The Metropolitan Clan Interlude:
The Overland Campaign, Part 4
A Change of Scenery
Convinced that further trench warfare over the area around Spotsylvania Court House would not be beneficial, Grant began his planned move to the south on the night of May 20-21, 1864. His numerical advantage over Lee had narrowed, due to the expiration of many soldiers' enlistment terms and the heavy losses in the recent battles. Even so, he had roughly 70,000 soldiers left, compared to Lee's army which had slightly less than 50,000 men by most estimates.
Grant's next target in his campaign to force Lee to give battle would be the line of the North Anna River and the important railroad junction at Hanover Crossing, just south of the river. This was a key stop on the railroads running north from Richmond, and would effectively cut Lee off from Richmond if captured. However, Grant was mindful of how Lee, wary of the possibility of being cut off by dug-in Union forces with Luthor guns, had shifted troops out of the Wilderness fighting at the first sign of his own withdrawal towards Spotsylvania Court House. Once Lee became aware that Grant was marching in force on Hanover Crossing, It would be very difficult to reach the North Anna ahead of Lee, especially since the road directly south of Spotsylvania Court House was firmly in Lee's hands and Union forces would have to take detours.
Grant resolved to set a trap, using Hancock's corps as bait to draw Lee's army out of position and then pounce on Lee with all his forces. But Lee would have none of it, partly because he suspected such a trap, and partly because of the same caution he showed regarding the idea of launching attacks against Luthor guns throughout the campaign.
On the other hand, Lee was more reluctant to withdraw from his position around Spotsylvania Court House than he had been from the Wilderness. His men were well situated on defensible ground, and were fighting a reasonable distance from Richmond. Withdrawing further south would leave the capital closer to the enemy's main body, and potentially leave the Army of Northern Virginia strung out and vulnerable if Sheridan's cavalry came back to harass them on the march.
Furthermore, Grant had shown every sign of being willing to stand his ground around Spotsylvania Court House and pound on Lee's army all summer. The armies had been facing off in the area for nearly two weeks, and Lee suspected that Grant would try no more than slight repositionings of his forces. As such, he significantly underestimated the threat of an advance on the North Anna.
Another Race South
When Hancock ordered his troops to redeploy, he ran into unexpected opposition that delayed him considerably. Lee was receiving reinforcements- roughly 2,000 men from Pickett's rebuilt division, then guarding the James River against General Butler, and another 2,500 from the Shenandoah Valley.
Lee had hoped for more men from Pickett, but they were not available. Although the man was inexperienced in battle and better known for his political support of President Lincoln, General Butler had able subordinates and a force nearly twice the size of his opponents. Moreover, he was liberally supplied with materiel- including powerful modern field artillery- from the Metropolis foundries, by way of the port facilities at Hampton Roads. The Confederate defenses south and east of Richmond had to be kept well manned, and while General P.G.T. Beauregard had managed to stop Butler's advance at the Battle of Proctor's Creek, it hadn't been enough to force Butler out of the field entirely.
However, while the scant reinforcements available were only a small boost to Lee's numbers, they meant that there were extra Confederate units operating in brigade strength in areas Grant hadn't expected earlier. Alerted by Graves agents of the activity of the reinforcement columns, but lacking the cavalry support to locate them precisely, Hancock moved his corps cautiously. Hancock's corps bumped into men detached from Pickett's division, alerting him to the presence of the reinforcements and causing him to abort the 'bait' operation.
But Lee had not yet realized Grant's true intentions. While he ordered the Shenandoah troops to take positions along the North Anna, he did not consider a march south to be nearly as urgent as the forced march he'd sent Anderson on two weeks earlier. As such, when lead elements of the Army of the Potomac arrived at the river on May 23rd, they encountered only the small force from the Shenandoah. This was a fine opportunity; Lee's army arrived slightly too late to block the Union forces.
Union troops stormed forwards, overwhelming the Confederate positions north of the river and driving them back. However, they did not push forwards across the bridge, due to heavy fire from Confederate artillery. Another force under Warren succeeded in securing a bridgehead south of the river- and again, Lee mistook a genuine threat for a feint. While he pushed troops forwards to block Warren's attack, he committed far too little force to actually repel the strength of an army corps. The Union soldiers were taken by surprise, but laid down enough fire from artillery and Luthor guns that they lost only a small amount of ground.
Lee was finally coming to understand that this was no feint or reconnaissance in force, nor even an attempt to maneuver a blocking force around his flank. This was unfolding into a major battle. Lee, consulting with his engineers, conceived a scheme to deploy his forces in an inverted V formation once again, using the point of the V to divide Grant's army into two parts, which would be further separated by the line of the Ox River. To fight Lee in close quarters, Grant would have to split his army in two, and neither half could reinforce the other without having its soldiers cross the Ox twice, once to reach the north bank and once to return to the south. This would give Lee a better chance of weakening his foe.
