Terrible Swift Sword (39 page)

Grant's chief of staff, General John Rawlins, sat down and penned these words to his wife: “The hero of the Shenandoah stands affront of all on the Appomattox [River]. His personal gallantry and great genius have secured us a great success today.” Sheridan's “great generalship” at Dinwiddie, Grant wrote, where he stubbornly fought Pickett with dismounted cavalry instead of retreating, had made the victory at Five Forks possible.

Five Forks has been justifiably nicknamed “the Waterloo of the Confederacy.” Sheridan shattered Pickett's task force, rendering Petersburg and Richmond indefensible. The nine-month stalemate was ended. In a finger snap, the Union army again crackled with optimism and determination. Five Forks, wrote Porter, “pointed to peace and home.”
³⁹

APRIL 1865

PHILIP SHERIDAN'S TROOPERS SEVERED the Southside Railroad, a vital escape route for Robert E. Lee's besieged troops in Petersburg. From the Confederate citadel ten miles to the northeast, the distant thump of cannon fire and the roar of musketry reached the cavalrymen's ears. At 4:45 a.m. on April 2, four Union army corps had launched an all-out attack on the city.

The triumphant Cavalry Corps cheered lustily whenever their fierce-looking leader rode along the column. Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Newhall noted that he had rarely seen such zeal for a commander “since the old enthusiastic days.”
²
One and all, the men recognized the momentousness of Five Forks, and Sheridan's integral role in it.

Not only was Five Forks the first unmistakable Union military victory over Lee's army since Ulysses Grant took command a year earlier, but it made Lee's continued
occupation of Petersburg impossible. Grant had hoped that by sending Sheridan to threaten Lee's right flank, he would compel Lee either to attack him or to abandon Petersburg. In fact, Sheridan's movement had accomplished both objects. The collapse of Petersburg's southwestern defenses and Grant's all-out attack meant that the Confederates had to abandon the city immediately or be destroyed.
³

 

AT HIS HEADQUARTERS AT the Turnbull House on Edge Hill, Lee heard the thunder of his impending doom. He had seen this coming since the previous summer, when he had failed to stop Grant from reaching the James River. To Jubal Early, he had presciently written, “If he gets [to the James], it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.”

The gaunt veterans still loyal to the Southern cause had fought for years, and many of them had been wounded at least once. But Petersburg's miserable trenches, the drenching rains, the semistarvation rations, and the very stasis of a siege had driven their morale to its lowest point. Desertions had spiked to one hundred or more a day—with groups of neighbors and relatives sometimes slipping away together. There were probably no more than 35,000 effectives at Petersburg on April 2, when the Union troops massed outside the city launched their onslaught.

Lee recognized that time had finally run out for Petersburg and the Confederate capital, Richmond, and that both cities must be evacuated.
⁴

 

VIGOROUS, DISCIPLINED, AND PROACTIVE, Lee rarely indulged his dark fears about his unraveling army. Penned up these nine months at Petersburg, he almost welcomed preparing for the likelihood of a retreat, because it at least promised movement, on which Lee thrived.

Planning had begun in February. The army's objective would be Danville, a Rebel supply depot 140 miles to the southwest, followed by a union with General Joseph Johnston's 20,000-man Army of Tennessee in North Carolina. Lee's last hope was that his and Johnston's combined armies might crush William Sherman, then return to Virginia to drive out Grant.

The time to leave Petersburg was at hand. Lee ordered the withdrawal to begin at dusk—if his army could hang on for that long. Lee sent a telegram that reached President Jefferson Davis as he was attending Sunday services at St. Paul's Episcopal Church.

As Davis read Lee's message, nearby worshippers saw him blanch. Leave Richmond immediately, the telegram said. That night, a train filled with Confederate government officials, boxes of government files, and more than $500,000 in gold and silver crossed the James River, headed south. Smoke and flames began to fill the sky behind them.
⁵

The next day, April 3, black Union troops from Major General Godfrey Weitzel's XXV Corps entered Richmond as its quailing citizens braced themselves for rapine, looting, and murder. Instead, Weitzel's men put out the fires set by the retreating Rebels—although not before the conflagration had destroyed tobacco warehouses, foundries, gunboats, the armory, and most of the downtown business district.

