“Nothing Daunted” Andrew A. Humphreys, the Union II Corps, and the Appomattox Campaign

Maj. Gen. Andrew A. Humphreys (1810–1883) was the best chief of staff in the storied history of the Army of the Potomac.1 He was smart, meticulous, and obsessively hardworking. He had accumulated in the years before the Civil War more high- level administrative experience than anyone in the Army. Over a period of sixteen months, he served successfully under the mercu- rial Maj. Gen. George G. Meade and played a vital role in bloody encounters in Virginia at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. In June 1864, prominent newspaperman and War Department liaison Charles A. Dana called Humphreys “the great soldier of the Army of the Potomac.”2 Others, including Meade and Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, admired his talents as a strategist, tactician, and topographical engineer and were effusive in their praise.3 But the fiery and ambitious Humphreys was always apathetic about the position. Several weeks into it, he grumbled to a friend that “it suits me in nothing, my habits, my wishes, my tastes. It is even more distasteful to me than I can well express.”4 He wanted a top field command, preferably something in the Army of the Potomac, and vowed to quit volunteer service if he did not get it.5 Then in November 1864, a way opened. Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, still suffering from a festering wound received at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, relinquished command of the vaunted II Corps. Grant turned it over to Humphreys and never for a day regretted it.

On a brisk Saturday morning, 26 November 1864, Humphreys mounted his gray mare, Beckie, and departed from his familiar spot at Army headquarters in the direction of his new assign- ment. “Expressing their regard,” fifteen mounted officers skipped breakfast to accompany him to his new post and remained with him all morning, stomachs growling.6 The II Corps held a dangerous and fatiguing frontline position on the army’s right, east of Petersburg, and it took Humphreys and his entourage more than an hour to navigate the nearly six miles to his new headquarters.7 There he was warmly received by Hancock, a fellow West Pointer and Pennsylvanian and probably the most consistently successful corps commander of the war. The two were “best of friends,” according to Humphreys, and had been “since we first met in the Peninsula [Campaign].”8 They later fought together at Gettysburg in a desperate effort to resist and ultimately throw back a slashing Confederate attack along Emmitsburg Road.9 At Petersburg, they were occasional eating (and drinking) companions.10

That morning they “passed an hour and a half together,” during which Humphreys met with his division commanders. All three were, Humphreys wrote, “known to me and very clever men they are.”11 The best was Maj. Gen. John Gibbon who commanded the 2d Division, but he was “mad,” as one staff officer described him, at being passed over for command of the corps.12 He asked to be relieved, but Meade, and later Grant, talked him down.13 Brig. Gen. Nelson A. Miles, a gifted 25-year-old officer who later gained fame as an Indian fighter, ably managed the 1st Division. Maj. Gen. Gershom Mott led the 3d Division. He was brave and popular with his men but was, as one contemporary historian wrote, “lacking a little in that stirring ambition.”14

At midday, Humphreys saw Hancock off to the train for City Point and returned to set up camp. “The transfer to a new command,” he wrote to his wife, Rebecca, “is always uncomfortable. There are so many little arrangements to make or to be understood.” In this case, however, it was “all . . . done quickly and without fatigue.”15 Before the sun set behind enemy works, he had “tents pitched and arranged” and “settled . . . the servants, the horses, the orderlies, [and]the mail carrier.” He met—all on that first day—with each department head, including the “Inspector General, Chief of Staff, Chief Commissary, Chief ambulance, Chief signal, Provost Marshall, Chief of Artillery.” He also drafted a general order marking the transition and promising the men that “I shall try to do my duty, and preserve your reputation unsullied.”16 By evening he was content. “Everything is now arranged like an old establishment.”17

As the new commander of the II Corps, Humphreys could also take satisfaction in knowing that he and his fellow West Point engineers now dominated the highest ranks of the Army of the Potomac. Meade, an 1835 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, was, of course, the commanding general. Maj. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren, the “Hero of Little Round Top,” had the V Corps; Maj. Gen. John Grubb Parke led the IX Corps; and Maj. Gen. Horatio G. Wright commanded the VI Corps. Coincidentally, Warren, Parke, and Wright each graduated second in his class at West Point—in 1850, 1849, and 1841, respectively. Humphreys, an 1831 graduate, was five years older than Meade and the oldest major general in the Army. He already had served thirty years as an Army engineer—the vast majority of that time with the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, which later produced Meade, Parke, and Warren as well. Wright was the product of a companion organization, the Army Corps of Engineers.

Wartime exigencies saw that second engineer entity take over the first to create a combined Corps of Engineers headed by a new chief of engineers at the rank of a brigadier general in the Regular Army. The top engineer job was, as Humphreys foreshadowed years earlier, the only one in the Army “worth striving for.”18 That alone seems to explain his support for the 1863 merger that put him crossways with most of his fellow topographical

Portrait of General Meade and corps commanders in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., June 1865. From left to right: Major Generals Wright, John A. Logan, Meade, Parke, and Humphreys

engineers. Parke and others staunchly opposed the move and the consequent loss of a distinct topog identity.19 There would be stiff competition for postwar assignments in the consolidated Corps of Engineers, particularly for the top job, but, as an engineer, Humphreys enjoyed a reputation second to none. He understood, perhaps better than his rivals, that much would depend on the outcome of the war with reputations made (or unmade) on the battlefield—andwithGrantasalikelyfinal arbiter. Humphreys was anxious to distin- guish himself. According to one close staff officer, the wealthy bon vivant and diarist Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman, Humphreys was “in high glee at going [to the II Corps], and will be in despair if a big fight is not got up for his special benefit.”20

President Abraham Lincoln’s landslide re-election in early November 1864, together with the start of Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s devas- tating March to the Sea through Georgia and the Carolinas, hastened the end of the Confederacy, but the rebel army remained a formidable and dangerous foe. General Robert E. Lee (himself a onetime Army engineer) and the battered Army of Northern Virginia, numbering 50,000 men, were entrenched at Peters- burg behind powerful fortifications. They maintained supply lines via the South

Side Railroad and Boydton Plank Road, both approaching from the west, and the Weldon Railroad from the south. Grant faced Lee with 100,000 men positioned mainly to the east and south of Peters- burg. The Army of the Potomac consti- tuted the bulk of that force, and it too had been bled by years of hard fighting. Meade, who spoke “strictly confidential, as I would be condemned for telling the truth,” reported that “this army . . . lost one-hundred thousand, killed and wounded” through 1863 and another “ninety thousand men, killed, wounded, and missing” through November 1864.21

Of its four remaining corps, the II Corps was the oldest and most celebrated. Its men had fought and died by the thou- sands on famous battlefields stretching from the Bloody Lane at Antietam to Devil’s Den at Gettysburg to the Mule Shoe salient at Spotsylvania. It suffered the highest numerical losses of any Union corps with a wartime casualty rate approaching 40 percent. Its officer ranks had been decimated. Over the years, twelve brigades had chewed up twenty- five commanders, and the replacements were, according to Hancock, “not half as good as when he started.”22 Things were even worse at the regimental level where the expiration of the three-year enlistees, the patriotic volunteers of 1861, in summer of 1864 exacerbated painful losses at the Wilderness and Cold Harbor.

