Recollections of the Civil War / With the Leaders at Washington and in the Field in the Sixties

by Charles A. Dana

The Army of the Potomac was then composed of the Second, Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Army Corps, and of one cavalry corps. In command of the army was Major-General George C. Meade. He was a tall, thin man, rather dyspeptic, I should suppose from the fits of nervous irritation to which he was subject. He was totally lacking in cordiality toward those with whom he had business, and in consequence was generally disliked by his subordinates. With General Grant Meade got along always perfectly, because he had the first virtue of a soldier—that is, obedience to orders. He was an intellectual man, and agreeable to talk with when his mind was free, but silent and indifferent to everybody when he was occupied with that which interested him.

As a commander, Meade seemed to me to lack the boldness that was necessary to bring the war to a close. He lacked self-confidence and tenacity of purpose, and he had not the moral authority that Grant had attained from his grand successes in other fields. As soon as Meade had a commander over him he was all right, but when he himself was the commander he began to hesitate. Meade had entirely separate headquarters and a separate staff, and Grant sent his orders to him.

In command of the Second Army Corps was Major-General W. S. Hancock. He was a splendid fellow, a brilliant man, as brave as Julius Cæsar, and always ready to obey orders, especially if they were fighting orders. He had more of the aggressive spirit than almost anybody else in that army. Major-General G. K. Warren, who commanded the Fifth Army Corps, was an accomplished engineer. Major-General John Sedgwick commanded the Sixth Army Corps. I had known him for over twenty years. Sedgwick graduated at West Point in 1837, and was appointed a second lieutenant in the Second Artillery. At the time of the McKenzie rebellion in Canada Sedgwick's company was stationed at Buffalo during a considerable time. I was living in Buffalo then, and in this rebellion the young men of the town organized a regiment of city guards, and I was a sergeant in one of those companies, so that I became quite familiar with all the military movements then going on. Then it was that I got acquainted with Sedgwick. He was a very solid man; no flummery about him. You could always tell where Sedgwick was to be found, and in a battle he was apt to be found where the hardest fighting was. He was not an ardent, impetuous soldier like Hancock, but was steady and sure.

Two days after I reached the army, on May 9th, not far from Spottsylvania Courthouse, my old friend Sedgwick was killed. He had gone out in the morning to inspect his lines, and, getting beyond the point of safety, was struck in the forehead by a sharpshooter and instantly killed. The command of the Sixth Army Corps was given to General H. G. Wright. Wright was another engineer officer, well educated, of good, solid intellect, with capacity for command, but no special predilection for fighting. From the moment Meade assumed command of the army, two days before Gettysburg, the engineers rapidly came to the front, for Meade had the pride of corps strongly implanted in his heart.

Major-General Burnside, whom I had last seen at Knoxville in December, was in command of the Ninth Army Corps. Immediately after the siege of Knoxville, at his own request, Burnside had been relieved of the command in East Tennessee by Major-General John G. Foster. The President somehow always showed for Burnside great respect and good will. After Grant's plans for the spring campaign were made known, the Ninth Corps was moved by rail to Annapolis, where it was recruited up to about twenty-five thousand men. As the time for action neared it was set in motion, and by easy marches reached and re-enforced the Army of the Potomac on the morning of the 6th of May, in the midst of the battle of the Wilderness. It was not formally incorporated with that army until later, but, by a sort of fiction, it was held to be a distinct army, Burnside acting in concert with Meade, and receiving his orders directly from Grant, as did Meade. These two armies were the excuse for Grant's personal presence, without actually superseding Meade.

In my opinion, the great soldier of the Army of the Potomac at this time was General Humphreys. He was the chief of staff to General Meade, and was a strategist, a tactician, and an engineer. Humphreys was a fighter, too, and in this an exception to most engineers. He was a very interesting figure. He used to ride about in a black felt hat, the brim of which was turned down all around, making him look like a Quaker. He was very pleasant to deal with, unless you were fighting against him, and then he was not so pleasant. He was one of the loudest swearers that I ever knew. The men of distinguished and brilliant profanity in the war were General Sherman and General Humphreys—I could not mention any others that could be classed with them. General Logan also was a strong swearer, but he was not a West Pointer: he was a civilian. Sherman and Humphreys would swear to make everything blue when some dispatch had not been delivered correctly or they were provoked. Humphreys was a very charming man, quite destitute of vanity. I think he had consented to go and serve with Meade as chief of staff out of pure patriotism. He preferred an active command, and eventually, on the eve of the end, succeeded to the command of the Second Corps, and bore a conspicuous part in the Appomattox campaign.

Meade was in command of the Army of the Potomac, but it was Grant, the lieutenant general of the armies of the United States, who was really directing the movements. The central idea of the campaign had not developed to the army when I reached headquarters, but it was soon clear to everybody. Grant's great operation was the endeavor to interpose the Federal army between Lee's army and Richmond, so as to cut Lee off from his base of supplies. He meant to get considerably in advance of Lee—between him and Richmond—thus compelling Lee to leave his intrenchments and hasten southward. If in the collision thus forced Grant found that he could not smash Lee, he meant to make another move to get behind his army. That was to be the strategy of the campaign of 1864. That was what Lee thwarted, though he had a narrow escape more than once.

The first encounter with Lee had taken place in the Wilderness on May 5th and 6th. The Confederates and many Northern writers love to call the Wilderness a drawn battle. It was not so; in every essential light it was a Union victory. Grant had not intended to fight a battle in those dense, brushy jungles, but Lee precipitated it just as he had precipitated the battle of Chancellorsville one year before, and not six miles to the eastward of this very ground. In doing so he hoped to neutralize the superior numbers of Grant as he had Hooker's, and so to mystify and handle the Union leader as to compel a retreat across the Rapidan. But he failed. Some of the fighting in the brush was a draw, but the Union army did not yield a rood of ground; it held the roads southward, inflicted great losses on its enemy, and then, instead of recrossing the river, resumed its march toward Richmond as soon as Lee's attacks had ceased. Lee had palpably failed in his objects. His old-time tactics had made no impression on Grant. He never offered general battle in the open afterward.

The previous history of the Army of the Potomac had been to advance and fight a battle, then either to retreat or to lie still, and finally to go into winter quarters. Grant did not intend to proceed in that way. As soon as he had fought a battle and had not routed Lee, he meant to move nearer to Richmond and fight another battle. But the men in the army had become so accustomed to the old methods of campaigning that few, if any, of them believed that the new commander in chief would be able to do differently from his predecessors. I remember distinctly the sensation in the ranks when the rumor first went around that our position was south of Lee's. It was the morning of May 8th. The night before the army had made a forced march on Spottsylvania Courthouse. There was no indication the next morning that Lee had moved in any direction. As the army began to realize that we were really moving south, and at that moment were probably much nearer Richmond than was our enemy, the spirits of men and officers rose to the highest pitch of animation. On every hand I heard the cry, "On to Richmond!"

But there were to be a great many more obstacles to our reaching Richmond than General Grant himself, I presume, realized on May 8, 1864. We met one that very morning; for when our advance reached Spottsylvania Courthouse it found Lee's troops there, ready to dispute the right of way with us, and two days later Grant was obliged to fight the battle of Spottsylvania before we could make another move south.