27

Through the Mud to the Left

 

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By the morning of May 10 the trenches which the South­ern soldiers had been digging for two days around their great uneven arc had become formidable indeed. On both sides the lines had been gradually extended. On some higher ground near the Conferedate center the line bulged out for a mile or so. This salient, about a half-mile deep, the Rebel soldiers aptly called the Mule Shoe.

It had become a matter of at least a little fighting practi­cally every day. After the Berdan-Bucktail shooting match the day before, the First Brigade got back to the Union line in time to go in with the rest of the Reserves in a sharp twi­light skirmish to force back the enemy pickets. Today there would be more of the same. All morning long the guns boomed. Crawford, back in action after his bout with the tree-top, early in the day advanced his division through some badly tangled woods. With a double line of skirmishers thrown out, the Reserves slowly, but steadily, went through the thickets. By mid-afternoon they were holding the crest of a little ridge. There they were so close to the Confederate line of logs and banked earth that any movement by a blue soldier immediately drew gray fire.[1]

Colonel Martin D. Hardin, former commander of the Twelfth Reserves, was back after losing an arm at the hands of guerrillas near Bristoe Station the previous winter.  Now

 

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with one sleeve pinned up (it seemed this was the case of so many young officers these days), Hardin's cavalry mustache and sharp, dark eyes appeared as warlike as ever. He was given the command of the First Brigade. West Point 1859, Hardin had seen a lot of war in the last three of his twenty­seven years. He had been with Lee at Harpers Ferry the October after his graduation from the military academy when John Brown was doing so much to divide the nation. Seriously wounded several times, Hardin always came back for more and had been in all the big fights except Antietam, Fredericksburg, and the Wilderness. He would make a cap­able successor to the wounded McCandless.

Toward evening farther to the left at the Mule Shoe young Colonel Emory Upton with a brigade of the Sixth Corps penetrated the Rebel line. Left with no support, he had to withdraw. In conjunction with Upton's charge, War­ren pushed the Reserves, Gibbon's Division, and a part of Birney's against the Confederate entrenchments. Two bitter charges were made, but the musketry and canister which the Southerners poured into the advancing line of blue were just too much to withstand. Both attacks were beaten back with heavy losses.

The Reserves had been under fire most of the afternoon, which had been climaxed with the two futile charges of the evening. The days of their enlistment were slowly running out; meanwhile, the casualty lists were mounting. The next morning Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant sent one of his famous messages, something about fighting it out on this line if it took all summer. The war had indeed changed.[2]

All day long on a drizzling, dreary May 11 the Bucktails lay in the wet trenches. The lines were close, and firing was intermittent. A big movement was being planned for the next dawn. Hancock's entire Second Corps was to hit the

 

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Mule Shoe. General Horatio Wright, in command of the Sixth Corps in place of the gallant old Sedgwick, who had been killed by a sharpshooter's bullet, was to be in support of the Second, as was Burnside.

This plan required Hancock to move his corps from the Union right off toward the left. That night after Hancock's men started slopping off through the murk and mud east­ward for their big push, Crawford had to spread his soldiers out pretty thin along the line of soddened entrenchments. It was to be the job of Warren's Corps to hold down a long line of the Union right while the main attack was being delivered at the Mule Shoe.[3]

Through a misty dawn the men of Hancock found their way into the Mule Shoe, followed by those of Wright and Burnside. They took the salient, and got caught there. Lee kept sending in reinforcements, and the Union soldiers could turn neither right nor left. For hours some of the fiercest fighting of the war took place, especially at a point along the eastern edge of the Mule Shoe where the Confed­erate line ran south. Without exaggeration, history has called this spot the Bloody Angle.

Back on the Union right by 6 A.M. Warren had five bat­teries booming through the fog and a line of skirmishers slowly moving ahead. After the break-through at the Mule Shoe, the entire line of the Fifth Corps started forward. As they approached the Rebel line the canister and musketry were just too hot to face. The Reserves fell back to their wooded ridge. Hancock had started asking Meade to send him help from the right. After the initial attack of the Fifth Corps had been stalled, the Army commander ordered an­other try at once. Warren appeared reluctant and Grant told Meade to replace him if he continued to hestitate. So the three little divisions were started out again before the men

 

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had had time to catch their breath. Meade sent word to the embattled Hancock that if Warren's men were again re­pulsed, he would send a part of the Fifth Corps to the Mule Shoe.

