The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 2 (of 2) / A Narrative and Critical History

by George Cary Eggleston

The result was foredoomed, of course. Speaking of the affair years afterwards Mr. Stephens pithily said:

"Mr. Davis carefully spiked all our guns and then ordered us to the front."

It was about this time that Lee visited Mr. Davis and explained the situation to him. He set forth the fact that Grant, with his enormously superior force, could indefinitely extend his lines to the left, thus compelling the Confederate commander to stretch out his own lines to nothingness; that Grant could, and surely would, concentrate an overwhelming force at some point and there irresistibly break through the Confederate lines of defenses; and that when this should be done, successful retreat would be impossible to the Confederate army.

There is good historical ground for the belief that General Lee at that time proposed an alternative course of action. He asked Mr. Davis to give him the negroes of the South as soldiers; to permit him to put them into the defensive works, and thus set his veterans free to make a last desperately determined invasion of the North; or, if the negroes were denied to him, that he should be permitted to abandon the defense of Richmond and Petersburg, while retreat was yet possible, retire to the line of the Roanoke river, form a junction with such other forces as the Confederacy still had at command and make a final stand in the far interior against Grant.

It is credibly reported that Mr. Davis resolutely refused to permit General Lee to carry out either of these alternative plans; that he refused to permit the enlistment of negroes and at the same time forbade General Lee to withdraw his army from the defense of Richmond and Petersburg.

There was left to the great Confederate commander only the duty of returning to his headquarters, resisting while resistance was possible, and accepting the inevitable end whenever the advance of spring and the consequent hardening of the roads should open the way for Grant to bring that end about by a decisive movement.

The time was not yet ripe for the delivery of the final blow. Mud still stood in the way; but while awaiting his opportunity Grant continued those operations in other quarters which effectually prevented Lee's reinforcement and contributed in important ways to the accomplishment of his ultimate purpose. He kept Canby pounding at Mobile. He drew from Thomas in Tennessee strong reinforcements for the Army of the Potomac. In February he directed Sheridan to move up the Valley of Virginia in irresistible force, brush the remnant of Early's army out of existence, destroy the locks of the James river and Kanawha canal, cut the railroad communications and then sweep like a hurricane eastward to join the main army before Petersburg and Richmond. At the same time he ordered a column to move from Chattanooga eastward toward Lynchburg, destroying the railroad as it marched and thus additionally hemming Lee in and crippling him.

In the meanwhile his own pounding on Lee's lines was ceaseless. The object of this was to occupy all of Lee's attention and prevent him from detaching troops for operations in any direction.

Grant's lines now extended from a point north of Richmond, eastward, southward and westward to positions south and west of Petersburg, and at every opportunity he was pushing his left wing farther around Lee's flank, with the double purpose of still further weakening the Confederates by attenuation and rendering impossible the successful retreat of the Army of Northern Virginia when the time should come to concentrate an overwhelming Federal force against some point in it and break through.

To meet this strategy General Lee undertook a bold operation on the twenty-fourth of March which was brilliantly, but in the end unsuccessfully, executed by General Gordon. His plan was by an attack upon the Federal left wing to compel Grant for a time to contract his lines on the left and thus to secure to the Confederates a way out of the net in which they had been enmeshed. The attack was made in the night, a fact which would have rendered it perilous in the extreme had the troops that made it been other than war-worn veterans. At the point selected for assault the Federal and Confederate lines lay within one hundred yards of each other, and both were strongly fortified. By an adroit movement the Confederates captured the whole body of Federal pickets and sent them as prisoners to the rear, thus reducing the distance between themselves and the earthworks to be assaulted to less than fifty yards. Then with a rush they hurled themselves upon the Federal works and carried them. For a time it seemed likely that they would crumple up the whole of Grant's left wing and compel the contraction of his lines by several miles. But General Parke, who commanded the Federal forces in that quarter, made hurried dispositions to check the Confederate assault, and after some hours of hard fighting, in which the Confederates lost 4,000 men and the Federals 2,000, the Federal lines were reëstablished.