A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (70 page)

Lee had hoped to avoid closing with the enemy until he had his entire army drawn up, but on July first it was spread all over roads in a twenty-five-mile radius around southwestern Gettysburg. By afternoon on July first, Confederate forces had driven back the Yankees. Lee’s subordinates, however, hesitated to take the strong Union positions on Culp’s Hill. The result was that at the end of the first day at Gettysburg, the federals held the high ground along the ridge.

On July second, Lee’s forces, deployed more than a mile below Cemetery Ridge along a tree line called Seminary Ridge, faced Meade’s line. The Yankees were deployed in a giant fishhook, with the barb curling around Culp’s Hill, then a long line arching along Cemetery Ridge, culminating in the hook at Big Round Top and Little Round Top. Upon learning that the two hills that held the loop of the fishhook constituting the Union position, Big and Little Round Tops, were undefended, Lee sent Longstreet’s division to capture the hills, then roll up the federal lines.

In fact, Meade already had started to defend the Round Tops. John Bell Hood’s Texas division climbed up the hill to overrun Union positions, opposed by the very end of the Union line. There, another legend of the war was born in Maine’s fighting Colonel Joshua Chamberlain. A Union regiment, the 20th Maine commanded by Chamberlain, held the farthest point of the entire fishhook and thereby the fate of the entire army. A quiet professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College, Chamberlain had volunteered with his Maine neighbors and his brother, who was his adjutant. Six months previously Chamberlain had charged up Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg, where he and what was left of his decimated troops were pinned down in the mud. All night, he had listened to the whiz of musket balls and the screams of the wounded, using a dead man’s coat to protect him from the chilling wind.

From his position on the extreme left of the Union line, Chamberlain received word that the Confederates were advancing through the thick woods. Ordering his men to pile up brush, rocks, and anything to give them cover, the regiment beat back one attack after another by the determined Rebel troops. Suddenly a cry went out that the Confederates had marched still farther to the Union left and that they intended to flank Chamberlain’s position. Whether at his order or at the suggestion of a subordinate, the 20th Maine “refused the line,” bending backward at a 45-degree angle to keep the Confederates in front of its fire. By that time, Chamberlain’s men were almost entirely out of ammunition. Many had only two or three rounds left. Chamberlain shouted “Bayonet! Forward to the Right!” and the 20th Maine fixed bayonets.

From its refused position, the Yankees swept down on the exhausted Confederates. The bold maneuver, combined with the shock of men racing downhill in a bayonet assault on weary attackers, shattered the Confederate advance, routing the Rebels down the hill. Although fighting raged on for hours on both ends of the fishhook, Chamberlain’s men had saved the Union Army.
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Chamberlain claimed he never felt fear in battle. “A soldier has something else to think about,” he later explained. As a rule, “men stand up from one motive or another—simple manhood, force of discipline, pride, love, or bond of comradeship…. The instinct to seek safety is overcome by the instinct of honor.”
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Late in the evening of July second, however, the engagement hardly seemed decisive. General George Pickett’s division had just come up to join Lee, and Stuart had finally arrived. On the evening of July second, ignoring the appeals from Longstreet to disengage and find better ground, Lee risked everything on a massive attack the following day. Longstreet’s final attempt to dissuade Lee was met with the stony retort that he was “tired of listening, tired of talking.”
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After two days of vicious fighting, Lee was convinced that the federal flanks had been reinforced by taking men from the center, and that an all-out push in the middle would split their line in two. Pickett’s Charge, one of the most colorful and tragic of all American military encounters, began on July third when the South initiated a two-hour artillery barrage on the middle of the Union line at Cemetery Ridge. Despite the massive artillery duel between Yankee and Rebel cannons, Lee did not know that under the withering steel torrent coming from his artillery, only about 200 Yankees had been killed and only a handful of Union guns destroyed.