Wadsworth had been killed in the Wilderness fighting, and his Fourth Division was now commanded by Brigadier General Lysander Cutler. The Reserves were still holding on to the ridge ahead of and to the right of Cutler's line. Crawford's attack had to be governed by the progress of the Fourth Division. Before eleven o'clock Cutler had to report

to Warren that he was losing badly and just could not dent the Rebel line. That was the end of the offensive action on the Union right. Shortly, both Cutler's and Griffin's First Division were started toward the Mule Shoe. This left only the Pennsylvania Reserves, an independent heavy artillery brigade under Colonel J. Howard Kitching, and the Eighth Maryland Regiment to occupy the entire Fifth Corps front. Warren described the line as "not as strong as a single rank." Crawford was ordered to draw back to the trenches left by Griffin.[4]

For a while during that terrible afternoon it appeared that the Reserves, too, would be thrown into the Mule Shoe maelstrom. This would have meant the abandonment of the Union right altogether. When it was realized just how small the divisions of Crawford and Griffin actually were, the idea was given up as too risky. So the Reserves stayed, their line stretched out thin as thin could be, while after many hours the furious fighting finally faded in that blood-spattered, less-than-one-square-mile of Mule Shoe.[5]

While the fighting lessened, it was down rather than out. It was one of those nights when the struggle which had

gone on all day long could not quite stop. The Bucktail historians wrote that no one got much sleep that night. The

 

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infantrymen, who could sleep through shells, were bound to awake when one of the intermittent bursts of small arms started. Nature added her bit to the men's discomfiture by sending down a thin, spraying rain. As day broke the First Rifles found that they were all but out of ammunition.

That dismal dawn, as the skirmishers started out toward the Rebel batteries within canister range, the Pennsylvania Reserves would have felt better had they known the message which within a few hours would come to the Fifth Corps chief from the Army commander. Said Meade: "From what I have heard I think the Pennsylvania Reserves are entitled to some notice and acknowledgment."[6]

By mid-day the Reserves had reoccupied the advance line which had been given up the day before when Griffin and Cutler had moved to the left. It was close to the enemy trenches, and gray guns started to shell the position. In the early afternoon the field telegraph at Warren's headquarters started snapping messages from Meade. A night march was shaping up for the Fifth Corps. Soon Warren rode off to army headquarters for briefing as to the new movement.

The plan called for Warren to move his entire corps across the Ny River, somewhat to the north, make a seven-mile swing clear around the rear of the whole Union Army, and come out upon a road leading to Fredericksburg on the ex­treme Union left. There the next dawn they were to launch an attack, or at least that was the plan.

"It was one of the darkest nights . . . I ever saw." That is how General Warren described the night of May 13. Quite early in the evening the supply wagons started squeaking away, the teamsters probably primed for what undoubtedly turned out to be a night of profanity as the roads became increasingly soggy. Then, one by one, the guns were lim­bered up and the artillery train started off, soon to be

 

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blocked in the blackness by other bogged-down vehicles. It was nearly ten o'clock before the weary foot soldiers got started. Griffin's, Cutler's, and then Crawford's men, in that order, sloshed out through the mud of a pitch dark night without rations. Left behind in the rain along the aban­doned entrenchments was a long, lean, line of pickets.[7]

Throughout the dark, stormy night the tired soldiers waded along the muddy roads, which in places were blocked by wagons stalled in the knee-deep mire, mules straining, and drivers cursing. Singly and in groups, there was much falling behind as fatigue reached the limit of endurance. Whole companies lost their way in the strange country, by turns swampy and wooded. When day finally dawned Warren had to report that not enough of his men had come up to make a good skirmish line. The attack had to be called off.

Gradually during the day the men struggled in. Before another nightfall there was some brisk fighting over a rise of ground near the road which led back to Fredericksburg. Bleak Hill, it was called. As the day ended the exhausted Reserves were astride the hill, munching one day's ration of salt pork.[8]

Within a few days the Union Army would start another move to the left. Grant had hoped to wear down Lee's le­gions along the Spotsylvania line. Confederate casualties were high, as were the Federal, and replacements were not as easy for the South. The Union Army of the James, under General Benjamin F. Butler, was supposed to tie down a considerable number of Rebel troops south of that river. Franz Sigel's Union forces had been assigned the job of keep­ing the Southerners guarding the Shenandoah Valley enter­tained, so that no reinforcements from there could be sent to Lee.

