The president and his best general knew they had to end the menace in Virginia—but which strategy would work?
In the mind of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the great problem with Union strategy up to 1864 had been that Northern armies had generally “acted separately and independently of each other.” After he was appointed general-in-chief of the Federal armies on March 9, 1864, “I determined to stop this,” Grant bluntly declared in his memoirs.
Grant’s determination was reflected in the plan he developed in the weeks after his appointment for Union operations in Virginia. “Oh, yes, I see that,” Abraham Lincoln exclaimed when Grant presented it. “As we say out West, if a man can’t skin he must hold a leg while someone else does.”
But as is usually the case in war, the course of operations would compel adjustments, and there would be a profound change in who was to do the skinning and who was to do the holding in Virginia.
During the first week of May 1864, Grant ordered four separate Union forces to more or less simultaneously begin offensive operations in Virginia. The most important of these was Maj. Gen. George G. Meade’s hard-luck Army of the Potomac, assisted by Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s independent IX Corps. To this force, Grant assigned the unenviable task of crossing the Rapidan River to take on Gen. Robert E. Lee’s seemingly indomitable Army of Northern Virginia. As Grant saw it, the key was to eliminate the main Confederate armies in the field—and Lee’s army was unquestionably the center of the Confederate war effort. “Lee’s army will be your objective point,” Grant told Meade. “Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.”
As Meade and Burnside went after Lee under Grant’s personal direction, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler’s Army of the James was to operate along its namesake river and menace the Confederate capital at Richmond, holding forces there that might otherwise be sent to Lee’s aid.
West of the Blue Ridge, where the past three years had been a tale of unmitigated woe for the Union war effort, Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel was in charge. Grant assigned him two tasks. The first was to have a cavalry force commanded by Brig. Gen. George Crook and a mixed force commanded by Maj. Gen. E.O.C. Ord and Brig. Gen. William W. Averell target vital Confederate resources in the mountains and valleys of West Virginia. The second was for a force under Sigel’s personal command to advance south up the Shenandoah Valley from Harpers Ferry, W.Va. But Grant made clear in a letter to William T. Sherman that he did not have high expectations of Sigel and considered his efforts in the Valley decidedly secondary to his own. At the least, Grant declared, “if Sigel can’t skin himself he can hold a leg while someone else skins.”
Butler and Sigel proved unequal to the task of “holding,” however. Defeats at New Market and Drewry’s Bluff in mid-May cost Sigel his command and compelled Butler to take refuge in an entrenched position at Bermuda Hundred. Meanwhile, in what became known as the Overland Campaign, Grant’s and Lee’s forces suffered horrific casualties in a series of brutal engagements at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, the North Anna River, Totopotomoy Creek and Cold Harbor.
Yet by mid-June, Grant had placed Meade’s command in a position near Richmond, where it could cooperate with Butler’s. And Sigel’s replacement, Maj. Gen. David Hunter, led Union forces to an all-too-rare battlefield victory in the Shenandoah Valley at Piedmont on June 5. The win had the happy effect of allowing Hunter to push farther south toward Lexington, keeping Confederate manpower in the Valley and away from Grant. One week after Piedmont, Grant opened an offensive against Petersburg, ordering his forces from Cold Harbor south toward the James.
On learning Grant had crossed the James, Lincoln relaxed his stance on keeping the Army of the Potomac where it could not directly shield Washington. “I begin to see it,” he wrote Grant. “You will succeed. God bless you all.”
But Grant came a hair short of seizing Petersburg. Nonetheless, with Hunter holding in the Valley, Lee and the forces defending Richmond and Petersburg seemed ripe for skinning. Grant’s first try, an attempt to extend the Union lines to the South Side Railroad on June 22, proved a fiasco, ending with the vaunted II Corps losing 1,700 prisoners in the Battle of the Jerusalem Plank Road.
Grant, however, was undeterred. He authorized Federal forces east of Petersburg to begin regular siege approaches against the Confederate defenses protecting vital Cemetery Hill. Grant wasn’t convinced siege operations alone could bring timely results, but believed he had enough troops around Petersburg to also move around the Confederate right to seize roads and rail lines south of the city that sustained its defenders. In addition to Meade’s four corps, Grant had one of Butler’s in the trenches in front of Petersburg; the rest of Butler’s command could man the trenches at Bermuda Hundred and maintain a bridgehead at Deep Bottom on the north side of the James. On top of this, Grant anticipated the arrival of the XIX Corps, fresh from Louisiana.
Then, as he had done so often threw a massive wrench into Union plans. The Confederate commander gambled that Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early’s Corps would do more for the Con- federate cause against Hunter than it could as part before, Lee of the force confronting Grant. Early’s command reached Lynchburg June 17-18, linking up with Confederate forces commanded by Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge as Hunter’s Federals advanced from the west. Early’s menacing forces caused Hunter to fall back toward Charleston, W.Va.—which gave Early a clear road north to the Potomac River. On July 5-6, Early pushed his 14,000 men across the Potomac then turned east in the direction of Washington, D.C. He defeated a Federal force commanded by Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace near Frederick, Md., on July 9. The following day Grant, who had sent Maj. Gen. Horatio Wright’s VI Corps from Petersburg and diverted a detachment from the XIX Corps to defend Washington, received a message from Lincoln politely requesting a wholesale rethinking of who was holding and who was skinning. “Now what I think is that you should provide to retain your hold where you are certainly, and bring the rest with you personally,” Lincoln declared, “and make a vigorous effort to destroy the enemy’s force in this vicinity.”
