This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [216]
The move was handled with skill. Despite the closeness of enemy pickets, Grant got his men out of the trenches without arousing Confederate attention, put them on the roads in the night, moved down and crossed the Chickahominy, and tramped on toward the bank of the James. Lee was a hard man to fool, but it appears that for a day or two this move deceived him; the Army of the Potomac had vanished, and although it had obviously moved off somewhere to the southeast it was well screened behind a cordon of cavalry and infantry and there was no way to tell where it might appear next. It was quite possible that it would wheel and come back up on the north side of the James, and Lee held his army in position to counter such a move. Meanwhile Meade’s engineers laid a 2100-foot pontoon bridge over the James — completing the job in eight hours, cutting a long approach road on the northern bank, and performing a prodigy of labor — and the Army of the Potomac began to cross and to march for Petersburg, picking up some of Butler’s men from Bermuda Hundred as they went.
Petersburg should have fallen on June 15, for the better part of two army corps reached the place then and found it defended by the merest handful of Confederates under Beauregard — who was aware of his danger and was sending to Lee and to the Rebel War Department desperate appeals for aid. But the attack was muffed. Commander of the Union advance was the same General Baldy Smith who had done so well in the matter of opening a supply line at beleaguered Chattanooga in the preceding autumn. He had won Grant’s good opinion then, but today he lost what he had won, and lost as well a dazzling chance to cut the artery that fed the Confederate capital. He seized trenches and guns, won a position from which one determined drive would inevitably have put him into Petersburg — and then grew cautious, concluded that he ought to wait for reinforcements, and let the opportunity slip away.
The next three days repeated the same story. Beauregard began to get reinforcements, but the Army of the Potomac was coming up faster, and on each day Beauregard had ample reason to believe that he was about to be driven away in total defeat. Yet the opportunity was never quite grasped. Union attacks were poorly co-ordinated and driven home without vigor — one reason may have been that the army as a whole was simply exhausted from the work of the past six weeks — and in the end Lee managed to get the Army of Northern Virginia down just in time to make the place secure. By June 20, Grant had called off further attacks and was settling down to make a siege of it.2
In the technical sense it was not really a siege, for Petersburg was by no means surrounded. Two railroads to the south were still open, and the roads between Petersburg and Richmond were not cut. The Army of the Potomac was dug in with a rambling arc of trenches and fieldworks that confronted Petersburg only from the east; north of the Appomattox there were other works that ran across the neck of Bermuda Hundred, and above the James, close to Richmond, Federal and Confederate patrols confronted each other, and all along this lengthy line there were intermittent firing and constant sniping while the two armies labored mightily to make their defenses strong.
But although Grant had not done all that he had hoped to do he had finally done one thing Lee was extremely anxious to prevent; he had compelled the Army of Northern Virginia to occupy a fixed position — had put it into a spot from which it could not withdraw and in which the greater resources of the North could be consistently applied with a steadily rising pressure. Freedom of movement was very largely gone now, as far as Lee was concerned, and without it he was condemned to the kind of warfare the Confederacy could hardly hope to win. Lee was pinned; Grant’s problem now was to keep him pinned and build up the pressure.
Some freedom, to be sure, was left, and Lee would use it to the very best of his ability, which was great. Union defeats in the Shenandoah