A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  Their possessions were many, because infantry commands leaving Washington for the front always discarded (or could be quietly despoiled of) much property, and so the “heavies” had extra blankets, stoves, civilian-type bedsteads, and good table equipment. Their hospitals boasted white sheets and pillowcases, and some regiments even maintained regimental libraries. Certain regiments actually kept pigs, feeding them on swill from the company kitchens and dining frequently on fresh pork. One outfit of mechanically minded Yankees set up a little machine shop, and before inspection they would take their muskets in and have the barrels turned in lathes to take on a dazzling gleam and polish, with machine-driven buffers to put a glossy sheen on the stocks. These men had been enjoying a very comfortable war, and the combat troops had been resenting it (and envying them) for a long time.

  Now, without warning, these huge regiments left their happy homes, marched down to the Rapidan, and began to pitch their shelter tents in the mud just like everybody else, and the infantry was jubilant. Veterans would line the roads, whooping with delight, calling out all manner of greetings—asking the new regiments why they had not brought their fortifications along, referring to them derisively as “heavy infantry,” inquiring when their guns would arrive, and offering instruction about various aspects of the soldier’s life. These heavy artillery regiments were many times as large as the veteran infantry outfits—the colonel of the 12th Massachusetts was protesting just now that his regiment could muster only 207 enlisted men for duty—and the veterans would make heavy-handed remarks on the fact; when a new regiment came in they would ask what division this was.20

  Certain cavalry commands met a similar fate, and got just as much sympathy. Some of these had been in camp at Washington for a refit, waiting with perfect resignation for the slow processes of government to provide them with remounts. These abruptly found themselves deprived of sabers, of carbines, and of all hope of new horses, given infantry muskets instead, and sent down to the Rapidan on foot. A Connecticut heavy artillery regiment, meeting such a command of dismounted Maryland cavalry, asked incautiously: “Where are your horses?” A Marylander replied sourly: “Gone to fetch your heavy guns.” The Official Records contain a plaintive and quite useless protest by an outraged colonel, who recited that he led a spanking new regiment of Pennsylvania cavalry into Washington that spring—1,200 men, well mounted, disciplined, drilled, and equipped—only to be ordered to turn in his horses and weapons, draw muskets, and consider his command infantry thenceforward.21

  All of this pleased the infantry greatly, cavalry in general not being too popular with foot soldiers, and there was admiration for the general who had brought it all to pass. With this admiration came a dawning respect for his power. Pulling the heavy artillery and the dismounted cavalry down to the Rapidan meant that Washington was being left almost defenseless. In earlier times, White House and War Department had insisted on keeping 40,000 men or more within the Washington lines, even though no enemies ever came within miles of them. If this new general could override that insistence he must have prodigious strength. Apparently he could have things just about the way he wanted them, and the army would move with greater power. At the very least, it seemed that the country’s strength was going to be used. When he rode the lines, a soldier wrote that the men would “look with awe at Grant’s silent figure.” 22

  Not all of the changes were popular. One which was bitterly resented by thousands of the best soldiers in the army was a shake-up which consolidated the five infantry corps into three. Actually, this was none of Grant’s doing, Meade having put it in the works before Grant took over, but it was announced while all the other changes were taking place and it was generally accepted as part of Grant’s program. Meade seems to have made the move partly because he felt that the army would work better with fewer and larger units, and partly because there were not as many as five qualified corps commanders in the army anyway. The consolidation enabled him to shelve several generals who had been withering on the vine—the best of them, probably, crusty and slow-moving George Sykes, famous because of the work his Regulars had done in the early days.

  What made this shake-up unpopular with so many men was the fact that the I Corps and the III Corps ceased to exist, their brigades being distributed among the three corps which survived. These two corps had been famous and their men had been cocky, wearing their corps badges with vast pride, and they were brought almost to the verge of mutiny by the change. (One army historian, writing more than twenty years later, asserted that “the wound has never yet wholly healed in the heart of many a brave and patriotic soldier.”)23 The two organizations had been wrecked at Gettysburg and it had never been possible, somehow, to repair the damage and bring them up to proper strength. Yet the consolidation was unfortunate. Heretofore, each corps had had its own individuality and its own tradition, and these had done much for morale. Just as the three which remained were striving to digest the miscellaneous lot of new recruits which were coming in, they were given the unhappy brigades and divisions from the two corps which had been abolished. The result was that nobody quite felt that his old outfit was what it used to be. There was also the possibility that the great increase in the size of each corps would put a new strain on the corps commanders.

  In the midst of all of this reshuffling the army almost lost John Sedgwick. Sedgwick had never felt it necessary to assure Washington that he hated Democrats and loved emancipation, nor had he ever concealed his admiration for McClellan, and these tilings had made him suspect with Secretary Stanton. Early this winter Sedgwick had bluntly told the War Department that Butler’s poorly handled attempt to capture Richmond had done the Union cause more harm than good, and since Butler was a pet of the radical Republicans—a standing test of the other generals’ allegiance to the cause, so to speak—this was remembered where it would hurt. In February Sedgwick wrote to his sister that the army grapevine was predicting a reorganization “to get rid of some obnoxious generals,” and he admitted that he himself might be on this list. It would not bother him much, he said, if this turned out to be true: “I feel that I have done my part of field duty.… I could even leave altogether without many regrets.”

