Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Virginia, May–October 1864 337
of baggage wagons allowed to each regiment and to each brigade, division, and
corps headquarters. Meade’s army needed its wheeled transport to haul rations
and ammunition through the familiar, fought-over Virginia countryside between
Washington and Richmond (see Map 8). 2
While the Union’s main armies were in motion, a fourth, led by Maj. Gen.
Benjamin F. Butler, would advance from Fort Monroe up the James River toward
Richmond. Grant himself visited Fort Monroe in early April to discuss the move,
for Butler was a national figure, one of the nation’s leading War Democrats—certainly
the most prominent one in uniform—and too important to ignore in forming
plans for the spring campaign. The two generals were in substantial agreement
about an attack up the James, but Grant thought it best to confirm the results of their
conference with a letter marked Confidential. Concentration of force was essential,
he told Butler. As the Army of the Potomac advanced south toward the Army of
Northern Virginia and Butler’s Army of the James moved northwest toward the
Confederate capital, the two would draw closer together and eventually coordinate
their operations. Butler’s army would receive a reinforcement of ten thousand
men drawn from Union forces in South Carolina, Grant said. “All I want is all the
troops in the field that can be got in for the Spring Campaign,” he explained in a
letter to Sherman. Since Butler had served only in administrative posts, Grant assigned
Maj. Gen. William F. Smith, a former corps commander in the Army of the
Potomac, to direct command of operations. Grant, who had graduated from West
Point two years ahead of Smith, thought him “a very able officer, [but] obstinate.” 3
Butler’s force included a division of six USCI regiments—the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th,
10th, and 22d, along with Battery B, 2d United States Colored Artillery (USCA).
Other black troops on the peninsula between the James and York Rivers included
the 1st and 2d United States Colored Cavalries (USCCs), at Williamsburg. Some
seventy miles to the north, but still within Butler’s command, the 36th USCI guarded
prisoners of war at Point Lookout, Maryland. 4
Brig. Gen. Edward W. Hinks commanded the six regiments that accompanied
the main force. A Massachusetts officer who had served with Butler in Maryland
during the first weeks of the war, Hinks had received a severe wound while leading
his regiment at Antietam in 1862 and had spent more than a year afterward in
administrative posts. When he saw that Butler was to take charge of the Department
of Virginia and North Carolina in the fall of 1863, he wrote to the general,
requesting a field command. Hinks arrived at Fort Monroe in late April, just as
news of the Fort Pillow massacre reached the East. Within a week, he asked to
replace his division’s “unreliable” weapons, which might, he said, “answer for
troops who will be well cared for if they fall into [enemy] hands, but to troops who
cannot afford to be beaten, and will not be taken, the best arms should be given that
the country can afford.” The 1st USCI regiment, its colonel complained, carried
2 The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate
Armies, 70 vols. in 128 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), ser. 1, 33:
827–29, 919–21 (quotation, p. 828) (hereafter cited as OR).
3 OR, ser. 1, vol. 32, pt. 3, p. 305 (“All I want”); 33: 794–95 (Confidential); vol. 36, pt. 3, p. 43
(“a very able”). William G. Robertson, Back Door to Richmond: The Bermuda Hundred Campaign,
April–June 1864 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), pp. 18–24.
4 OR, ser. 1, 33: 1055, 1057.