But instead of going into line of battle and making an advance, they filed into the captured works, watched Smith's troops retire, ate their supper and boiled their coffee, and put out sentinels for the night. Slowly the men came to understand that there would be no fight that night, and one of them wrote afterward: "The rage of the enlisted men was devilish. The most bloodcurdling blasphemy I ever listened to I heard that night, uttered by men who knew they were to be sacrificed on the morrow. The whole corps was furiously excited." ¹³

So the II Corps went grumpily to sleep, and Smith's men went to sleep, and Beauregard's men stayed awake and worked hard. On a north-south ridge between the city and the works they had just lost, the Confederates were hard at it building new trenches and gun pits. During the night Hoke's division, which had been on loan north of the James, began to come in, and as the men were rushed out to the new defense line Beauregard took the last desperate step that was available: he ordered abandonment of the lines which held Butler's army immured at Bermuda Hundred, left a thin line of pickets there to watch the situation, and brought the men down to Petersburg. As a result of all of this, by morning he had 10,000 men or more in position to defend the town.¹⁴ The odds against him were still long, but they were nothing like what they had been the day before, and it was just possible now that Beauregard could hold on until Lee's army could come down below the river and help.

Meade was busy, too. During the evening of June 15 he got word from Grant that Smith was fighting hard and that the rest of the army must come up as soon as possible, and so Burnside and his IX Corps crossed the river with orders to move up and take position on the left of Hancock's corps. The V Corps was to follow Burnside, artillery and trains and cavalry were to follow that, and Wright's VI Corps would hold the north bank of the James until everyone else was south of the river. Then the VI Corps would come up, the pontoon bridge would be removed, and everything would be south of the James with City Point as the new supply base.

Meade himself crossed the river on the morning of June 16, and as he rode up from City Point toward Petersburg, along toward noon, he met Grant, just returning from an inspection of the front. Grant was full of enthusiasm, and he told Meade: "Smith has taken a line of works stronger than anything we have seen this campaign. If it is a possible thing I want an assault made at six o'clock this evening." ¹⁵

So ordered. Late in the day Hancock's and Burnside's troops were in line, the guns were in position in the captured works, and a great thunder of gunfire rolled out as the artillerists began to hammer the new Rebel trenches, which lay on the far side of a shallow valley. The sun was going down and the air was full of dust and smoke, and as Meade and his staff rode out to watch the fight there was a strange, coppery tinge in the atmosphere and on the landscape. Things looked posed and unreal, and one of Meade's party saw the gunners silhouetted against the unearthly light as they sponged out the guns and rammed the charges home and mused that they might have been lifted out of die old mezzotint engravings of Napoleon's battles which he used to see on the parlor wall of his parents' home.¹⁶

The Confederates had made good use of their time and the new line of works was strong. Hancock and Burnside sent their troops forward and there was bitter, inconclusive fighting. Gains were made, and the II Corps got in close around a commanding hill which anchored the left center of the Rebel line, but the Rebels lashed out with sharp counterattacks which made Meade think that Beauregard had a lot of troops in reserve, and in the end it was clear that the work could not be finished that day. The firing died out with a few spiteful rifle shots from the skirmish lines, and the hot guns on the ridge cooled as the sun went down, and Meade sent an officer back to City Point to give Grant a report.

This officer entered the general's tent and found Grant sitting on the edge of his cot, mostly undressed, just ready to go to sleep. He made his report, and Grant knew that Lee had only that afternoon begun to pull his troops out of the works north of the James to march for Petersburg; and he smiled a little and permitted himself a rare moment of self-congratulation, remarking: "I think it is pretty well, to get across a great river and come up here and attack Lee in the rear before he is ready for us." Then Grant went to bed and the staff officer returned to Meade, and everybody made ready for the next day.¹⁷

Next day ought to do it. Most of the army was up, by now —all of the II and V Corps, two divisions of Smith's corps and one of Wright's and three of Burnside's—in all, more than 80,000 fighting men. The men were very tired, for they had not yet had a chance to recover from six weeks' unbroken fighting and marching, and both Meade and Hancock noted that attacks now were not driven home as they used to be.¹⁸ But morale was high, for the men sniffed victory in the air, and as June 17 dawned opportunity was bright.

Beauregard's trenches were strong, but the line was uneven. It ran south from the Appomattox for four miles, or thereabouts, and it had two principal strong points—the Hare house hill, around which Hancock's men had gained a foothold the night before, and a similar hill a mile or two south and a little east of there, crowned by the house of a man named Shand. This latter hill lay in front of Burnside, and it seemed likely that it could be flanked, and Meade considered that a hard joint attack by Hancock and Burnside ought to knock out both of these strong points and break the line wide open.