At one-thirty in the afternoon, Pickett’s entire division—15,000 men, at least—emerged from the orchards behind the artillery. In long and glorious well-ordered lines, a march of just under a mile began across open ground to attack the federal position. Longstreet vociferously protested: “General Lee, there never was a body of fifteen thousand men who could make that attack successfully.”
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At a thousand yards, the Union artillery opened up and at 100 yards they changed to canisters—tin cans filled with minié balls that flew in all directions upon impact. Row after row of Rebels fell. Then the long lines of Yankee infantry, which had lain prone beneath the artillery rounds sailing over their heads, stood or kneeled when the Rebels marched to within two hundred yards to deliver a hailstorm of lead.

Amazingly, Virginians under General Lewis Armistead reached the stone wall from which the Yankees were hurling a withering fire into their midst. Armistead stuck his general’s hat on his saber and screamed, “Give them the cold steel!” Scaling the wall with about 200 Virginians following him, Armistead was killed. Known as the high-water mark of the Confederacy, it was a scene later recaptured in film and art, yet it lasted for only minutes as Union reserves poured new volleys into the exposed Confederates, then charged, reclaiming the stone wall. The attack utterly erased Pickett’s division, with only half the 15,000 men who began the attack straggling back to Rebel lines in the orchards. As they ran, a chant rose up from the Yankee infantry behind the stone wall. “Fred-ricks-burg. Fred-ricks-burg.”
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Reports trickled in to Longstreet, then Lee, who, in despair, kept repeating, “It’s all my fault.” The final tally revealed that the Army of Northern Virginia had taken a terrible beating at the hands of Meade: the Confederates lost 22,638, the Union, 17,684. Yet the most important phase of Gettysburg had just started. Defeated and nearly broken, could Lee escape? Would Meade blink, and prove to be another McClellan and Hooker?

Meade’s son, a captain on his father’s staff, wrote confidently on July seventh that “Papa will end the war,” a phrase the general himself made two days later in a missive to Washington when he said, “I think the decisive battle of the war will be fought in a few days.”
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Yet Meade did not follow up, even when it appeared that nature herself demanded the war end then and there. Storms had swollen the Potomac River, temporarily blocking Lee’s escape. An aggressive general could have surrounded the demoralized Confederate Army and crushed it by July 15, 1863. Instead, Lee’s engineers hastily put up new pontoon bridges, and the Rebels began to slip away. When he learned the news, Lincoln wept.

Despite monumental failure, Meade also had achieved monumental success. He had done what no other Union general had done—whipped Bobbie Lee in a head-to-head battle—and shattered the Army of Northern Virginia. That, in turn, meant that Lincoln had to be careful how he dealt with Meade in public. He could not, for example, fire him outright, but the president continued his search for a general who would fight ceaselessly. When, simultaneously with Meade’s victory, Ulysses S. Grant resolutely took Vicksburg in his ingenious campaign, Lincoln found his fighting general.

From Chickamauga to Charleston

Gettysburg and Vicksburg marked a congruence of the war effort, a deadly double blow to the hopes of the Confederacy, capping a string of battlefield failures that met the Confederates in 1863. By that time, Ulysses Grant commanded all the military operations in the West, and he promptly sent Sherman to open up the road to Atlanta—and the Deep South. Then, on March 10, 1864, Lincoln appointed Grant as supreme commander over all Union armies, and Grant, in turn, handed control of the western war over to Sherman.

William Tecumseh Sherman resembled Grant in many ways, not the least of which was in his utter failure in civilian life, as a banker and lawyer. How much he owed his command to political favoritism, especially the influence wielded by his powerful brother, John Sherman, the new senator from Ohio, is not clear. Unlike Grant, however, Sherman was already a Republican and a member of the Radical wing of the Republican Party that opposed slavery on moral grounds. But he was also a racist whose view of the inferiority of blacks—especially Negro troops—would bring him into constant friction with Lincoln, whom he despised. His unintended role in reelecting the president in 1864 nearly led him to switch parties, just as Grant had switched from Democrat to Republican over almost the same issues. Sherman’s hatred of Lincoln, whom he labeled a black gorilla (echoing terms used by McClellan), was exceeded only by his animosity toward the Confederates.
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Although he admitted that Lincoln was “honest & patient,” he also added that Lincoln lacked “dignity, order & energy,” many of the traits that McClellan also thought missing in the president.
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Born in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1820, Sherman had been unloaded on relatives by his widowed mother. His foster father, Thomas Ewing, proved supportive, sending Sherman to West Point, and the young red-haired soldier eventually married Ewing’s daughter. The Mexican War took him to California, where he later resigned and ran a bank—poorly. By the time the Civil War broke out, he had found some measure of success running the Louisiana State Seminary and Military Academy—later known as Louisiana State University—but resigned to serve the Union after Louisiana’s announcement of secession. He wrote the secretary of war requesting a colonelcy rather than a general’s position, and wanted a three-year appointment, wishing to avoid the impression he was a “political general.”

