The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (166 page)

Instead of lifting it grew heavier as the red ball of the sun bounced clear of the landline. Gordon saw plainly that without help from the nonexistent forts he not only could not deepen or widen the dent he had made, he would not even be able to hold what he had won by the predawn rush. Accordingly, he notified Lee of his predicament, and word came back, shortly before 8 o’clock, for him to call off the attack and withdraw. The Georgian was altogether willing to return to his own lines, but the same could not be said for hundreds of his soldiers, who preferred surrender to running the gauntlet of fire that boxed them in. As a result, Confederate losses for this stage of the operation came to about 3500 men, half of them captives, as compared to a Federal total of 1044. Nor was that all. Convinced that Lee must have stripped the rest of his southside line to provide troops for the strike at Stedman, Grant ordered a follow-up assault to be launched against the rebel right, where Hill’s intrenched picket line was overrun near Hatcher’s Run, inflicting heavy casualties and taking close to a thousand additional prisoners, not to mention securing a close-up hug on Hill’s main line of resistance. By the time a truce was called that afternoon for collecting the dead and wounded on both sides, the casualty lists had grown to 4800 for Lee and 2080 for Grant. The bungled affair of the Crater — which today’s effort so much resembled, both in purpose and in outcome
— had been redressed, although with considerably heavier losses all around.

Another difference was that the southern commander could ill afford what his opponent had shrugged off, eight months ago and less than a mile down the line, with no more than a brief loss of temper. Riding rearward, Lee met Rooney coming forward in advance of his division. With him was his younger brother Robert, now a captain on his staff. Both greeted their father, who gave them the news that there would be no cavalry phase of the operation. The assault had failed, and badly, at great cost. “Since then,” Robert declared long afterwards, “I have often recalled the sadness of his face, its careworn expression.”

Lee’s depression was well founded. On no single day since the Bloody Angle was overrun at Spotsylvania had he lost so many prisoners, and these combined with the killed and wounded had cost him a solid tenth of his command, as compared to Grant’s loss of less than a sixtieth. “The greatest calamity that can befall us is the destruction of our armies,” he had warned Davis eleven days ago, while Gordon was planning the Stedman operation. “If they can be maintained, we may recover from our reverses, but if lost we have no resource.” Today marked a sizeable step toward the destruction of the first army of them all. Moreover, it had gained him nothing, while costing him Hill’s outer defenses, now occupied by Grant, who could be expected to launch a swamping assault from this new close-up position — a sort of Stedman in reverse — in just the direction Lee would be obliged to move when he tried for a breakout west and south: no longer for the purpose of combining with Johnston for a lunge at Sherman before the red-head crossed the Roanoke, but simply as the only remaining long-shot chance of postponing the disaster he foresaw. Notifying Breckinridge of the failed attack, he made no complaint of Gordon’s miscalculations; he merely remarked that the troops had “behaved most handsomely.” But next day, in following this with a report to the President, he confessed himself at a loss as to his next move, except that he knew he had to get away, and soon. “I fear now it will be impossible to prevent a junction between Grant and Sherman,” he frankly admitted, “nor do I deem it prudent that this army should maintain its position until the latter shall approach too near.”

He was warning again that Richmond would have to be given up any day now, but what would follow that abandonment he did not say; perhaps because he did not know. All he seemed to have in mind was a combination with Johnston for the confrontation that was bound to ensue. “I have thought it proper to make the above statement to Your Excellency of the condition of affairs,” he concluded, “knowing that you will do whatever may be in your power to give relief.”

But the power was Grant’s, and Grant knew it. When Lincoln
came to headquarters, shortly after the Confederates began their withdrawal from Fort Stedman — those of them, that is, who did not choose surrender over running the gauntlet of fire — the general observed that the assault had been less a threat to the integrity of the Union position than it was an indication of Lee’s desperation in regard to the integrity of his own. Accordingly, he rescheduled the V Corps review, which would be staged in rear of a sector just south of the one where Gordon’s attack had exploded before dawn, and decided as well that the President would be safe enough in taking a look at the ground where the struggle had raged between 4 and 8 o’clock that morning.