Farther south the prospects were even better. The Confederates months ago had built trenches completely encircling Petersburg, but they did not begin to have men enough to occupy all of them. Because the whole Yankee army was massed east of town, Beauregard had massed all of his troops there to meet the threat. On the south he was wide open. There was a country turnpike that dropped south from Petersburg, bearing the pleasing name of the Jerusalem Plank Road, and it and the country west of it held no Rebel troops at all, except for a thin cordon of cavalry pickets. Beauregard was painfully aware that he was defenseless in that quarter, and he wrote later that if Meade had put so much as one army corps over on the Jerusalem Road and told it to march due north, "I would have been compelled to evacuate Petersburg without much resistance." ¹⁹

The army corps which might have made such a march was readily available—Warrens V Corps, which held the extreme left of Meade's line. It was the freshest outfit in the army, for it had not been involved in the hard fighting at Cold Harbor and had not, in fact, been heavily engaged since Spotsylvania. On June 16 Grant had wired Meade to get Warren over to the Jerusalem Road as fast as possible, and in a general way this was supposed to be Warren's objective on June 17. But Warren found Rebel skirmishers in his front and they were busy and seemed to be very bold and cocky, and Warren was cautious about pressing them too hard—and, in the end, nothing in particular was done and the empty country west of the Jerusalem Plank Road remained empty all day long.

On Warren's right there was hard fighting. Burnside dutifully moved up to attack the Shand house hill, where his men fought manfully but without intelligent direction. There was a ravine in front of the hill, and on the Yankee side the ground was full of gullies and patches of thick wood, which made it hard to form and move a line of battle. During the night Burnside's leading division, Potter's, struggled across this uneven ground. The going was hard, and the men had just made an all-night march after being under arms for thirty-six hours, and whenever a brigade or regiment was temporarily halted the men would drop where they were and go to sleep. When it was time to move on again they could be aroused only with much difficulty.

Line was formed close to the Confederate position. Orders were passed in a whisper, and the men were required to put their canteens in their haversacks so that they would not rattle. Just at dawn, with bayonets fixed, the division swept over the crest, plunged down into the ravine, and made for the Rebel position.²⁰

The position was strong, but there were few Rebels in it, and Potter's tired men seized the hill, dug some rifle pits, and looked around for the support that had been promised. On their right a division of the II Corps had been told to make a simultaneous attack, but orders had gone sour somewhere and the attack was not being made. (One trouble probably was that Hancock had finally been disabled by his old Gettysburg wound and had had to turn the corps over to the senior division commander, General Birney; in any case, liaison had broken down and the support was not there.)

In the rear things were no better. Another of Burnside's divisions, Ledlie's, had been supposed to follow on Potter's heels, but through some incredible breakdown in staff work nobody had told Ledlie about it and he and his men were sound asleep when the attack was launched. For the time being Potter's men could do nothing but dig in and wait.

Birney finally got his attack moving and it was successful, swamping the Confederate defenses on the Hare house hill, from which position the II Corps might have made a sweep toward the south, taking in flank what was left of the Confederate line. But control of the fight seems to have slipped out of Meade's hands, and no unit commander up front was concerned with anything except what lay immediately before him, and although the Confederate line had been broken in two places before noon nothing effective was done to exploit the openings.

Several hours passed. Burnside finally got a second division forward and it charged through Potter's troops and attacked the new line which Beauregard had patched up there. The men had to cross a railroad cut and climb a steep slope and there was a Confederate battery placed so that it could fire down the length of the railroad cut, and the new division was broken up and forced to retreat with nothing accomplished. Toward dusk, Burnside brought up Ledlie's division, and it went slamming down into the railroad cut and up the far side in the face of a furious fire. There were confused attacks and counterattacks all up and down the slope, and men used bayonets and clubbed muskets in desperate fights for gun pits. The 39th Massachusetts won an advanced position, losing three color-bearers, and at last was forced back, leaving its colors on the ground. Its colonel asked for volunteers to go out and get the flags. A corporal and a private responded and ran out to get them, and suddenly—and quite unexpectedly— the Confederates stopped firing, allowed the men to pick up the flags, and as they went back to the regiment the Rebels waved their hats and raised a cheer. Night came, and Ledlie's men got to the crest of the slope, seized the Confederate works there, and then had to stop because they had run out of ammunition.

So once more the Confederate line had been broken, and Beauregard wrote afterward that it then seemed to him that "the last hour of the Confederacy had arrived." But the Union command system just was not functioning this day, and the story at twilight was a repetition of the story at dawn: it had occurred to no one to have troops ready to follow up a success, and there had not even been any routine arrangements for getting ammunition up to the firing line, and the strategy which had enabled the army to fight for Petersburg with eight-to-one odds in its favor was totally wasted. The day ended and the fighting ended, and in the darkness Beauregard retired his entire line to a final position within easy gunshot of the town.²¹

There was still a chance. Lee was getting his Army of Northern Virginia down to Petersburg with driving speed-lean men in faded uniforms or no uniforms hurrying on through the night, desperately in earnest and handled by a soldier who knew precisely what he was doing and how to do it—but he had not got there yet and he would not be able to get there until several hours after daylight on June 18. A dim awareness of this fact seems to have been astir in the headquarters tents of the Army of the Potomac, and during the night Meade issued orders for an attack all along the line at the moment of dawn.²²

When light came on June 18 it brought only more confusion. The Federals now were posted on a long ridge, with the Hare and Shand house hills in their possession, and Beauregard's last line was on an opposite ridge, and the different Federal commanders seem to have felt that they ought to explore this new position with some care before they attacked. Up near the river Baldy Smith's troops seized a Confederate skirmish line, took a number of prisoners, and then halted. Birney found himself unable to get his men moving until nearly noon, when he attacked with one division and was quickly repulsed. Burnside managed to edge some men forward and consolidated the position he had won the evening before on the far side of the railroad cut, but he waited for Warren to go into action on his left and this wait turned out to be rather long.

