This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [215]
4. A Question of Time
Shortly after the spring campaign began, Robert E. Lee remarked that Grant’s army must on no account be allowed to reach the James River. If that happened, he said, the Army of Northern Virginia would be compelled to withstand a siege, “and then it will be a mere question of time.”1 In six weeks of bitter fighting he had managed to stave off that fate; yet he was now so close to the Richmond fortifications that he could have put his army into them by no more than one short march, and in the middle of June, Grant made a swift, decisive move whose final effect was to force upon Lee the siege warfare that Lee had so greatly dreaded.
The rival armies stayed in the trenches around Cold Harbor for the better part of two weeks, and they were not weeks that any soldier afterward recalled with pleasure. All along the front the two armies were in intimate contact — each one entrenched up to the ears, dug in so that no conceivable frontal attack could ever accomplish anything. There was firing every hour, from dawn to darkness, and at night the pickets were alert to detect any movement, which invariably would call forth a burst of musketry and cannon fire. An unspeakable stench lay over the battlefield, the weather was excessively hot, soldiers were caked with dirt and plagued by vermin and by thirst, and sharpshooters on both sides were ready to drill any luckless soldier who incautiously raised his head above the parapet, even for a moment.
To all appearances, it was deadlock. The Army of the Potomac could no longer sidle to its left, which was what it had been doing all the way down from the Rapidan; its left touched the Chickahominy now, and one more side-slip would do nothing better than put it up against the Richmond trenches, which Grant was no more anxious to encounter than Lee was to occupy. It could not move by its right, for that would take it too far away from its tidewater base and expose its supply line to rupture by Confederate cavalry.
Confederate cavalry, to be sure, was not having things its own way now, as it had had in 1862 when McClellan was on this ground. Phil Sheridan was swinging the Yankee cavalry around like a scythe; had raided far in Lee’s rear during the Spotsylvania fight, forcing Jeb Stuart to make a hell-for-leather ride after him, fighting a bitter battle in the very suburbs of Richmond, and — sponging one more of the bright romantic streaks off of the board of this war — killing Stuart himself in the process. Nevertheless, the Army of the Potomac was deep in enemy country, and for its own security it had to keep its line line short, which meant that it could not move far from one or another of the rivers where Federal gunboats and supply steamers could anchor.
But there was still a move Grant could make. If he could get his army out of its trenches without tipping his hand, he could leave the Cold Harbor sector entirely, march southeast down to the James River, get over to the southern shore (provided his engineers could throw a pontoon bridge over a deep stream nearly half a mile wide), and drive on for the little city of Petersburg, which lay on the south bank of the Appomattox River, some ten miles from the place where the Appomattox flows into the James. Petersburg was a place the Confederacy had to hold if it meant to hold Richmond; for of the railroads that came up from the Carolinas and brought the supplies which the capital and its defenders had to have, all but one came up through Petersburg. In effect, the North could win Richmond by winning Petersburg. A blow at Petersburg was a blow Lee would have to parry no matter