The combined Federal armies settled into fortifications running from northeast to southeast of Petersburg, Virginia. Major-General George G. Meade, commanding the Army of the Potomac, issued orders declaring that operations would be conducted according to “regular approaches.” This meant initiating siege tactics and gradually extending the Federal line until the defensive line of General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia broke. Federal crews began building railroad lines around the Petersburg perimeter, which would bring in supplies from City Point, at the confluence of the James and Appomattox rivers.
City Point quickly transformed from a small village to one of the biggest seaports on Earth. Over 200 vessels of all kinds brought supplies into City Point daily. Warehouses lined the shores, with enough quartermaster, ordnance, and commissary supplies to sustain up to half a million troops. A military hospital took up 200 acres and served up to 10,000 patients at a time. Passenger steamers connected City Point to Washington and brought civilians to work on the docks and in the bakeries, blacksmith shops, freight yards, and repair shops. A new railroad connected the docks to the army on 21 miles of track that branched off to serve all sectors of the Petersburg offense line on a regular basis.
City Point kept the Federals well supplied to conduct siege operations, even though technically this campaign was not a siege. This was because siege tactics were traditionally undertaken when an enemy was surrounded, and the Confederates were not. Federal General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant sought to eventually move around the Confederate right flank and surround the enemy, but the Lee’s army was too strong to allow it.
Washington A. Roebling, part of the Fifth Corps staff and future chief engineer on the Brooklyn Bridge, assessed operations in July: “Our siege is progressing slowly, at a very snail’s pace… no one seems to care about pushing it, we have lost all our energies for the time being, and it requires some great occasion to rouse them again, such as an attack for instance.”
As both sides dug in, Meade dealt with problems within his army. He had just made an uneasy peace with Major-General Gouverneur Warren, commanding the Fifth Corps. Charles Dana, observing the Petersburg campaign on behalf of the War Department, wrote to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton on July 1 that “the difficulty between Meade and Warren has been settled without the extreme remedy which Meade proposed last week.”
Dana shared army gossip with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton that “a change in the commander of the Army of the Potomac now seems probable.” Dana added about Meade, “I do not think he has a friend in the whole army. No man, no matter what his business or his service, approaches him without being insulted in one way or another, and his own staff officers do not dare speak to him unless first spoken to, for fear of either sneers or curses.”
Many of Meade’s subordinates resented him, and he was bitterly criticized by the press partly because of his harsh treatment of reporters. James Biddle of Meade’s staff defended his commander from his opponents, writing, “The trouble is they want to make Meade the scapegoat & are trying to fasten everything that goes wrong in the Army upon him.”
Major-General Winfield Scott Hancock, commanding the Second Corps, visited Meade on July 12. Meade wrote his wife, “Hancock told me today, he had been confidentially informed, it was intended to remove me from command and that he was to be my successor… said he believed it was a political intrigue & intimated a victim was wanted to appease the public & I was to be the man.”
Hancock told Meade that Grant most likely opposed the move, which seemed to indicate that the high command at Washington had lost faith in Grant’s leadership as well as Meade’s. All kinds of rumors circulated throughout the army, and nobody knew what to believe. Meade concluded, “I do not see as I can do any thing to defend myself against unknown enemies on unknown charges…”
Truthfully, President Abraham Lincoln had not lost confidence in Grant, but he could not deny that northern dissatisfaction with Grant was rapidly increasing. A cavalry raid on the Weldon Railroad in late June had failed; Colonel Theodore Lyman of Meade’s staff angrily wrote on July 16, “Those scamps the rebs have repaired the Weldon railroad… and have been running trains on it, for three or four days, past our noses.”
Grant told Meade that using the cavalry to wreck both the Weldon and the Richmond & Danville railroads “will be a great help to us.” But both Meade and Major-General Philip Sheridan, commanding the Cavalry Corps, said that such a move could not be made without strong infantry support. Grant was not willing to detach infantry from the Petersburg line until he got the Sixth and Nineteenth corps back from their pursuit of Confederates out of Washington.
It seemed that no real progress was being made outside Petersburg. An article in the New York World asked, “Who shall revive the withered hopes that bloomed on the opening of Grant’s campaign?” The enormous number of casualties shocked the administration so much that Lincoln felt it necessary to respond to a message Grant had sent Major-General William T. Sherman:
“In your dispatch of yesterday to General Sherman I find the following, to wit: ‘I shall make a desperate effort to get a position here which will hold the enemy without the necessity of so many men.’ Pressed as we are by lapse of time, I am glad to hear you say this; and yet I do hope you may find a way that the effort shall not be desperate in the sense of a great loss of life.”
Lincoln issued a proclamation on July 18 calling for 500,000 more volunteers to replenish the Virginia losses. To avoid another Wall Street crisis like that in May, Lincoln encouraged men to volunteer before the draft, which was ordered to take place after September 5 to fill any remaining quotas. This move made Lincoln just as unpopular as Grant in the North and endangered his reelection chances in the upcoming presidential election to the point that a Democratic editor quipped, “Lincoln is deader than dead.”
Bibliography
- Catton, Bruce, The Army of the Potomac: A Stillness at Appomattox. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1953.
- Catton, Bruce, Grant Takes Command. Open Road Media, Kindle Edition, 2015.
- Davis, William C., Death in the Trenches: Grant at Petersburg. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1983.
- Foote, Shelby, The Civil War, A Narrative: Red River to Appomattox. New York: Vintage Civil War Library, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Kindle Edition), 2011.
- Long, E.B. with Long, Barbara, The Civil War Day by Day. New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1971.
- Sears, Stephen W., Lincoln’s Lieutenants: The High Command of the Army of the Potomac. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books, (Kindle Edition), 2017.