Michael Brasher@2ndMississippi
The Last Arithmetician
An Introduction to the Overland Campaign, May–June 1864
[Author's Notes: Today marks the anniversaries of two of the war's most consequential engagements — Chancellorsville, where Lee achieved perhaps his most brilliant victory, and Port Gibson, where Grant planted his army on the east bank of the Mississippi and never looked back. It has been a full day for those of us who try to keep faith with these men and these dates. But as May deepens, the calendar turns toward something larger still. One year after Chancellorsville — almost to the week — a new Union commander crossed the Rapidan River with a hundred and twenty thousand men and launched the campaign that would, at long last, decide the war in the East. No more retreating after a battle. No more wintering north of the river and waiting for spring to try again. Grant came south and kept coming, through the Wilderness and Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor, all the way to the gates of Petersburg, in the most sustained and brutal offensive the continent had ever seen. Over the next several weeks I'll be covering the major engagements of the Overland Campaign — the fights that defined it, the men who endured it, and the commanding generals who drove it forward on both sides. I hope you'll follow along.]
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In the late winter of 1864, Abraham Lincoln had a problem that no general had yet solved for him, and he had tried a good many generals. He had tried the careful ones and the bold ones, the political ones and the professional ones, the ones who moved too slow and the ones who moved too fast, and through all of it Robert E. Lee had remained, had endured, had bled his enemies white in the tangled Virginia countryside and sent them back across whatever river they had crossed to reach him. The war in the East had a rhythm by now, a cruel and familiar one: the Army of the Potomac would advance, Lee would hurt it badly enough to give it pause, and presently the army would fall back to reorganize and reconsider and await the next man Lincoln sent to try his luck. McClellan had tried. Pope had tried. Burnside had tried, and Hooker, and Meade — Meade who had won at Gettysburg and then watched Lee slip back across the Potomac like a man leaving a party before the host could think of a reason to detain him. It had been going on for three years. The country was running out of patience and the army was running out of men and Lincoln, who understood arithmetic better than any of them, was running out of time.
The man he promoted to Lieutenant General in March — the first officer to hold that full rank since George Washington himself — had come out of the West, out of the river country and the river towns, out of Belmont and Donelson and Shiloh and the long siege that had finally cracked Vicksburg open on the Fourth of July. Ulysses Grant was not a handsome man, not a theatrical man, not a man who inspired speeches or filled a uniform the way McClellan had. He was five feet eight inches of plain Ohio stubbornness, a man who smoked cigars until they were gone and who, when asked what he intended to do next, generally did it. His staff called him the quietest man they had ever known in the presence of a crisis. His enemies called him a butcher, though they would not say so to his face, and what they meant was that he was willing to pay a price that the other commanders had not been willing to pay. What they did not understand — what most of them would never understand — was that Grant had simply done the arithmetic and accepted the answer.
He came east and established his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac, leaving George Meade in nominal command of that army but making it plain, by his presence, that nominal was the operative word. The arrangement was awkward and both men knew it. Meade had built the Army of the Potomac into a formidable instrument; Grant would play it. What Grant brought with him was not a plan so much as a philosophy. Every Union army would move, and move simultaneously, and keep moving, so that Lee could not strip one front to reinforce another, could not use the Confederacy's interior lines the way a chess player uses tempo. Grant would go after Lee's army — not Richmond, not any particular piece of ground, but the army itself — and he would not stop until it was done. "Find out where your enemy is," he had said more than once. "Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can, and keep moving on."
Across the Rapidan, Robert E. Lee had spent the winter watching and thinking. His army numbered perhaps sixty-four thousand men — lean, veteran, magnificently led, short of everything except courage and the memory of what they had done to other armies in this same country. They had fought in the Wilderness before, at Chancellorsville the previous spring, where Stonewall Jackson had taken twenty-eight thousand men through the forest and come out on Hooker's flank like something conjured from the timber itself, and the result had been as near a masterpiece of Confederate arms as the war had produced. Jackson was dead now, twelve months gone, and Lee had reorganized the army and replaced what could not be replaced and moved on, because that was what Lee did. He knew Grant was coming. He had watched the Federals reorganize through the winter, had noted the consolidation of corps and the arrival of heavy artillery regiments stripped from the Washington fortifications — men who had never heard a rifle volley but who came in units of twelve hundred strong, fresh and well-fed. He calculated the odds with the clear eye of a man who has calculated them many times before. He knew what the numbers meant. He had always known what the numbers meant. What he intended to do was fight in the Wilderness, where numbers meant least and knowledge of the ground meant most, and hurt Grant badly enough, early enough, to take the heart out of the new campaign before it found its legs.
On the night of May 3rd, one hundred and twenty thousand Federal soldiers began moving in the darkness toward the Rapidan River crossings. They moved with the practiced, grinding efficiency of a great army that has made this kind of march before — infantry and artillery and wagon trains stretching back across the roads for miles, the creak of wheels and the shuffle of feet and somewhere in the dark the low sound of men who know they are going somewhere from which not all of them will return. Grant rode with them or ahead of them, a cigar clamped in his teeth, saying little. By the morning of the fourth they were across the river and entering the Wilderness — that same dense, second-growth tangle of scrub oak and pine and underbrush where Hooker had come to grief a year before, where the trees grew so close together that a regiment could lose itself in fifty yards, where the smoke of battle had nowhere to go and fires started in the dry leaves and men burned where they fell.
Grant had hoped to move through the Wilderness quickly, to get his army out the other side and into the open country where his superior numbers and artillery could be brought to bear. Lee had other ideas.
What followed over the next six weeks — from the Wilderness through Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor and the crossing of the James, all the way to the outskirts of Petersburg — would test both armies in ways that no previous campaign in the East had managed. It would be the longest, bloodiest, most relentless sustained offensive of the entire war. It would cost Grant sixty-five thousand casualties. It would reduce Lee's army to a shadow of what it had been. And at the end of it, Grant would be exactly where he intended to be, doing exactly what he intended to do, pressing the life out of an army that had been pressing the life out of Union generals since the first summer of the war.
The arithmetic, in the end, was not complicated. It was only terrible.