Grant resisted making as big a diversion as Lincoln sought, advising the president that he believed “it would have a bad effect for me to leave here” and that he already had “sent from here a whole corps commanded by an excellent officer….One division of the Nineteenth Corps, six thousand strong is now on its way to Washington.”
After a sharp engagement with the Federals at Fort Stevens on July 11-12, Early fell back and had the last of his command re-crossing the Potomac at White’s Ford on July 14.
Grant could be forgiven perhaps if he thought he had done enough. Wright prepared to return with his corps and the XIX Corps detachment to Petersburg, and Grant went ahead with operations north and south of the James River beginning July 26 with a mixed force of infantry and cavalry testing the Confederate defenses in the First Deep Bottom expedition. That was followed four days later with an attempt to break the Confederate lines east of Petersburg by digging a mine under them and then blowing a hole large enough to let an assaulting force seize Cemetery Hill, which would render the Southern defenses at Petersburg all but untenable.
Partly to avoid that political meddling in military operations contributed mightily to the army’s problems in Virginia, Lincoln had planned to leave combat decisions to Grant. But when Early arrived on the outskirts of feeding a widely held perception Washington—and then fell back to Virginia for all intents and purposes unmolested—Lincoln wasn’t convinced Grant clearly understood just how serious the situation was. The president’s frustration was further exacerbated when news arrived that Early had taken advantage of Wright’s departure to inflict yet another embarrassing defeat on Federal forces in the Shenandoah Valley at Second Kernstown on July 24. In particular, Lincoln wanted Grant to fix the command situation around the capital and in the Shenandoah Valley, with the obvious solution being to combine the four separate departments that had bungled their response to Early into a single command.
Two days after Second Kernstown, a member of Grant’s staff traveled to Washington to present Lincoln with a proposal to combine them into a single military department under Meade’s command. While Lincoln agreed with the idea of combining the departments, the president had had enough of dealing with Grant through intermediaries and telegraph messages. On July 26 and 28 Washington informed Grant that Lincoln intended to “meet you at Fort-Monroe.” Grant begged off on a July 30 meeting because of the pending mine operation, so the meeting was rescheduled for July 31.
By that time, however, events had further fouled the mood when the president arrived at Fort Monroe. While the mine did work—spectacularly—the follow-up assault was badly botched. The failure at the Crater came on the heels of the bungled first assault on Petersburg and the fiasco at the Jerusalem Plank Road. As if this were not bad enough, the very same day the Crater debacle unfolded, elements from Early’s command suddenly appeared at Chambersburg, Pa., and, with their demand for a ransom of $500,000 in U.S. currency or $100,000 in gold unmet, put the town to the torch.
No record exists of what exactly was said between Lincoln and Grant when they met at Fort Monroe. Grant made no mention of the meeting in his memoirs at all. At the least, whatever thought Grant had that his original vision could remain intact about who would hold and who would skin was undoubtedly put to rest.
On the back of a telegram from Grant, Lincoln had scribbled “Meade & Franklin/McClellan/Md. & Penna.” Grant had proposed in preparing for the meeting that a unified command around Washington and in the Shenandoah Valley be placed under the direction of either Meade or Maj. Gen. William B. Franklin. For his part, Lincoln had been entertaining the possibility of bringing McClellan back in a military capacity. This had a significant political calculation behind it: McClellan had been approached to find out if he’d be willing to accept a new command, thus eliminating the prospect of the Democratic Party nominating him for president. Though Grant later recalled he’d been interested in bringing “Little Mac” back to active service earlier in 1864, Lincoln may have raised the subject at Fort Monroe as a thinly veiled reminder to Grant of the hazards of not managing affairs to the president’s satisfaction.
In any case, Lincoln undoubtedly made clear that he did not believe that any of these men possessed the qualities necessary for dealing with Early. To be sure, all three had demonstrated their ability to conduct defensive operations and were thus suited to a holding mission. But that was not what the president had in mind for the Valley. Lincoln wanted a skinner.
Finally, Grant proposed Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan for the job, a man who had repeatedly displayed the will and ability to skin the Confederates. Some in Washington had qualms about whether Sheridan was experienced enough for such an important command, but he had the qualities Lincoln wanted. He approved the appointment and Grant’s instructions for Sheridan “to put himself south of the enemy and follow him to the death. Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also.”
Until Early had been eliminated as a menace once and for all, Grant knew he could not hope to get Sheridan back to the task of defeating Lee. Thus, in front of Petersburg and Richmond, Grant would spend the late summer and fall of 1864 conducting relatively limited—though by no means inconsequential or bloodless—operations around the James.
If there was going to be a skinning in Virginia in the summer and fall of 1864, Grant recognized that it would be Sheridan’s job in the Valley. As history shows, “Little Phil” was fully up to it.
Historian Ethan S. Rafuse is a professor at the U.S. Army Command General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and is the author of Robert E. Lee and the Fall of the Confederacy, 1863-1865.
Originally published in the September 2014 issue of America’s Civil War. To subscribe, click here.