The Union had to discharge thousands of hardened veterans. To replace those wounded, killed, and retired, the Union armies turned to draftees, substitutes, and bounty men. Many were paid as much as $1,000 to enlist, a tidy sum in 1864 and a powerful inducement that lured the uncertain as well as the unscrupulous.23 These “reluctant soldiers” swelled the depleted ranks of the II Corps and, together with returning veterans, made good nearly all of the losses sustained in the Overland Campaign the previous spring.24 Still, much of the army was green and of generally poor quality.25

These worrying deficits had already brought disaster to the II Corps. After the crater incident in late July, Grant abandoned the frontal assault for a series of flanking maneuvers intended to stretch rebel defenses to the south, weaken the line, and expose the rail- roads behind Lee’s right and rear. These lines were the lifeblood of Richmond. Lee had to hold them or abandon the Confederate capital. In mid-August, Warren and his V Corps destroyed the final few miles of the Weldon Railroad as it approached Petersburg from the south, forcing Lee and his teamsters to haul supplies in wagons by a roundabout way. A week later, Grant followed up with Hancock and two of his divisions (Mott stayed behind) to extend the job. It went well enough at first. By late

10 Army History Summer 2019

evening of 24 August they had destroyed an additional eight miles of track and worked their ruin several miles south of Reams Station as far as Malone’s Crossing. Under a blazing summer sun, the soldiers raised large fires to heat the rails, bend them, and otherwise render them useless. Some they twisted but, try as they might, could not manage the shape of the II Corps emblem, the trefoil (“Clubs are trump!”).26

That night, Hancock received a dispatch from Chief of Staff Humphreys indicating that “large bodies of infantry,” about 8,000 to 10,000 men, had been seen “leaving their works” about sunset and “passing southward from the Petersburg entrenchments.”27 These were elements of the Confederate Third Corps, under the command of Lt. Gen. A. P. Hill. Forewarned, Hancock returned to Reams Station and settled into open trenches. These had been “hastily thrown up” by the VI Corps two months earlier and were, according to Humphreys, “slight.”28 Hancock made little effort to improve them before the following afternoon when Hill’s division smashed headlong into his works. Three green New York regiments under Miles caught the brunt of it, and the line buckled. Some of the soldiers f led, but most surrendered en masse. Gibbon fared little better as his men “fell back in great confusion.”29 It was a rout. Badly stung by the failure of his two crack divisions, Hancock ordered a withdrawal to the east. His losses were 559 men killed and wounded, 2,046 men captured and missing. He had also lost nine cannon and twelve colors, several times the losses at any previous engagement.30 Hancock blamed the lack of experienced junior officers, some of whom did not speak English, and the poor quality of the new recruits. The whole affair dealt a devastating psycho- logical blow that left Hancock and his men deeply scarred. It forced Grant to admit that the “gallant old corps” was, at the moment anyway, unfit for offensive operations.31

In a late November letter to his wife, Humphreys related the sorry condition of his new command—“a corps with a high reputation, but completely broken down, as everyone knew.”32 The terrible battles of May and June and the debacle at Reams Station had nearly extinguished the fire that had always animated the II Corps.33

It needed rest but could find little at its current frontline position in the vicinity of Fort Sedgwick (also known as Fort Hell).34 For three months, Hancock held the right of the entrenchments before Petersburg. Running for five-and-a- half miles and punctuated by a series of enclosed forts, these were “in close contact with the enemy where the [sniper and artillery] firing was incessant.” The danger, as Humphreys explained, was that “troops lose their discipline in long continued campaigns” but “especially if they are kept in trenches” where condi- tions precluded any “opportunity for drill or rest” or to assimilate incoming recruits who composed more than half of the enlisted men in many regiments.35 Two days after assuming command, he received orders to transfer his corps off to the extreme left. He was to swap places with his friend and fellow Pennsylvanian, Parke and the IX Corps. This was, as Lyman explained, “a delicate job in the face of the enemy, who are pretty close up; but it was all done in entire quiet.”36 Humphreys located his new headquarters along Squirrel Level Road in the vicinity of Peeble’s Farm. From this new vantage point, he was happy to report that for the first time in many months, “virtually the whole corps is resting and in reserve.”37 He could now turn his attention to the heavy work of restoring the II Corps to its former glory.

First, Humphreys needed a personal staff that he could trust. His inclination was to bring back the old gang—a coterie of loyal staff officers from his previous division commands.38 At the top of the list were Captains Carswell McClellan, Henry C. Christiancy, and his eldest son, Henry H. “Harry” Humphreys. His close association with McClellan went back to July 1862 when Carswell, a Williams College graduate and first cousin to former army commander Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, transferred to the Corps of Topographical Engineers, Army of the Potomac, then under Humphreys. McClellan followed Humphreys as a staff officer through his two division commands before transferring to Army headquarters. He was serving in that latter capacity when Confederates captured him along with 2,500 Union soldiers on 19 August 1864, during Warren’s first assault on the Weldon Railroad. McClellan did a two- week stint at the infamous Libby Prison in Richmond and was granted parole on 16 November. Then, “compelled from impera- tive private considerations,” he resigned his commission.39 Upon hearing from his former commander, he moved to recall his “order for my dismissal” but inexplicably was boxed out.40 Humphreys blamed it on “personal hostility to [Carswell’s cousin] General McClellan in the War Department” though persistent rumors of alcoholism had long followed him.41 Deeply disappointed,

Humphreys had, as he wrote to his wife, “counted much on having him with me. He is a most efficient officer and a devoted friend.”42 His luck was no better with Chris- tiancy who had apparently tired of Army life, returned to his native Michigan, and was, as he excused himself, “expecting to go into business within a month.”43 That left only Harry who had scarcely left his father’s side since abandoning his studies at Yale Scientific School for an Army commission in October 1862.

