Confederate Waterloo

The Battle of Five Forks, April 1, 1865, and the Controversy that Brought Down a General

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Contents

Setting the Stage

With the approach of spring 1865, knowledgeable observers had concluded that the life span of the Confederacy was ebbing inexorably. Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's troops reached Savannah in December 1864, and Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas's army had crushed Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood's Army of Tennessee at Nashville. More Union troops threatened to strike the Southern heartland than the Confederacy could field to oppose them. With Northern forces victorious throughout the rest of the South, the standoff around Petersburg and Richmond had become almost secondary in military importance. As the headquarters of Gen. Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, the personification of Confederate resistance — Petersburg — however, still held vital psychological significance. To destroy the Confederacy, Federal forces would have to defeat Lee.

General Lee had already concluded that the Confederate cause was hopeless. On February 20, 1865, the last comprehensive enumeration of Confederate forces at Petersburg (the Army of Northern Virginia) fielded about 55,000 effective troops in the Richmond-Petersburg lines. From then until the end of March, best estimates indicate the army lost some 4,000 men from desertion and another 5,000 as the result of the attack against Fort Stedman, which reduced their strength at the beginning of the spring campaign to about 46,000 men.

On March 31, Lee directly faced Ulysses S. Grant's two Federal armies, a separate cavalry corps, and additional detached forces totaling some 128,000 men. Farther south in North Carolina, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston had managed to pull together about 40,000 troops, many of whom were home defense forces and convalescents, to face Sherman's armies totaling 90,000 veterans.

Lee offered a thoughtful, accurate assessment of the deteriorating military situation in several letters to President Jefferson F. Davis and Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge. On March 26, 1865, he wrote:

I fear now it will be impossible to prevent a junction between Grant and Sherman. ... I cannot reasonably expect him [Gen. Johnston] to bring across the Roanoke more than ten thousand infantry, a force that would add so little strength to this army as not to make it more than a match for Sherman, with whom to risk a battle in the presence of Grant's army, would hardly seem justifiable. ... Their two armies united would therefore exceed ours by nearly a hundred thousand.

If the two enemy armies maneuvered properly, he added, it "would render it impossible for me to strike him [Sherman] without fighting both armies."

Grant, the commander of all US armies, believed the defeat of the Army of Northern Virginia was as much a psychological necessity as a military one. He realized that Lee, despite his understanding of the hopelessness of his situation, would only relent when compelled to do so. Lee's conception of honor, deeply ingrained by his upbringing and his military training, allowed him no other course of action.

Years later, both Grant and Maj. Gen. Phil Sheridan acknowledged that Sherman could easily have swept up behind Lee's army and forced its surrender. Grant's desire to root Lee from his entrenchments and force his capitulation before Sherman provided the overwhelming force to handle the job stemmed from the personal, social, and political forces that had swirled around the Eastern armies since the days when the cry of "On to Richmond!" haunted them. Despite the near certainty that trapping Lee and his forces between two numerically superior and better equipped army groups would have resulted in a decisive victory, Sheridan strongly encouraged Grant to undertake offensive operations without waiting for Sherman. With unbounded confidence in his cavalry leader, Grant acceded to his exhortations with little resistance. Years later, both men agreed that their motivation for this decision was to protect the feelings of the long-frustrated soldiers of the Army of the Potomac.

For the spring campaign, Lee planned to break away from his lines and move west and then south by forced march to link up with Johnston's forces in North Carolina. Hoping to get a lead on the pursuing Federal troops, he and Johnston (with a maximum combined force of 85,000) would try to overwhelm Sherman's army and then turn against Grant. In an effort to facilitate his escape by forcing Grant to shorten his lines, Lee assaulted an area of the Union line centered at the strong point of Fort Stedman in the early morning hours of March 25, 1865. The desperate assault overran the Yankee picket lines and captured the fort and some of its supporting batteries, but the Confederates lacked the power to sustain the offensive. Counterattacks evicted the Rebels with heavy losses, particularly in the number of men captured.

With the stifling of this significant Confederate offensive thrust, Grant determined to complete the destruction of his foe. Fundamentally an improvisational general, he never set forth his plans in detail. Instead, he provided an outline of movements subject to adjustment as Lee responded. His outline for breaking the Confederate lines at Petersburg called for one of the two infantry corps in the Army of the James to shift south from the lines around Richmond to Petersburg. Once reinforced, the Army of the Potomac would then shift westward (left) in an effort to turn the Confederates right flank and make Petersburg untenable.