 

EARLY ON APRIL 2, 60,000 Union troops smashed six miles of A. P. Hill's III Corps lines. Horatio Wright's VI Corps infantrymen were the first to breach Petersburg's defenses. Suddenly there were bluecoats in the woods and fields near the city. III Corps losses included Hill, shot dead during a confrontation with Union Troops.

As night fell, the Confederate army marched out of Petersburg. Burning buildings lighted the way along the muddy roads to Pocahontas Bridge over the Appomattox River. The thirty-mile-long train included tens of thousands of thin, gray-uniformed troops, as well as 4,000 gaunt horses and mules pulling 1,000 supply and ammunition wagons and more than two hundred guns. They pressed on through the night for Amelia Court House, one hundred railroad miles from Danville and North Carolina.

Amelia Court House, forty miles from both Petersburg and Richmond, would be the rendezvous point for Lieutenant General Richard Ewell's mixed units of Richmond reserves, marines, and artillerists; Lieutenant General James Longstreet's I Corps from the far left; and Lee's Petersburg troops. Lee had ordered 350,000 rations to be sent to Amelia from Greensboro, Lynchburg, and Danville. The prospect of plentiful food kept the hungry Rebels marching all that night and the next day.
⁶

 

THE YANKEES TRAILED LEE'S army by a full day—except for George Custer's cavalry division, which harried the Rebels' left rear sporadically throughout April 3 in the hope of provoking the Confederates to stop and fight. During a clash at Namozine Church, Custer's men captured 1,200 Rebels. Sheridan informed Grant that a Yankee prisoner who was recaptured by Union troops reported “not one in five of the rebels have arms in their hands.”

With the Richmond & Danville Railroad still open to the south, Lee planned to resupply at Amelia and then to transport supplies and food by rail as he marched south to Danville. By shifting his operational base there from Richmond, Lee would shorten his own supply lines and lengthen Grant's.

 

BUT WHEN THE CONFEDERATES reached Amelia Court House on April 4, the promised rations were not there. Instead of food, the Rebels found boxcars filled with caissons, crates of ammunition, and harnesses. What happened to Lee's order and the rations has never been explained.

Lee sent foragers throughout the boggy countryside to find food. The need for it was now so acute as to eclipse military priorities. He was waiting, too, for Ewell, whose troops had been delayed in crossing the Appomattox River.

Lee's one-day lead over his pursuers evaporated as his foragers gathered what scanty supplies they could for the 45,000 Rebel soldiers gathering at Amelia from Petersburg and Richmond. “The delay was fatal,” Lee later acknowledged, “and could not be retrieved.”
⁷

 

THE DELAY WAS A godsend for Sheridan, whose Cavalry Corps, hot on Lee's trail, was gobbling up Rebel stragglers. Grant updated President Abraham Lincoln at City Point: “I have not yet heard from Sheridan, but I have an abiding faith that he is in the right place at the right time.”

When Sheridan surfaced on April 3, Grant informed him that the Rebels were converging on Amelia Court House. “The first object of the present movement will be to intercept Lee's army, and the second to secure Burkeville,” he wrote. Burkeville Junction was on the Richmond & Danville Railroad line twenty miles southwest of Amelia.

Sheridan sent George Crook's and Wesley Merritt's cavalrymen ahead to Jetersville, midway between Burkeville and Amelia, with V Corps right behind them. If the Yankees reached Jetersville before Lee, the Confederates would have to find another way to Danville or continue traveling west to Lynchburg.
⁸

The Cavalry Corps arrived at Jetersville on April 4 to find that the Confederate army had not yet been there. And then pickets arrested a man with two copies of a telegram from Lee's army ordering 300,000 rations to be sent to Burkeville Junction. The telegraph lines were down at Amelia, and the man was under orders to send the telegram to Danville and Lynchburg from the first working telegraph station.

Sheridan exulted at the stroke of good fortune; the telegram not only apprised him of Lee's location and approximate troop strength but suggested that the Rebels were “short of provisions.” Two of Major Henry Young's scouts, disguised as Confederate troopers, set out toward Danville and Lynchburg with instructions to send the telegrams to the intended recipients.