Joining Harry on staff, then, were several exceptional young officers. Two, like Colonel Lyman, were recent Harvard graduates from the Boston elite. They were Lt. Col. Charles A. Whittier and Capt. Charles James “Charlie” Mills, both classmates (class of 1860) of the martyred Col. Robert Gould Shaw of the 54th Regiment Infantry, Massachusetts Volunteers. Whittier came from a family of abolitionists. One promi- nent relative, John Greenleaf Whittier, was a “fireside poet,” a newspaper editor, and close associate of William Lloyd Garrison. In 1861, the younger Whittier received a commission into the famed 20th Regiment Infantry, Massachusetts Volunteers, nicknamed the “Harvard Regiment” for the preponderance of the college’s graduates among its officers. Before joining Humphreys late in the war, he was senior aide-de-camp to Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick, then commander of the VI

Corps. Whittier was at Sedgwick’s side at Spotsylvania when a sniper’s bullet claimed the life of the popular general.44

Mills studied engineering at the Lawrence Scientific School for two years before the war began and was a nephew of the prominent Navy scientist, R. Adm. Charles Henry Davis, who later served with Humphreys on the U. S. Lighthouse Board. Mills was injured badly at Antietam—shot through both thighs while prone on a sweltering battle- field—and was discharged for disability. He worked briefly for his uncle in the Navy’s new Bureau of Navigation but was anxious to return to the war, which he did in January 1864, though he was scarcely fit for it.45 As a fellow officer recounted, “one leg was shorter than the other and he was obliged to walk with a cane, and climbed with great exer- tion into his saddle,” though “this did not dispirit him at all.”46 He was already on staff when Humphreys took command of the II Corps and soon became, as the general later admitted, “one of my favorites.”47

A third staff member was Maj. Thomas L. Livermore, who shared a tent with Mills. Born in Galena, Illinois, Livermore lacked the advantages of birth and family but was quick-witted and good with numbers. When war came, he was a student at Lombard University in Galesburg, Illinois, and was anticipating an appointment to West Point. He thus declined service in a company raised in his hometown and, for a time, drilled by a “Mr. U. S. Grant,” whom Livermore described as “a leather dealer… who had been a captain in the army, a quiet respectable diligent man.” The academy appointment never materialized, and the eighteen-year-old soldier rushed off to Washington, D.C., to enlist as a private in the 1st Regiment, New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry.48 By November 1864, Livermore was a captain in the 18th Regiment, New

Hampshire Volunteer Infantry, and holding down a staff position in the II Corps.

As Humphreys pulled his personal staff together, Grant made plans for a third raid on the Weldon Railroad. “If but one Corps goes on the expedition,” he wrote Meade, “I would as soon General Humphreys would command it as any other officer.” He ultimately decided on a larger force “of twenty thousand infantry” that would combine elements of two corps and so went with the senior Warren and his V Corps supplemented by an additional infantry division from the II Corps—Mott and his 3d Division.

Humphreys stayed behind, but the episode showcased his best brigade commanders. The two could not have been more different in personality or temperament. Brig. Gen. Robert McAllister, a former Pennsylvania railroader and a staid, clean-shaven, Presby- terian teetotaler (nicknamed “Mother McAl- lister” by his men) was in command of the 3d Brigade. The colorful French artist and aristocrat, Brig. Gen. Régis de Trobriand, a childhood playmate to a grandson of Charles X of France, commanded the 1st Brigade.49 Humphreys and de Trobriand were, like Mott, veterans of the old III Corps and were well acquainted and friendly.

Very early on 7 December 1864, Mott’s division followed Warren out of Petersburg on a southwesterly march along Jerusalem

General de Trobriand

General McAllister

Plank Road. A heavy fog soon gave way to warmer temperatures and, despite some early rain, a comfortable autumn afternoon. It was good marching weather. The long blue column covered twenty miles that first day and another fifteen the next, bringing it to Jarratt’s Station on the Weldon line. The army’s only mounted division, then operating under Brig. Gen. David M. Gregg, had already cleared the area of rebels, burned the station and bridge, cut the telegraph line, and, together with men of the V Corps, begun a somewhat feeble effort to destroy the road.50 Mott’s division guarded the trains before retiring for the night as area temperatures plunged into the teens.51

The men awoke to a cold north wind, ate their breakfasts, and moved stiffly down the tracks in preparation for their work of destruction. Mott rode up to his 3d Brigade with instructions but McAllister politely rebuffed him. McAllister later explained, “As I was a builder of railroads, I thought I ought to know how best to demolish them.” His plan was simple and effective. He lined his full brigade in single file along one side of track and then, as he explained to his wife, gave an order “not known in tactics and not taught at West Point.” It was “Take Hold!” whereupon several hundred men grabbed and loosened one end of the crossties and lifted them waist high in a common effort. Then, to the order of “Turn Over!” the men flipped the entire track. That done, the track broke apart easily, with the ties burned and the iron rails melted. The men then moved down the line and repeated the process. The men completed the entire work by 2100, with track demolished for twenty miles to the town of Hicksford (now Emporia) on the Meherrin River. The men then settled in for the night.52

The following morning, 10 December, they awoke to a “strange scene.” An ice storm had transformed the Virginia countryside into, as de Trobriand later recounted, a “landscape of sugar candy.” It was “as beau- tiful as an opera decoration, and fantastic as a fairy tale, but exceedingly uncomfort- able.”53 As late morning temperatures crept above freezing, a slow thaw saw conditions quickly deteriorate. Mud and ice turned the road into a pig wallow. Some soldiers were “almost barefooted,” according to McAllister, “shoes having given out as they often do on a long march.”54 And there were other more deadly hazards. Lee had already dispatched A. P. Hill to intercept the column, and it was a race against time to avoid an open fight. Then there was the immediate threat of local guerrillas. These irregulars avoided the main body of soldiers but fell upon stragglers in deadly raids. The guerrillas captured one group of six or seven dalliers and stripped them of their clothing, placed them in a rough circle and summarily executed them—“shot in the head” according to McAllister. The irregulars murdered other soldiers while they slept in local farmhouses—their bodies had been found with “the throat cut, the head crushed in by blows of an ax, and the breast pierced by a knife.”55 These atrocities sparked a blind fury in the men, and, as de Trobriand recalled, “punishment began at the same hour.” Union men burned the Sussex County Courthouse and, with Hill and his Confederates forgotten, continued to unleash their rage on the return to Petersburg. They torched thirty or more plantations to include barns, cotton gins, and haystacks. They even burned the large tavern on the Nottoway River before crossing it and stopping for the night.56 The following day, the weary bluecoats reached Petersburg unmolested and filed back into camp. The Hicksford Raid, as it became known, was the final campaign of 1864.

Wintering At PetersBurg

The approaching winter proved to be “one of unusual severity,” but the Army of the Potomac weathered it remarkably well.57 The II Corps had only recently relocated to the extreme left of the Union lines, so the men spent the first days adjusting to their new location and building temporary lodging. Some scratched together wooden shacks. Others remained in tents but put down wood plank foundations. Still others appropriated the crude huts left behind by the IX Corps and made them their own. Many of the officers, like McAllister, put up simple log cabins.58 But Humphreys preferred a tent when in the field and, in a late-January letter to his wife, was unabashedly sentimental about outdoor life.

