On the morning of June 13, 1864, Confederate scouts edged toward the Union lines outside Cold Harbor, Virginia, and found them empty. The trenches where a hundred thousand federal soldiers had crouched for nine days were silent. No rifles, no cook fires, no men. The entire Army of the Potomac had walked away in the dark, and Robert E.
Lee had no clear idea where it had gone. For six weeks, since the first days of May, Grant had hammered south through Virginia in what history would call the Overland Campaign. The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, the North Anna. Each time, Lee blocked him.
Each time, Grant slid to his left and pressed on. Then came Cold Harbor. On June 3, Grant ordered a frontal assault on Lee’s entrenched line. In the span of an hour, thousands of Union soldiers fell in front of works they could not break.
Grant later wrote that he always regretted that assault. For nine days afterward, the two armies lay in trenches, sometimes only yards apart, the dead between them, the heat rising. The campaign looked stalled, and critics had begun calling Grant a butcher. But Grant was planning something audacious.
He would abandon the trenches entirely, march the whole army across the Chickahominy River and then the James, and seize Petersburg, the rail hub roughly twenty miles south of Richmond that fed Lee’s army and the Confederate capital. The hard part was the leaving. Pulling a hundred thousand men out of trenches a stone’s throw from the enemy without Lee noticing was the kind of thing that got armies destroyed. So Grant built a deception.
Through the evening of June 12, the corps farthest from the enemy slipped away. The two corps nearest Lee’s line, under Winfield Scott Hancock and Horatio Wright, held the works late, then pulled back to a prepared line of earthworks to make it look as if the army meant to stay. Bands played, pickets kept up their fire, cavalry rode out to screen the roads. Far to the west, Grant sent Philip Sheridan and most of his cavalry on a raid toward Trevilian Station to pull Lee’s horsemen away.
To the south, Benjamin Butler stirred at Bermuda Hundred to hold Confederate attention near Richmond. The plan was a small masterpiece of staff work. Meade’s chief of staff, Major General Andrew Humphreys, drew it up as four coordinated columns, each with its own road and its own river crossing, so that a hundred thousand men and their wagons would not pile into a single bottleneck in the dark. Through the night of June 12 and into June 13, the army flowed south across the Chickahominy on pontoon bridges the engineers had laid down in advance.
By the time Lee’s scouts found the empty trenches at sunrise, the lead elements were already miles away. Lee was furious and blind. He knew only that Grant was gone. He assumed Grant would do what he had done every time before, slide around his flank and keep pressing toward Richmond.
So he shifted his army to cover the approaches to the capital and waited to pick up the scent. The hardest part of the plan was not the leaving. It was the river still in front of him. The James is one of the great rivers of Virginia, broad and tidal as it runs toward the Chesapeake Bay.
For an army on the move, it was a wall of water. Somewhere along its banks, Grant had to put a hundred thousand men, their guns, their wagons, and their herds of cattle across to the south side, and he had to do it fast before Lee found him and before the army was caught split between two shores. Grant’s engineers had been studying the river for days. One of the men who helped choose the spot was a young lieutenant named Peter Mickey, born in Brechin, Scotland, raised in Cincinnati, and graduated near the top of his West Point class only the year before.
Mickey served under Brigadier General Godfrey Weitzel, the chief engineer of the Army of the James. In the second week of June, he was sent down to the lower river to find a place where the impossible might be done. He found it at Weyanoke Point, a low tongue of land on a wide bend of the James a few miles below the old plantation landings of Charles City County. Across the water stood Windmill Point near the earthwork called Fort Powhatan.
The numbers tell the whole story. At Weyanoke Point, the James ran roughly 2,100 feet wide, well over a third of a mile of open water. The main channel was deep, about 85 feet to the bottom. It was tidal, so the water rose and fell three to four feet twice a day, and the current through the channel was strong enough to tear a bridge loose and carry it off.
You could not build piers; the water was far too deep to drive them. You could not ferry an army of this size across in small boats in any reasonable time. To move fast, Grant needed a bridge, and the only kind that could span a third of a mile of deep tidal water on short notice was a floating pontoon bridge, a roadway laid across a line of boats anchored end to end. No one in the war had built a pontoon bridge like the one this crossing would demand.
The longest spans of the war so far were a fraction of this width. To bridge the James would mean assembling the longest military pontoon bridge of the Civil War against a current that wanted to rip it apart, in water deep enough to swallow the boats whole, with a hundred thousand lives riding on the answer. Mickey studied the marshy approaches and helped choose a defensive bridgehead, a position the army could entrench to cover the crossing so the men gathering on the south bank would not be caught helpless. He set crews to cutting timber for a corduroy road, a surface of logs laid side by side to carry wagons over ground too soft to bear them.
