"He," said the Southerner, "is a damned abolitionist."

This immediately brought on a fist fight, and officers had to come out to break it up. Still, men who felt enough at home with each other to argue about politics and fight with their fists over it were hardly, at bottom, sworn enemies estranged by hatred.

A Massachusetts soldier on the II Corps front told how his regiment made friends with a Confederate regiment opposite it and worked out a fairly extended cessation of hostilities, and he said that if the enlisted men of the two armies had the power to settle the war, "not another shot would have been fired." The friendly Confederate regiment was at length moved away from there, and just before it left a Rebel soldier stood up on the rampart and called out a warning: "Keep down, Yanks—we 'uns are going away." As soon as the replacements came in the firing was resumed. When the V Corps was shifted around to the left of the Union line, so that it faced the Confederates across the Chicka-hominy River, the 118th Pennsylvania and the 35th North Carolina put in the day sitting on opposite banks of the narrow stream, fishing and chatting.

A soldier in a New York heavy artillery regiment wrote that it seemed, now and then, as if an increasing number of Confederates were willing to slip over to the Union side after dark and surrender, yet he added wryly that "when it comes to fighting, one would not suppose that any of them had the faintest idea of surrendering." Between fights, he said, Northerners and Southerners talked things over, concluded that peace would be a very fine thing, and agreed that "if a few men on both sides who stayed at home were hung, matters could easily be arranged." ¹⁸

Yet the soldiers were only a part of it, and what happened to them out along the rifle pits amid the choking dust was having a queer reverse effect on men back home who would never know what it was like to charge a line of riflemen in the smoky twilight, gun butt raised to crush a human being's skull. For this was the year when the shadow of death lay all across America, and grotesque shapes moved within the shadow and laid hold of men's hearts and minds. The soldiers at the front could look ahead to peace without seeing it through a veil of hatred, and if they talked lightly about the need to hang a few stay-at-homes, they spoke as men who had seen so many killings that a few more might not make much difference. Yet there were quiet civilians who were talking of hangings, too, these days. They were men of years and peace, who might inspire violence but who had never actually seen any of it, and the war had worked upon them until they could feel that death and heartbreak were positive goods.

Some were men who had always lived by the sword, and they were beginning to see in this war a chance to reach a monstrous goal, with an undying fire blazing across a wasteland which had once been peopled by men who disagreed with them. But others were moderates, not usually given to thoughts of vengeance and reprisal, carried away now by the fury of war.

There was Gideon Welles, for instance, Secretary of the Navy, a white-whiskered, brown-wigged man, God-fearing and humorless and gossipy, a good Connecticut editor and politician who lived austerely, fathered a large family, and worshiped at the shrine of the Union. While the worst of the Cold Harbor fighting was going on, Welles communed with himself in his diary, seeing death and suffering as abstractions, remarking sagely that no man had been prepared for the extraordinary changes the war had brought. It often came to him, he wrote, that "greater severity" might well be invoked against the South—yet the thought had to be dealt with cautiously, for "it would tend to barbarism." And in his quiet study, where the night's peace was broken by no sound worse than the clatter of horse-drawn cabs on the paving stones outside the curtained windows, Welles reflected on the business of hanging one's enemies:

"No traitor has been hung. I doubt if there will be, but an example should be made of some of the leaders, for present and future good."

To be sure, the Southern leaders could be imprisoned or exiled, once the war was safely won, but that might not answer. People would try to rescue them, and parties would form to uphold their principles, and in the end these principles might revive and grow strong again. Perhaps ideas and emotions could be destroyed forever, if the men who held them were destroyed; and the thought led Mr. Welles to set down his conclusion:

"Death is the proper penalty and atonement, and will be enduringly beneficent in its influence."

But perhaps hangings would not be possible, since there is in man a deep tendency toward softness of heart. In such case, Mr. Welles felt, the Rebel leaders could at least be stripped of their wealth and their families impoverished. The effect of this (wrote the good family man) would be wholesome. Yet it did not really seem likely that any of these stern things would be done, and he concluded regretfully: "I apprehend there will be very gentle measures in closing up the rebellion." ¹⁹

Mr. Welles might be wrong about the inevitability of gentleness. In this year when blood-red fantasies danced against the clouded moon of war, men who had never seen the grotesque indignity of violent death could talk easily about the good fruits that might grow at the foot of the gallows tree, and devout Christians could wonder if something precious might not slip too easily through the loose meshes of Christian charity. At this moment, when casualties in the Army of the Potomac had averaged 2,000 men a day for a solid month, Abraham Lincoln was waging the hardest fight of his life to uphold the dream that peace could finally be made decently and justly, without malice or a desire to have revenge.