In late 1861, facing Confederate troops in Kentucky, Sherman became delusional, plummeting into a deep clinical depression that left him pacing his residence all night long, muttering to himself, and drinking heavily. Thus the relationship between Lincoln and Sherman—both probably manic depressives—was even more complex than either man realized. It remains one of the astounding pieces of history that the Union was saved by two depressives and a partially re-formed drunk! After fighting effectively at Shiloh, Sherman received special praise from Grant and earned promotion after promotion. Grant named the red-haired Ohioan commander of all the armies in the West in the spring of 1864, with instructions to “create havoc and destruction of all resources that would be beneficial to the enemy.”
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On May 4, 1864, with almost 100,000 men, Sherman stuck a dagger into the heart of the South by attacking Atlanta. Joe Johnston’s defending Confederate armies won minor engagements, but the overwhelming Union advantage in men and supplies allowed Sherman to keep up the pressure when Johnston had to resupply or rest. Jefferson Davis blamed Johnston, removing him in July in favor of John Bell Hood, but the fact was that even a mediocre general would have crushed Atlanta sooner or later. Sherman was no mediocre general.

With Yankee troops on the outskirts of Atlanta, Hood burned the railroads and withdrew, and on September 1, 1864, Union forces entered the city. Offering the Confederates the opportunity to remove all civilians, Sherman announced he would turn the city into a military base. Hood, hoping to draw the federal troops away from Atlanta, moved around him to the north, in an effort to destroy Sherman’s supply lines. Sherman scoffed that he would “supply him with rations” all the way to Ohio if Hood would keep moving in that direction. Instead, Sherman headed south, preparing to live off the land and to destroy everything the Union Army did not consume. “War is hell,” he soberly noted.

Sherman’s great victory at Atlanta constituted one of a trio of critical victories in late 1864, news of which reached Washington—and the voters—just as Lincoln was under political assault. One of Lincoln’s detractors thus ensured his reelection.

Politics in the North

By early 1864, in retrospect, Union victory seemed inevitable. U.S. Navy ships blockaded Southern ports, breached only occasionally (and ineffectively) by blockade runners. The Mississippi now lay open from Missouri to the Gulf, while Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana were surgically isolated from the rest of the Confederacy. In the far West, small important battles there had ensured that New Mexico, Utah, and California would remain in the Union and supply the federal effort with horses, cattle, gold, silver, and other raw materials. Braxton Bragg’s northern defensive perimeter had shrunk from the Kentucky border on the north to Atlanta. In Virginia, Lee’s army remained a viable, but critically damaged, fighting unit. Northern economic might had only come fully into play in 1863, and the disparities between the Union and Confederate abilities to manufacture guns, boots, clothes, ships, and, most important, to grow food, were shocking.

Given such a string of good news, Lincoln should have experienced stellar public approval and overwhelming political support. In fact, he clung to the presidency by his fingernails. Some of his weakened position emanated from his strong support of the man he had named commander of the Union armies.

Ulysses Grant and Abraham Lincoln rarely corresponded, though Grant tended to send numerous messages to Halleck, who would, he knew, read them to Lincoln. A Douglas Democrat in 1860, Grant had nonetheless gravitated toward unequivocal emancipation, though he was not a vocal abolitionist. No one seems sure when he actually changed parties. Courted by the Democrats as a potential presidential nominee in 1864, Grant refused to be drawn into politics at that time, and, in reality, never liked politics, even after he became president himself. By the fall of 1864, though, Grant endorsed Lincoln indirectly in a widely published letter.