May 21, 1864---To The North Anna River; The Circassian Genocide

MAY 21, 1864: 

In Virginia, Union troops moving southward toward the North Anna River run headlong into Confederate troops engaged in a reconnaissance in force. The resulting skirmish, though not very large, alerts Robert E. Lee to the exact position of The Army of The Potomac. He maneuvers in order to block their access to the River. 

Elsewhere in the world, after decades of localized warfare, the Tsarist Empire of Russia defeats the Circassians, a Muslim ethnic group famed since antiquity as warriors. The traditional home of the Circassians is along the Black Sea coast between the Crimea and the Caucasus. Upon the signing of the formal surrender on this day, Russian forces immediately begin a brutal campaign of expulsion / genocide against Circassian civilians, who are brutally tortured, raped, murdered and mutilated in the tens of thousands within only a few weeks. There is an international outcry. Survivors flee to the Ottoman Empire, where they are treated as enemy aliens. The Tsarist government later admits to killing 400,000 Circassians and exiling 400,000 to Turkey; however, Ottoman records show that only 75,000 Circassians entered their realm. Some modern sources estimate that only 150,000 of 1.5 million Circassians survived the genocide. 

May 20, 1864---Crossing the Mattaponi River

MAY 20, 1864: 

Samuel H. Bassitt (1848-1925), a sixteen year old Ohio boy who ran off to join the army, writes home to his parents from the battlefield in Georgia. His letter reads in part: 

I am well and in the best of spirits and hope you folks are the same. Well Father we have laid still today that is to say we haven't marched any. We have had considerable skirmishing since we left Chattanooga. We drove the Rebs out of a town called Resaca but there was considerable loss on both sides. We have had skirmishes ever since with them. We are now within 60 miles of Atlanta. I tell you ole Grant is giving them fits up at Richmond, the news is that the Rebs are going to evacuate Richmond and then come down here and run us out, but I'll tell you they will have a sweet time if they undertake that game. Well Father you asked how I liked to be a soldier by now and I like it well so far. You mentioned you wanted to get a discharge for me since all soldiers under 18 was entitled to one. So you go ahead and get the papers showing I am under 18 and send them to the Provost Marshall and I can get my discharge. I must bring my scribbling to a close for now. 

In Virginia, U.S. Grant and The Army of The Potomac cross the Mattaponi River.


In Washington, D.C., President Lincoln signs into law the Bill creating the Official Records (OR) of the War of The Rebelliom, an archive of every report, order, and document generated during the war.  

May 19, 1864---The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House comes to an end

MAY 19, 1864: 

The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House (Day Twelve) (The Battle of Harris' Farm (Day Two)): 

 

Although Robert E. Lee can report to Richmond with complete honesty that he has repeatedly frustrated Ulysses S. Grant’s tactical goals in this Spring’s battles, Marse Robert’s conscience must be pricking him hard. 

Lee is learning the awful truth of President Lincoln’s words after Fredericksburg, that if that battle could be fought “over again, every day through a week of days . . . the army under Lee would be wiped out to its last man, the Army of The Potomac would still be a mighty host, the war would be over, the Confederacy gone.” 

For although Lee has inflicted over 20,000 casualties on The Army of The Potomac during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House and almost 18,000 during the Battle of The Wilderness immediately preceding it --- a total of almost 40,000 men rendered either dead or combat ineffective in just two weeks, a terrible toll --- The Army of The Potomac is still 85,000 strong. 

Lee’s much smaller Army of Northern Virginia began the month with 65,000 effectives; it now has 40,000 fighting men. 

And Grant has not been driven off. Yes, he disengaged in The Wilderness, and yes, he is disengaging at Spotsylvania Court House this very day, but the bitter Battle of Harris' Farm is a Union victory at the last; what’s worse is that Grant is maneuvering around Lee’s flank just as he did when he marched his men out of The Wilderness. Even as he disengages, Grant keeps up a harassing fire. 

Moving south toward Richmond, the Union army is still on the offensive. Lee has no choice but to attempt to stop Grant. He moves. The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House comes to a sanguinary end.

While the recent bloody battles are tactical draws, strategically Grant is in control of the field. The Yankee and Rebel armies are like two pirouetting dancers, or perhaps two boxers in the clinches, holding on to each other and pummeling each other to gain an advantage. With every spin, Richmond, and the end of the war, comes closer. 

Despite the agony he is inflicting on individual men and units in the Federal army, Lee is well aware he cannot keep up this relentless slugfest. Eventually, and far sooner than Grant, he will run out of troops, run out of supplies, and run out of weapons. In the end he will run out of options.