For of all the men who controlled and directed the war, Lincoln was the one who most deeply shared the spirit that moved across the steaming trenches at Cold Harbor—fight to the limit as long as the fighting has to go on, but strike hands and be friends the moment the fighting stops. Before the war even began, in that haunted springtime when its dark shape was rising, Lincoln had tried to warn North and South that they could never travel on separate roads. Win or lose, someday they would have to get along with each other again, and whatever they did before that day came had better be done in such a way that getting along together would still be possible. The soldiers had got the point perfectly, and they expressed it very simply: Hang a few troublemakers and we'll all go home. Mysteriously, the fighting seemed to be bringing them mutual understanding, and they may almost have been closer to each other, in spirit, than they were to their own civilians back home. Yet there was nothing they could do about it. They had not made the war and they would not end it. They could only fight it.

And the men who had made the war—the sharp politicians and the devoted patriots, the men who dreamed the American dream in different ways and the other men who never dreamed any dreams at all but who had a canny eye for power and influence—most of these, by now, were prisoners of their own creation.

The hospitals in Washington were full as never before, and every day steamers came up the river with more broken bodies to be unloaded, and it was easy for those who watched this pathetic pageant to be embittered by what had happened to these men rather than inspired by what they had dreamed of. It was hard to think clearly, and the act of embracing unmitigated violence could be a substitute for thought.

There was a colonel on Grant's staff who typified the trend perfecdy. He could see that Southern resistance was still very strong, although he did not seem to be able to see anything else very clearly, and he was going about the tents these days smiting an open palm with a clenched fist and growling: "Smash 'em up! Smash 'em up!" ²⁰ As a tactical slogan this had its faults, since logically it led to nothing better than Cold Harbor assaults, but it was a perfect expression of the growing state of mind behind the fighting fronts. Smash 'em up: the war cannot be settled, it can only be won; smash 'em up—and afterward, on the pulverized fragments, we can sit down quietly and decide what we are going to do next.

If the war was to be won, it was important that it be won soon. It had been born of anger and misunderstanding and it was breeding more as it went along. It was pushing men to the point where vengeance seemed essential, driving even a man like Secretary Welles to think well of the process of dangling a political opponent by the neck, with convulsive feet kicking at the unsustaining air. The longer the war lasted, the harder it was for people to think beyond victory, the more probable that victory when it finally came would have to be total and unconditional. What Lincoln and the soldiers wanted was a dream, and 2,000 casualties a day created an atmosphere in which dreams could not live.

So a Cold Harbor stalemate was unendurable, and among the people who saw this was General Grant. He had been commissioned to break the fighting power of the Confederacy, and he still hoped that it could be done by one bold stroke rather than by a slow process of grinding and strangling and wearing out. Before he even bothered to seek a truce so that dead men might be buried and wounded men brought back within the lines—they lay there, untended, for several days, bullets flying low above them—he set things in motion for a new move. The network of trenches grew deep and strong, but even as they took on their air of grim permanence the army that crouched in them was given a new objective.

From the moment he crossed the Rapidan, Grant's ruling idea had been to go for Lee's army without a letup—to keep that dangerous body of fighting men so everlastingly busy that it could never again seize the initiative, to compel it to fight its battles when and where Grant chose rather than by Lee's selection. The chance for decisive victory lay that way, and in the past month's fighting the army had come tolerably close to it two or three times. To stay in the Cold Harbor lines would be to give up all hope of decisive victory, for if anything was clear, it was that no offensive at or near Cold Harbor could possibly succeed. General Halleck was clucking like a worried mother hen, urging that the army stay put and conduct a siege, running no risks and counting on time and general military erosion to wear the enemy down.²¹ But even though Grant had given the Army of the Potomac more trench warfare in a month than it had had in all of its earlier existence, he still believed in a war of movement. He had taken Vicksburg by maneuver and he had one maneuver left, and now he would try it.

Grant had a basilisk's gaze. He could sit, whittling and smoking, looking off beyond the immediate scene, and what he was looking at was likely to come down in blood and ashes and crashing sound a little later. Right now he was looking all the way across the James River to a peaceful, sleepy Virginia city named Petersburg, which lay on the southern bank of the Appomattox River, twenty-odd miles south of Richmond, near the point where the Appomattox flows into the James.

