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As the war that had begun on 12 April 1861 dragged on, European nations looked on with a mixture of anxiety and apprehension. Prior to the conflict, for example, textile mills in Great Britain had imported more than three-quarters of their cotton from the American South, and the Confederacy tried to play this as a trump card in dealing with the British. Hoping to bring the country into the war as an ally, the South first embargoed exports to the UK. But this effort backfired. The British prime minister Lord Palmerston had no intention of allying with the South, or of running the risks of evading the Northern naval blockade of the Confederacy’s ports – a decision reinforced by the fact that British textile mills were at the time overstocked with cotton.
Despite their government’s reluctance to get involved with the war in North America, British ships did continue to run the Union blockade – but did not ultimately provide enough matériel to influence the outcome of the war. In the meantime, the British shipyard of John Laird, Sons and Company had already produced the heavily armed Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama, which would go on to sink some 65 vessels before being itself sunk by the USS Kearsarge off the coast of northern France. By the end of 1863, Laird had already also completed two ironclad rams, which were never delivered to the Confederate navy. The South continued to plead for recognition and support – but after the catastrophic setbacks at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga (see MHM 144, February/March 2025), Great Britain and France decided to let things play out without their involvement. The Confederate States of America were on their own.
Grant takes command
With his successful actions at Vicksburg, and then at Chattanooga, Ulysses S Grant provided a welcome change for Abraham Lincoln. The US President had finally found a general unafraid to take risks, and with the bulldog tenacity that was needed to prosecute a costly but necessary war that was becoming increasingly unpopular. Thus in March of 1864, as the war approached its third anniversary, Grant received a letter notifying him that Congress had appointed him a Lieutenant General, and that President Lincoln had placed him in command of all Union armies.
A stubborn and taciturn man, Grant soon determined that the various Federal armies were working at cross purposes. Operations in the various theatres of war had thus far been independent of each other. The Union’s superiority in manpower and matériel could, he decided, be more effectively employed in concert, thus he conceived of a three-pronged offensive – with one force sweeping down the Shenandoah Valley, the strategically important area of Virginia known as the ‘breadbasket of the Confederacy’. A second force would move south and eastward from Chattanooga, in Tennessee, towards the sea; while a third force would push due south from the Washington DC area. This revised plan of campaign began somewhat slowly, encountering strong resistance first from Confederate General Joe Johnston, who conducted a superb delaying action as he withdrew slowly towards Atlanta, Georgia. Meanwhile, Grant accompanied the Union’s main field army, the Army of the Potomac, still commanded by General Meade, as it crossed the Rapidan River and moved deeper into Virginia.
Return to the Wilderness
Numbering 120,000 men, the Federal force greatly outnumbered Confederate commander Robert E Lee’s 60,000 men opposing them. Lee knew that he was at a distinct disadvantage numerically, and that if he let Grant choose the battlefield his force would be subject not only to Grant’s infantry and cavalry but to their accompanying artillery as well. Thus Lee waited until the Army of the Potomac had entered into the wooded terrain of the Wilderness – the same area of Virginia, densely forested with white oak above a thicket of undergrowth and brambles, where a year before Joe Hooker’s force had been brought to near disaster. While Grant had hoped to have cleared the Wilderness before dawn the next day, his army instead found itself strung out and bogged down among the trees. As his troops looked for bivouac sites, they stumbled across the remains of men killed there a year earlier – with one soldier recalling how ‘we wandered to and fro looking at the gleaming skulls and whitish bones…’ wondering if they were Union or Confederate dead. The dead would soon have company.
On 5 May 1864, Lee struck. The effect on Meade’s command was horrendous, as his force was hammered from all sides in the dense forest – a situation made worse as sparks from gunfire ignited the dry undergrowth. The Wilderness became a hellscape as the wounded, unable to escape, were burned to death in the conflagration. One Union veteran recalled, ‘the roar of musketry was incessant and prolonged… the whole forest was now one mass of flame.’ The next day proved even worse, with the arrival on the scene of Confederate General James Longstreet’s corps, which sent the Army of the Potomac reeling back. Grant was dismayed by this unexpected setback, but was not to be deterred. Rather than retreating before the Southern assault, he elected to sidestep – moving around the Wilderness, and continuing to push south. It was a clever move, but Lee was, if nothing else, an unconventional thinker. As the Army of the Potomac swung around him, he changed direction, and struck out to intercept the Federal army that was now headed for the area, 20 miles or so south-east, around the crucial crossroads of Spotsylvania Court House.
