In April 1864, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant met with Major General Benjamin F. Butler and approved his plan to attack Richmond by moving an army up the James River while the Army of the Potomac moved against Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. Butler was to land the Army of the James at Bermuda Hundred and advance on Richmond, but because Grant knew Butler lacked significant combat experience, he assigned two West Point-trained officers, William F. “Baldy” Smith and Major General Quincy Gillmore, as corps commanders. This command arrangement became one of the war’s most contentious, as Butler and his subordinates quarreled openly from the opening days of the Bermuda Hundred Campaign, harming the operation and the army’s good order and discipline. Before the war, Butler had been a lawyer and Massachusetts congressman, and in May 1862 he commanded the troops that entered New Orleans after its surrender to the Federal navy; though battlefield success eluded him, he was widely regarded as a brilliant administrator, and by 1864 he strongly supported the use of African-American soldiers and commanded more regiments of United States Colored Troops than any other general. Smith had graduated near the top of his West Point class in 1845, had fallen out of favor in Washington after the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, and in 1863 served as chief engineer of the Army of the Cumberland, where his abilities impressed Grant; he came east in 1864 expecting to command the Army of the James, and his subordination to Butler created tension between them. Gillmore graduated first in his West Point class in 1849, spent much of 1863 besieging Charleston in South Carolina, and when assigned to Butler moved his Tenth Corps very slowly to Virginia, a perceived delay that quickly fed a feud between the two men.