Through June 13 and into June 14, the four columns converged on the river. Warren’s 5th Corps swung west to screen the movement. Wright’s 6th Corps and Ambrose Burnside’s 9th Corps crossed the Chickahominy downstream and pushed south. Hancock’s 2nd Corps marched for the river landings.
Out on the Pamunkey, the supply base at White House was being closed, and Baldy Smith’s 18th Corps was loaded onto steamers to be carried by water back to Butler’s army near Bermuda Hundred. The crossing had a place, a plan, and a deadline. What it did not yet have was a bridge. The bridge was the responsibility of the engineer brigade of the Army of the Potomac, commanded by Brigadier General Henry Benham, working out of Fortress Monroe near the mouth of the river.
The pontoon material had been shuffled around the lower James in the first days of June, moved up toward Bermuda Hundred, and then hauled back down to Fortress Monroe on June 12, the very day Grant began his march. Now it all had to be repositioned at Weyanoke Point. The engineers reached Weyanoke Point on the afternoon of June 14 and found confusion. The infantry crossing had already begun a few miles upstream at Wilcox’s Landing, where steamers and ferries were shuttling men across.
But at the bridge site itself, little had been done. Before a single pontoon could be floated into place, the engineers had to get a solid roadway out across the soft ground to reach deep water. A detachment of about two hundred men waded into waist-deep water and mud, and in roughly an hour built a trestle abutment about 150 feet long out through the soft marshes. Men who were there called it the hardest single piece of the whole job.
Then came the boats. The method of a pontoon bridge is simple to describe and brutal to execute. You anchor a boat, then another beside it, then another, building a line of hulls across the current. Over the boats you lay heavy timbers, and over the timbers you lay planking until you have a continuous wooden road riding on the water.
Crews worked from both shores at once, the line growing toward the middle from each side, racing the daylight and the tide. The middle was where the river fought back. The current through the deep channel was strong enough to bow the line of boats downstream and threaten to break the bridge apart at its center. The engineers’ answer was bold.
They brought up schooners, large sailing vessels, and anchored several of them in the river above and below the bridge site, using them as floating anchor points to brace the span and hold the center against the pull of the water. Benham came up late in the afternoon with more men and more material, and the work pressed on. Beginning in the afternoon of June 14, working from both banks and bracing the center against the tide, the engineers closed the gap and finished the bridge in roughly seven to eight hours. When it was complete, it stretched some 2,100 feet across the James, a floating wooden road riding on 101 pontoon boats, the longest military pontoon bridge of the war.
It was finished in less time than many bridges a fraction of its length, by men standing in mud and tidal water within a day’s hard ride of an enemy army that did not yet know where to look. Most of the infantry did not march over the bridge at all. The bulk of the foot soldiers were ferried across on steamers and transports at Wilcox’s Landing a few miles upstream, a slower business that took the better part of three days. The great pontoon bridge carried the rest: the wagons, the artillery, the ambulances, the herds of cattle that fed the army, and a portion of the troops.
Two roads across one river, working at once, moving an army of a hundred thousand from one bank to the other. For a day and more, the bridge held against everything the river could do. And while it held, Robert E. Lee was still trying to understand the movement.
For the first time in the campaign, the board had gone dark. Lee had lost contact with the main body of Grant’s army, and he could not find it. His instinct told him Grant would come at Richmond, so he positioned the Army of Northern Virginia to defend the capital. By June 14, Lee had pieces of the picture.
He knew Grant was near the river. What he did not yet know with certainty was whether Grant intended to cross the James in force and throw his main weight against Petersburg. He kept most of his army where it could defend Richmond’s approaches and waited for Grant to show his hand. That hesitation was among the most expensive pauses of Lee’s career, because while he waited, the door to Petersburg stood open, guarded by far too few men.
Five railroads met there. The supplies that kept Lee’s army in the field and Richmond fed flowed up through Petersburg from the south. Lose it, and Richmond could not hold. Yet in the second week of June, the city was defended by a thin garrison strung along an outer line of earthworks called the Dimmock Line, a ten-mile arc of batteries and trenches built to be held by far more men than were actually there.
The officer responsible for those defenses was General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, one of the Confederacy’s most famous early commanders, now charged with holding a vital city with almost nothing. By the time Grant’s vanguard approached, Beauregard had perhaps 2,000 to 2,500 men in the eastern works facing the direction the blow would come from. He scraped together every man he could find and sent message after message north to Lee and to Richmond, warning that a major federal force was crossing to his front and that Petersburg was in mortal danger. Lee, still convinced the real threat was to Richmond, was reluctant to strip his lines on the word of a subordinate who might be facing nothing more than a demonstration.
Beauregard knew. Lee doubted. And the two of them could not act as one fast enough to matter, because the entire point of Grant’s maneuver had been to make sure they could not. The first Union troops to reach Petersburg were the vanguard of the crossing, the 18th Corps under Major General William Farrar Smith, a careful officer everyone called Baldy.