There is the wind still rising and falling in its notes among the pine tops on the grove in which our tents are pitched. How much I shall miss the sounds, familiar to me as the accompaniment of three winter camps, were I transferred to more humanizing scenes. What companionship they have made with me all through life, those sounds of the wind in the pine forests.59

Daily necessities were plentiful throughout the winter. The sprawling depot at City Point, a tiny backwater before the war but by 1864 one of the busiest ports in the world, pushed forward a steady flow of food, clothing, ammunition, and other supplies. The numbers were staggering. On an average day, vast warehouses held 9 million standard rations and 12,000 tons of hay and oats. A commissary bakery built on the grounds produced 100,000 servings of bread a day. Two dozen locomotives and 275 railroad cars delivered the goods along a dedicated rail line.60 Thanksgiving had been an extravaganza as turkeys, chickens, geese, apples, baked beans, and assorted pies arrived by the thousands. This extraordinary bounty was, according to Lyman, “a great treat to our ragamuffins.”61

With his men settled into winter quarters and their immediate needs met, Humphreys saw to it that training began in earnest. Drilling became part of the daily routine as officers worked to restore discipline, conformity, and trust while teaching and practicing battlefield maneuvers. The 141st

Regiment Infantry, Pennsylvania Volun- teers, one of Mott’s regiments, followed a typical training regimen. According to its chaplain, it spent the early winter “doing camp and picket duty . . . and engaged in regular drills when not otherwise employed.”62 On 26 December it had its “first dress parade since they set out on the spring campaign.”63 Several days later in a formal general order, Humphreys enjoined his division commanders to use “every hour of favorable weather for drills and evolutions. Regular recitations in tactics and regulations should now be had, and the Articles of War should be frequently read. A systematic effort should be made by division, brigade, and regimental commanders to bring their troops to the highest practicable state of discipline.”64

Humphreys reviewed Gibbon’s 2d Divi- sion on 12 January and, though a sopped field left his grey mare “floundering in quicksand,” was pleased with what he saw. “The troops looked finely, clearly intelligent, active young men with their arms in elegant order.”65 Two days later, Gibbon left to take command of the XXIV Corps in the Army of the James. It was a loss for the II Corps, but Humphreys had a ready replacement in 32-year-old Brig. Gen. Thomas Alfred “Tom”

Smyth, a prominent Irish nationalist, former carriage maker, and one of the most expe- rienced and capable brigade commanders in the Army.66 On 17 January, Humphreys reviewed Mott’s 3d Division which he “found in surprisingly good condition. In fact, the whole corps seems to me to be in excellent discipline and improving daily.” McAllister’s brigade especially impressed him, which he thought “the finest . . . yet inspected.”67 Humphreys hoped “by spring to see the Second Corps as effective as it ever was.”68

To combat winter doldrums, the Union men turned to all types of entertain- ment. Music was pervasive. The II Corps had “several bands, but,” according to Humphreys, “only two that are remark- able.”69 In late January, he enjoyed “some delicious air from a German band . . . a favorite quartette.” He especially liked a song called “The Chapel,” with the “words and music being descriptive of the chapel as seen perched in the distance on a mountain peak.” Minstrel troupes were popular in camp and often accompanied by a banjo. Humphreys described one show headed by a small man, “his face . . . grotesquely misshapen, his figure dwarfed,” and later joined by four or five others, one of whom

A view of City Point

was “more grotesque, dwarfish, and comical and impish than the first.” It was a rousing show. “They danced,” as the general recalled, “until they exhausted us with laughter.”70 Horse racing was another popular activity. Thousands attended a St. Patrick’s Day race organized by the 1st Brigade (also known as the Irish Brigade) with Humphreys presiding and Warren and Meade in the audience.71 The brigade erected a grandstand and distributed sandwiches and whiskey punch. Preliminary foot, sack, and mule races set the stage for the main event which included several flat and hurdle races. Livermore’s new horse, Ajax, marred the festivities when it “bolted to one side” of an obstacle and struck a soldier of the 69th Regiment, New York Volunteers. The man later died of head injuries.72

News from afar was plentiful and practically all good through the winter. December brought word that Union Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas had crushed Confederate Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood, a former student of his at West Point, and destroyed the Army of Tennessee as an effective fighting force. The Army of the Potomac celebrated by “firing a hundred shotted guns from the forts.” The fall of Savannah, Georgia, a week later had the men “wild with delight.” The capture of Fort Fisher, North Carolina, the “Gibraltar of the South” in mid-January and the fall of Charleston, South Carolina, a month later “gave such evidence of waning power [of the Confederacy] that the men began to forecast the day when their services were no longer needed.” For the men of the II Corps, there was additional and more immediate evidence that the Confederacy was “tottering to its fall.”73

The months following Lincoln’s re-elec- tion, which gutted any prospect of a negoti- ated peace, saw a sharp spike in Confed- erate desertions. Lyman estimated that 900 rebels had come over the Union lines in the month of February alone and that, notably, “these were old men [veterans]—nearly all of them—and not raw conscripts.”74 That same period saw the return of thousands of Union veterans. Such was their confi- dence and resolve, wrote one regimental historian, that “conscripts and hirelings were animated by it and the Army of the Potomac was itself again.”75

While Humphreys prepared his men for a spring campaign that many believed would end the war, he continued to fret about his postwar prospects. The seniority system that determined rank in the old Army was rigid and demonstrably flawed, but it curbed favoritism and corruption and was, if anything, predictable.76 The war, together with the merger of the two engineer corps, tossed it all in the air, and the resulting uncertainty created enormous anxieties for Humphreys. He shared these with his wife in early November:

Those who have accepted commissions in the Volunteer Service, like myself, and have served in the highest positions with the

highest rank known in the Army . . . [and] have led divisions and corps in battles that are famous, are nothing more in the regular service than they were at the beginning of the war, and when necessity for the large volunteer forces ceases they will have nothing but their old regular army commissions.77

His concerns were not unfounded. Promotion in the Army had always been slow, relying as it did on the death or resignation of more senior officers. By the time of the Civil War, Humphreys had decades of distinguished service yet held the rank of captain. He was elevated to major in August 1861 while still with the topographical engineers. His final wartime promotion in the Regular Army came in March 1863, and, despite his volunteer rank of major general and his recent elevation to corps command, he remained yet a lieutenant colonel in the Corps of Engineers.