‘If it takes all summer…’
Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia beat Grant to Spotsylvania. Not by much – but in enough time for it to deploy and dig in to strong defensive positions. Sometimes referred to as the ‘King of Spades’, Lee managed to erect bastions and trenchworks extending over a five-mile front manned by 50,000 soldiers and including 200 pieces of artillery. The massed Federal army hit these positions head on, and a fierce struggle ensued that would last for ten days. The combat was brutal in the extreme. On the first day, Union Major General John Sedgwick, who commanded Grant’s VI Corps, rode forward to observe enemy positions. Urged by his aide to get down out of sight, Sedgwick shook off the advice, declaring loudly, ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance’. He immediately toppled from his horse, struck in the forehead by a rebel sniper’s bullet. The fight went on, as Grant threw one assault after another against the Confederate positions for days on end. ‘I intend to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer!’, he stated at one point.
If anything, the struggle for this small piece of ground grew even more fierce, with one Federal officer later recalling, ‘Never since the invention of gunpowder has such a mass of lead been hurled into a space so narrow.’ As evidence of the ferocity of the combat, in a meadow adjacent to Spotsylvania Court House, a large tree of white oak that was 18 inches in diameter was completely cut down by rifle bullets. (To this day, the shattered stump remains on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.) Finally, on 18 May, Grant disengaged the Army of the Potomac, swung out and around Lee’s positions, and continued heading southwards towards Richmond, the Confederate capital. It had been an especially costly engagement, with the North suffering some 17,500 casualties and the South losing around 10,000 men. These were losses that Lee could ill afford, as Grant continued his inexorable march towards Richmond.
No advantage whatever
Having covered most of the 50 miles from Spotsylvania, the Army of the Potomac once again ran into Lee’s army as it neared Richmond. This time the confrontation happened 10 miles from the city – at a dusty crossroads called, almost inexplicably, Cold Harbor. There was, in fact, no harbour – rather a small tavern, which offered travellers temporary refuge but no hot meals (hence the name). After General Phil Sheridan’s cavalry drove off a Confederate cavalry force and captured the crossroads, Lee rushed infantry into the area and quickly began to dig in, throwing up a ring of interlocking defensive positions. The back and forth combat would rage on from 1 to 12 June in the blazing sun, with each assault by the Federal troops being beaten back with horrendous losses. One action would cost the lives of some 7,000 Union troops in less than an hour. Finally, Grant withdrew his forces and changed direction yet again. Afterwards he would state, ‘I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made… No advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained.’
Despite the fruitless assaults at Cold Harbor, Grant was determined to allow Lee’s army no respite. He knew his army was steadily eroding the Confederacy’s ability to wage an effective war. Federal casualties in Grant’s Overland Campaign were fearful – but the toll on the South was even heavier, as Lee lost 46 per cent of his fighting force. These were losses that could not be replaced, and that was Grant’s object – to bring the war to an end whatever the cost. Thus, as the Army of the Potomac pulled back from Cold Harbor, rather than retreating north it moved even further south, crossing the James River and heading for the city of Petersburg, 20 miles beyond Richmond.
In Grant, Lincoln had finally found a general unafraid to take risks.
A march to the sea
As Grant and the Army of the Potomac was engaged in whittling down Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, further west Federal General William Tecumseh Sherman was battering Confederate General Joe Johnston’s Army of Tennessee. While Johnston’s stubborn delaying tactics were managing to keep Sherman at bay, the Confederate president Jefferson Davis was becoming increasingly frustrated with what he considered Johnston’s dilatory approach. Davis wanted a more aggressive response to Sherman’s offence, and so replaced Johnston with the fiery young General John Bell Hood. With a reputation for aggressive action, Hood was frequently at the centre of any assault – as witnessed by the loss of his left arm at Gettysburg and his right leg at Chickamauga. But Davis’s choice was to prove, as historian Bruce Catton noted, ‘probably the single largest mistake that either government made during the war’. Hood, who had been critical of Johnston’s more deliberate defence of Atlanta, proceeded to launch four successive assaults against Sherman’s army. Every one of them failed miserably, and by September 1864 he was obliged to evacuate all his forces from Atlanta and withdrew hastily south towards Alabama.
