A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  He may have been commissioned by pure favoritism, but he turned out to be a good soldier. In the fall of 1862 he won distinction by leading a cavalry raid into Fredericksburg—a stroke that accomplished nothing much but showed boldness and leadership—and the next summer, during the Gettysburg campaign, Dahlgren made his reputation.7

  While the fighting was beginning around Gettysburg, Dahlgren took a couple of troops of cavalry and went prowling far around in Lee’s rear, and he captured a Confederate courier coming up from Richmond with dispatches. The capture was important, for the courier bore a letter from Jefferson Davis telling Lee that the government did not think it advisable to bring Beauregard and a new army up to the Rappahannock to add weight to Lee’s invasion of the North. The letter was promptly sent to Meade, who was thus enabled to campaign in the secure knowledge that Lee was not to be reinforced.

  A few days after this, Dahlgren’s outfit got into a fight with Rebel cavalry at Boonsboro, Maryland, and Dahlgren was badly wounded. His right leg was amputated, and he spent the next few months convalescing at his father’s home in Washington. Then, in November, a one-legged army officer on crutches, he went down to the fleet off Charleston and lived on his father’s flagship, going ashore now and then with the Navy in small-boat expeditions of one kind and another. Early in the winter he returned to Washington to receive a colonel’s commission and to have an artificial leg fitted, and just as this was done he heard about the Kilpatrick expedition. (The bar at Willard’s was abuzz with it.) Dahlgren hurried down to see Kilpatrick about it, satisfied himself that he could ride a horse despite the handicap of a wooden leg, and shortly after the II Corps review he wrote to his father:

  “I have not returned to the fleet, because there is a great raid to be made, and I am to have a very important command. If successful, it will be the grandest thing on record; and if it fails, many of us will ‘go up.’ I may be captured or I may be ‘tumbled over’ but it is an undertaking that if I were not in I should be ashamed to show my face again. With such an important command I am afraid to mention it, for fear this letter might fall into wrong hands before reaching you. I find I can stand the service perfectly well, without my leg. I think we will be successful, although a desperate undertaking.… If we do not return, there is no better place to ‘give up the ghost.’ ” 8

  Kilpatrick gave Dahlgren a key assignment. When the expedition moved there would be an advance guard of 500 troopers which would swing west to strike the James River some miles above Richmond. While the main body approached the city from the north and east, this group would cross the river and come up to the city from the south. With the attention of the defense centered on Kilpatrick, it was believed that this party could enter Richmond almost unopposed. It would seize the principal prison camp at Belle Isle, free the 15,000 prisoners there, lead them out on the north side, rejoin Kilpatrick’s column there, and all hands would go romping back to the Union lines. And this advance contingent, on which the success of the whole movement would very largely depend, was to be commanded by Colonel Dahlgren.

  So it was all arranged, and Kilpatrick got his formal orders on February 27. He was to “move with the utmost expedition possible on the shortest route past the enemy’s right flank,” and next day various cavalry commands were ordered to report at his headquarters, where the men were issued five days’ rations and officers were ordered to see to it that all the horses were well shod and that the men’s arms and equipments were in order. The troopers obeyed gleefully, for this sounded like a raid, and as one man remarked, “It is easier to get a trooper or even a hundred for a raid than to get one to groom an extra horse.” 9

  Ponderously but surely, the army machine began to move. John Sedgwick took his VI Corps upriver toward Madison Court House, and flamboyant young Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer, with his gaudy uniform, his anointed curls, and his hard, expressionless eyes, took his cavalry division off on a dash toward Charlottesville—wondering, as he rode, whether he might not be cut off entirely and so be compelled to ride all the way to Tennessee to join Sherman’s army. The bait thus dangled was taken, and the Army of Northern Virginia took thought for its left flank; and on February 28, a fine starlit evening with a moon putting a shimmer on the waters of the Rapidan, Dahlgren and Kilpatrick took their men down to the river at Ely’s Ford, rounded up the Rebel pickets there, and set off on their long ride.10

