"A Mere Question of Time" Grant Crosses the James — June 12, 1864 "We must destroy this army of Grant's before he gets to the James River," Robert E. Lee had told Jubal Early in the grim first days of June 1864. "If he gets there, it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time." He was right about all of it. He was just unable to stop any of it. Grant had been moving since early May, crossing the Rapidan on the 4th and plunging south into the dark tangle of the Wilderness, where Lee hoped the scrub timber and the narrow roads would cancel Union numbers and Union artillery. They did — for a time. The armies clawed at each other for two days in that trackless second-growth, fighting by sound as much as sight, whole brigades losing their direction in the smoke and the thickets. Grant took his losses — upward of seventeen thousand men in two days — and moved south by the left flank. Every general who had come before him had turned back across a river after something like that. Not Grant. He moved south. South to Spotsylvania, where the fighting ground on for nearly two weeks and produced the Bloody Angle of May 12 — that eighteen-hour killing ground in the rain where men were stacked three deep in a Confederate trench and shot and bayoneted and beaten with musket butts until darkness and exhaustion stopped what orders could not. South again through North Anna and Totopotomoy Creek, Lee always getting there first, the lines always settling back into that deadlock that favored the defender. The Overland Campaign had already cost Grant somewhere around fifty-five thousand casualties — killed, wounded, missing — against perhaps thirty to thirty-five thousand Confederate losses. Both armies were used up in ways that did not show on paper. Then Cold Harbor. On the morning of June 3, Grant ordered a frontal assault on Lee's entrenched position, and every man in the Army of the Potomac understood, with the particular clarity that comes from having done this before, what was waiting for them across that ground. Some of them — the ones who had learned what these assaults cost — pinned slips of paper to their coats the night before, with their names and home addresses on them, so that whoever found them in the morning could write the letters that would need to be written. The assault lasted perhaps an hour. The Union army lost close to seven thousand men before Grant called it off. He would later write that it was the one order of the war he most regretted giving. The armies then settled into something like a siege at Cold Harbor, wounded men lying between the lines for days while officers haggled over truce terms that never quite materialized in time. Grant used the stillness to think. *** His target was Petersburg, twenty-three miles south of Richmond — not the Confederate capital itself, but the rail hub that fed it. The Weldon Railroad. The South Side Railroad. Sever them and Lee's army and Richmond starved together. But getting there meant doing something no army had accomplished in this war: disengaging from a front-line trench with the enemy forty yards away, marching south in the dark, crossing two rivers, and arriving on the far side with enough strength and speed to take Petersburg before Lee could divine where he had gone and move to stop him. Grant built the plan quietly. On June 7, his aides Horace Porter and Cyrus Comstock rode down to scout the James crossing sites and coordinate with Ben Butler's Army of the James at Bermuda Hundred. Engineers were set to calculating pontoon requirements. Demonstrations were arranged against Richmond's eastern defenses to suggest Grant was still looking north and east rather than south. Wilson's cavalry was positioned to screen the flanks. Deception, speed, and superb staff work — that was what this required, and Grant knew it. On the night of June 12, 1864 — one hundred sixty-two years ago tonight — the Army of the Potomac began to disappear. Hancock's II Corps and Wright's VI Corps held the old lines while the rest of the army pulled out and moved south through the summer dark, under orders to keep quiet and keep moving. Warren's V Corps cleared the roads ahead. Burnside's IX Corps followed. Smith's XVIII Corps, already shifted toward Butler, was angling separately toward the James. Tens of thousands of men moved without torches, without drums, hauling with them five thousand wagons and ambulances, fifty-six thousand horses and mules, twenty-eight hundred head of cattle — everything a hundred-thousand-man army needs to eat and fight and bleed for several days running. The silence of that march, for men who had been under fire without real pause since the first week of May, must have been almost as disorienting as the noise they had lived in. *** Lee learned on the morning of June 13 that the Cold Harbor trenches were empty. He didn't know where Grant had gone — not with any certainty. The cavalry that in other seasons would have cut through the Union screen and traced the dust clouds south was not what it had been. Stuart had been dead since May 11, shot at Yellow Tavern, and the Confederate horse had not recovered its edge. The riders Lee sent probing came back with contradictions rather than answers. Back to the Pamunkey to refit? A new thrust at Richmond's north? Or south — the thing Lee had dreaded since those words to Early? He could not know. And not knowing, he could not move. There was another complication, and the timing of it carried an irony that no amount of hindsight makes any easier to look at straight. Around June 12 — at very nearly the moment Grant was beginning his withdrawal — Lee had sent Early and the II Corps marching toward the Shenandoah Valley, ordered to deal with Union successes there and, if circumstances permitted, to threaten Washington and pull pressure away from Richmond. It was defensible on the merits. It stripped Lee's lines at the precise moment when stripped lines might prove fatal. *** The James River at Weyanoke Neck is wide, tidal, and not forgiving of improvisation. Lt. Col. James Duane directed the engineering effort, drawing on Butler's officers who had been given some advance notice, and what they built was staggering in its ambition: one hundred and one pontoon boats plus larger anchoring vessels, a structure stretching somewhere between twenty-one hundred and twenty-two hundred feet across a tidal river with a mind of its own. Construction began around midday on June 14 — some accounts push it to the early hours of the 15th — and the bridge was complete in roughly seven or eight hours, the current and the tide fighting the engineers every foot of the way. Infantry crossed mostly by steamer and transport boat. The bridge carried the guns, the wagons, the animals, the cattle, and then more infantry as the columns kept coming. By the morning of June 17, it was done. Over one hundred thousand men, with everything they owned and needed, had crossed a broad tidal river thirty miles from the Confederate capital without losing a regiment, without a major engagement on the far bank, without effective interference of any kind — because Lee did not know where they were until knowing no longer mattered. *** Not until around June 16 did Lee grasp the full shape of what had happened — that Grant was across the James and driving hard on Petersburg. He rushed forces south, reshuffled his lines, did what he could with what remained. Beauregard, holding Petersburg with a force that had no business holding anything, performed brilliantly in those desperate days — concentrating his thin regiments with the instinct of a man who understood he had no margin for error, calling Hoke's division up from the Richmond defenses, managing to keep his works intact against the piecemeal Union attacks on June 15, 16, 17, and 18 that might, under a different weight of coordination and energy, have ended it all in an afternoon. They did not end it. And by the time Grant acknowledged that the city would not fall by direct assault and shifted to siege operations, Lee's army was filing into the Petersburg trenches. It had become, as Lee had prophesied, a siege. And now it was a question of time. *** The siege would last nine months and twenty-three days. It would wear through regiment after regiment — including the 2nd Mississippi Infantry and the other used-up veterans of Heth's Division who had already given more than seemed possible at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor — until there was very little left to wear through. The supply lines would go, one by one. The rations would thin, and then thin further. Men would dig and watch and wait and in the quiet hours begin to run the arithmetic of whether the Confederacy could still survive, and the answer they kept arriving at would drive the desertions that Lee could not prevent and could not replace. The question he had stated so precisely in the first days of June was being answered, slow and certain, in the trenches outside Petersburg. The final answer came on a Sunday morning the following April, at a village called Appomattox Court House. But it had been written here, in the dark, on the night of June 12, when a hundred thousand men crossed a tidal river without drums — and Robert E. Lee, forty miles to the north, could not see which way they had gone.