What Grant saw when he stared off through the mists toward Petersburg was the Confederates' problem of supply. The immediate vicinity of Richmond did not begin to produce enough food and forage to support either Lee's army or the Confederate capital. An important part of this material came down from the Shenandoah Valley, over the Virginia Central Railroad and the James River Canal. Even more important, however, was what came up from the Deep South, and most of this came by railroads which ran through Petersburg. If the Federal army could seize Petersburg, the Army of Northern Virginia and the civil government which supported it would go on starvation rations. If, at the same time, the connection with the Shenandoah Valley could be broken, Richmond could no longer be defended.

Yet it was not Richmond itself which Grant wanted. He wanted to destroy Lee's army, and to do that he had to get it out of its trenches. The one way to compel it to move was to cut off its supplies. So he made his plans: seize Petersburg, block the line to the Shenandoah, and let hunger drive Lee's army out into the open. Once that happened there could be a finish fight, under conditions in which the Federal army's advantage in numbers ought to be decisive.

Within forty-eight hours of the failure of the June 3 assaults Grant was writing his orders, and by June 7 Sheridan had two of his cavalry divisions on the road, heading west for Charlottesville. At Charlottesville Sheridan was to meet an army under Major General David Hunter, who had replaced Sigei after that general's inglorious defeat at Newmarket. Hunter had the troops that had been Sigel's, another division which General George Crook had led east from West Virginia, and a good body of cavalry under Averell. With these men he had marched up the Valley to Staunton, crushing a small Confederate force which tried to delay him, and at Staunton he was turning east, burning and destroying as he came. Grant's idea was that Hunter and Sheridan would join forces and come down toward Richmond together, taking the Virginia Central Railroad apart as they came and rejoining the Army of the Potomac somewhere below the James River.²²

front at Cold Harbor, and the army as a whole was shifting slowly to its left, with Warrens corps lining up along the Chickahominy. A fleet of transports had come up the Pamunkey to the base at White House, and warships, transports, barges, and a great number of pontoons were being assembled at Fortress Monroe, ready to go up the James on order. The arrangements were intricate but they were well directed, and finally, late in the afternoon of June 12, Grant and Meade struck their headquarters tents and rode down the north bank of the Chickahominy, past Despatch Station, to make a new camp beside a cluster of catalpa trees in a farmhouse yard. As night came on, the hot air was filled with dust as 100,000 soldiers began moving out of the positions which they had occupied for the better part of a fortnight.

It was risky business. This was no mere repetition of the sidestep which had been done so many times on the march down from the Rapidan. This time the whole army was marching directly away from its foes, gambling that it could disappear completely even though the two armies were in intimate contact along a five-mile front, their lines nowhere more than a few hundred yards apart. Once it got clean away—if it did —the Federal army had to make a fifty-mile hike and cross a tidal river which was half a mile wide and fifteen fathoms deep: a river which, unlike all of the little streams which had been crossed earlier, bore on its surface a number of formidable ironclad Confederate gunboats. There were Yankee gunboats, to be sure, to keep these in check, but if even one Southern warship managed to slip past these defenders, it could turn the projected river crossing into disaster.

Much worse than the danger of the gunboats, however, was the chance that Lee would find out what was going on and would move out to interfere. If he should catch the Army of the Potomac in the act of turning its back on him and marching down to the James River, what he and his soldiers might do to it would hardly bear thinking about. Two years ago he had detected McClellan making the same move on the same ground, and only the utter greenness of his staff and command arrangements had kept him from destroying Mo

Clellan's army. The greenness had long since been corrected.

Yet in making this move Grant was not simply gambling that Lee could be hoodwinked. Lee or any other general could be fooled briefly, in this country of obscure roads and concealing swamps and woods, but it was not likely that he could be fooled for very long. What Grant was really banking on was the belief that the terrible pounding of the last six weeks had taken something out of the Army of Northern Virginia—that it was no longer the quick, instantly responsive instrument that had made such deadly thrusts in the past, and that it would not lash out today as it had done in 1862, when it discovered its opponent in the act of making a flank march across its front. Those tawny gray legions were still unconquerable behind trenches, but they had lost the incomparable offensive power of the old days: that, in essence, seems to have been the bet Grant was really making.²³

The different Federal moves were intricate, this night of June 12, but the timing was good. Hancock and Wright took their men back to the inner trench line as insurance against accidents. Smith led his XVIII Corps back to White House, where the transports were waiting. Burnside followed, turning off a few miles short of White House to follow a road down to the James. Wilson's cavalry, left behind by Sheridan, moved down to a Chickahominy crossing at Long Bridge— the bridge had long since been destroyed and the name merely designated a place—and went splashing across the river in the midnight dark, laying a pontoon bridge immediately afterward. Warren's V Corps promptly crossed on this bridge and marched boldly in the direction of Richmond along the fringe of historic White Oak Swamp.