Meanwhile, men whom Humphreys considered rivals had stayed behind “in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, and . . . received Corps promotions in the Regular Army owing to the expan- sion of the Staff Departments.” Among these were Brig. Gen. George W. Cullum (superintendent of West Point), Maj. Gen. John Gross Barnard (chief engineer of the armies in the field), and Brig. Gen. Richard Delafield (chief of engineers). Another prominent engineer, Montgomery C. Meigs, became quartermaster general of the Army in May 1861 and held that position throughout the war at the rank of brigadier general.78 Humphreys’ relative position in the field was no better. Fellow engineers Warren, Wright, and Parke—all much younger—ranked him in the volunteer service and threatened to overtake him in the engineer corps as well. Meade was promoted to major general in the Regular Army in early December and, unbe- knownst to Humphreys who thought his immediate commander had “done nothing in recommending any corps commanders or myself for anything,” Meade had also been lobbying Grant for months to promote Warren, but not Humphreys, to a brigadier generalship in the Regular Army. Warren was, of course, a dear friend and close protégé of Humphreys but fully twenty years his junior.

After two months of “mortification and depression,” Humphreys set aside his better judgment and fired off a letter to Grant on 26 February.79 The trigger was, as he wrote, a list of “recent promotions to the rank of general officer by brevet in the Regular Army by which I find so low an estimate placed upon services in the field and so high a one upon the subordinate administrative duties chiefly not in the field.” It was “humiliating in the extreme” and left him with the “depressing conviction . . . that all this extraordinary [field] service counts for nothing.” He concluded with the assertion that “these brevets that have been given should follow the promotion of those in the field, not take their place or precede them.” Grant never responded, but Humphreys—for whom “the subject…never…ceasedtobeasource of unquiet”—believed that his letter would “bear fruit in time” and was on the whole “glad” he sent it. Parke saw a draft copy and commented favorably, “I doubt not [it] will make Genl. G. put on his thinking cap.”80 The Army largely resolved (or rendered meaningless) the issue of brevets on 13 March 1865, when it gave wholesale brevet promotions to thousands of officers for “faithful and meritorious service,” including hundreds of staff officers and “desk soldiers” who, as a disgusted Humphreys put it, “have not heard the sound of a battle.”81 The same order brevetted Humphreys to brigadier general for his “gallant” actions at Gettys- burg. It was his second such promotion. He had received a brevet to full colonel in December 1862 following Fredericksburg.

In February, the war once again imposed itself on Humphreys and his II Corps. Lee had turned to wagon trains to carry vital supplies from the truncated Weldon Railroad along the Meherrin River and then northeast on the Boydton Plank Road through the town of Dinwiddie and on to Petersburg. The road was vulnerable, and Grant wanted to take a whack at it before the spring thaw. Again he turned to Warren, the horseman Gregg, and elements of the II Corps. But this time Humphreys would accompany his men in what would be his first engagement as a corps commander. In the cold early hours of 5 February, the army’s lone cavalry division advanced west from Ream’s Station for the plank road with instructions to “intercept the trains said to be on it” and to “do such other injury.”82 Warren and his V Corps followed Gregg along the Vaughan Road, waded across the frigid Hatcher’s Run, and advanced to a position about halfway between the run and Dinwiddie.

Bringing up the rear, Humphreys and two of his divisions under Smyth and Mott (Miles stayed behind) approached Hatcher’s Run and, instead of following Warren to the west, turned north toward Armstrong’s Mill, occupying about two miles between the Vaughan Road and the

General Gordon

mill and covering Warren’s right flank. Both divisions “entrenched sufficiently.” Situated immediately north of Mott, Smyth held an advanced position within view of the Confederate trenches. Humphreys surveyed the new line that afternoon and saw a “wood road” opening into a field on Smyth’s right. “To sit down in this way all day close to the enemy’s entrenchments,” Humphreys wrote later, “was to invite an attempt on one’s flanks, and I anticipated that one would be made on Smyth’s right, expecting the enemy to come along the wood road.” To foil such an attempt, he “brought over McAllister’s brigade of Mott’s division and put it along the edge of the wood” where it was hidden from view and positioned to cover the road. At about noon, Humphreys “took a survey” of the brigade, and, according to McAllister, ordered it “to put up breastworks at once.”83 Riding with Livermore, Humphreys also brought up the Harvard Regiment to close a gap between Smyth and McAllister.84

Lee was, of course, sensitive to any move- ment along his right flank and sent elements of Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon’s Second Corps and Hill’s Third Corps (including most prominently Maj. Gen. Henry Heth’s division) to meet Humphreys. Arriving late in the afternoon, the rebels “made a deter- mined attack” along Smyth’s entire front. Hundreds fell on both sides, but the Union line held.85 Then, exactly as Humphreys anticipated, “a column of infantry emerged from the woods . . . by the road already mentioned, evidently expecting to find it unoccupied, and that they would take Smyth in flank and rear.”86 Instead it found McAl- lister’s mostly entrenched brigade which “promptly opened a heavy and unexpected

fire upon the enemy’s column,” forcing it back at once through the woods. Hearing the exchange, Humphreys sent a staff officer to see how they were “making out.” McAl- lister reported back that he was fighting “with and without breastworks and also that he would whip the rebels either way.”87 Humphreys ordered up additional reinforce- ments and made his way to the action as the Confederates rallied and, accompanied by a rousing rebel yell, charged McAllister in massed columns. The Union soldiers, still outnumbered along a narrow front, “opened a most destructive fire,” and again the enemy fell back. Just after dark, the rebels made a second attempt and, as “flashing powder illuminated the battle scene,” were repulsed yet again and withdrew. A cheer broke out along McAllister’s line.88 In his first outing, Humphreys notched a win as his men “bravely stood firm and inflicted severe loss on their assailants.”89 He and Gordon would continue to lock horns through the spring. The encounter at Armstrong’s Mill also touched off a minor rebel mutiny. According to a captured lieutenant from Heth’s division, Robert E. Lee was present at the concentrated attack on McAllister’s right and yet “the first efforts failing, the troops could not be got up to the attack.” The men of his Mississippi company afterward “heard General Lee say that for the first time his troops failed him.”90

The II Corps was reinforced that night by both the V Corps and Gregg’s cavalry, whichhad returned to the Vaughan Road after finding little traffic on Boydton Plank Road. The second day brought renewed fighting but mainly involving the V Corps. About noon, Meade ordered Warren and his men forward “to feel the enemy” along his front and “fight him if outside his lines.” They enjoyed some early success in the vicinity of Dabney’s Saw Mill before a sharp Confederate counterat- tack overwhelmed whole units, tossing them back in a chaotic retreat. Witnesses described it as “disgraceful beyond anything they have ever seen on the part of the fifth Corps.”91 Amid a violent winter storm the next morning, Warren set out again and recovered part of the ground taken and then lost the previous day but could not—fairly or unfairly—wash away the growing stain to his reputation.92

