army, waited through most of May 7 for another attack, and that evening he slipped to his left along the Brock Road, toward Spotsylvania Court House. Confederates beat him to that hamlet, and for two weeks he hammered at them in one entrenched position after another.

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