Sadly, there are apparently no more works coming anytime soon from Rhea’s masterful pen. But he does leave this reader with some kind of hope for the future.
“The executive director of Pamplin Historical Park, A. Wilson Greene, is the leading historian of the Petersburg Campaign. He has recently completed the first book of a multivolume study that when finished will stand as the authoritative word on the campaign.”
It’s already on my "Books to Get" list.
That was in September 2018. I’m writing now in August 2019 and, needless to say, A Campaign of Giants, subtitled The Battle For Petersburg, and further subtitled Volume One: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater, is that referenced work.
Let’s jump right in. It is Saturday, June 18, 1864. Much of Grant’s army has already crossed the James River, and major pieces of it are hurling themselves against earthwork lines hastily thrown up by the Rebels in an attempt to capture Petersburg and cut the supply lines for the Confederate capital at Richmond. As you read this extended excerpt, know that I am including it because it is essentially the story of the entire campaign in miniature.
Colonel [Joshua Lawrence] Chamberlain had emerged from the obscurity of regimental command on July 2, 1863, when his unit, the Twentieth Maine, successfully defended the far left flank of the army on Gettyburg’s Little Round Top. Chamberlain would receive the Medal of Honor for his heroism that day, but a more immediate reward resulted in his promotion to command of Griffin’s First Brigade. Chamberlain’s outfit included five depleted veteran regiments and an oversized new one, Pennsylvanians all. The thirty-five-year-old Chamberlain had been a professor at Maine’s Bowdoin College when he left the classroom in 1862 to fight for the Union. His distinguished postwar political and literary career -- including a penchant for self-promotion -- and the attention paid him by modern writers and filmmakers have elevated Chamberlain’s stature well beyond what it was on June 18, 1864, although without doubt the colonel from Maine enjoyed a sterling reputation among those who knew him.
Are you with me so far? A citizen soldier, in the proudest American tradition. Elevated to command because of his courage, competency, and good fortune. Now, for the situation he’s facing.
Chamberlain had managed to advance his brigade across the railroad and into cleared ground south of Baxter Road, where Confederate shells played havoc with his waiting troops. The colonel placed his seasoned regiments, averaging about 250 men each, in his first line, extending along a front of about 400 yards. The 121st Pennsylvania anchored his left with the 142nd Pennsylvania, 150th Pennsylvania, 149th Pennsylvania, and 143rd Pennsylvania aligned, in that order, left to right. The rookie 187th Pennsylvania, numbering about 1,000 muskets and innocent of any combat experience, deployed in a second line some fifty yards behind the first and covering about three-fourths of the length of its five sister regiments. Two batteries -- Capt. Patrick Hart’s Fifteenth New York and Capt. John Bigelow’s Ninth Massachusetts -- came forward to provide close support, joined later by a third set of guns.
The war has been going on for a long time. Pennsylvania would in total organize 215 numbered infantry regiments in the Civil War, and the rookie 187th is now making its appearance. The “veteran” regiments of the 121st, 142nd, 143rd, 149th, and 150th are all down to about 250 men, meaning that each has lost 750 or more to battle wounds, death and/or disease. And note the precision that Greene attempts when placing each one on the battlefield. This, I’ve discovered, is often the mark of a serious historian.
While supervising the initial deployment, Chamberlain and his staff looked up to see a Confederate shell that exploded immediately above them. The blast unhorsed every officer in the colonel’s entourage, severely wounded Chamberlain’s mount, Charlemagne, and claimed the lives of three men while wounding seven others, including the brigade color bearer. Chamberlain retrieved the flag and held it aloft as his troops withdrew a short distance to a safer location, awaiting orders for an assault against the main Confederate line.
Needless to say, mortal danger abounds. For his men. For Chamberlain and his officers. Even for his horses.
Those orders, according to Chamberlain, arrived in the person of an unidentified lieutenant colonel bearing instructions “in the name of the general commanding” for Chamberlain’s brigade to assault the enemy’s works alone. An astonished Chamberlain purportedly penned a three-paragraph response to the unidentified general officer (presumably Meade) explaining the operational situation and suggesting that if an attack be made, the entire army should be ordered forward. When the staff officer returned, he brought the welcome news that the rest of the army would, indeed, be ordered forward, but that Chamberlain’s advanced position dictated that his brigade lead the effort.
Perhaps because of the hasty movement across the James, general officers are far from the troops that they command. Orders are sent based on the sketchiest of operational understandings. Some brigade or even regimental commanders question the orders they are given, some carry them out, and some firmly refuse to do so.