  They were good men, and there was a chance that they might succeed. Yet they were pursuing a dream, because peace could not now be won by planting pamphlets about amnesty in the Confederate capital, and the thought that it might come so was essentially a romantic thought, however noble. This venture was a departure from reality, of a piece with the officers’ dances at which men and women quoted Byron to themselves and borrowed, for their own beset lives, the tag ends of implausible poetry describing a bloodless bookish war. It was born of a romantic dream and it was aimed at glory, and glory was out of date, a gauzy wisp of rose-colored filament trailing from a lost world. Victory could no longer be imagined as a bright abstraction, lying like the sunrise at the end of a shining road. It was an ugly juggernaut that would crush and smash many values and many lives into the everlasting mud, and it was the only thing that counted nowadays. The longer the war lasted the more victory was going to cost, and a dazzling cavalry raid would not even be the small change of the final purchase price.

  Still, for whatever it might be worth, the expedition rode on, and the men slipped safely past Lee’s right flank, trotting at dawn through a sleepy crossroads town known as Spotsylvania Court House, where Kilpatrick reined in briefly to let Dahlgren’s men go on ahead. The troopers were in high spirits, and they were in enemy country, and they reflected that the five days’ rations issued to them did not include any meat, which indicated that they were expected to forage liberally on pasture and farmhouse. A Pennsylvania regiment came down a country road, and in a farmyard there was an old woman with a flock of geese, and it amused the soldiers to ride into the flock, sabers swinging, to see how they might decapitate the long-necked birds without dismounting or coming to a halt. The woman seized a broom and fought with them in frantic despair, and the men shouted and guffawed as they dodged her blows, and they advised her that “the Yanks are hell on poultry.” At last all of the geese were killed, and the woman slammed the gate of her front-yard fence and screamed the protest of the defenseless civilian who lay in the path of war—“You ’uns are nothing but dirty nasty Yankees after all!” 11

  The column rode on, collecting foodstuffs as it rode, and a staff officer went through the regiments announcing that the Rebels had no troops in Richmond, no one but government clerks and bookkeepers to bar the way. It was a fine bright day and a pleasant war, and the march went on unbroken except for a very short breather now and then. But during the afternoon the sky grew cloudy, and when dusk came there was a cold, gusty wind driving icy rain into the men’s faces. Twenty-four hours in the saddle, and no rest in sight, and the war began to look a little less like a rowdy picnic; and they came to Beaver Dam Station after dark, and while the rain turned to sleet, freezing on overcoats and scabbards and carbine barrels, the men set fire to station and freight house and boxcars and outbuildings, cavorting madly about their bonfire, pleased that they were laying a heavy hand on the republic’s enemies, making strange prancing silhouettes against the red flames in the smoky night. Then they went on again, leaving their fires as a great meaningless beacon, and they followed narrow roads in Egyptian darkness, and men in the outside files lost their caps to the low branches of unseen overarching trees.

  Dahlgren and his party were off to the west somewhere, presumably, making for the James River crossing, and from time to time a signal corps officer who was riding with Kilpatrick turned aside to send up a rocket as a signal to the detached party. The rockets sputtered and climbed the wet black sky and went out, futile signals from nowhere to nobody, and there was no way to tell where Dahlgren was or whether he ever saw th
em. The blind column went on and on, everybody cold and soaked and exhausted.

  There were Rebel skirmishers adrift somewhere in the night, and at intervals these spattered the column with bursts of fire, carbine flashes winking ominously in the surrounding blackness. Up ahead there were parties cutting down trees to obstruct the road, and the progress of the column became a maddening succession of confused stops and blind gallops—sudden traffic jams as the regiments jangled to an unexpected halt, men swaying in their saddles with fatigue or clumping heavily to the ground to rest their horses, then going on again at top speed to catch up with the rest, and it began to be possible to see why the young general was known as Kill Cavalry. Horses foundered, and some of the troopers had to plod along on foot, carrying their saddles, getting help by clinging to a comrade’s stirrup. The storm grew worse and no one could see anything, and whether a man collided with a tree or with his neighbor was entirely up to his horse.12

  Sometime during the night there was a brief, unsatisfactory halt for rest. Then the column moved on, having more brushes with Confederate bushwhackers, and a gray cheerless dawn came in; and at last, around midmorning of Tuesday, March 1, the men came out on the Brook Pike within five miles of Richmond. Up ahead were the permanent fortifications of the capital, and by all information these could be held only by militia, and Kilpatrick flung out a dismounted skirmish line, brought up his six field guns, and prepared for his big moment.

