While Sheridan rode against Richmond, Lee and Grant were struggling in
a pool of red at the "Bloody Angle" of Spottsylvania. The musketry fire
against the trees came in a low undertone, like the rattle of a hail
storm on the roofs of houses.
A company of blue soldiers were cut off by a wave of charging gray. The
men were trying to surrender. Their officers drew their revolvers and
ordered them to break through. A sullen private shouted:
"Shoot your officers!"
Every commander dropped in his tracks. And the men were marched to the
rear. Hour after hour the flames of hell swirled in endless waves about
this angle of the Southern trenches. Line after line of blue broke
against it and eddied down its sides in slimy pools.
Color bearers waved their flags in each other's faces, clinched and
fought, hand to hand, like devils. Two soldiers on top of the trench,
their ammunition spent, choked each other to death and rolled down the
embankment among the mangled bodies that filled the ditch.
In this mass of struggling maniacs men were fighting with guns, swords,
handspikes, clubbed muskets, stones and fists. Night brought no pause to
save the wounded or bury the dead.
For five days Grant circled his blue hosts in a whirlpool of death
trying in vain to break Lee's trenches. He gave it up. The stolid,
silent man of iron nerves watched the stream of wagons bearing the
wounded, groaning and shrieking, from the field. Lee's forces had been
handled with such skill the impact of numbers had made but little
impression.
Thirty thousand dead and mangled lay on the field.
The stark fighter of the West was facing a new problem. The devotion of
Lee's men was a mania. He was unconquerable in a square hand-to-hand
fight in the woods.
A truce to bury the dead followed. They found them piled six layers deep
in the trenches, blue and gray locked in the last embrace. Black wings
were flapping over them unafraid of the living. Their red beaks were
tearing at eyes and lips, while deep below yet groaned and moved the
wounded.
Again Grant sought to flank his wily foe. This time he beat Lee to the
spot. The two armies rushed for Cold Harbor in parallel columns flashing
at each other deadly volleys as they marched. Lee took second choice of
ground and entrenched on a gently sloping line of hills. They swung in
crescent as at Fredericksburg.
With consummate skill he placed his guns and infantry to catch both
flanks and front of the coming foe. And then he waited for Grant to
charge. Thousands of men in the blue ranks were busy now sewing their
names in their underclothing.
With the first streak of dawn, at 4:30, they charged. They walked into
the mouth of a volcano flaming tons of steel and lead in their faces.
The scene was sickening. Nothing like it had, to this time, happened in
the history of man.
_Ten thousand men in blue fell in twenty minutes._
Meade ordered Smith to renew the assault. Daring a court martial, Smith
flatly refused.
The story of the next seventy-two hours our historians have refused to
record. Through the smothering heat of summer for three days and nights
the shrieks and groans of the wounded rose in endless waves of horror.
No hand could be lifted to save. With their last breath they begged,
wept, cried, prayed for water. No man dared move in the storm-swept
space. Here and there a heroic boy in blue caught the cry of a wounded
comrade and crawled on his belly to try a rescue only to die in the
embrace of his friend.
When the truce was called to clear the shambles every man of the ten
thousand who had fallen was dead--save two. The salvage corps walked in
a muck of blood. They slipped and stumbled and fell in its festering
pools. The flies and vultures were busy. Dead horses, dead men, smashed
guns, legs, arms, mangled bodies disemboweled, the earth torn into an
ashen crater.
In the thirty days since Grant had met Lee in the wilderness, the
Northern army had lost sixty thousand men, the bravest of our race.
Lee's losses were not so great but they were tragic. They were as great
in proportion to the number he commanded.
Grant paused to change his plan of campaign. The procession of
ambulances into Washington had stunned the Nation. Every city, town,
village, hamlet and country home was in mourning. A stream of protest
against the new Commander swept the North. Lincoln refused to remove
him. And on his head was heaped the blame for all the anguish of the
bitter years of failure.
His answer to his critics was remorseless.
"We must fight to win. Grant is the ablest general we have. His losses
are appalling. But the struggle is now on to the bitter end. Our
resources of men and money are exhaustless. The South cannot replace her
fallen sons. Her losses, therefore, are fatal!"
War had revealed to all at last that the Abolition crusade had been
built on a lie. The negro had proven a bulwark of strength to the South.
Had their theories been true, had the slaves been beaten and abused the
Black Bees would surely have swarmed. A single Southern village put to
the torch by black hands would have done for Lee's army what no opponent
had been able to do. It would have been destroyed in a night. The
Confederacy would have gone down in hopeless ruin.