This tale had been repeated so often as to become generally accepted as factual. Its pedigree, however, is suspiciously limited to Chamberlain’s own testimony and that of a sergeant in the 143rd Pennsylvania, Patrick DeLacy, both writing several decades after the war. The notion that Meade would send direct orders to a lowly brigade commander, bypassing both Warren and Griffin in the process, is illogical, as is Chamberlain’s claim that he directed a written response straight to the army commander without going through channels. No evidence exists of any order designating Chamberlain to lead the attack, although the peculiar terrain that prevented a coordinated advance among Warren’s units might have left Chamberlain with the impression that his regiments had charged alone. The complaints of Sweitzer’s soldiers that Chamberlain had failed to provide support on their left demonstrates that both of Griffin’s attacking brigades went forward without a firm physical or visual connection. Chamberlain’s postwar version of events has come under question in other contexts and this seems to be an example of the eloquent colonel’s fondness for enhancing his personal reputation and that of his soldiers at the expense of the truth.
We see only through a glass darkly, and one of the things darkening the glass is the desire of the combatants to promote their own brands rather than communicate (or even understand) the truth. Again, like any serious historian, Greene is trying to get to the truth, and is willing to call into question anything that seems fishy or otherwise calculated for the approval of posterity.
It is incontestable, however, that Chamberlain’s Pennsylvanians charged ahead about 3:00 P.M., consistent with Warren’s wishes. They faced a daunting task. Kershaw’s Division, thought by the Federals to be 3,000 to 5,000 strong and well supported by artillery, waited behind the works of the old Dimmock Line and the hasty barricades constructed by Beauregard’s forces early that morning. Ransom’s Tar Heels and Elliott’s South Carolinians Dug in on Kershaw’s left, opposite Chamberlain, as part of an unbroken chain of Beauregard’s brigades. Chamberlain’s men would top the small ridge behind which they had sought protection, descend into the valley of Poor Creek, and then climb toward the Confederate line across shelterless ground. Chamberlain explained to his regimental commanders that they were to move quickly down the slope, break ranks to cross the stream as rapidly as possible, then re-form on the other side and rush the enemy. The veterans in Chamberlain’s first line knew that many would never return from such a mission, and an officer in the new 187th Pennsylvania shared their concern. “My heart dropped to my shoes,” he remembered. “Cold drops stood on my forehead [and] my blood was frozen solid.”
Men were about the charge an entrenched line of determined defenders. They were frightened, but they would do it anyway, believing it was necessary and honorable to do so.
The Maine colonel attempted to calm the nerves of his anxious soldiers by delivering an inspirational speech and positioning himself at the head of the lead column. “Attention! Trail Arms! Double-quick, march,” Chamberlain intoned as the buglers sounded the advance. The men crested the ridge and began to take musketry and artillery fire while yelling “like a pack of infuriated devils,” then plunged into the morass at the base of the hill. Chamberlain, on foot, reached the little stream, whose banks were festooned with dwarf trees and thick vegetation. Enfilading fire peppered the drainage, and Chamberlain saw that maneuvering through this terrain would be a deadly business. He turned to his left and began to give instructions for the men to oblique to their left in order to expedite their advance. As he did so, a minie ball ricocheted off the ground and into his right hip, passed through his lower abdomen, nicked his bladder and urethra, and came to rest just under the skin behind the bone near his left hip.
Correctly diagnosed. A deadly business.
The wound was as painful as it was serious, and Chamberlain staggered under the blow. Fearing, however, that by falling he would demoralize his men, the colonel thrust his officer’s sabre into the ground as a prop and continued to stand as his troops rushed past and ascended up the slope. Eventually, a loss of blood compelled his collapse. In the meantime, some of Chamberlain’s men reached the base of the Confederate works before the lethal fire pouring from the muzzles of rifles and cannon stopped them, and then drove most of them back down the hill, leaving the ground blanketed with casualties. A few intrepid souls remained at the base of the works, in defilade and hoping that a renewed attack or nightfall would provide them relief. The green soldiers of the 187th Pennsylvania broke when they reached the ravine, and although some of them rallied, their hesitance robbed the brigade of whatever slim chance it enjoyed of breaking the Rebel line. “Our boys killed ‘blue bellies’ to their hearts content,” wrote a satisfied captain in Kershaw’s Division.
