Regiment at dinner.
CHAPTER XIX.
FROM THE RAPIDAN TO COLD HARBOR.
May, 1864.
There are few months in the calendar of centuries that will have a more conspicuous place in history than the month of May, 1864. It will be remembered on account of the momentous events which took place in one of the greatest military campaigns of history. We are amazed, not by its magnitude merely, for there have been larger armies, heavier trains of artillery, greater preparations, in European warfare,—but by a succession of events unparalleled for rapidity. We cannot fully comprehend the amount of endurance, the persistency, the hard marching, the harder fighting, the unwearied, cheerful energy and effort which carried the Army of the Potomac from the Rappahannock to the James in forty days, against the stubborn opposition of an army of almost equal numbers. There was not a day of rest,—scarcely an hour of quiet. Morning, noon, and midnight, the booming of cannon and the rattling of musketry echoed unceasingly through the Wilderness, around the hillocks of Spottsylvania, along the banks of the North Anna, and among the groves of Bethesda Church and Cold Harbor.
There were individual acts of valor, as heroic and soul-stirring as those of the old Cavaliers renowned in story and song, where all the energies of life were centred in one moment. There was the spirited advance of regiments, the onset of brigades, and the resistless charges of divisions,—scenes which stir the blood and fire the soul; the hardihood, the endurance, the cool, collected, reserved force, abiding the time, the calm facing of death; the swift advance, the rush, the plunge into the thickest of the fight, where hundreds of cannon, where fifty thousand muskets, filled the air with iron hail and leaden rain.
The army wintered between the Rappahannock and the Rapidan. There had been a reduction and reconstruction of its corps,—an incorporation of the First and Third with the Fifth and Sixth, with reinforcements added to the Second. The Second was commanded by Major-General Hancock, the Fifth by Major-General Warren, the Sixth by Major-General Sedgwick.
These three corps, with three divisions of cavalry commanded by General Sheridan, composed the Army of the Potomac, commanded by Major-General Meade. The Ninth Corps, commanded by Major-General Burnside, was added when the army took up its line of march.
Lee was behind Mine Run, with his head-quarters at Orange Court-House, covering the advance to Richmond from that direction.
There was concentration everywhere. General Gillmore, with what troops could be spared from the Department of the South, joined his forces to those on the Peninsula and at Suffolk under General Butler; Sigel commanded several thousand in the Shenandoah; Crook and Averell had a small army in Western Virginia; at Chattanooga, under Sherman and Thomas, was gathered a large army of Western troops; while Banks was up the Red River, moving towards Shreveport.
The dramatis personæ were known to the public, but the part assigned to each was kept profoundly secret. There was discussion and speculation whether Burnside, from his encampment at Annapolis, would suddenly take transports and go to Wilmington, or up the Rappahannock, or the James, or the York. Would Meade move directly across the Rapidan and attack Lee in front, with every passage, every hill and ravine enfiladed by Rebel cannon? Or would he move his right flank along the Blue Ridge, crowding Lee to the seaboard? Would he not make, rather, a sudden change of base to Fredericksburg? None of the wise men, military or civil, in their speculations, indicated the line which General Grant adopted. The public accepted the disaster at Chancellorsville and the failure at Mine Run as conclusive evidence that a successful advance across the Rapidan by the middle fords was impossible, or at least improbable. So well was the secret kept, that, aside from the corps commanders, none in or out of the army, except the President and Secretary of War, had information of the line of march intended.