So it was that Lincoln, going forward on the railroad to the margin of that field, saw on a considerably larger scale what he had seen at Fort Stevens eight months earlier, just outside Washington. Mangled corpses were being carted rearward for burial in the army cemetery near City Point — which incidentally, like everything else in that vicinity, had been much expanded since his brief visit in June of the year before — and men were being jounced on stretchers, writhing in pain as they were lugged back for surgeons to probe their wounds or remove their shattered arms and legs. There was pride and exhilaration in statements that Parke, cut off from communication with Meade and Grant while the fighting was in progress, had used only his three IX Corps divisions to contain and repulse the rebels without outside help. But for Lincoln, interested though he always was in military matters, the pleasure he would ordinarily have taken in such reports was greatly diminished by the sight of what they had cost. He looked “worn and haggard,” an officer who accompanied him declared; “He remarked that he had seen enough of the horrors of war, that he hoped this was the beginning of the end, and that there would be no more bloodshed.”

Still another shock was in store for him before the day was over, this one involving his wife. For some time now, particularly since the death of her middle and favorite son, eleven-year-old Willie, Mary Lincoln had been displaying symptoms of the mental disturbance that would result, a decade later, in a medical judgment of her case as one of insanity. Her distress, though great, was scarcely greater than her family misfortunes — exclusive of the greatest, still to come. Four of her five Kentucky brothers had gone with the South, and three of them died at Shiloh, Baton Rouge, and Vicksburg. Similarly, three of her four sisters were married to Confederates, one of whom fell at Chickamauga. Such losses not only brought her grief, they also brought on a good deal of backhand whispering about “treason in the White House.” All this, together with Lincoln’s lack of time to soothe her hurts and calm her fears, combined to produce a state in which she was quick to imagine slights to her lofty station and threats to all she valued most, including her two surviving sons and her husband.

It was the latter who was in danger today, or so she conceived
from something she heard as she rode with Mrs Grant and Lieutenant Colonel Adam Badeau, Grant’s military secretary, in an ambulance on the way to the review that had been rescheduled for 3 o’clock. Badeau happened to remark that active operations could not be far off, since all army wives had recently been ordered to the rear: all, that is, but the wife of Warren’s ranking division commander, Mrs Charles Griffin, who had been given special permission by the President to attend today’s review. The First Lady flared up at this. “What do you mean by that, sir? Do you mean to say that she saw the President alone? Do you know that I never allow the President to see any woman alone?” Speechless with amazement at finding her “absolutely jealous of poor, ugly Abraham Lincoln,” the colonel tried to assume a pleasant expression in order to show he meant no malice; but the effect was otherwise. “That’s a very equivocal smile, sir,” Mrs Lincoln exclaimed. “Let me out of this carriage at once! I will ask the President if he saw that woman alone.”

Badeau and Mrs Grant managed to persuade her not to alight in the mud, but it was Meade who saved the day. Coming up to pay his respects on their arrival, he was taken aside by Mrs Lincoln for a hurried exchange from which she returned to fix the flustered staffer with a significant look. “General Meade is a gentleman, sir,” she told him. “He says it was not the President who gave Mrs Griffin the permit, but the Secretary of War.” Badeau afterwards remarked that Meade, the son of a diplomat, “had evidently inherited some of his father’s skill.”

Unfortunately, the Pennsylvanian was not on hand for a similar outburst the following day, when the troops reviewed were Ord’s, beyond the James. Arriving late, again in an ambulance with the staff colonel and Mrs Grant, Mrs Lincoln found the review already in progress, and there on horseback beside her husband, who was mounted too — he wore his usual frock coat and top hat, though his shirt front was rumpled and his strapless trouser legs had worked up to display “some inches of white socks” — was Mrs Ord. She was neither as young nor as handsome as Mrs Griffin, but that was no mitigation in Mary Lincoln’s eyes. “What does the woman mean by riding by the side of the President? And ahead of me! Does she suppose that
he
wants
her
by the side of
him?”
She was fairly launched, and when Mrs Grant ventured a few words of reassurance she turned on her as well, saying: “I suppose you think you’ll get to the White House yourself, don’t you?” Julia Grant’s disclaimer, to the effect that her present position was higher than any she had hoped for, drew the reply: “Oh, you had better take it if you can get it. ’Tis very nice.”