An unsupported attack, breaking hard against an entrenched line, and fizzling, leaving some men in retreat, some dead, and some pinned down in an impossible situation.
Two of Chamberlain’s aides, Lts. West Funk and Benjamin Waters, spied their colonel lying down in the mud and muck and dragged him out of the defile. Chamberlain remained conscious and ordered the subalterns to notify the brigade’s ranking officer that he was now in charge. He also instructed them to find support for the artillery, which was on the near side of the railroad cut and in danger of capture should the Confederates come screaming down the slope in a counterattack. Funk and Waters did as they were told, and Chamberlain remained alone, his life blood oozing into the Virginia soil.
Meanwhile, the attention of combatants, commanders, and historians alike are drawn to the gallantry of their officers, men bravely committed to achieving the practically impossible. To wit, the following three paragraphs.
When Captain Bigelow of the Ninth Massachusetts Battery learned of Chamberlain’s wounding, he sent some men to retrieve him. The colonel waved them off and, thinking his wound fatal, urged them to devote their attention to those who might be saved. The cannoneers ignored this plea and, under fire from Confederate ordnance, loaded Chamberlain onto a litter and carried him to a spot behind Bigelow’s guns. Eventually, an ambulance transported the colonel to a field hospital several miles distant, where the first surgeon he saw declared him a lost cause.
By this time, the colonel’s younger brother, Capt. Tom Chamberlain, had learned of his sibling’s dire situation and persuaded two surgeons form his old brigade, Dr. A. O. Shaw of the Twentieth Maine and Dr. M. W. Townsend of the Forty-Fourth New York, to examine his brother. These physicians recognized a difficult case but decided to attempt to repair the damage to Chamberlain’s internal organs. Chamberlain had not been fully sedated, and at one point during the procedure his suffering became so acute that the doctors considered abandoning their work to spare a dying man such agony. Chamberlain, however, encouraged them to continue, and against all odds they managed to complete their work and provide the colonel at least the chance for recovery.
Warren and Griffin both reached the hospital once the fighting ebbed for the day and watched somberly, believing like most others that the gallant colonel would soon breathe his last. At Chamberlain’s behest, they hurriedly drafted a request to promote the wounded man to brigadier general, hoping that the honor could be approved before the sufferer expired. Their request reached Grant’s desk on June 20 and by virtue of Special Orders No. 39, the general-in-chief named Chamberlain a brigadier general of volunteers to rank from June 18. Despite the work of Shaw and Townsend, Chamberlain also considered himself mortally wounded and wrote a heartfelt letter to his wife on June 19, pledging his undying love and promising to meet her in heaven. But God had other plans for Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Transferred to the Naval Hospital in Annapolis, Maryland, Chamberlain received excellent care, and on September 20 he earned a discharge and a convalescent furlough. On November 18, 1864, Chamberlain would return to active duty.
But God had other plans. What tribute to gallantry would be complete without the obligatory appeal to Providence? Disappointing that the Almighty wasn’t focused on rescuing any other members of His flock.
Chamberlain’s brigade failed to break the Confederate line for reasons other than simply the wounding of its popular commander. Like Sweitzer, Wheaton, and Martindale, the Pennsylvanians had charged with what they perceived as little direct support on their left.
And there you have it. As I said, a story in miniature of the whole campaign -- and maybe the entire Civil War. Courageous action, hampered by political jockeying and uncoordinated attacks, and lauded with providential appeals to heart-tugging gallantry.
All That Is Possible For Men To Do
I really want to underscore the juxtaposition of what happened in the trenches versus what happened in the command tents of this campaign. Here’s a description of another uncoordinated and unsupported attack on the Confederate line.
Ayres ordered his division forward at 3:00 P.M. in concert with the rest of the Fifth Corps, but he made little progress. “Just as soon as we raised the top of our works the rebs opened,” wrote Sgt. Charles Thomas Bowen of the Twelfth U.S. Infantry. “Sometimes a solid shot would knock a file of men ten feet in the air or a charge of canister tear down half a dozen files.” Bowen thought that “the air seemed full of iron of all shapes whizzing by us” and the officers ordered the regulars to hit the dirt. “We gradually sunk ourselves in the sandy soil by a regular hen scratching with our hands,” admitted Bowen, who considered the resistance to be “the heaviest artillery fire I ever was in … Arms, legs, headless trunks, & heads without bodies were strewn in every direction.” The 146th New York suffered a similar nightmare. Their officers quickly called a halt to the slaughter and the men employed their bayonets and tin cups to create “a miniature breastwork” behind which they made themselves “as small as possible to avoid Confederate fire.” A shell decapitated the Fifth New York’s color bearer, splattering his brains over his comrades before that regiment reached cover.