  Yet the war that morning seemed to be full of evil omens, and there was no way to tell where Dahlgren was. According to the plan, he should at this moment be in Richmond, followed by a multitude of released prisoners of war, and Kilpatrick opened with his guns to let Dahlgren know that the main body was where it was supposed to be. But there came no answering sign from Dahlgren. Instead there were Confederate guns which opened a brisk fire, and from somewhere Kilpatrick heard, vaguely, that veterans from Lee’s army had entered the lines, and it began to seem to him that he was in trouble.

  The skirmishers crept forward, peppering the Rebel lines and getting peppered in return. Kilpatrick rode to the front, and a soldier heard him complain: “They have too many of those damned guns; they keep opening new ones on us all the time.” What had begun as the prelude to a smashing attack slipped imperceptibly into a sparring match, with everybody waiting hopefully for some indication that Dahlgren had got into Richmond and would presently get out again. But the gray skies and the bleak countryside gave no sign. The Confederate trenches lay half a mile away across a level plain, the fields heavy with cold mud, chilly mist, and smoke lying low over all. The Rebel fire grew stronger, and the day dragged on toward evening.

  Kilpatrick had imagined this expedition, he had pulled wires to get it approved and to win command of it, and now he and his division were here at the gate of Richmond, and his advance guard was lost off beyond the smoky flats and someone a good deal tougher than government clerks seemed to be manning the Rebel guns. The quick victorious assault that had looked so possible back at Brandy Station seemed now an effort too great for worn-out unaided cavalrymen to make. At last the weight of responsibility was too much, and at dark—feeling that “an attempt to enter the city at that point would but end in bloody failure”—Kilpatrick called in his skirmishers, wheeled his command about, and headed back to the north side of the Chickahominy River. There, beyond the Meadow Bridge, the command went into bivouac.13

  The bivouac was not a success, although the expedition had been without sleep for sixty hours. The men had no shelter tents, and the weather grew much worse. One trooper recalled their woes, in a breathless expressive sentence: “A more dreary, dismal night it would be difficult to imagine, with rain, snow, sleet, mud, cold and wet to the skin, rain and snow falling rapidly, the roads a puddle of mud, and the night as dark as pitch.” He added that it was impossible to build fires to cook food, and anyway all of the poultry that had been taken so blithely had long since been consumed.

  Late in the evening Kilpatrick partially recovered his grip on himself and determined to make one more try. He ordered two columns formed for a dash up the Mechanicsville Pike, but it took time to get exhausted men and horses into line in the consuming storm, and before the columns were half ready a swarm of Confederate cavalry—no militia, now, Wade Hampton’s veterans from Lee’s army—came pelting in through the slush and opened a heavy fire. Hampton had brought two fieldpieces with him, and these slammed case shot in at destructive range, and befogged soldiers found the inky woods full of flashes of fire and angry yells of “Git, you damned Yankees!” and there was great confusion and much shouting and fruitless cursing.14

  In the end the attack was beaten off, but this clearly was no place to make a camp, and the troopers got on their horses again and went squelching off through the mud, with scattered Confederates following to prick them along with rifle fire from the dark. Finally, long after daybreak, the outfit made another camp some miles away from Richmond, and while the men got what sleep they could Kilpatrick waited for news of the missing Dahlgren.

  He got it, late that day, when some 300 of Dahlgren’s men came stumbling into camp, without Dahlgren. Their story made Kilpatrick no happier.