Errors Upon Errors
Grant had succeeded in tricking Lee, but was himself falling into a trick- he mistook the tip of Lee's V formation for a rear guard holding the crossing at Ox Ford. He assigned the task of seizing the crossing to Burnside, who in turn delegated further advances to General Crittenden, who in turn delegated them to one of his brigadiers, James Ledlie, a man infamous for his alcoholism and recklessness. Ledlie, who was drunk during this phase of the battle, ordered ill-conceived attacks that were pushed back with heavy losses. However, after the battle, he was praised for the 'gallantry' of his brigade and promoted to command a division, with unfortunate consequences later in the campaign.
With some of Grant's stupidest and weakest subordinates facing the point of his V formation, and the rest of Grant's army split into two parts on either side of Ox Ford, Lee had the Army of the Potomac right where he wanted it.
Unfortunately, he was in no condition to do anything about this fact.
Shortly after setting up a headquarters south of the North Anna to command his army, Lee was suddenly confined to his tent and the latrines by an intense bout of food poisoning. Delirious and groaning "we must strike them a blow- we must never let them pass again," Lee had failed to delegate to any of his subordinates the power to order an overall defense. The Confederate corps commanders debated among themselves, but ultimately did little.
On the other hand, Grant was growing wary of frontal attacks. Even without machine guns, the Confederate rifles and gunners had made such assaults costly, and if Grant lost men in a repeat of Pickett's Charge or the attack on Marye's Heights, his numerical superiority over Lee might evaporate almost entirely. However, he had expected considerably more activity out of the Confederates- counterattacks, bombardments, and so on- once his own troops south of the river dug in their own positions. A tense period of skirmishing passed on May 24th-25th before Grant, unaware of Lee's illness, began to infer that the losses at Spotsylvania Court House had "really whipped" the Army of Northern Virginia. This was to prove untrue, but the two armies were locked in stalemate for the time being.
An Obtrusive Butler
Although General Butler's actions during this time were relatively uninspired, he had performed adequately. His well-supplied troops had repelled Confederate attempts to dislodge them, and were establishing a fortified supply line that threatened Richmond from the east. Only the fortified ring around Richmond proper, and the anti-ship cannon at Drewry's Bluff that had repelled Union ironclads back in 1862, were keeping Butler from laying siege to the city.
Among the units guarding Butler's supply lines were large forces of the U.S. Colored Troops. Butler had been an early advocate of freeing large numbers of slaves held in Confederate territory, arguing that even if slavery was still legal under U.S. law (at the time, 1862, it was), the slaves of a bunch of rebels were 'contraband' and were under no obligation to do anything other than escape to Union lines and freedom. Colored troops had been deployed to help strengthen Butler's force, and this included the detachment holding a fort at Wilson's Wharf. The commanders of this unit had developed an infamous reputation among the Richmond aristocracy after a flying column of black troops marching from Wilson's Wharf rushed the plantation of one Quentin Turnbull, a prominent area planter and liberated most of his slaves. To add injury to 'insult,' the Union soldiers responded to Turnbull's reputation as a harsh master by tying him to a post in his own yard for a horsewhipping.
President Jefferson Davis ordered Confederate cavalry to mobilize and "break up this nest and stop their uncivilized proceedings."
However, the Confederate horsemen were in poor condition after repeated clashes with Sheridan's carbines and machine guns. Some were now forced to rely on horses of poor training, and their units had many holes in their ranks. When Fitzhugh Lee took 2,200 men and a single cannon to attack the fort, he was in for far more trouble than he expected. Though the colored troops had only half Fitzhugh's numbers, they were well sited, and possessed a cannon of their own, along with three Luthor guns and support from the gunboat USS
Dawn.
Fitzhugh's men rushed forward, but were driven back with nearly 300 casualties by interlocking fields of gunfire and artillery, while the colored troops lost only five killed and thirty-three wounded. This was the first significant clash between Confederate forces and black soldiers; the Confederacy, unwilling to admit the nature of the defeat, claimed that there had been
six U.S. Navy gunboats present.
To the Pamunkey!
Grant might be confident that Lee's army was on some level 'whipped,' but he knew that he would make little enough headway attacking while in such an awkward position with his forces divided by Lee's deployment plan. Even if he succeeded in driving Lee back, there were three small rivers behind Lee's position that could act as secondary defense lines to deprive him of the opportunity for a victory.
Grant, now reunited with Sheridan's cavalry and aware of the performance of General Butler, elected to relocate once again. This time he would march southeast, past the place where the North and South Anna Rivers joined to form the Pamunkey, in an attempt to find an unguarded crossing. Not only would he have a better chance of crossing the river downstream, but the rivers that would have been obstacles to his own advance would then become barriers to Lee's attempts to countermarch.
The problem was, disengaging from his current position would be tricky. Now that he had his cavalry, though, he could launch reconnaissance operations against the west end of Lee's position, in an attempt to disguise his attempt to shift to the east. Lee, still stuck in his tent as of May 26th and suffering from the diarrhea, fell for the ploy and shifted some of the weight of his troops west, anticipating the same kind of bulldog attack tactics Grant had employed earlier in May. After sunset, the Union infantry sneakily withdrew from their positions and recrossed the North Anna, breaking contact with the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee had, proverbially, been caught with his pants down.