Press accounts called the entire operation a failure, but Meade put a positive spin on it in a telegram to Grant. The Battle of Hatcher’s Run extended the Union line southwest by several miles to the Vaughan Road crossing, putting it, as Meade reported, “nearer to threaten the enemys [sic] line of communica- tions on the Boydton plank road.” He wanted the new spot held, which for Humphreys meant abandoning a comfortable and secure camp for a more forward and exposed position on the extreme left of the Union lines.93 The move occurred with little fanfare. Humphreys placed his new headquarters about a half mile east of Hatcher’s Run near the Wilkinson House, extended the terminus of the military railroad to nearly his front door, and engaged his engineers in the construction of new protective works. Livermore was impressed that, with the entrenching work underway, Humphreys “rode from one end of the line to the other ceaselessly, until his earthworks were completed—a practice of this admirable officer which I never knew to be pursued by any other corps officer.”94 The Confederates kept the Boydton Plank Road open, but Humphreys forced them to extend their own thinly stretched defenses.

After overseeing the establishment of his new line and what would be his last perma- nent camp of the war, Humphreys pressed for a long-promised, two-week leave of absence. Grant approved it on 13 February but only hesitantly and with the caveat that his II Corps commander be subject to recall “at any time by telegraphic orders.”95 Humphreys hoped to enjoy the company of

his wife, Rebecca, and to attend a birthday party for his youngest daughter, Leticia.96 He also planned to shore up support in Washington among political allies for his still-pending (formal) promotion to II Corps command. Little was accomplished in any case before he was recalled to Petersburg after less than a week at home. Grant anticipated some movement by Lee and asked Meade to “please direct Gen. Humphreys, who is now in Washington, to return immediately to his command. He has yet four or five days leave which he will have to take another time when he can be better spared.”97 Humphreys returned to find no activity at all. He grumbled to his wife that “there was no necessity whatever for my returning. Lee has no occasion for withdrawing from Petersburg just now, and he doesn’t intend doing it until the last moment.” By 10 March, after days of rain and “only grayish light,” Humphreys was again “desperately homesick, despairingly so at moments to such a degree,” as he told his wife, “that I felt like getting up, walking out of my tent and going home.”98

As springtime settled on the Virginia Piedmont, Humphreys took solace in the warmer air, longer days, and returning wildlife, especially, as he noted in a letter to Rebecca, “blue birds, robins, and the little twittering yellow birds, and some others whose cheerful notes I recognize.” He wrote more frequently in these last quiet weeks of the war, filling long letters with accounts of everyday camp life and mollifying his wife with frequent updates on Harry and their second son, Charley, a young Army captain who was “looking remarkably well,” having “taken the excess flesh off. He appears to be very much interested in his duties and very constantly occupied.” On 6 March he wrote that Harry “took a flag of truce yesterday and today on my left to enable a party to remove the remains of a private.” The senior Humphreys coordinated the effort with the rebel Gordon who responded “in a most courteous manner.”99

The letters also referenced the more frequent forays into his personal library. He read (or likely reread) at least two books during this period. The first was by Thomas Carlyle, a respected European historian and a famous purveyor of the “great man theory.” Humphreys recalled in his own words one of Carlyle’s “great principles,” probably in reference to the Scotsman’s History of Friedrich II of Prussia (Leipzig, 1858), that “the art of war has always been the same.

It is simply common sense, good judgment applied to destruction instead of preserva- tion and improvement.” Humphreys also enjoyed William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Four Georges (London, 1860), a fictionalized account of the personal side of British royal life. He appreciated the tender description of the third George who ended life as a madman, blind and deaf. Humphreys reproduced one particularly melancholy line in a 4 March letter—“All light, all sound of human voices, all reason, all the pleasure of the world were taken from him.”100

The II Corps had its final wartime review on Thursday, 23 March. The whole body— numbering some 18,000 men—turned out with six batteries of artillery. A gathering crowd of “ladies and gentlemen from Boston and Philadelphia,” joined them throughout the late morning. The group included William Biddle, Margaretta Sergeant Meade (Meade’s wife) with her daughters, and Elizabeth Russell Lyman (Lyman’s wife) and her sister—“both lovely,” according to Humphreys, but “especially Miss Russell.” Then, just after 1200, about an hour before the scheduled review, skies rapidly darkened as a violent storm moved through the area—“the wind rose to almost a hurricane.” Within minutes it was “impossible to see anything five feet from you or to face the wind. Driving dust and sand filled the whole atmosphere and not only rendered it impos- sible to see but almost to breathe.” The storm started fires, downed trees, and killed men.

Meade and his entourage arrived in railroad cars nearly two hours late and missed the whole affair. They had lost their way as “fallen trees had impeded their progress.” Nevertheless, Humphreys, who conducted the review in Meade’s absence, was pleased with his men, “I have never seen so soldierly a review.”101

The next day, Humphreys and his son, Harry, traveled to Deep Bottom to see fellow West Pointer, Maj. Gen. Edward O. C. Ord, commander of the Army of the James. They visited a “fleet of Monitors, Dutch Gap and vicinity, and Genrl. Ord’s Headquarters and the troops there and the works.”102 They also met with R. Adm. David D. Porter and enjoyed “a fine lunch in his cabin, everything very elegant compared to our own rough establishment within the army.” Humphreys reminded Porter where they had previously met—“at Charles Davis’s table.” As was usually the custom, there was some considerable drinking throughout the evening, and it was 2300 before Humphreys undertook the return trip. It was the early morning on Saturday 25 March when he stumbled into his tent to find some sleep.

tHe BAttle of fort stedmAn

He awoke at 0500 to “a sick headache” and a rumbling sound of “cannonading and some musketry going on.” As he clambered to his feet, it was “hot haste” and confusion at corps headquarters while officers, awaiting orders, struck tents, saddled horses, and readied weapons. All could hear artil-

Henry J. Hunt,
shown here as a major general

lery pounding away off to the north “as if in a pitched battle,” and, as Livermore noted later, false rumors quickly spread “that the enemy had reached the military railroad and were holding it.”103 At 0545, Humphreys received a telegram from Brig. Gen. Henry J. Hunt, the chief of artillery, that bore out the facts. Lee had gathered a large force under Gordon—about half of the remaining infantry of the Army of Northern Virginia—and had undertaken a predawn

attack against the right of the Union lines, capturing Fort Stedman and opening a gap nearly 1,000 feet wide in the line. The rebels initiated a move toward City Point ten miles away, where a visiting Lincoln, together with Grant and Meade, slept unawares through most of the early excitement.104 Confederate soldiers had cut the telegraph line.105