Not a black hand had been raised against a Southern man or woman in
all the raging hell. This fact is the South's vindication against the
slanders of the Abolitionists. The negroes stood by their old masters.
They worked his fields; they guarded his women and children; they
mourned over the graves of their fallen sons.
And now in the supreme hour of gathering darkness came the last act of
the tragedy--the arming of the Northern blacks and the training of their
hands to slay a superior race.
In the first year of the war Lincoln had firmly refused the prayer of
Thomas Wentworth Higginson that he be allowed to arm and drill the Black
Legions of the North. Later the pressure could not be resisted. The
daily murder of the flower of the race had lowered its morale. It had
lowered the value set on racial trait and character. The Cavalier and
Puritan, with a thousand years of inspiring history throbbing in their
veins, had become mere cannon fodder. The cry for men and still more men
was endless. And this cry must be heard, or the war would end.
Men of the white breed were clasping hands at last across the lines
under the friendly cover of the night. They spoke softly through their
tears of home and loved ones. The tumult and the shout had passed. The
jeer and taunt, blind passion and sordid hate lay buried in the long,
deep graves of a hundred fields of blood.
Grant's new plan of campaign resulted in the deadlock of Petersburg.
The two armies now lay behind thirty-five miles of deep trenches with a
stretch of volcano-torn, desolate earth between them.
The Black Legions were massed for a dramatic ending of the war. Grant,
Meade, and Burnside had developed a plan. Hundreds of sappers and miners
burrowed under the shell-torn ground for months, digging a tunnel under
Lee's fortress immediately before Petersburg.
The tunnel was not complete before Lee's ears had caught the sound. A
counter tunnel was hastily begun but Grant's men had reached the spot
under the center of Elliot's salient before the Confederates could
intercept them.
Grant skillfully threw a division of his army on the north side of the
James and made a fierce frontal attack on Richmond while he gathered
the flower of his army, sixty-five thousand men with his Black Legions,
before the tunnel that would open the way into Petersburg.
Lee was not misled by the assault on Richmond. But it was absolutely
necessary to meet it, or the Capital would have fallen. He was
compelled, in the face of the threatened explosion and assault, to
divide his forces and weaken his lines before the tunnel.
His men were on the ground beyond the James to intercept the column
moving toward Richmond. When the assault failed, Hancock and Sheridan
immediately recrossed the river to take part in the capture of
Petersburg and witness the end of the Confederacy.
The tons of powder were stored under the fort and the fuse set. The
Black battalions stood ready to lead the attack and enter Petersburg
first.
At the final council of war, the plan was changed. A division of New
Englanders, the sons of Puritan fathers and mothers, were set to this
grim task and the negroes were ordered to follow.
High words had been used at the Council. The whole problem of race and
racial values was put to the test of the science of anthropology and of
mathematics. The fuse would be set before daylight. The charge must be
made in darkness with hundreds of great guns flaming, shrieking, shaking
the earth. The negro could not be trusted to lead in this work. He had
followed white officers in the daylight and under their inspiration had
fought bravely. But he was afraid of the dark. It was useless to mince
matters. The council faced the issue. He could not stand the terrors of
the night in such a charge.
The decision was an ominous one for the future of America--ominous
because merciless in its scientific logic. The same power which had
given the white man his mastery of science and progress in the centuries
of human history gave him the mastery of his brain and nerves in the
dark. For a thousand years superstition had been trained out of his
brain fiber. He could hold a firing line day or night. The darkness was
his friend, not his enemy.
The New Englanders were pushed forward for the attack. The grim
preparations were hurried. The pioneers were marshaled with axes and
entrenching tools. A train pulled in from City Point with crowds of
extra surgeons, their amputating tables and bandages ready. The wagons
were loaded with picks and shovels to bury the dead quickly in the
scorching heat of July.
The men waited in impatience for the explosion. It had been set for two
o'clock. For two hours they stood listening. Their hearts were beating
high at first. The delay took the soul out of them. They were angry,
weary, cursing, complaining.
