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Francis Lawley was two miles away at Lee’s headquarters when he heard the muffled boom and saw the “dark curls of smoke” billowing from the crater. He embellished the fiasco in his report to give a false picture to British readers of white bravery and black cowardice. “The panic-struck negroes,” he lied, “crowded into the empty crater of the mine, and cowered down in abject terror.” While he was crafting his Times dispatch, a messenger arrived with the news that Jubal Early had torched the Pennsylvania town of Chambersburg. Lawley added this to the end of his report, to show that Lee still retained the ability to attack Northern targets: “Richmond never laughed more scornfully at the puny onslaught of her foe.”34

“We have met with a sad disappointment at Petersburg,” Seward wrote to his wife on August 5. “And now we have to deal with a disappointed, despondent, and I fear discontented people, who expect the Administration to guarantee success.”35 Lincoln traveled down to Fort Monroe for a private conference with Grant. The general blamed the war secretary, Edwin Stanton, for insisting “that defending Washington was more important than chasing the enemy, even if it allowed Early to feint and pounce wherever he chose.”36 A few days after the meeting, Grant had his way and General Phil Sheridan was allowed to lead a force of forty thousand men into northern Virginia. Sheridan’s instructions were clear: to make the fertile Shenandoah Valley unfit for human habitation and destroy Jubal Early’s army. Grant’s precise words were for Sheridan “to follow him to the death.”37 The key was mobility, which could only be achieved if Sheridan’s supply lines kept up with him. The “thankless and arduous” task of guarding the continuously moving wagon trains was given to Colonel Currie.38

Lee had hoped that Early’s raids would force Grant to send reinforcements to northern Virginia; he was even prepared to sacrifice a whole division of his army if it diverted the Federals away from Petersburg and Richmond. Francis Dawson was among the cavalry force under General Fitz Lee, which arrived in the Shenandoah Valley on August 8. “I then realized, as never before,” wrote Dawson, “the devastation of war.… The brutal Sheridan was carrying out his fell purpose … columns of smoke were rising in every direction from burning houses and burning barns.”39 Yet he prevaricated to his parents, telling them the Confederacy was “tattered but like our soldiers it stands well.”40

The detachment of forty thousand Federal troops made little difference to Grant’s strength in southern Virginia, whereas Lee needed every man in the trenches. Grant was relentless, probing and attacking any perceived weakness in the Confederate defenses. “[He] is a man of such infinite resource and ceaseless activity,” wrote Charles Francis Adams, Jr., admiringly on August 13. “Scarcely does one scheme fail before he has another on foot; baffled in one direction he immediately gropes round for a vulnerable point elsewhere—that I cannot but hope for great results the whole time. He has deserved success so often that he will surely have it at last.”41

General Butler’s Army of the James finally had worse things to worry about than the biting flies. “We have had no fighting here since I last wrote,” James Horrocks admitted to his parents just before the army was deployed on August 14. “We have been remarkably quiet. I believe we have not fired a shot nor had a shot fired at us for over a month.” But Horrocks came down with typhus and did not take part in the march to Deep Bottom (so named after a deep bend in the James River about eleven miles southeast of Richmond), where Grant planned to mount a second attack—the first had ended badly on July 27—against Lee’s defenses at Chaffin’s Bluff.42 Horrocks’s illness saved him from participating in what turned out to be the second of three assaults at Chaffin’s Bluff. On this occasion, a lack of proper planning meant that the ships carrying the troops along the river were too big to dock at the designated landing areas. The schedule