That left General Parke in command of the Army of the Potomac, but he was under siege. Fort Stedman anchored his line just south of Petersburg. As he worked furiously to seal off the Confederate incur- sion, Humphreys, several miles to the south, updated his division commanders and seized on an active strategy. He would initiate a strong reconnaissance across his whole front to “ascertain the condition of the enemy . . . and to attack their entrenched picket line with a view to assaulting their main works, if the force holding them had been materially weakened” in support of the rebel offensive against Parke. The orders went out. Humphreys led the charge, as Livermore recalled, “into the thickest of it like the old fire-eater he was in battle.” Lyman celebrated “good Duke Humphreys, who, spectacles on his nose, rushed violently at the entrenched skirmish line of the enemy . . . with the double view of making a reconnaissance and a diversion, and furthermore of showing the Johns that we were not going to be pitched into without hitting back.”106

As Humphreys engaged across his whole front, Gordon bogged down and found himself surrounded on three sides as Parke gathered his men on the hills behind Fort Stedman. These included five regiments and about 4,000 men, stretched in a semicircle nearly a mile wide and ready to charge and retake the fort. Wright had a division still en route, but Parke pushed ahead anyway. At 0730 the long line swept down on Fort Stedman from the east. Its success was “immediate and complete.”107 Hundreds of apparently stunned Confederates threw down their rifles and surrendered. There was a momentary hand-to-hand struggle for the rebel flags in the fort, but a squad from the 208th Regiment Infantry, Penn- sylvania Volunteers, shortly won the fight. In the meantime, Humphreys had advanced through the enemy picket line and pushed ahead until 0800 when the assault stalled, as he later wrote, “under the close fire of artillery and musketry of their main works, which proved to be held by a force suffi- cient to maintain them against assault.”108 Humphreys fell back only to the captured

20 Army History Summer 2019

An interior view of Fort Stedman

rebel picket lines, which he was determined to hold. The Confederates demonstrated against these throughout the afternoon and evening but were, as Humphreys reported, “thrown back” every time, “leaving his dead and wounded on the field.”109 Lyman wrote to his wife that “our men never behaved better” and then teased her, “Isn’t it funny for you to think of the polite Humphreys riding round in an ambulance with you Friday, and, the next day, smashing fiercely about in a fight?”110 The II Corps casualties were about 500 killed and wounded, equal roughly to the number of enemy killed, but Humphreys also captured over 500 rebel prisoners. Total Confederate losses on the day (killed, wounded, missing, or captured) were 4,000 irreplaceable men—nearly a third of those engaged. Late in the day at Patrick Station, south of Petersburg, President Lincoln and his wife saw trains carrying Union dead and wounded off to distant hospitals. Lincoln lamented that “he had seen enough of the horrors of war and had hoped that this was the beginning of the end.”111 He had fewer than three weeks to live.

Monday, 27 March, saw a new moon overhead—a harbinger of change and herald of fresh plans. On that day, Humphreys learned that he had “at last been assigned by the President to the command of the II Corps.”112 The news, as he wrote to his wife, “came to me by telegraph this evening” and was “of course . . . gratifying.” He had

heretofore been ad interim. The “one good of it will be the making of Harry a Major, as I shall at once send his name as the senior Aide de Camp with that rank.”

Humphreys also noted the return of favored aide Charlie Mills, who had left in late January for his home in Boston suffering from a “bilious colic,” “severe dyspepsia,” and, as Mills explained in a letter to his mother, “a great deal of pain in my bowels.” After six weeks of treatment, he had permis- sion from his doctors to return to the war. He traveled by train through Philadelphia and Baltimore and stopped in the capital to see his uncle Charles Davis (“the Admiral,” as he referred to him), and also to make a friendly call on Rebecca Humphreys before pushing on to camp late Sunday. He was warmly received the next morning upon presenting himself at corps headquarters—“everyone seemed glad to see me, and altogether it is delightful to be back.”113 He was pleased especially to see Whittier, his old Harvard classmate. That evening, Humphreys noted to his wife that, despite the young man’s protestations to the contrary, Mills was “in delicate health from severe wounds he has received . . . I hope he will be able to remain in the field.”

Monday saw Lincoln return to City Point, where former Western Theater generals joined him for a fateful meeting, one that would determine the final tactics of the war while relegating the fighting engineers of the Army of the Potomac—Humphreys, Warren, Wright, Parke, and even Meade—tosubordinate roles. With the latter notably absent, Grant confabbed with his close friend, Sherman, whose devastating march through the Carolinas put his Army of the Tennessee on pace to reach Petersburg by the end of April. Grant determined, however, to push ahead without him, preferring instead his cavalry commander, Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, a short, stocky, and bombastic figure who, at Grant’s request, left the Western Theater in April 1864 to lead the horsemen of the Army of the Potomac.

Sheridan served for a time under Meade, but the prideful cavalryman bristled at a supporting role. In August, he leveraged his close friendship with Grant for command of the Army of the Shenandoah and was tasked with subduing the wily Maj. Gen. Jubal A. Early and his Confederate Second Corps as well as local guerrillas under Col. John S. Mosby. Sheridan’s record in the valley was mixed. The decisive battle came in October 1864 at Cedar Creek where he narrowly avoided disaster in a comeback win over a much smaller rebel force. Lincoln rewarded the timely victory, which came just ahead of the 1864 presidential election, by elevating Sheridan to major general in the Regular Army. That placed him over every Union corps commander, ranking the thirty-six- year-old behind only Grant, Sherman, and Meade. In March 1865, Sheridan moved to rejoin the Army of the Potomac, feeling, as he later wrote, “that the war was nearing its end, I desired my cavalry to be in at the death.” Midnight approached when Grant

General Early

gave Sheridan his marching orders. The cavalry commander was to lead the Union offensive with a separate command—outside and above the Army of the Potomac—and to include at times the II, V, and VI Army Corps. Warren, Wright, and Humphreys would be subordinate to Sheridan who would answer only to Grant.114 The objective was to disrupt the nearly nine-month stalemate by unpinning the Petersburg defenses, cutting the one remaining railway line (the South Side Railroad), and isolating and forcing Lee from his entrenchments. Sheridan would target his sizeable force at a lonely country crossroads known as Five Forks.115