Grant chose Phil Sheridan to conduct the widest sweep with the army's Cavalry Corps, freshly returned from routing Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early's forces in the Shenandoah Valley. Of all the men Grant had advanced during the war, none progressed more rapidly nor engendered more controversy than "Little Phil" Sheridan. Plucked from relative obscurity as an infantry division commander in the Army of the Cumberland to become Cavalry Corps Commander in the East, Sheridan owed his entire career after the battle of Chattanooga in November 1863 (when Grant first observed his performance) to Grant's support. When Sheridan retired in 1885 as the highest ranking officer in the US Army, it was clear how effective that patronage had proven to be.

Most who knew him well credited Sheridan with an intensity of belligerence that made him an effective military commander, especially when he possessed substantial advantages in men and materiel. His aggressive swagger could inspire men on the battlefield to rise to the occasion better than almost any other officer. At the battle of Cedar Creek in October 1864, he earned renown by riding at a gallop from miles away to revive his men's morale and turn pending defeat into decisive victory. Brigadier General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain called his manner of fighting and leading less cerebral but more spirited than was common in the Army of the Potomac. These traits, however, did not add up to Sheridan's being the greatest general of that or any previous time (as Grant would describe him).

Grant enjoyed a much closer relationship with Sheridan than he had with his other ranking Eastern generals, all of whom had preceded Grant and Sheridan in the Virginia theater armies. Of those who had commanded at the corps level or higher when Grant arrived in Virginia in 1864, only Maj. Gen. George G. Meade still held his position when Lee surrendered in April 1865. Meade criticized Grant intensely in letters to his wife, however, closing his Civil War correspondence with her by lamenting, "I, however, now give up on Grant."

Historians have not been shy in criticizing Grant. His characterization as a blundering butcher emanated from the Confederate side before the war ended and has been repeated in various forms by many historians. The large number of senior subordinate commanders Grant reassigned or sent home because of their inability to satisfy his demands, however, has been little noticed until recently. Some of these men were incompetent or worse, but Grant did not confine his disfavor to the bumblers.

In fact, Grant had difficulty even with highly competent subordinates like Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas. Often ranked as one of the finest commanders of the Civil War, Thomas fought directly under Grant's command in several battles in the Western Theater, most notably in the great Union victory at Chattanooga. In that critical struggle, it was Thomas's men from the Army of the Cumberland who had made the assault up Missionary Ridge that carried Union forces to triumph. Thomas never seemed to gain Grant's confidence, however. When Grant assigned Thomas to defend Tennessee in late 1864 from John Bell Hood's advancing Confederate army, Grant so doubted Thomas's abilities that he nearly relieved him just before the battle of Nashville. More than 1,000 miles away from the action in Tennessee and ignorant of the tactical situation, Grant still felt competent enough to make a judgment that would have jeopardized the Yankee defense of Nashville and devastated Thomas's military career. Based on a secondhand evaluation of the Nashville situation and his own previous observations in which he had judged Thomas as "slow," Grant barely avoided a disaster. Just hours before the orders relieving him arrived, Thomas won a crushing victory that saved him from humiliation and, not incidentally, saved Grant from making a serious blunder. Rather than acknowledge the obvious, however, Grant in his autobiography did his best to justify his view that Thomas had been too slow at Nashville. Thomas had made an absolutely correct assessment of the situation, and his preparations resulted in one of the most overwhelming Union victories of the war.

Grant also often found fault with Maj. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren, the Army of the Potomac's V Corps commander. Second in the 1850 graduating class at West Point, Warren had demonstrated remarkable scientific and analytical skills years before the war. In the 1850s he made several important exploratory trips into the Western Plains and Rocky Mountains, cataloging flora and fauna, studying native tribes, evaluating geologic formations, and producing state-of-the-art maps. In 1854, he prepared a comprehensive analysis of potential routes for a transcontinental railroad under the auspices of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Warren's superiors and the scientific community considered his study the model of precision. Years later his cartographic skills and meticulous record keeping led to his election to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, an unusual honor for an active duty army officer. A mathematics professor at West Point when the war started, Warren resigned to become the lieutenant colonel of the 5th New York Volunteer Infantry (Duryea Zouaves), one of the most highly regarded units in the Union army. By the time Grant arrived in the Eastern Theater, Warren had risen to command the V Corps. Despite his intelligence in the art of warfare, his widely recognized personal bravery, and his popularity with his soldiers, by the spring 1865 he seems to have become persona non grata with Grant for reasons that remain difficult to determine.

In contrast, Grant had come to place utmost confidence in Phil Sheridan. To confirm Sheridan's newly won stature after his successful campaign in the Shenandoah Valley and avoid unpleasant confrontations between Sheridan and his former commanding officer, Maj. Gen. Meade, Grant retained the designation of Sheridan's cavalry force as the Army of the Shenandoah. Grant did this even though it did not contain any infantry and no longer operated in or near the Shenandoah Valley. This sleight of hand allowed Sheridan to remain an "independent army" commander.