Sheridan planned to appropriate the provisions for his own men. During their rapid march, the Cavalry Corps and V Corps had outrun the supply trains and were “hard up for rations.” The infantrymen, who had covered twenty miles in the warm, hazy weather, had resorted to shooting cattle in the fields for their dinners.
⁹

On April 5, Lee sent cavalry scouts toward Burkeville Station. If the way was clear, he intended to march to Burkeville and collect the 300,000 rations he had requested from Danville and Lynchburg.
¹⁰
But when his scouts informed him that Union cavalrymen were at Jetersville and V Corps was digging in nearby, Lee decided
to march west to Farmville, twenty miles away. From Farmville, the Confederates might yet turn southeast, slip behind the Yankees at Jetersville, and reach Burkeville Junction.

Brigadier General Henry Davies's cavalry brigade from Crook's division, scouting near Amelia Court House, spotted Lee's army on the march. Lee was traveling west, not south, Davies reported to Sheridan.
¹¹

 

MAJOR GENERAL GEORGE MEADE, prostrated by nerves and indigestion and riding in an ambulance, arrived at Jetersville with II Corps and VI Corps. Meade ordered Sheridan to ready his cavalry, as well as II, V, and VI Corps, to march on Amelia Court House.

Sheridan pointed out that Lee had already started for Farmville—and that the army should fast-march straight west and place itself in Lee's path rather than “make our pursuit a stern-chase.” Unimpressed by Sheridan's plan, Meade ordered him to wait until the rest of the Army of the Potomac reached Jetersville.

Sheridan fumed at the delay, which he was certain would allow Lee to escape. He sent a telegram to Grant, who was traveling behind the army, and included the contents of a captured letter written by a Confederate staff officer, Colonel William Taylor, to his mother in Michlenburg, to “give you [Grant] an idea of the condition of the enemy.” Taylor's letter began with the words “Our army is ruined, I fear.”

Sheridan then got to the gist of what he really wanted to tell Grant: “I wish you were here yourself,” he wrote. “I feel confident of capturing the Army of Northern Virginia if we exert ourselves. I see no escape for Lee.”
¹²

 

AS HE HOPED THEY would, Sheridan's words brought Grant to Jetersville. Just before midnight, Grant, his staff, and Sylvanus Cadwallader of the
New York Herald
burst into Sheridan's headquarters, a small log cabin in the middle of a tobacco field, rousting Sheridan from his sleeping place on the floor upstairs.

Sheridan scrambled down the ladder, spread out his maps, and eagerly showed Grant where the Union army was located and where he believed Lee was headed. Sheridan declared that if Meade would make a night march, “then not a man of Lee's army would escape.” Cadwallader said Sheridan was emphatic, enthusiastic, “and not a little profane in expressing his opinions.”

Grant listened with an expression of “quiet enjoyment” and mildly told Sheridan that he must not expect too much too soon. Sheridan sputtered that not a single regiment would escape “and reiterated the opinion many times.” The two generals then went to see Meade in his tent.

Grant explained to the Army of the Potomac commander that “we did not want to follow the enemy; we wanted to get ahead of him” and that Meade's plan “would
allow the enemy to escape.” Meade changed his orders. The infantry would march north to Amelia Court House as planned, but Sheridan's cavalrymen would ride west, shadowing Lee's army and watching for opportunities to attack or head off the enemy column.

Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain wrote that, from that moment forward, “Meade was no longer in reality commander of the Army of the Potomac, but only the vanishing simulacrum of it.” Grant and Sheridan were directing the chase.
¹³

 

EWELL'S CORPS FROM RICHMOND had no sooner reached Amelia Court House on April 5 than Lee issued the order to march. It was late in the day, but Lee could not afford to wait; his men were hungry, and 80,000 rations in railroad cars from Lynchburg awaited them at Farmville. The Confederates would have to march all night—and Ewell's just-arrived troops would get no rest. “This was the most cruel marching order the commanders had given the men in four years of fighting,” wrote Confederate army historian Douglas Southall Freeman.