On June 15, Smith led his men westward from the river toward the city’s eastern defenses. The Dimmock Line was imposing, the kind of fortified position that had butchered Union assaults again and again over the previous six weeks. What Smith could not see was that behind those formidable earthworks stood only Beauregard’s thin garrison, a couple thousand men holding a line built for ten times that number. Smith spent the day reconnoitering.
He held back his attack until the evening, around seven o’clock, partly because he expected Hancock’s 2nd Corps to arrive in support, and partly because Cold Harbor had taught everyone a hard lesson about charging earthworks without looking first. When the assault finally went in, it worked almost beautifully. Smith’s men, including a division of the United States Colored Troops, used the ground to get in among the defenses, and the line cracked. They carried a string of batteries and drove Beauregard’s outnumbered men back toward Harrison Creek.
For a few hours on the evening of June 15, Petersburg lay open. In Beauregard’s own later words, the most direct road into the city was all but in federal hands. And then Smith stopped. It was getting dark.
His men were tired. Hancock’s 2nd Corps had finally arrived, but late, held up because the order telling Hancock to hurry to Petersburg had gone astray in the cumbersome chain of command that ran from Grant through Meade and onward. When the two generals conferred, both decided to wait for morning. Smith believed he held the key to Petersburg, but he set it down on the table and left it there until dawn.
It handed the Confederates the one thing they needed more than men. It handed them time. Beauregard used every minute. Through the night he pulled reinforcements toward the city.
He made the desperate decision to strip the lines at Bermuda Hundred to the north, abandoning works there to scrape together troops for Petersburg, and gambled that the Union force facing those abandoned lines would be slow to notice. His men dug furiously, falling back to a new and shorter line behind the captured works and throwing up fresh earth in the dark. Beauregard kept hammering Lee and Richmond with warnings, his messages growing frantic. By one account, he warned that without reinforcements soon, Petersburg and the capital could not be saved.
The next three days became a grim, escalating repetition of the first night’s lost chance. On June 16, again on June 17, and again on June 18, the Union corps, now joined by Burnside’s 9th Corps and more of the army that had crossed the James, threw themselves at Beauregard’s defenses. Three Union corps, tens of thousands of men, against two thin Confederate divisions. Each assault captured some ground; none achieved the breakthrough.
With every passing hour, the Confederate line grew stronger, manned by more troops digging deeper, until the fleeting opening of June 15 had sealed shut. The cost was terrible. Across those four days of attacks on Petersburg, the Union army lost on the order of ten thousand men killed, wounded, and missing, in assaults against a position that had been there for the taking on the first evening. Meade, watching the army fail to break through, spoke bleakly of the spent condition of his men.
The fight had gone out of an army that had been asked to charge fortifications one too many times. On June 18, the thing Grant had maneuvered so brilliantly to avoid arrived anyway. That was the day the lead elements of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia finally reached Petersburg in force. Lee had at last understood the truth, that Grant’s whole army was across the James and locked onto the city.
He rushed his veterans into the lines beside Beauregard’s exhausted men. With Lee’s army now holding the works, further assault was hopeless. The window had closed for good. The armies dug in.
The lines both sides scraped into the Virginia clay that week would harden into miles of trench and battery, and they would not be broken for nearly ten months. The crossing of the James River, a feat of engineering and deception that had left the most dangerous general in America guarding the wrong city, had delivered Grant to the gates of Petersburg with the door standing open, and his army had failed to walk through it. What Grant got instead was the siege. Lee had seen it coming.
Earlier that month, by one account, he had warned a subordinate that if Grant ever reached the James, the war would become a siege, and a siege would only be a matter of time. He was right, though not in the way he feared. It ground on through the summer, the fall, and the long winter, slowly strangling Petersburg and Richmond until the lines finally broke in the spring of 1865, and Lee’s army marched to its surrender at Appomattox. On June 18, even as Lee’s men filed into the Petersburg defenses, the great pontoon bridge at Weyanoke Point was hastily taken up.
The last of the army was across. The engineers who had built the longest pontoon bridge of the Civil War in a single afternoon now broke it apart and floated its boats back upriver toward the new Union supply base at City Point. The wooden ribbon that had carried an army across the great tidal river simply vanished from the surface of the James as quietly as the army had vanished from the trenches at Cold Harbor a week before. The bridge was a masterpiece.
The crossing was flawless. The maneuver did everything Grant asked of it, and it was undone not mainly by Lee, who had been kept uncertain long enough, but by what the Union army failed to do in the hours after it arrived. The door to Petersburg had stood open on the evening of June 15, and the brilliance that pried it open could not make anyone walk through.
Grant slipped an entire army past the most dangerous commander of the age and still inherited the ten months of trenches he had crossed the river to avoid.