Warren began to move at dawn, as ordered, with all four of his divisions abreast, and he had the power to go sweeping through to the Jerusalem Road, wheel toward the north, and break things up once and for all. But he ran into skirmish fire, found the ground unfamiliar, and at six o'clock halted his men and told them to dig in while patrols examined the ground in their front.

In the rear Meade was in a foul temper, which kept growing worse, and he emitted a furious stream of orders in a completely futile attempt to bring about the united attack which had been designed. Hours passed, and the breakdown in the command system became complete, and by early afternoon Meade was wiring to his corps commanders: "I find it useless to appoint an hour to effect co-operation . . . what additional orders to attack you require I cannot imagine. . . . Finding it impossible to effect co-operation by appointing an hour for attack, I have sent an order to each corps commander to attack at all hazards and without reference to each other." ²³

Late in the afternoon, the attacks were finally made. It was too late, by now, for Lee's veterans were in the trenches at last and the eight-to-one odds had vanished forever; this was Cold Harbor all over again, with its cruel demonstration that trench lines properly manned could not be taken by storm. The chance had gone, and an attack now could result in nothing but destruction for the attackers.

The men were lying down when the order to charge the Rebel works came in, and as the officers shouted and waved their swords the inexperienced artillerists sprang to their feet while the veterans ahead of them continued to lie prone. The veterans looked back, saw the rookies preparing to charge, and called out: "Lie down, you damn fools, you cant take them forts!"

One of the artillery regiments, 1st Massachusetts heavies, accepted this advice, lay down again, and made no charge. The other one, 1st Maine, valiantly stayed on its feet, ran forward through the rows of prostrate men, and made for the Confederate line. It was a hopeless try. The Confederate gun pits had been built low and the black muzzles of the guns that peered evilly out of the embrasures were no more than a foot or two above the ground, and when they fired the canister came in just off the grass so that nobody could escape. The whole slope was burned with fire, and in a few minutes more than 600 of the 900 men in the regiment had been shot down, the ground was covered with mangled bodies, and the survivors were running for the rear.²⁴

In another part of the II Corps front, what remained of the veteran Excelsior Brigade of New York troops was moving up to the attack. The men passed through a line of artillery, and a gunner called out to ask if they were going to make a charge. A soldier answered him: "No, we are not going to charge. We are going to run toward the Confederate earthworks and then we are going to run back. We have had enough of assaulting earthworks."

The gunner who asked the question went to the rear shortly after this with a caisson to get more ammunition. He got his load and on his return he noticed that the road led over an open hill in such a way that he and his wagonload of explosives would be in clear view of a distant Confederate battery. While he was reflecting that he would undoubtedly draw Confederate fire, he noticed that in a field on the reverse slope of the hill several hundred stragglers were lounging about little campfires, boiling coffee and enjoying themselves. He mused that these were the worthless bounty men and conscripts who had fled from the firing line, and whose mere presence in uniform weakened the entire corps, and he wished earnestly that something bad would happen to them: and just then the Rebel gunners caught sight of him, swung their guns in his direction, and let fly with a salvo.

The range was long and their aim was imperfect, and the shells missed the caisson and skimmed down into the very middle of the coffee boilers, where they exploded and sent campfires and coffee pots up in flying dust and sparks and smoke. On the ground were screaming men, fearfully wounded, and those who had not been hurt were mnning desperately for the woods; and the gunner reined in to enjoy the scene, and hugged his knees and rocked in wild laughter, and when he got back to his battery he told his mates it was "the most refreshing sight I had seen for weeks." ²⁵

The afternoon's attacks came to nothing at all. Warren and Burnside finally sent their men forward at three o'clock—the morning's opportunity gone with the morning's mists—and the Army of Northern Virginia was waiting for them in secure trenches, and the men were repulsed with heavy loss. The day ended, finally, and Meade wired Grant that nothing more could be done. He added piously that "our men are tired and the attacks have not been made with the vigor and force which characterized our fighting in the Wilderness; if they had been, I think we should have been more successful."

Grant replied that they would make no more assaults: "Now we will rest the men and use the spade for their protection until a new vein has been cut." ²⁶

So the men huddled in their trenches, and after dark they could hear the mocking sound of the belfry clocks in Petersburg striking the hours, and a man in a Connecticut regiment wrote that "this was the most intolerable position the regiment was ever required to hold." ²⁷

in that respect the situation here was no worse than it had been at Cold Harbor or half a dozen other places. What made it truly intolerable was the realization, running from end to end of a tired, heartsick army, that the greatest chance of the war had been missed—and that, as a military critic expressed it years afterward, "the blame of the failure to take Petersburg must rest with our generals, not with our army." ²⁸