Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[831] Fort Fisher as a reason for relieving me. One reason he gives is that when he was absent I was in command of the whole army, and the corps commanders had not confidence in me, as he had expressed it before, I not having had a technical military education. I had three times been in command of all the armies as the senior major-general, in Grant's absence, and having not too much confidence in some of his major-generals, who generally failed to be on time when an order was given and some of whom were boys at West Point when I was a major-general in command of armies, I never attempted to make any movement during his absence. This I omitted to do because I knew that they would no more obey my command implicitly and promptly than they did Meade's during those last disastrous days, the 16th, 17th, and 18th of June, when Meade was attempting to retake Petersburg, which the colored troops of Smith's corps had once taken, and which he had let go.

It appears by Meade's circular of orders to make the attack on those days, that he did not instruct each corps to attack in exact time and conjunction with the others, so that his superiority of numbers, fifty thousand to ten thousand, would tell in his favor, obliging the smaller number of the enemy to keep their whole line of intrenchments fully manned all the time. On the contrary, he said in substance: “As I find it impossible to have the corps commanders attack simultaneously, each corps commander is ordered to attack as soon as he can get ready.” The result of such an uncombined and miscellaneous attack was that the Confederates could mass large bodies of their troops at each point upon which an attack was made, and, after repulsing it, could put them in that portion of the intrenchments next attacked, when some corps commander got ready to make one, after their “interminable reconnoissances,” from which Assistant Secretary of War Dana said Meade had suffered so much. The end of it all was that we lost Petersburg and some seventeen thousand killed, wounded and captured; and then, laying down the musket, we took up the spade in a nine months endeavor to recapture that city, which was at last effected through the starvation of Lee's army.

While the command of the Armies of the James and Potomac devolved upon me as the senior major-general in Grant's absence, the only action that I took while so commanding was to send a telegram to the Secretary of War, communicating the fact that I had