Mrs Ord, seeing the vehicle pull up, excused herself to the dignitaries around her. “There come Mrs Lincoln and Mrs Grant; I think I had better join them,” she said, unaware of the tirade in progress across the way, and set out at a canter. It was not until she drew rein
beside the ambulance that she perceived that she might have done better to ride in the opposite direction. “Our reception was not cordial,” an aide who accompanied her later testified discreetly. Badeau, a former newsman, gave a fuller account of Mrs Ord’s ordeal. “Mrs Lincoln positively insulted her, called her vile names in the presence of a crowd of officers, and asked what she meant by following up the President. The poor woman burst into tears and inquired what she had done, but Mrs Lincoln refused to be appeased, and stormed till she was tired. Mrs Grant tried to stand by her friend, and everybody was shocked and horrified. But all things come to an end, and after a while we returned to City Point.”

Things were no better there, however: certainly not for Lincoln, who was host that night at a dinner given aboard the
Queen
for the Grants and Grant’s staff. Mrs Lincoln, with the general seated on her right, spent a good part of the evening running down Ord, who she said was unfit for his post, “not to mention his wife.” Making no headway here, she shifted her scorn toward her husband, up at the far end of the table, and reproached him for his attentions to Mrs Griffin and Mrs Ord. Lincoln “bore it,” Badeau noted, “with an expression of pain and sadness that cut one to the heart, but with supreme calmness and dignity. He called her Mother, with old-time plainness; he pleaded with eyes and tones, and endeavored to explain or palliate the offenses.” Nothing worked, either at table or in the saloon afterwards; “she turned on him like a tigress,” until at last “he walked away, hiding that noble, ugly face that we might not catch the full expression of its misery.” Yet that did not work either; she kept at him. After the guests had retired, she summoned the skipper of the
Bat
, Lieutenant Commander John S. Barnes, who had been present at today’s review, and demanded that he corroborate her charge that the President had been overattentive to Mrs Ord. Barnes declined the role of “umpire,” as he put it, and earned thereby her enmity forever. He left, and when he reported aboard next morning to inquire after the First Lady, Lincoln replied that “she was not at all well, and expressed the fear that the excitement of the surroundings was too great for her, or for any woman.”

By then it was Monday, March 27. Sherman’s courtesy call that evening, within an hour of his arrival from down the coast, was all the more welcome as a diversion: for Lincoln at any rate, if not for the red-haired Ohioan, who had accepted Grant’s suggestion — “Suppose we pay him a visit before supper?” — with something less than delight at the prospect. “All right,” he said. He had small use for politicians, including this one, whom he had met only once, four years ago this week, at the time when the Sumter crisis was heading up. Introduced at the White House by his senator brother as a first-hand witness of recent activities in the South, he testified that the people there were preparing for all-out conflict. “Oh, well,” he heard the lanky Kentuckian say, “I
guess we’ll manage to keep house.” Disgusted, he declined to resume his military career, and though he relented when the issue swung to war, he retained down the years that first impression of a lightweight President.

Now aboard the
Queen
, however — perhaps in part because he could later write, “He remembered me perfectly” — he found himself in the presence of a different man entirely, one who was “full of curiosity about the many incidents of our great march” and was flatteringly concerned “lest some accident might happen to the army in North Carolina in my absence.” Sherman’s interest, quickened no doubt by Lincoln’s own, deepened into sympathy as the exchange continued through what he called “a good, long, social visit.” He saw lights and shadows unsuspected till now in a figure that had been vague at best, off at the far end of the telegraph wire running back to Washington. “When at rest or listening,” he would say of his host, now three weeks into a second term, “his arms and legs seemed to hang almost lifeless, and his face was careworn and haggard; but, the moment he began to talk, his face lighted up, his tall form, as it were, unfolded, and he was the very impersonation of good-humor and fellowship.”