Although he is still, and will forever be, lionized by the South, and with good reason, Lee has not gone to war on a large scale since Gettysburg. His actions in the last winter’s Mine Run Campaign were tentative. Robert E. Lee is no longer the Lee of Chancellorsville or even Second Manassas. Historians speculate that he may have suffered a coronary sometime in the Spring of 1863, rendering him physically weaker, less decisive, and inherently more cautious. Lee’s health problems cannot be confirmed with absolute certainty. But what he has lost for a certainty is Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart.  

While the Southern Command is still better far than most of the Northern Command, Lee is down to his second string players. At the very same moment in time that Lee is burying Jeb Stuart, Grant, Sherman and Sheridan are coming into their own as leaders of the Union armies. 

Grant will never be beloved like Lee, Sherman is viscerally different than Jackson, and Sheridan is a paler version of Stuart. But Lee is no longer facing the gout-ridden Scott, the unlucky McDowell, the timorous McClellan, the arrogant Pope, the dull Burnside or the frightened Hooker. He is not even facing Meade, the victor of Gettysburg, as senior commander. 

Grant may not be subtle. In fact, he has all the panache of a mallet. But Lincoln has found his General. 

May 18, 1864---"Bloody Spotsylvania"; The Battle of Harris' Farm; The Gold Hoax

MAY 18, 1864: 

The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House enters its eleventh day. With the weather cleared and the ground dry enough to traverse, again Ulysses S. Grant throws thousands of troops against Laurel Hill. Although Lee has withdrawn from the salient known as The Muleshoe, and although Grant has driven the Confederates from The Bloody Angle and the other outlying defensive lines, this time Grant tries to break through Lee’s inner defenses on Laurel Hill, only to face massed cannons. 

A contemporary Confederate report stated dryly: “Very little musketry was used in this engagement, for the reason that the enemy did not come near enough our lines.” 

1,250 Union men are killed in the assault, most torn to pieces by heavy ordnance. This day of slaughter, amazingly, has no name of its own in history, but gave a name to the field of battle: “Bloody Spotsylvania.” 

The Battle of Harris' Farm: 

Even as the frontal assault at Laurel Hill rages, General Grant begins to move troops around the Confederate right flank, hoping to interpose Union forces between Lee and Richmond. A line of New York infantry crosses the Ni River, only to find a Confederate battery on the far bank. A roaring battle commences. The Rebel battery is immobilized on wet ground, and the New Yorkers, despite facing down cannons, are surprisingly fierce. 

Union troops and cannons keep arriving en masse, and soon the banks of the Ni are a bare-blasted no-man’s land. Lee begins to fear that the battle may turn against him, leaving the road to Richmond in Union hands. He orders his troops to disengage from battling the Federals. Again he moves into a blocking position between Grant and Richmond. 

Even as Grant and Lee and Sherman and Johnston are locked in vicious combat at opposite ends of the Eastern Theatre, a financial panic grips the nation when two New York City newspapers, the New York World and the New York Journal of Commerce, each publish the story that President Abraham Lincoln has issued a proclamation conscripting 400,000 more men into the Union army. Given the reports from wholesale carnage coming from the battlefields the Northern public immediately assumes that this means that the war is not going well for the Union, and Wall Street reacts as might be expected: Stocks go into free fall, and investors begin buying gold, which balloons in value more than 10% within a few hours. 

 

It turns out that the story is a hoax, cooked up by Joseph Howard Jr., the City Editor of the anti-Lincoln Brooklyn Eagle, who has invented a fake Associated Press dispatch about the President’s call for more troops. Not unsurprisingly, Howard has also just recently invested heavily in specie, and makes a killing in just a few hours. 

Howard is arrested on May 22nd, and spends three months in prison. He is released on August 22, 1864. With perfect irony, the very day Howard is released, President Lincoln issues a call for 500,000 more soldiers.

May 17, 1864---The Battle of Adairsville, Georgia

MAY 17, 1864:

The Battle of Adairsville, Georgia. William Tecumseh Sherman’s inexorable blue juggernaut rolls slowly southward toward Atlanta. General Joseph E. Johnston C.S.A. holds a war council with his subordinate commanders, Leonidas Polk and John Bell Hood, who both convince a skeptical Johnston that the Union army is too strong to be resisted. Units of the Confederate Army of Tennessee engage Union troops in a delaying action while the bulk of the Rebel force withdraws across the Etowah River toward Rome, Georgia. Casualties are light, but the South is giving ground perhaps unnecessarily.