Want more?
Dushane’s Marylanders hardly moved forward at all, but on Ayres’s right Kitching’s heavy artillery regiments formed in two lines and advanced at the signal. Kitching reported the loss of 159 men to a “fearful fire of artillery and musketry” and his soldiers, too, employed “bayonets, spoons, hands, sticks, -- almost anything … to ‘scratch dirt,’ and like magic a line of two or three thousand men who are one moment exposed to every shot will be pitching head foremost into the earth, like moles.” Field’s troops were beginning to arrive and they contributed to the almost effortless repulse of Ayres’s division. “The men went in, but not with spirit,” thought Colonel Lyman, “as much to say, ‘We can’t assault but we won’t run.’” Ayres managed to shift some of his troops into abandoned Batteries 22 and 23 on the Dimmock Line, facing west, and thus refusing the army’s left flank. Warren suggested that the assaults be renewed that evening, but Meade disapproved. “We have done all that is possible for men to do,” confessed the army commander, “and must be resigned to the result.”
That, I think, may be the best summary of all. We have done all that is possible for men to do, if, by men, you mean the men in the squads, companies, and regiments that are offering themselves up for slaughter on the off chance that someone, somewhere can pierce the Confederate line and turn the tide of battle for the scattered and distracted Federals.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I get it. Like Lee at Gettysburg, or Grant at Cold Harbor, you don’t really know what men can do until you throw them with love and patriotism into the meat grinder of battle. And in the brutal efficacy of combat, there are only so many tools in the toolbox, and most of them are thinking, breathing people with inner dialogues and others who love them. But at some point, does it not become essential to break out of the mold that has been cast for you, to recognize meaningless slaughter for what it is, and to seek some other way of solving your problems and resolving your differences?
That, unfortunately for the American Civil War, was never the job of the generals. It was the job of the politicians. And they, famously, were abundantly inadequate to their task.
The Incident at Stony Creek
But the lessons explored above are manifest in dozens of other Civil War engagements. The Petersburg Campaign has other and somewhat unique lessons to teach us, to better understand the heartlessness of man and the horror of war.
When the Federals reached the narrow bridge over Stony Creek, they found a deep stream defined by precipitous and rocky banks. General Wilson and his staff forced their way across the span near the head of the column, leaving the impression that the commander “was confoundedly alarmed.” A bottleneck occurred as the frantic aggregation of cavalry and hundreds of terrified blacks attempted to gain access to the slender bridge. The Second New York Cavalry, First Connecticut Cavalry, and Fifth New York Cavalry tried to blunt the pursuing Confederates. They inflicted a few casualties, wounding Maj. James Breathed of Lee’s horse artillery, but the mass of retreating humanity turned the entire operation into anarchy. “The men were almost completely demoralized,” remembered Chaplain Louis Boudrye of the Fifth New York Cavalry, “at least one third having either thrown away or lost their arms in the flight.” Some troopers desperately endeavored to ride their horses down the steep slope and across the wide stream, many of them tumbling into the swirling water. “Men and horses mingled in almost every conceivable shape, struggled to reach the opposite bank,” remembered Boudyre, “while bullets whizzed among the trees, and shells screamed over our heads.”
Lomax and Wickham applied the pressure at Stony Creek. “They fired right smartly … & partially checked us but … the enemy retired rather sullenly until our sabres began to knock their caps off,” boasted a trooper from the Third Virginia Cavalry. “They then fled precipitately exposing to view about 1500 negroes scampering across the fields (of all sizes & sexes) with great bundles of plunder stolen from their masters’ houses, upon their backs. … Such screaming & yelling as they sent up Pandemonium itself could scarcely beat.”
Are you following the scene here? The Confederates have repulsed another anemic Federal charge -- this time of cavalry -- and are chasing not just the soldiers, but a passel of (soon to be former?) slaves, who are desperately trying to reach the perceived safety of the Union lines. And the slaves in question are not just young men (like the Union soldiers), but include whole families: men, women and children. Now, brace yourself before reading on.
