SPOTTSYLVANIA AND THE BLOODY ANGLE
All day during the seventh of May the two armies lay still. There was
a little cavalry fighting at Todd's Tavern, but the two great armies
did not again engage each other in conflict. They had tried conclusions
here, and each was measurably satisfied with the result.
The question now was where next they should meet each other in arms.
Lee had chosen the field of the first onset. It was for Grant to choose
the next. And in pursuance of his strategy Grant determined to move
by his left flank to Spottsylvania Court House, hoping to reach that
position before his adversary could get there, and to seize upon its
best strategic points. In that position he would still have the great
waterways at his back as a support, and a trustworthy source of supply.
His desire was throughout the campaign to thrust his army in between
the Army of Northern Virginia and Richmond, and this seemed to be his
best opportunity to do so. He had somewhat a shorter line of march, and
moreover by taking the initiative he was able to start first. If he was
baffled in the attempt it was only by reason of the alertness of Lee's
genius which penetrated his purpose, grasped his thought, and promptly
acted in contravention of it.
Spottsylvania Court House lay fifteen or sixteen miles southeast
of the Wilderness battlefield, and nearly that far southwest of
Fredericksburg. In order that the movement might be made without
danger of his army being attacked while in motion, Grant adopted the
plan of using the troops on his right as the advance force of his
movement towards the left. He did this throughout that campaign by
the left flank, always withdrawing the forces on his right, passing
them in rear of his main army, and thus making of the movement what is
technically known as a countermarch. In this way the advancing troops
had always the main army between them and the enemy until they cleared
the position occupied, and were well on march toward the new one aimed
at. After that, of course, they must take care of themselves, but in
the meanwhile the march was begun without discovery on the part of the
enemy.
The movement on this occasion was begun at nine o'clock in the evening,
on the night of Saturday, May 7. With his extraordinary alertness and
penetration Lee anticipated it and obstructed it. He threw a force of
cavalry across the roads that Grant's head of column must traverse, and
directed it to oppose and delay the movement so far as it was possible
to do so. He also sent sappers and miners ahead to fell trees across
the road over which Grant must march, then with caution, but with
boldness, he set his own columns in motion, sending the head of them to
seize upon and hold the strongly strategic positions at Spottsylvania
until such time as Grant's movement should so far develop itself as to
justify him in moving his whole army into that position. The Federal
cavalry had occupied these strategic positions before the Confederates
got there, but they were quickly brushed away, and by the time that the
head of Grant's column of infantry and artillery reached Spottsylvania,
Lee's advance was in full possession and everywhere throwing up
earthworks. The remainder of Lee's forces were quickly brought up, as
were those of Grant, and the two great armies again confronted each
other, each with set lips, determined to get the better of the other if
human resolution could accomplish that purpose.
In the meanwhile Grant had sent Sheridan with a strong force of cavalry
to ride around the Confederates as Stewart had thrice done around the
Federal army, to disturb their communications, and obstruct their
avenues of retreat in case of disaster. His movement was promptly met
by the Confederate cavalry under their great leader J. E. B. Stuart,
and the two forces fell a-fighting at a point known as the Yellow
Tavern, seven or eight miles north of the city of Richmond. There in
fierce conflict Stuart met the death which he had always declared that
he longed for. He was mortally wounded at the head of his men while
making one of those tremendous onsets which it was the pride of his
soul to conduct. With Stuart disabled, the Confederate cavalry was left
without a leader capable of making the most of its dash and prowess,
and Sheridan succeeded in breaking through the outer lines around
Richmond, but not in going farther. He retreated and rejoined the army
under Grant on the twenty-fifth of May, seventeen days after the time
of his setting out.
The first casualty of importance at Spottsylvania was the killing of
General Sedgwick by a Confederate sharpshooter. This one sharpshooter
had already sent his bullets through twenty men as the Federals were
trying to establish themselves in position. So deadly was his aim that
in spite of the distance he seemed to be able to hit anybody that he
shot at. After a little experience with him the men who were engaged in
erecting fortifications shrank from their work, and General Sedgwick
rebuked them, saying that at such a distance the best sharpshooter
couldn't hit an elephant. A moment later he fell dead pierced through
by a bullet from the sharpshooter's rifle.
By the evening of the ninth of May the two armies confronted each
other, each behind its breastworks. A little fighting of a severe
character occurred that evening on the Confederate left, both sides
losing heavily, and neither gaining any advantage of moment. On the
next day the fighting was renewed with desperation upon both sides.
Several times the Federalists reached the Confederate breastworks,
and held them for a few moments, but upon every occasion they were
driven back. In their retreat they carried away some prisoners, some
battle flags, and other trophies, but none of the guns that they had
temporarily captured.