The fuse had gone out. Another had to be trained and set. As the Maine
regiments gripped their muskets waiting for the explosion of the mine, a
negro preacher in the second line behind them was haranguing the Black
Battalions. His drooning, voodoo voice rang through the woods in weird
echoes:
"Oh, my men! Dis here's gwine ter be er great fight. De greatest fight
in all de war. We gwine ter take ole Petersburg dis day. De day er
Juberlee is come. Yes, Lawd! An' den we take Richmon', 'stroy Lee's
army an' en' dis war. Yas, Lawd, an' 'member dat Gen'l Grant an' Gen'l
Burnside, an' Gen'l Meade's is all right here a-watch-in' ye! An' member
dat I'se er watchin' ye. I'se er sargint in dis here comp'ny. Any you
tries ter be a skulker, you'se gwine ter git a beyonet run clean froo
ye--yas, Lawd! You hear me!"
He had scarcely finished his harangue when a smothering peal of thunder
shook the world. The ground rocked beneath the feet of the men. Some
were thrown backwards. Some staggered and caught a comrade's shoulder.
A pillar of blinding flame shot to the stars. A cloud of smoke rolled
upward and spread its pall over the trembling earth. A shower of human
flesh and bones spattered the smoking ground.
The men in front shivered as they brushed the pieces of red meat from
their hands and clothes.
The artillery opened. Hundreds of guns were pouring shells from their
flaming mouths. The people of Petersburg leaped from their beds and
pressed into the streets stunned by the appalling shock and the storm of
artillery which followed.
The ground in front of the tunnel had been cleared of the abatis.
Burnside's New England veterans rushed the crater. A huge hole had been
torn in Lee's fortifications one hundred yards long and sixty feet wide
and twenty-five feet in depth.
The hole proved a grave. The charging troops floundered in its spongy,
blood-soaked sides. They stumbled and fell into its pit. The regiments
in the rear, rushing through the smoke and stumbling over the mangled
pieces of flesh of Elliott's three hundred men who had been torn to
pieces, were on top of the line in front before they could clear the
crumbling walls.
When the charging hosts at last reached the firm ground inside the
Confederate lines, the men in gray were rallying. Their guns had been
trained on the yawning chasm now a struggling, squirming, cursing mass
of blue. Slowly order came out of chaos and Burnside's men swung to the
right and to the left and swept Lee's trenches for three hundred yards
in each direction. The charging regiments poured into them and found the
second Confederate line. Elliott's men who yet lived, driven from their
outer line by the resistless rush of the attack, retreated to a deep
ravine, rallied and held this third line.
Lee reached the field and took command. Mahone's men came to the rescue
marching with swift, steady tread. They took their position on the crest
which commanded the open space toward the captured trenches.
As Wright's brigade moved into position, the Black Battalions were
ordered to charge. They had been hurried through the crater and into
the trenches on the right and left. At the signal they swarmed over the
works, with a voodoo yell, and in serried black waves, charged the men
in gray. In broad daylight the Southerners saw for the first time the
plan of the dramatic attack.
The white men of the South shrieked an answer and gripped their muskets.
The cry they gave came down the centuries from three thousand years of
history. It came from the hearts of a conquering race of men. They had
heard the Call of the Blood of the Race that rules the world.
Without an order from their commanders, with a single impulse, the whole
Southern line leaped from their cover and dashed on the advancing Black
Legions in a counter charge so swift, so terrible, there was but a
single crash and the yell of white victory rang over the field. The
Blacks broke and piled pell mell into the trenches and on into the hell
hole of the crater.
Fifty of Lee's guns were now pouring a steady stream of shells into this
pit of the damned.
The charging gray lines rolled over the captured trenches. They ringed
the edge of the crater with a circle of flaming muskets. The writhing
mass of dead, dying, wounded and living, scrambling blacks and whites,
was a thing for devil's joy. At the bottom of the pit the heap was ten
feet deep in moving flesh. In vain the terror-stricken blacks scrambled
up the slippery sides through clouds of smoke. They fell backward and
rolled down the crumbling walls.
Young John Doyle stood on the brink of this crater, his eyes aflame
with revenge. His musket was so hot at last he threw it down, tore a
cartridge belt from the body of a dead negro trooper, seized his rifle
and went back to his task.
Sickened at last by the holocaust, the officers of the South ordered
their men to cease firing. They had charged without orders. They refused
to take orders. The officers began to strike them with their swords!
"Cease firing!"
"Damn you, stop it!"
Their orders rang around the flaming curve in vain. They seized the men
by their collars and dragged them back. The gray soldiers tore away,
rushed to the smoking rim and fired as long as they had a cartridge in
their belts.
It was the poor white man who got beyond control at the sight of these
yelling black troops wearing the uniform of the Republic. Had their
souls leaped the years and seen in a vision dark-skinned hosts charging
the ranks of white civilization in a battle for supremacy of the world?