  So when Meade began to make changes Stanton told him that it would be well to find some other place for Sedgwick, and after some argument back and forth it had finally been agreed to put Sedgwick in command up in the Shenandoah Valley. It would have been an odd sort of demotion, for the valley command was destined to be very important, but it was all upset at the last minute when Mr. Lincoln unexpectedly gave the job to Franz Sigel, and in the end Sedgwick remained in command of the VI Corps.24

  With the men of this corps he was very popular. One day in this winter of 1864 Wheaton’s brigade of the VI Corps came in to camp after several months of detached service in western Virginia. The brigade detrained in a miserable cold rain, and since all of the good camp sites had been taken it appeared that they would have to pitch their tents in a muddy field, with no shelter from the elements and the nearest source of wood for campfires several miles away. There was a fine grove near by, to be sure, but some brigadier and his entourage had long since pre-empted it. While the men stood disconsolate in the wet, a burly horseman in a muddy cavalry overcoat came splashing up—Sedgwick. He took in the situation at once, rode over to the little grove, told the brigadier and his henchmen to pack up at once and move to some other place, and ordered Wheaton to have his brigade take over the vacated campsite.25

  Winfield Scott Hancock led the II Corps. He had been badly wounded at Gettysburg and the wound still bothered him, but he came back at the end of the winter with all of his old gusto and the men were glad to see him. He was a vivid, hearty sort of man—his chief of staff, with strong understatement, remarked that he was “absolutely devoid of asceticism”—and it was believed that he could conduct a long march with less straggling and more professional competence than any other officer in the army. He differed from most Regular Army officers (incl
uding Meade himself) in that he liked volunteer soldiers and did his best to make them feel that they were as good as Regulars, and his army corps repaid him for that attitude.26 The corps badge was a trefoil, and when the men went into action they had a way of yelling: “Clubs are trumps!”

  To the V Corps, in place of the departed Sykes, came one of the most baffling figures in the army—Major General Gouverneur Kemble Warren.

  Warren was thirty-four, with long jet-black hair and a mustache which he was fond of twirling; a slightly built man with sallow complexion, looking not unlike an Indian, well liked by the troops because he displayed great bravery under fire. (No officer could be popular in this army unless he could show a spectacular contempt for danger.) He was a queer mixture of the good and the ineffective—a fuss-budget with flashes of genius, a man engrossed in detail and given to blunting his cutting edge by worrying over trifles which a staff captain ought to have been handling. He had never heard of delegating authority, and he had a certain weakness for setting his own opinion above that of his superior officer’s.

  He had had two great days. One was at Gettysburg, when as an engineer officer on the commanding general’s staff he had stood on Little Round Top, had seen the coming danger, and by a hair’s thin margin had got Union troops there in time to save the day. The other was at Mine Run, in December, when half of the army had been given to him for a mighty assault that was to destroy the Rebel army and make General Warren a national hero. At the last minute General Warren had discovered that the Confederate line was far stronger than had been supposed: so strong, indeed, that the attack could not possibly succeed and would be no better than a second Fredericksburg. With no time to refer matters to the army commander he had had the moral stamina to call things off, let Meade’s wrath descend entirely on himself, and take whatever rap might be coming.

  He came from Putnam County, New York, and as a young man he was a sobersides, not to say a bit of a prig. He can be seen, at twenty-two, a very junior second lieutenant, writing home to his mother telling her how to rear the eleven other children she had borne: “You must dress them warmly and give them the best of shoes to keep their feet dry.… Put flannel underclothes on them all. Cold fingers and cold ears are not much account, but cold feet is the cause of a great deal of sickness. If Edgar is still troubled with that tickling in his throat, put woollen underclothes on him, place a plaster on his chest, keep his feet warm and dry, and I know it will disappear.” Yet he would not merely give advice: “I have money to spare, if that is lacking.”

  An engineer officer, he had worked on Mississippi River flood-control projects, and under Harney he had fought the Sioux Indians. He had an unmilitary ability to be sensitive to human suffering. The worst thing about fighting Indians, he wrote, was that one shot a good many women and children, and when it came time to dress their wounds afterward one discovered that they were just like any other women and children and not at all like howling savages. He had filled in for Hancock in charge of the II Corps, this past winter, and now he had a corps of his own. It included many good fighters and contained some of the best of the troops from the departed I Corps, and what it might do would depend a good deal on General Warren.27

  So the army had been made over, with familiar organizations broken up and familiar faces gone, and what nobody could miss was the fact that it was being made larger and at the same time harder and more compact. The three rebuilt army corps were grouped more closely together. The detached troops which had been spending dreary months guarding the line of the railroad back to Alexandria were all called back into camp. To replace them there appeared an old familiar figure from the unhappy past—Major General Ambrose E. Burnside, dignified and friendly and incurably addicted to fumbling, short jacket belted tightly around his tubby figure, bell-crowned hat shading his incomparable whiskers.