Thus the fighting on the tenth of May resulted in no advantage to
either side. Grant had failed completely in his effort to place himself
at Spottsylvania in advance of Lee, and thus to thrust his army in
between Lee and Richmond, compelling the Confederate general to make
a race for it under disadvantageous circumstances, and by a longer
line than that which Grant must follow. Thus when the fight began
at Spottsylvania Lee was still between Grant and Richmond, and the
fighting itself was an attempt to dislodge him by assault, by an army
outnumbering his by two to one or more.
On the eleventh of May throughout the day and night it rained
incessantly, and enormously. The whole earth in that region was
converted into a quagmire impracticable for the movement of artillery,
and almost impassable even by infantry. Lee's men in the trenches
were forced to stand upon fence rails and sticks and whatever else
they could get to keep themselves from sinking to their knees in the
glutinous red clay, softened as it was by the rain. It was impossible
even to send couriers with orders in the rear of either line in the
rain, and so the orders were passed, particularly during the night,
by word of mouth, from one man to another up and down the lines.
The conditions were of a kind to try the courage and endurance of
soldiers far more severely than either battle or hard marching could.
Yet through it all these veterans on either side maintained their
courage and resolutely refused to let even the rains of that Virginia
springtime wash the starch out of their stamina.
The two lines were so near together at many points that pickets could
not be thrown out even into the rifle pits which are customarily placed
between works thus closely confronting each other. It was impossible
to see for any distance in any direction, and at all hours of that
terrible night there was a constant threat of sudden advance and
surprise upon one point or another of the Confederate line. These
threats were reported by word of mouth, as has been explained, from
one soldier to another along the line. A message would come "Look out
on the left," or "Look out on the right; enemy advancing." About two
o'clock in the morning, after there had been a lull of half an hour in
the tremendous downpour, the rain began again in bucketsfull and some
wag in the Confederate lines started a message, "Get out of the wet."
In spite of their discomforts, of their fatigue, of their exhaustion
from sleeplessness, and of their momentary danger, the gallant fellows
took it up and passed it from one to another, as they might have passed
any order of General Lee's. This incident is related here merely by way
of showing into what condition of cheerful endurance the men had been
wrought by their soldierly experience. It is of value as showing what
stuff these contesting armies were made of in the spring of 1864, when
the issues of the war lay in their hands.
The Confederate line at one point presented what is known in military
parlance as a salient angle,--that is to say, a bend, the point of
which projects toward the enemy, so that the enemy advancing toward
it, and upon either side of it, has the advantage of shooting down
along the lines of the men defending it on either side. This is called
enfilading, and it especially endangers a position of the kind. Grant
decided to begin the fighting on the twelfth by an early assault upon
this Confederate salient. During the night he carefully disposed his
forces with a view to this operation, hoping thus early in the morning
to break through the Confederate line, cut it in two and assail each of
its divisions in rear and at disadvantage.
In this operation he was greatly favored by a dense fog, which rendered
it impossible for his enemy to discover his movements, or even the
presence of his moving columns at a greater distance than a few yards.
Hancock had charge of this particular movement, and he succeeded before
his movement was discovered in gaining a position very near to the
exposed salient angle, and from that position his men rushed with a
wild hurrah upon the works. The Confederates stood their ground as such
veterans were at that time always expected to do.
Hancock's men climbed over the breastworks, and the fighting that
ensued was that of desperadoes in mortal conflict. They were foes of
a sort that knew no flinching and no fear. They fought hand to hand.
They thrust each other through with bayonets. They brained each other
with clubbed muskets. Cannoneers on the Confederate side finding the
infantry support inadequate used their rammerheads, their linstock
points, and even the handspikes of their guns with deadly effect.
Those of the artillerymen who had none of these instruments to use did
that which is not often done in war. They drew their short artillery
swords--blades resembling the bowie knife in shortness--and fought with
them to the death.
So sudden was the onset and so overwhelming was Hancock's force that in
spite of its desperate resistance the small Confederate body holding
the salient was overcome, and the greater part of it captured. It
consisted of General Edward Johnson's division of about 3,000 men,
together with twenty guns, which were immediately turned upon such of
the Confederates as had succeeded in avoiding capture.
Flushed by this success, and believing that they had finally broken
the Confederate line, Hancock's men pushed on towards Spottsylvania
Court House, until they encountered a second line of entrenchments,
which, in spite of rain and fog and mud had been thrown up during that
night of storm across the rear of that dangerously salient angle. Those
entrenchments were manned by the flower of Lee's army, and they quickly
brought to nought the triumphant march of an enemy who had supposed
that his hard work was, for the time being, done,--that the Army of
Northern Virginia was broken in two, and must seek safety in flight.
