Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [40]
The next day even Grant was forced to stop and reconsider, especially since it was by no means sure at this point that the Union troops could, or would, make another charge over ground that was still thickly covered with Union dead and wounded. With one of those swift changes of mind that mark the true military genius, Grant decided to give up the position that had cost him so many lives and cross the James River to the south of Richmond. He would move his army to where Butler had been ineffectually camped, abandon his line of communication to the north, and take up positions where he could be supplied by steamships coming up the James. From there he would move his army to the left in an effort to cut the railway lines running to Richmond from the south, in effect choking Lee off from his supplies.
By June 14 Grant had his army across the James, and he determined at once to move on Petersburg, a small town south of Richmond through which one of the major railways ran. He moved immediately to take Petersburg, but the Confederate forces there, under the command of General Beauregard, with fewer than fifteen thousand men to Grant’s fifty thousand, managed to hold out until Lee could disengage from his lines north of Richmond and bring the Army of Northern Virginia by forced march into Petersburg. Grant’s generals may have been hesitant to attack after the experience of Cold Harbor, and the men themselves may at that point have been reluctant to attempt another frontal attack, but whatever the reason, the brief moment in which the Union army might have seized Petersburg passed with Lee’s arrival on the scene, and both enemies settled down for a long siege.
Grant’s view of his position echoed that of Gen. Joseph Joffre fifty years later when he was asked how he proposed to defeat the Germans after they had entrenched themselves following the Battle of the Marne—“Je les grignote,” Joffre said (“I shall nibble away at them”), and that is precisely what Grant set out to do, with a seemingly endless series of attacks against the Confederate trenchworks from his own, the kind of fighting which was to characterize war on the western front for four long years. Artillery bombardments, mining, bayonet charges, sniping, and hand-to-hand fighting became the defining activities of the siege of Petersburg—those and death by disease as tens of thousands of men huddled together in conditions of primitive unsanitariness.
At City Point, a steamer landing on the south side of the James, Grant built up a whole city of wooden huts, the headquarters and supply base for an army of 125,000 men, and he was soon joined there by Mrs. Grant and their children. Conditions were primitive; mud or dust, depending on the season, was omnipresent; huge quantities of guns, food, forage, and ammunition were accumulated; field hospitals built and staffed—it was in every way the equivalent of a modern army’s base of supply, a sight so impressive that visitors could hardly imagine why the war was still going on or how the Confederates were still able to resist, but then, as Grant explained when he was in the mood, Lee had the advantage of interior lines, so that he could quickly reinforce his defending troops anyplace where they were attacked.
From time to time Lincoln would come down by steamer to visit Grant, and the two were usually photographed together from a respectful distance, sitting opposite each other glumly under an awning, as if the weight of the world rested on their shoulders, which, in a sense, it did. They look as if they were sitting in complete silence, something that would have been uncommon for Lincoln but not for Grant. Perhaps the best-known photograph of Grant was taken by Mathew Brady at City Point, Grant leaning against a tree in front of a tent, his uniform wrinkled and dusty, his hat pushed back a bit on his head, his eyes, at once determined and deeply sad, staring into the far distance over the photographer’s shoulder. He is not elegantly turned out, his trousers and shoes are muddy, but he is not wearing