Sherman took full advantage of Hood’s departure, and after destroying anything of military value, led his force east and south for 300 miles across Georgia, headed for the Atlantic Ocean. The entire force – with the Army of the Tennessee on the right and the Army of Georgia on the left – cut a swathe of destruction 60 miles wide across the centre of Georgia, destroying plantations, knocking down bridges, and ripping up railroad lines as they went. To ensure the railroads could not be quickly repaired, rails were ripped up, heated over large bonfires and then twisted around telegraph poles to form what were called ‘Sherman’s neckties’. As they marched across Georgia, Sherman’s forces were remarkably restrained in their behaviour. While the army scoured the countryside for miles around for rations and subsistence, and destroyed anything that could give succour to rebel forces, they were careful to respect the rights of civilians, especially small, independent farmers, ensuring that those caught up in the middle of a war would not be turned out of their homes or left to starve in the coming winter.
With his troops starving, Lee realised the game was finally up.
While he had to fight a number of actions en route, Sherman continued his march, reaching the Atlantic port city of Savannah, Georgia, which surrendered to him without a fight on 21 December. The following day, Sherman sent a telegraph to President Lincoln saying, ‘I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah with 150 heavy guns & plenty of ammunition & also about 25,000 bales of cotton.’
Twilight of the Confederacy
As Sherman was marching through Georgia, to the north General Phil Sheridan was laying waste to the Shenandoah Valley – taking Grant’s instructions almost literally, when he was told to ‘eat out Virginia clear and clean… so that crows flying over it will have to carry their provender with them’.
While Sheridan and Sherman were doing their utmost to crush Confederate resistance, Grant’s Army of the Potomac was dug in around Petersburg, with more than 30 miles of trenches, running from the eastern outskirts of Richmond to the southern outskirts of Petersburg. The city was subjected to siege for over nine months – during which the constant bombardment, the mud, the obstacles, and the back and forth raids prefigured the nightmare of Europe’s Western Front in the early 20th century. It was also noteworthy for the large number of black troops committed on the Federal side, too many of whom died in the ill-fated assault to exploit a huge crater blown in the Confederate defences by Federal sappers. Despite the repeated failure of Federal assaults to break through Petersburg’s defences, the intense and prolonged pressure exerted by Grant’s forces finally had the desired effect. Lee determined that further resistance here was fruitless. He informed Jefferson Davis that the Army of Northern Virginia would evacuate, and on 2 April 1865 that command broke out of the besieged cities and headed west.
As the members of the government of the Confederacy fled Richmond, Lee was determined to continue the fight, if only he could obtain supplies for his soldiers and link up with the Army of Tennessee. For the next week, it was a game of cat and mouse as the Army of Northern Virginia pushed westward, but flanked on both sides by Federal forces that blocked and countered every move. If they could only reach Appomattox Court House, 90 miles west of the Confederate capital, they would find four trainloads of matériel waiting for them. By the time Lee arrived, skirmishes, sickness, and desertion had reduced his army from just over 50,000 men to fewer than 20,000 effectives. They were ragged and starving, but still willing to fight. Phil Sheridan’s cavalry beat them to their goal, however, capturing the promised supplies.
Lee realised the game was up, and when a messenger arrived from Grant offering terms of surrender, the Confederate commander reluctantly accepted. It was a very low-key meeting between Robert E Lee, resplendent in his clean, dress uniform, and Ulysses S Grant, arriving from the battlefield in a drab uniform blouse and mud-spattered boots. Contrary to his nickname of ‘Unconditional Surrender’, Grant was soft-spoken and magnanimous in his terms – while the soldiers would hand in their weapons, officers were allowed to keep swords and sidearms, and any man who needed to plough his fields could keep his horse or mule once the army was paroled. There would be no more prisoners of war, for the war was over.
For his part, Lee was gratified by Grant’s solicitousness. Turning to the Union commander, he remarked: ‘This will have the best possible effect upon the men. It will be very gratifying and do much toward conciliating our people.’ When Lee mentioned that his men were living on parched corn, Grant offered him 25,000 rations from Federal stores. Two days later, the Army of Northern Virginia formed up for the last time, to march to Appomattox Court House, where they furled their flag, stacked arms, and received a solemn salute from the assembled masses of the Army of the Potomac. On 9 April 1865 – 160 years ago this spring, and after four long years of fighting that had left at least 750,000 soldiers dead – the American Civil War was officially over.
Fred Chiaventone is a military historian, retired cavalry officer, and Professor Emeritus for International Security Affairs at the US Army’s Command and General Staff College.
In the next issue of MHM: How the American Civil War ushered in a terrifying new age of conflict.
All images: Wikimedia Commons, unless otherwise stated