Sheridan possessed certain traits that gave him extraordinary and frequently unmerited influence on Grant. The commanding general invariably attributed his subordinate's success to Sheridan's abundant aggressiveness — a trait Grant highly valued. Sheridan was usually aggressive, but that cannot wholly explain Grant's fondness for him. Another Grant favorite, William Tecumseh Sherman, fought more slowly and methodically during his long campaign to capture Atlanta, yet Grant never faulted him. Grant also exhibited incredible forbearance when Sheridan hesitated and dissembled at the start of his Valley campaign, even when often ignoring Grant's suggestions and instructions. The Union commander-in-chief rarely if ever seemed to take notice when Sheridan failed to follow orders.

Sheridan's crass boosterism in advancing his own reputation and that of his cavalry never seemed to bother Grant the way it infuriated Meade and many others. Grant treated Sheridan's insubordination and disrespect for anyone in authority (Grant himself excepted) as a humorous trait. The often-described argument between Meade (Sheridan's superior officer) and Sheridan about cavalry placement on the night the army raced Lee's forces to Spotsylvania was just one example in which Grant supported Sheridan's view against Meade. Also barely noted is that Sheridan's subsequent detached campaign against J. E. B. Stuart's cavalry, albeit resulting in Stuart's death and great public acclaim for Sheridan, was tactically unsound and deprived the army of critical cavalry support during the battle of Spotsylvania Court House. One modern historian's insightful assessment of Sheridan's capabilities as a commander encapsulates a long list of Sheridan's errors and transgressions during the Civil War. That assessment describes a man of significant ability coupled with serious weaknesses in leadership qualities.

In keeping with his perceptions of Sheridan, Grant assigned the cavalry the key role in his planned assault on Petersburg. He ordered the horsemen to move west and sweep around the Confederate lines, capturing the last remaining rail line into Petersburg. To complement the actions of Sheridan's force, Grant stacked two infantry corps onto his left flank with the intention of overlapping and overpowering Lee's right. Warren's V Corps occupied the far left. Whatever doubts Grant may have had about Warren and his troops, he assigned them to the far left perfectly cognizant that any move he contemplated in that direction would require serious work from them.

The V Corps was a unique organization in that it had originally contained all the prewar Regular Army regiments in the Army of the Potomac. Although the long steady fighting had bled down many regiments to company-size, these Regular outfits established a lasting esprit de corps and gave the corps a "spit and polish" image it would maintain until the end of the war. When President Lincoln asked to review troops during his last visit to Petersburg, the V Corps got the job.

Warren had led the corps for nearly a year. One of his subordinates called him "an odd duck" with jet black hair, swarthy skin, small black eyes, and a slight build. He looked nothing like the patrician soldier he might have aspired to be. Warren enjoyed reciting limericks, which never seemed as humorous to his audience as they did to him. At 33, the youngest by far of the infantry corps commanders, his relative youthfulness produced behavior his more mature peers sometimes found annoying. Warren was ambitious and never hesitated to criticize his colleagues or, more infuriatingly, his superiors, if he believed they had erred. Grant and Meade thought him excessively "self-reliant," willing to overlay his own judgment on theirs and interpret their orders loosely. When that quality combined with Warren's basic tactical disagreement with Grant about the value and necessity of frontal assaults against prepared Confederate positions, he and the lieutenant general clashed.

Gordon C. Rhea described the evolution of this relationship in his series of careful studies on the Overland Campaign. In his summary of the desperate fighting in the Wilderness, Rhea concluded that "Warren displayed a disconcerting mix of caution and stubbornness. ... The massacre [at Saunder's Field] that occurred when Meade forced his hand only served to harden Warren's resolve. Thereafter, he did everything in his power to avoid frontal assaults." After another series of bloody repulses for the V Corps at Spotsylvania Court House, Warren concluded that Grant's overall approach to battle was unnecessarily costly. "Disparagements of Warren can be too pat," added Rhea. "Warren's predicament lay in being forced to carry out the program of a commander in chief whose apparent disregard for lives revolted him."

Despite their conflicting visions, Grant had given Warren several critical (and usually difficult) assignments during the siege of Petersburg that he had carried out competently, and sometimes expertly. When Grant sought to cut the Weldon Railroad — the easternmost of General Lee's supply routes — he gave the task to Warren after other similar efforts had failed. On August 14, 1864, the V Corps, reinforced with two divisions of the IX Corps, moved to the Weldon line and began tearing up the tracks. A heavy Confederate counterattack inflicted serious casualties, but the Union troops held to the railroad with stubborn tenacity. When the Confederates attacked again two days later, Warren had developed his lines so well that his men inflicted severe punishment on the attackers. Meade sent a congratulatory telegram; Grant just questioned why he had not attacked after he had driven the Confederates off. Compared with the disaster befalling the vaunted II Corps during that same effort, Warren's performance must be judged to have been at least satisfactory.