Grant had already, in fact, put the first pieces of his plan in motion. That same Monday night, he sent Ord and half of his Army of the James—about 16,000 infan- trymen—on a “secret march of 36 miles to the left of the Army of the Potomac, taking post,” as Humphreys recalled, “in rear of the Second Corps . . . on the evening of the 28th.”116 Arriving unnoticed by the enemy, Ord and his men anchored the Union left, freeing both Humphreys and Warren to withdraw from their works and spearhead the planned offensive. Before dawn the next morning, Warren swung around the extreme left of the Union lines for Quaker Road while Sheridan’s cavalry took a longer, more southerly route toward Dinwiddie Court House. Humphreys followed the familiar Vaughan Road over Hatcher’s Run, where he pinned his right while wheeling around his left until his corps was in line, facing north, and in contact with Warren’s right flank near Gravelly Run. There, Lyman spotted “the sturdy Humphreys, who was gleaning through his spectacles with a fun- ahead sort of expression and presently rode ahead to get his men ‘straightened out.’”117

The Confederates did not fully engage and eventually fell back to their works along the far side of White Oak Road which ran due west from Boydton Plank Road and intersected Five Forks about five miles out. Recognizing the threat to his right flank and to his last remaining rail line, Lee pulled men from his left and center to reinforce Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett on the right while directing his nephew, Maj. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee, to hold Five Forks and assume command of all rebel cavalry. Then came the rain. It fell all night and most of Thursday, rendering the roads, according to Humphreys, “impassable for artillery and wagons until corduroyed. The country was flat, covered generally with dense forest and tangled undergrowth, with numerous small, swampy streams, that . . . did not drain the downfall quickly.”118 One chief quartermaster told Lyman “it was the worst day for moving trains he had ever had in all of his experience.”119 During the downpour and under limited visibility, the V and II Corps closed on White Oak Road and the Confederate lines—as near as they could get without triggering a general engage- ment—and entrenched.

As the sun reappeared late on a soggy Friday morning, 31 March, Humphreys mounted his horse and, with flags flying and a staff escort numbering nearly fifty men, rode ahead to the Rainey House for a better look at his own lines and the Confederate defenses opposite. It was about 1100. The house stood near the southern end of a large open field at the intersection of Boydton Plank and Quaker Roads and in plain view of the enemy out about 700 yards. There was a distant rolling of musketry when after some minutes a rebel battery of Napoleons opened on their position, sending 12-pound iron cannonballs “ricocheting around us,” as Lyman recalled. He turned at one point and

“saw Charlie Mills sitting on horseback, near General Humphreys.” The two Harvard men nodded and smiled at each other. Then came another boom, and Humphreys, following the projectile through the air, “saw it strike the ground and bouncing upwards come with a thud into the staff.” The men had instinctively spurred away, but the unlucky Mills was struck in his left side, just below the ribs. Larger than a man’s fist, the ball ripped clean through him, knocking the twenty-five-year-old off his horse. He landed on his back, opened his mouth once “without utterance,” and died. The same shot then tore through the neck of a horse ridden by an engineer officer and brought both down.

together—the horse dead and the officer shaken but uninjured. The incident rattled Humphreys, and he long mourned the death of a favored aide. He also felt responsible for it and, according to Livermore, “sincerely reproached himself for having ridden out with so many as to attract the attention of the enemy.”120 After sending away his staff, the general resumed his reconnaissance with the understanding that, per guidance from headquarters, “there would be no movement of troops that day, owing to the almost impassable condition of the roads and country.”121

Lee did not fret the road conditions. His inspection that morning of the White Oak

Road line identified a wide gap between the Union left held by the V Corps and the nearest cavalry units in the vicinity of Dinwiddie Court House.122 He ordered a flanking attack and sent in three Confed- erate brigades under Maj. Gen. Bushrod R. Johnson, a former West Pointer, disgraced Army officer, and longtime university professor. Though substantially outnum- bered, he routed four Union brigades and drove them back across Gravelly Run and down Boydton Plank Road. Some stragglers—“trailing,” as Lyman recalled, “sulkily to the rear”—began to trickle into the lines of the II Corps. Miles and his 1st Division occupied that stretch. At noon, and in coordination with Warren and his lone remaining division under Maj. Gen. Charles Griffin, Humphreys threw Miles into the exposed flank of the attacking force crossing to his left.123 “This was,” as Humphreys recalled, “done in a prompt and spirited manner.”124 Two brigades flung freely through the woods west of the Boydton Plank Road and drove the rebels from the field and back into their entrenchments, capturing the flag of an Alabama regiment along with 300 prisoners.125 Miles then pressed ahead on White Oak Road, moving west and dislodging enemy pickets along the way. To prevent Lee from concentrating against Miles, Humphreys had also sent Mott and Brig. Gen. William Hays forward against rebel positions on their fronts. Neither division broke through, but each made a vigorous assault.126 The Battle of White Oak Road changed the lines only a little, but the Confederates lost control of the strategic highway and were trapped in their works. Lee also lost contact with his task force around Five Forks, which left the occasionally unreliable Pickett cut off and without guidance at a critical juncture.127

As the fighting on his own front quieted late that afternoon, Warren heard the sounds of a distant battle receding toward Dinwiddie Court House.128 He correctly inferred that Sheridan was in retreat and in need of rescue. Late that morning, the brash horseman had ridden for Five Forks but a strong force of cavalry supported by infantry met him midway and drove him back in confusion to his starting point. Warren, acting entirely on his own initiative, sent a brigade of men under Brig. Gen. Joseph J. Bartlet

“across country,” as Humphreys later detailed, “to General Sheridan’s support, with directions to attack the enemy in flank.”129 It was getting dark when Bartlett reached the swollen Gravelly Run. He did not attempt a dangerous crossing but engaged Confederates on the opposite side with sniper fire. Nightfall gave cover to his brigade, which Pickett mistook for a much larger force, perhaps even a corps.130 Completely uncovered and fearing a flank attack, the Confederate commander decided at 2200 to withdraw to Five Forks just as Grant ordered the V Corps to march in support of Sheridan and to “start at once.”131 Warren was happy to oblige, but advised Meade’s chief of staff, Brig. Gen. Alexander S. Webb, that there would be some considerable delay. The rebels had destroyed the bridge over the

Gravelly Run, which was in flood and too deep to ford. The crossing would have to be restored, requiring a span of forty feet and the attention of competent engineers to complete.132

Also, Warren and his V Corps had just fought a bitterly contested, daylong battle and returned fatigued to their lines. Most of the men were fast asleep by 2200. As Warren himself later explained, “Our troops, so near the enemy could not be roused by drums or bugles or loud commands, but each order had to be communicated . . . from the General till it reached the non-commissioned officers, which latter only could arouse each man by a shaking.” And all of this had to be coordinated with Humphreys who had been ordered to fall back on his left to Boydton Plank Road and assume responsibility for that end of the Union line. So timing was an issue as well. Travel conditions remained abysmal. Warren had six miles to cover—at night—over byway