By dawn of June 13 there was nobody left at Cold Harbor. Even the inner line was empty, for it needed to be held only long enough to protect the withdrawal of the rest of the army, and by daylight the VI Corps was following Burnside's men and Hancock was taking his corps down over the Long Bridge crossing. When Confederate skirmishers crept forward across the strangely silent rifle pits they found nothing but empty trenches and the indescribable unseemly refuse left behind by a departing army. Since the Yankees did seem to be moving toward Richmond below White Oak Swamp, Lee pulled his own army out of its lines and moved down to cover the capital, occupying roughly the ground that had been fought over so hard during the McClellan retreat in 1862, from Glen-dale to Malvern Hill. Meanwhile, Warren withdrew his own corps—he had moved forward simply to protect the rest of the army during the early stages of the march—and headed for a spot known as Charles City Courthouse, close to the James. Wilson's cavalry remained behind, holding all of the road crossings and driving back the inquisitive Rebel patrols. A curtain was drawn between the two armies, and for the first time in a month and a half Federal and Confederate infantry were out of contact.

Thoroughly delighted to get away from Cold Harbor, the men of the Army of the Potomac were also deeply surprised. For once, no camp rumor had warned of the move, and up to the last the men had been busy elaborating their trench system as if they were to stay there all year. Things had changed, one veteran mused, "and it was not now the custom to inform the rank and file, and the newspapers and the enemy, of intended movements." Another man was reminded by this march down to the river of the similar march two years earlier, under McClellan, and it seemed to him that everything was much better now than it had been then. Cold Harbor had been terrible, and what led up to it had not been much better, but morale was good and the men proved it by their looks and actions. On the earlier march they felt that they had been beaten, and were depressed; now they felt that they were on the way to victory, and they stepped out with a springy step.²⁴

Late in the afternoon of June 13 the advance guard reached the James River, coming down to it past an impressive plantation once owned by the late President Tyler—the "Tyler too" of the rowdy campaign song. The river was broad and it glinted in the afternoon sun, and it was the first really pleasant-looking body of water anybody had seen since the campaign began. Yankee warships were anchored in the stream, white awnings spread against the heat, small boats coming ashore with rhythmical dip and swing of dripping oars.

An officer on Meade's staff found himself blinking and gaping at these Navy people as they came ashore. There seemed to be something wrong about them, and at last he realized what it was. They were all clean, their persons washed, their uniforms whole, unfaded, and unsullied. The officer discovered that he had got to the point where he was suspicious of anyone who was not dirty and in rags. He was used to soldiers, and where soldiers were concerned, "the more they serve, the less they look like soldiers and the more they resemble day-laborers who had bought second-hand military clothes." ²⁵

Only the leading echelons of the army reached the river that evening. They included a swarm of engineers who immediately went to work to lay a pontoon bridge over to the southern shore. The army had never built such a prodigious bridge before. It would be nearly half a mile long and it would require more than a hundred pontoons, and three schooners had to be anchored in the deep water out in midstream to support the central section of the bridge. The sappers got to work without delay, tugboats and barges bringing men and material to each shore, and along the bank where the advance guard was camped there was a great chopping and shoveling, because a grove of huge old cypress trees had to be cut down and it was necessary to build a causeway across a swamp to provide an approach to the bridge. Other details went to work to put a half-ruined wharf in proper shape, a little upstream from the place where the bridge was being built, and the transports were anchored just offshore to take men aboard as soon as the wharf was repaired. As many of the soldiers as could get down to the water went in swimming, whooping and splashing as they began soaking off the sweat and grime of weeks of fighting.

A mile or so from the water, Gibbon's division was camped on the plantation of Tyler-too. The enemy was many miles away, and the officers announced that the camp need not be fortified. Nevertheless, as soon as the men had stacked their muskets they began to dig a long trench all across the western edge of the plantation, and before they went to bed they had the place in shape to resist a regular assault. Meade's assistant adjutant general looked on their handiwork and concluded that the enlisted man was convinced that a rifle pit was "a good thing to have in a family where there are small children." ²⁶