  Dahlgren’s 500 had got down to the James River on schedule, burning sundry gristmills and canal boats on the way, and they stopped briefly at a plantation owned by James A. Seddon, the cadaverous-looking aristocrat who was Secretary of War in President Daviys cabinet. Dahlgren went up to the big house, full of boyish charm and abundantly living the part of the dashing romantic cavalryman, and he found that Secretary Seddon was not at home. Mrs. Seddon was, however, and Dahlgren charmed her, and they sat in her drawing room and chatted. When he identified himself she confided, prettily, that his father the admiral had been a beau of hers, back in the old days, and now she and the admiral’s son sat there and pledged each other in blackberry wine out of silver goblets, and apparently for the young man and the older woman the war narrowed to the misty focus of something by Sir Walter Scott. Then Dahlgren took his leave, very knightly and courtly, and he rode down to the river to make his crossing.15

  At the river bank the knightly pose vanished. Earlier in the day Dahlgren had picked up a young colored man, held in servitude on some looted plantation, and this man had said that he knew where and how the James River could be forded, and he had been the guide who led the party to this spot. But when the cavalcade came jingling down to the river bank at the place the guide had chosen, the water was deep and wicked-looking, swollen by rains and clearly not to be crossed save in boats, of which the cavalry had none. There was sudden wrath, a cry of treachery, and Dahlgren decided—apparently rather hastily, but a raider as deep in enemy territory as he was would hardly take a judicial view of things—that the guide had maliciously misled him. He immediately ordered the lad hanged to the nearest tree.

  One can picture the business, after all these years: stern young colonel, coldly furious at this mischance breaking in on his bright dream of glory; befuddled guide, staring blankly at a river all black and foaming where normally a man could wade across; expectant staff, seeing death in the young colonel’s eyes and whipping a picket rope from the nearest saddle; oak tree with convenient branch overhanging the bank, quick flurry of movement and smothered cry of protest, tanned hard faces looking on expressionless—and then the finished deed, inert body dangling at the end of a taut cord, and the law of war is hard and there is more to a cavalry raid than laughing troopers splashing through the shallows in winter moonlight, more to it even than a bright young colonel drinking a toast to his father’s old-time sweetheart with purple wine reflecting candleshine in a silver cup. Some echo of the colonel’s anger seems to have reached the lower echelons, because the troopers went back and burned Secretary Seddon’s barns.16

  Unable to cross the river, Dahlgren and his men went trotting toward Richmond on the north side, things vaguely going wrong and the shadow of disaster rising on the cold dark sky. Far ahead they heard Kilpatrick’s guns, and
toward evening they got up close to the city’s defenses. But it was too late now; Kilpatrick had seen too many Rebel guns and had retreated, the Confederates in Richmond were waiting for them, and Dahlgren was in a desperately bad spot—cut off from the main body, men and horses ready to drop, the whole country roused against him, safety many miles away.

  Dahlgren did his best to get his men out of it. He rode at the head of the column, and he got the command away from Richmond and north of the Chickahominy in a driving sleet storm, and it seemed as if all the soldiers in the Confederacy were buzzing around like hornets to sting the invaders to death. For a time the command had to fight its way along the road—miserable fighting in the dark, nothing to be seen but a ragged line of fire as unseen infantry assailed the outriders, quick spat-splash of flying hoofs as the troopers charged up the road, jeering taunts from the fields as the Rebels slipped away—with the whole business repeated, as likely as not, a quarter of a mile farther on.

  Somehow, in the night and the storm and the weird intermittent firing, Dahlgren’s column broke in half, the separated halves losing touch and stumbling on as best they could. The 300 who had just come in to Kilpatrick’s camp constituted one of these halves. The other half, with which Dahlgren himself had been riding, had vanished, and these survivors had no notion where it was or what had happened to it.17

  Only one thing was clear, to Kilpatrick and to everyone else: the whole expedition was a flat failure, and there was nothing for it but to ride down the Virginia peninsula and get within Ben Butler’s lines before disaster became absolute. This, at length, Kilpatrick did, and in the course of the next few days he learned about what had happened with Dahlgren.