Things did not turn out that way. Butler allowed his army,

 

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to be bottled up south of the James. Sigel met defeat in the Shenandoah. Lee could be reinforced after all. Hence fight­ing it out along the Spotsylvania line did not appear to Grant to be the good idea it first seemed. The Army of the Potomac would move away from the entrenched Spotsyl­vania position and seek again to fight the Southern Army in the open farther south.

By May 18 just about the entire Union Army had worked its way around to a position east of Spotsylvania Court House (it had started from northwest). That day, while preparations were under way for another leftward move­ment which would take the Army south, the Bucktails were doing picket duty in advance of the Reserves' line. For some time there had been a fairly heavy cannonading along the entire Fifth Corps front. The Southern guns of A. P. Hill had been replying.

Bucktail Companies F and K, with Captain John A. Wolfe in command, were sent out to try to silence one of the Rebel batteries. As the First Rifles crawled along toward the enemy guns and a line of rifle pits which sheltered covering gray infantry, there was a lull in the firing. Waiting behind a lit­tle ridge for the battery to resume, some of the Bucktails be­came impatient. Up they stood and peered over the crest to see what was holding up the gray guns.

"Get down thar, Yanks," sang out the Rebels in the pits ahead as their muskets poured a volley at the curious Buck­tails. The two companies hugged their little ridge and put their Spencers to work. As the sunny afternoon ran out they made themselves as bothersome to the battery as possible. In the evening the Rifles drove off an enemy party which had come out to make slashings and throw up another trench. This apparently made some Confederate officer a little mad. Shortly after, in the growing darkness, a strong Rebel line

 

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came out through the woods. These soldiers pushed the two little Bucktail outfits back where the Southerners considered they belonged.

Sometime during that afternoon a few of the Bucktails had a chance to do a little fraternizing with their butternut­clad adversaries. They got some tobacco in exchange for coffee. The seemingly-generous Rebels threw in some Rich­mond papers to boot. When they got back to their line, the Pennsylvania men discovered that all items of military in­terest in the Southern dailies had been carefully clipped.[9]

The artillery duel witnessed that day by the Bucktail skirmishers was a part of the repulse of the Union Second and Sixth Corps in another attempt to take the Bloody Angle. The next day Ewell's Confederate Corps crossed the Ny River and tried to get around the Federal right. A divi­sion of ex-heavy artillerists, under Brigadier General Robert O. Tyler, with a certain amount of help from some Fifth Corps units, turned the Rebels back. The Reserves were alerted but missed the fighting.

Fresh from the Washington fortifications, where they had taken things rather easy, and never before in combat, the gunners-turned-infantrymen gave a good account of them­selves. The veteran Reserves had an explanation for the stout fighting of the newcomers. The Reserves reasoned that Tyler's men were so green that they did not realize their own danger. The way the old Pennsylvania soldiers figured it, the sheer rashness of the new troops so amazed the war­wise, hard-fighting Southern soldiers that they were thrown off balance.

Riding the Bucktail picket line the morning after the "ex-heavies" had surprised everyone by their fine fighting, the newly appointed Reserves First Brigade commander, young Colonel Hardin, saw a sight perplexing indeed. All

 

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along the line the Bucktail pickets had their shelter tents and blankets on the enemy side of the trees, or whatever else they were using for cover. This was strange conduct for three­year army veterans. Hardin demanded an explanation. He got it. A Bucktail non-com pointed back to the position where Tyler's green men were camped. The First Rifles had been keeping covered from that direction. During the night. the fire from the tired Rebel pickets had been very occa­sional, Hardin was told. But from the position of the new, nervous Union soldiers who had been long used to sleeping in safe Washington barracks the Bucktails had received a "blizzard" of bullets every little while. Hardin accepted the explanation.

On May 21, with just ten more days of marching and fighting ahead of them, the Pennsylvania Reserves joined the long blue columns moving around the Confederate right. They were headed south for some place called Gui­ney's Station.[10]

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