It was here more conspicuously than anywhere else in all the history
of the war that the superb staying power of Lee's veterans was
illustrated. At the salient their line of battle had been successfully
broken, but at a brief distance in rear of the salient that line of
battle stood fast and irresistible to any assault that even Hancock's
victorious veterans might make upon it. Here we have a single fact
which might be multiplied many times over, which serves to show how
and why it was that this contest of 1864 was from beginning to end
so bloody and so determined. The time had come when the morale of
both armies was perfect, and when each was invincible, except by the
pressure of utterly overwhelming force. The time had come when the
Americans who were fighting on those Virginia fields were perfect
soldiers, immeasurably superior in stamina, in courage, and in devotion
to any regulars who were ever drilled into obedience and endurance in
any country of the world, before or since. This, the historian believes
to be a simple statement of fact which should be recorded in history
and not forgotten or overlooked by those persons, who in the twentieth
century shall study the story of what Americans did during the first
hundred years of the Republic's vigorous life.
But the fighting already described was only a shadowy beginning of that
which was presently to follow. The Confederates were not content with
having hurled back Hancock's assault at the base of their captured
salient, but were determined to retake the salient itself, although the
difficulty of doing so was appalling. What had been a salient angle in
possession of the Confederates became a reëntering angle as soon as
it was held by the Federals. For the Confederates to push their force
into it was for them to encounter a destructive fire from either side,
not only enfilading their lines, but sweeping them from front and rear
at the same moment. Nevertheless, and with a courage too splendid to
be fitly characterized by any adjective in the language, they promptly
followed Hancock's men as the latter retired under pressure to the
entrenchments of the salient angle. At that point the Federal troops
leaping over the works to their own side of them, used them as their
own in the defensive operation. Time after time--five times in all--the
Confederates pressed forward, enduring the bloodiest slaughter in their
attempt to retake the angle, amid a fire of hell from the front, both
flanks and diagonally from the rear. All day long this struggle was
continued. The Confederates in spite of the slaughter, and despite
all their disadvantages, forced their way, step by step, back to the
captured works, and there fought hand to hand over the small embankment
with their enemy on the other side.
The embankment itself was a frail structure of logs, from which the
rain had washed away the greater part of the earth that was intended
to give it a power of resistance against fire. Huddled on either
side of it--the Federals on the one side and the Confederates on the
other--they fought over and through it, throughout the hours of that
terrible day. Sometimes they thrust their bayonets through the crevices
in the log barrier, and thus ran each other through. Sometimes they
fired through those crevices upon enemies less than ten feet away.
Sometimes the men on one side or the other would suddenly mount upon
the small parapet, and with bullet or bayonet, assail their adversaries
on the other side.
This spot in the annals of the war is fitly called "The bloody angle at
Spottsylvania." The fighting there lasted throughout the day and until
after midnight of the twelfth. It was a fighting of blind fury from
beginning to end. It was such a struggle as few wars have ever given
birth to, and it illustrated in the most conspicuous way imaginable
that American heroism which made our war so terrible in its conduct,
and so glorious in its memory. At every point in the bloody angle when
the fighting was done dead men lay piled, one upon another, sometimes
five deep. Wounded men were often imprisoned under the dead, unable to
extricate themselves, at a time when there were none to rescue them.
Every bush and every sapling that constituted the thicket there was cut
away by a stream of bullets, as grass is before a mower's scythe. Even
an oak tree nearly two feet thick was worn in two near its base by the
continual and incessant stroke of leaden balls until it fell, crushing
some of the Confederates who were fighting beneath its branches.
Is not the question a pertinent one--what did the little charge of the
six hundred at Balaklava amount to as an exhibition of human heroism in
comparison with such a fight as this? Has the age of poetry passed? And
have the poets forgotten their cunning that not one of them has ever
yet celebrated in song such American deeds as these, or as Pickett's
charge at Gettysburg, or as Grant's assault at Cold Harbor, or as
the six matchless advances of the Federals upon Marye's Heights at
Fredericksburg? Or is it merely that our poets have been embarrassed by
the very richness of our Confederate war in deeds of derring-do?
On neither side have the losses in this struggle at the death angle
been separately computed with even such tolerable accuracy as might
justify the historian in the use of round numbers. But the slaughter,
it is certain, was as terrific as at any other point of fighting during
the entire war, with the possible exception of Cold Harbor, a little
later.
After midnight the Confederates withdrew from the apex of the angle to
their second line at its base, and for that day the fighting was over.
Concerning this struggle Dr. Rossiter Johnson in his "History of the
War of Secession" has written a sentence so wise and so just that no
apology is needed for incorporating it in the text of the present
work. He wrote, "If courage were all that a nation required, there was
courage enough at Spottsylvania, on either side of the entrenchments,
to have made a nation out of every state in the Union."