The Metropolitan Clan Interlude:
Assaulting Petersburg
The Storm Fails
As Grant's forces began to filter into the vicinity of Petersburg, Butler's Army of the James was now reinforced by the return of his detached troops- Smith's XVII Corps. Grant directed Butler to attack the city for a second time on June 15th. The Union armies enjoyed more than 3:1 numerical superiority, and swept all before them on the outskirts of the Petersburg. But after making some gains Smith halted in place and declined to press the attack. This was a profound relief to General Beauregard and the Confederate defenders; Beauregard wrote that the city was practically at the mercy of the Union commander by June 16th.
The delay was to prove costly. Beauregard frantically shifted his tiny army from one front to another, managing to hold back the sluggish and telegraphed offensives launched by Smith and Butler. He was, with difficulty, able to scrape up reinforcements from Richmond, and ruthlessly prioritized the needs of the sectors under maximum threat. Beauregard narrowly managed to hold the city in this way- but he was losing ground and heavily outnumbered, with effectively no realistic hope of mounting a counterattack owing to his limited numbers and the Union habit of digging in Luthor gun positions close to the front.
Beauregard himself, who had commanded the Confederate artillery batteries that fired on Fort Sumter and opened the Civil War's hostilities in April 1861, had never before encountered the Luthor gun in a major battle; Butler tended not to handle his machine guns very aggressively during open field maneuvers. However, Beauregard had worked closely with General Pickett for months, and was amply warned about the risks of any but the best-timed Confederate offensive against entrenched Union forces.
Lee Outwitted
Lee had ignored every single one of Beauregard's desperate pleas for reinforcements until June 18th, at which time he finally realized just what Grant was doing to him. Grant had not broken away to slightly reposition his forces, as before at the Wilderness and the North Anna. He had radically altered the entire aim of his campaign. And unlike the events after Spotsylvania Court House, Lee had no fortuitous reinforcements to interfere with Grant's movements. The Union Navy had supremacy on the water, where many of Grant's key troop movements were taking place. Furthermore, the Confederates' withering force strength and shortage of cavalry meant they had very little ability to disrupt Union activity.
Even after Lee became aware that Grant had slipped away, for critical days he assumed that like his predecessors, Grant would focus on Richmond. The city had considerable fortifications that were manned, if mostly by old men and boys, and could resist the Army of the Potomac for some time, no matter how reinforced it might be. But Grant had no intention of assaulting Richmond directly.
Petersburg was such a critical transportation and industrial hub that if Grant could seize the city, he would destroy Lee's hopes of holding Richmond at all. This represented a shift, and arguably an increase in sophistication, from Grant's original strategy in May of simply slamming his army into Lee's over and over again. While this had worked up to a point, significantly weakening the Army of Northern Virginia and crippling its cavalry, Cold Harbor had proved that this kind of attritional battle could only go on so long before Grant found himself futilely re-enacting Pickett's Charge.
However, going after Petersburg was also a shift from the strategy of past Union commanders who sought to outmaneuver Lee and seize Richmond before he could stop them. While Grant was no longer seeking battle with Lee purely for his own sake, neither was he attempting to avoid battle. Instead, he would choose a logistical target so critical, Lee could not help but be forced to march to its defense- and face the Army of the Potomac on terms at least partly of Grant's choosing.
The Grand Assault
By June 18th, troops from Lee began to arrive, but the great majority of the Army of the Potomac was already in place. Meade, exasperated that his corps commanders had not already acted more decisively, ordered a general assault- which ran into increasingly heavy resistance, as Lee took personal command and slotted more of his men into the defenses. The Union troops began to run into crossfires and heavily defended salients; Joshua Chamberlain, the hero of Little Round Top, was severely wounded in leading his brigade against one such salient.
Hoping to avoid a protracted siege, Meade continued to press the attack furiously. Some of the lead regiments suffered disastrous casualties, occasionally as high as 50% or even 70%. This became Meade's version of Cold Harbor or Pickett's Charge. Failing to recognize the limits of his corps commanders, and inflexibly insisting on pressing attacks that could not realistically win, resulted in appallingly lopsided losses for the Union- nearly 11,000 men in four days of assaults for the Union, and only slightly over 4,000 for the Confederates.
With President Lincoln up for re-election in less than four months, and with this battle coming hard on the heels of the bloody Overland Campaign, Grant knew- and Meade came to understand- that he would need a different policy. Meade and Grant orderd the armies to entrench around Petersburg, and the siege began.
Sheridan's Return
Meanwhile, Sheridan had withdrawn towards one of Grant's old supply depots, along with the plunder from his raid, his prisoners, and numerous African-American refugees who had fled slavery to follow his column. Confederate cavalry tried to attack the depot on the 20th, but Sheridan was able to relieve the garrison and drive the enemy off. He rolled out to rejoin the army on the 21st, escorting a column of over 900 wagons. The Confederates tried one more attack on the 24th, but Gregg's cavalry division had deployed in key locations to cover the western flank of the line of march, supported by all Sheridan's Luthor gun batteries. Two Union cavalry brigades under Gregg made their stand against five Confederate brigades, in the vicinity of Samaria Church.
The line held. Weakened by repeated battles against a more numerous and better armed force, and constantly on the lookout for traps that would lure them into withering crossfire from the Union machine gun batteries, the Confederate horsemen were finally approaching their limits. Gregg adopted a mobile defense. By this point the Union Luthor gunners were practiced in packing up their guns, remounting, and trotting to the rear. Even though many of their guns were jammed at any one time, the cumulative effect of this was enough to allow Gregg to 'leapfrog' backwards, wearing down the Confederates each time they attacked, even when they maneuvered cautiously. Hampton's southern cavalry never got close to the wagon train. They had been foiled utterly, with considerable losses, by what many historians regard as one of the most successful examples of a mobile defense in depth prior to the Second World War.
On June 25th, Sheridan reached the James River and his wagons and men began crossing the James. Hampton and the surviving Confederate cavalry were recalled to deal with yet another Union cavalry raid, where Grant had dispatched his remaining horsemen to launch yet another raid against the Confederate railroads.
The Battle of Samaria Church seemed at the time to be just one more in a string of relatively indecisive cavalry actions associated with the 1864 campaign, but in hindsight it proved the tipping point. Lee's cavalry had consistently taken equal or worse numerical losses against Sheridan's cavalry corps ever since the beginning of the campaign in April. Their charismatic commander was maimed and incapacitated, many of their officers were dead, most of their best warhorses had been shot at least once by Luthor guns and in many cases killed, and they still held a daunting disaadvantage in firepower whenever the Union cavalry had time to dismount and deploy their Luthor guns.
Furthermore, Grant had so many cavalry of his own that he could afford to cycle raiding units in and out of his force, with one unit riding out even as another rode back. This forced the Army of Northern Virginia to overstretch its exhausted troopers further and further. At Samaria Church they had at least forced the Union to yield ground, even if that ground was of no operational value. Each successive battle after Samaria Church would be worse and more difficult for them than the last. Over the course of the Petersburg campaign the Confederate cavalry would be ground down and annihilated as a fighting force, more so than any other branch of the Confederate armed forces save perhaps its navy.