  His IX Corps had been brought up to full strength again (it now contained a solid division of colored troops, who had gone wild with enthusiasm when they were paraded past Abraham Lincoln in Washington) and it was coming down from its rendezvous at Annapolis to occupy the line of the railroad. The corps was not formally a part of the Army of the Potomac. It was to act with the army, receiving direct orders from the general in chief; meanwhile it was on the railroad, and its arrival meant that the army could operate as a unit, none of its manpower wasted guarding the line of supply.

  Imperceptibly, a new spirit was appearing. Competence and confidence had arrived, neither one obtrusive, both unmistakable. Yet the soldier lived at the bottom of the pool, in a dim greenish light in which no outlines were very clear. He had seen army commanders come and he had seen them go, and he was going to take very little for granted. The only certainty was that the campaign ahead was going to be very rough, and the men frankly dreaded it—more on account of the marching, they said, than of the fighting. The viewpoint was aptly expressed in a letter which a Pennsylvania private wrote at the end of April: “If Congressmen at Washington, or the Rebel Congress at Richmond, were required to endure the hardships of a soldier’s life during one campaign, the war would then end.” 28

  Army life went on, despite shifts in command. There were baseball games, as spring dried the fields—the 13th Massachusetts beat the 104th New York one day by a score of 62 to 20—and there were the endless chores of army routine. An Illinois cavalry regiment came to camp after a spell of provost guard duty in Washington, reporting that it had been policing upwards of a hundred houses of prostitution, and a trooper confessed that “this work, although it amused the men for a time, and was arduous to perform, did not satisfy those who longed for more active service.” There were the age-old attempts to wangle furloughs. An Irish private one day went to his regimental commander, explaining that his wife was ill and the children were not well and that it was necessary for him to make a short visit to his home. The colonel fixed him with a beady eye and said: “Pat, I had a letter from your wife this morning saying she doesn’t want you at home; that you raise the devil whenever you are there, and that she hopes I won’t grant you any more furloughs. What have you to say to that?”

  Quite unabashed, the soldier replied that there were “two splendid liars in this room” and that he himself was only one of them: “I nivir was married in me life.” 29

  Perhaps the abiding reality this spring was the unseen army across the river, the Army of Northern Virginia. A fantastic sort of kinship had grown up in regard to that army. There was no soft sentimentality about it, and the men would shoot to kill when the time for shooting came. Yet there was a familiarity and an understanding, at times something that verged almost on liking, based on solid respect. Whatever else might change, these armies at least understood one another.

  Physically, they were not far apart, and the pickets often got acquainted. One Federal picket detail, which was ordered to hold certain advanced posts by day but to pull in closer to camp at night, discovered that a deserted log hut which it was using by day was being used by Rebel pickets at night, the Confederate arrangement here being just the reverse of the Federals’. Two groups of rival pickets met at this hut one morning, the Confederates being tardy in starting back to camp. There was a quick groping for weapons, a wary pause, then a conversation; and the Southerners said that if the Yanks would give them a few minutes to saddle up they would get out and the old schedule might go on. It was so arranged, with a proviso that each side thereafter would leave a good fire burning in the fireplace for its enemies.30

  The enlisted men knew their enemies better than the officers did. Cedar Mountain was just inside the Union lines, and there was a signal station on top of it, and one day, with marching orders imminent, two officers from a Maine regiment climbed this mountain to take a glimpse of the Rebel country. Far below them, in rolling broken fields and woods, they saw the storied land of the Rapidan—“grinning,” as one of them wrote, “with dreadful ghosts,” for many men had died in the fighting along this river during the last three years. Today everything looked pe
aceful, and spring was on the land, and through telescopes they could see a Confederate camp. There were men lounging about in shirt sleeves, some of them smoking their pipes and washing their clothes, others playing ball. The two officers stared at them for a long time, getting their first look at Confederate soldiers off duty. At last they put down their telescopes, and one officer turned to the other.

  “My God, Adjutant,” he said. “They’re human beings just like us!”31

  CHAPTER TWO

  Roads Leading South

  1. Where the Dogwood Blossomed

  IT WAS the fourth day of May, and beyond the dark river there was a forest with the shadow of death under its low branches, and the dogwood blossoms were floating in the air like lost flecks of sunlight, as if life was as important as death; and for the Army of the Potomac this was the last bright morning, with youth and strength and hope ranked under starred flags, bugle calls riding down the wind, and invisible doors swinging open on the other shore. The regiments fell into line, and great white-topped wagons creaked along the roads, and the spring sunlight glinted off the polished muskets and the brass of the guns, and the young men came down to the valley while the bands played. A German regiment was singing “John Brown’s Body.”

  Beside the roads the violets were in bloom and the bush honeysuckle was out, and the day and the year had a fragile light that the endless columns would soon trample to fragments. The last campaign had begun, and a staff officer sat on a bank overlooking the Rapidan and had a curious thought: how odd it would be if every man who was to die in the days just ahead had to wear a big badge today, so that a man watching by the river could identify all of those who were never coming back!