Many soldiers in blue and gray commented on the tragic abandonment of infants and toddlers, tossed aside by desperate slave mothers facing the awful choice between escaping slavery or being seized with their offspring. “Little nigger babies could be found lying in the woods nearly dead that were thrown away by the Yankees in their flight,” wrote a Virginian, choosng to blame Northern soldiers under the standard premise that few of the slaves left their homes voluntarily. The African Americans vied with Union troopers at the crossing of Stony Creek, faring poorly in the competition, and many were left stranded on the north side, to be captured or killed by the pursuing Confederates. “Negro women were seen throwing their little babies ruthlessly aside,” reported Pvt. John Gill of the First Maryland Cavalry Battalion, although it is possible instead that the mothers sought safety for their infants by placing them out of harm’s way. “Our men became greatly enraged, and it was difficult to restrain them. It was a question of quarter or no quarter, and it was mostly no quarter.” An officer in the First Vermont Cavalry confirmed that “the Rebels seemed to be inflamed with rage against the Negroes for running away, and leaving the ‘Yankees,’ would sabre the ‘Niggers’ without mercy.” Only about 200 of the runaway slaves managed to navigate the creek and keep pace with the fleeing Federal horsemen. Few Civil War scenes involving noncombatants would present greater horror.
It’s a good thing those Southerners were fighting for their right of their States to secede from the Union, because I’d hate to think of terrified mothers and their babies being slaughtered for some unimportant reason. Was there anyone, I wonder, who witnessed this scene and seriously asked themselves what they were doing in the war and why? If it hadn’t happened to me before this, I’d have to believe that this is the incident that would have pushed me off the pacifist cliff. I mean, really. Is anything you want so important that it warrants the murder of mothers and their babies?
The Sacrifice of Life Was Useless
I was happy to see, however, that some in the Union army began to question some of the tactics of their commanders.
The soldiers manifested their disillusionment in several ways, most pointedly in their disinclination to execute frontal assaults, the standard tactic in most engagements. “One thing is certain,” averred Lt. Col. Hazard Stevens, “our men are not so ready to charge earthworks as they were, so many of the best officers and men have been killed that the remainder are rather averse to rushing in blindly.” Surg. Nathan Hayward of the celebrated Twentieth Massachusetts, a unit that had seem more than its share of savage combat, agreed that “the Second Corps will no longer charge works with the vigor and enthusiasm with which they commenced their series of charges.” Citing the death or wounding of twenty brigade commanders and seventy regimental leaders in such assaults, Hayward asserted that “the sacrifice of life was useless and the soldiers knew it.” He decried that “orders for the charges have been given in the coldest methodical official manner … not the presence of general to encourage and inspire the men by the example of their own determination,” and insisted that these reluctant soldiers “are not cowards; they are eager to meet the rebels on an equal field. But they have lost faith in the wisdom of generals who order assaults … with what they consider insufficient means.” Lt. Claron I. Miltimore of the Thirty-Seventh Wisconsin simply concluded that “Grant and Lee are building a mighty slaughter pen for many an innocent victim as the ox who walks coolly to the slaying floor.”
This is a much different army than the one Grant took into the Wilderness in early May 1864. In two short months, assault after fruitless assault has not only worn it down, it has shown it the absolute futility of the approach still championed by its generals.
And perhaps nowhere is that futility more apparent than in the debacle that is “battle” of The Crater. Greene uses this as the climax to this, his first volume on the Petersburg campaign. It is the slaughter that ensued when some Pennsylvania miners tunneled under the Confederate line and exploded a mine directly beneath it, creating a deep and steep-walled crater that the waiting Union troops were unable to exploit. Instead, inexperienced troops (mostly African-Americans) were marched down into it, where they were shot mercilessly by the surviving and surrounding Confederates.
Wounded men … were the exception in the crater that grim afternoon. “The slaughter was fearful,” explained Captain Featherston. “The dead were piled on each other. In one part of the fort I counted eight bodies deep.” Pvt. James Paul Verdery of the Forty-Eighth Georgia entered the crater, but found the center “invisible to the eye owing to the many dead & dying Blacks piled upon one an other.” David Holt of the Sixteenth Mississippi thought that the scene in the crater “was the most horrible sight that even old veterans … had ever seen,” exceeding the carnage at Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle. Surgeon Minor considered the spectacle unnerving. “The ditches were almost filled with the dead. Men had to walk on the dead, could not find room for their feet. Such a sight,” he informed his sister, “was never seen before.”
It was a nightmare. But in many ways, only a sequel of what had come before, and a preview of what horrors were yet to come. I’m anxious to read Greene’s forthcoming volumes.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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