A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  The men of this army left books and letters behind them, and in these there is a remarkable testimony that the men who marched away from winter quarters that morning took a last look back and saw a golden haze which, even at the moment of looking, they knew they would never see again. They tell how the birds were singing, and how the warm scented air came rolling up the river valley, and how they noticed things like wildflowers and the young green leaves, and they speak of the moving pageant which they saw and of which they themselves were part. “Everything,” wrote a youth from Maine, “was bright and blowing.” It would never be like this again, and young men who were to live on to a great age, drowsing out the lives of old soldiers in a land that would honor them and then tolerate them and finally forget them, would look back on this one morning and see in it something that came from beyond the rim of the world.1

  Cavalry took the lead, moving down through the busy camps to the historic Rapidan crossings, Germanna and Ely’s fords. Foot soldiers watched them go, and called out, in what they conceived to be the idiom of their Southern foes: “Hey there! Where be you-all going?” Jauntily, the troopers called back that they were on their way to Richmond. But although the army felt that this campaign was going to be better than previous ones it still was skeptical, and cavalry needed to be put in its place anyway, so the infantry cried out: “Bob Lee will drive you-all back just as he has done before.” 2

  The troopers pushed on and crossed the river, and they left the sunlight behind and went up the winding woods roads that led into the Wilderness.

  This was a mean gloomy woodland, a dozen miles wide by half as deep, lying silent and forbidding along the southern bank of the river. Its virgin timber had been cut down years ago, mostly to provide fuel for small iron-smelting furnaces in the neighborhood, and a tangled second growth had sprung up—stunted pines, innumerable small saplings, dense underbrush, here and there a larger tree, vines and creepers trailing every which way through dead scrub pines with interlaced spiky branches; there were very few places in which a man could see as far as twenty yards. The soil was poor, and there were hardly any farms or clearings, and the land under the trees was like a choppy sea, broken by ridges and hillocks and irregular knolls.

  There were dark little streams that never saw the sun, and these had cut shallow ravines, some of which had very steep banks. These water courses wandered and twisted and turned on themselves, soaking the low ground into bush-covered swamps, and the thickets covered their banks. Once in a great while there would be a house—paintless, sometimes made of hewn logs, looking gaunt and forsaken like the forest itself, with a hopeless corn patch and weedy pasture around it—and there were a few aimless lanes, hardly more than tracks in the jungle, which did not seem to go anywhere in particular.

  It was the last place on earth for armies to fight, and the entire Army of the Potomac was marching straight into it.

  Actually, the high command had little intention of fighting here. The two armies had been facing each other, with the Rapidan between them, a number of miles upstream from the Wilderness, and when Grant made his plans he had two choices. He could move by his right flank, sliding along the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad in the general direction of Gordonsville, swinging past Lee to the west, and forcing him to fight in open country; or he could go by his left, slipping quickly through the Wilderness, heading for a position behind Lee’s right—where, as in the other case, there could be fighting in the open.

  He had taken the second choice, for reasons which seemed good to him. Chief reason was the matter of supply. Counting everybody, he would be taking some 116,000 men with him, and more than 50,000 horses, and it seemed improbable that the single-tracked railway line could supply all of them adequately. Furthermore, the railroad led through country infested with guerillas—John S. Mosby’s famous irregulars, mostly, who attacked Yankee supply lines and outposts so viciously and effectively that the region between Brandy Station and Alexandria was commonly known as “Mosby’s Confederacy.” If the Federal army dangled at the end of a hundred miles of railroad, these men would have a field day, and so would Jeb Stuart’s far-ranging cavalry, and half of the army would have to be left behind to cope with them. So the army was going to the left, where if it made progress there would be seacoast bases, with a short roadway for the enormous wagon train.

  There might have been a third choice: McClellan’s old route of 1862, putting the army on boats and going down by water to the tip of the Virginia peninsula, with a landing at Fortress Monroe and a quick march toward Richmond between York and James rivers. That way, the army could get up within shooting distance of Richmond without trouble, and the long overland hike with exposed supply lines and hard fighting at every crossroads would be avoided. Before he got to Brandy Station Grant felt that that was the way to go, and soldiers as good as John Sedgwick agreed. Why fight one’s way to Richmond when the army could travel most of the way by water and come up to the doors of the Rebel capital fresh and unbloodied?

  The trouble was that it was not that kind of war any more. Meade’s soldiers had noticed many changes this spring, but what they had not seen was the fact that the role of the Army of the Potomac itself had changed. The goal now was not to capture Richmond but to fight the Army of Northern Virginia—to begin to fight it as soon as possible and to keep on fighting it until one side or the other could fight no more.

  Whatever happened, Lee must never again be allowed to take the initiative. It might or it might not be possible to beat him, but it was all-important to keep him busy. It must be made impossible for him to detach troops to oppose Sherman, who was breaking his way into Georgia with the contemptuous remark that when you pierced the shell of the Confederacy you found hollowness within. Also, Ben Butler was advancing toward Richmond on the south side of the James, and if the Army of the Potomac spent the first month of the campaign getting on and off of steamboats Lee could concentrate against Butler, destroy him and his army, and thus win a dazzling victory at comparatively low cost.

  For all of these reasons, then, the Army of the Potomac had one paramount responsibility: it must get close to the enemy as soon as possible and it must stay close until the war ended. If it did that, victory would come. It might not come in Virginia, and the price paid for it might be terribly high, but it would come in the end.3

  So the army was heading down into the Wilderness, hoping to cross that unwholesome area quickly and to get the Army of Northern Virginia by the throat immediately thereafter. It was a good enough plan. The difficulty might lie in the fact that Lee was notoriously averse to fighting battles when and where his enemies wanted to fight them.

  Some of the soldiers felt this, and as they crossed the river they were vaguely uneasy. A cavalry regiment got over in the middle of the night, drove off the Rebel pickets at the crossing, and went jogging up the sandy roads into the black forest. As they rode the men talked, and one man said that he never thought “the army went hunting around in the night for Johnnies in this way.” A comrade explained: “We’re stealing a march on old man Lee.”

  They thought that over briefly, and someone suggested: “Lee’ll miss us in the morning.”

  “Yes,” said another, “and then look out. He’ll come tearing down this way ready for a fight.” 4

  Lee was on Grant’s mind, too, that day. At noon Grant crossed the Rapidan and made temporary headquarters in a deserted farmhouse overlooking the ford, and a newspaper correspondent brashly asked him how long it would take him to reach Richmond. About four days, said Grant soberly; then, as the newspaperman goggled at him, he went on—four days, provided General Lee was a party to the agreement. If not, it would probably take a good deal longer.

  Grant had ridden past the troops in midmorning, his ornamented staff trotting at his heels. Riding beside him there was the lone civilian amid all those thousands of soldiers—Congressman Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois, Grant’s personal friend and political sponsor, a headquarters visitor for the
opening days of the campaign. Washburne wore civilian clothes of funereal black, and when the soldiers saw him they asked one another who this character might be. A staff officer heard one rear-rank wit telling his mates that it was simple: the Old Man had brought along his private undertaker.5

  For the first twenty-four hours nothing happened. Warren and Sedgwick got their men over the river at Germanna Ford and headed south. The day was warm, and in the hollow roads no air was stirring, and before long the roadside was littered with packed knapsacks, overcoats, extra blankets, and other bits of gear which sweating soldiers found too heavy to carry. The veterans wagged their heads: all of that stuff was a sure sign that there were lots of recruits in the ranks—no old-timer would load himself down with excess baggage at the beginning of a march.

  Artillerists gloated, and scampered about collecting loot; they had an advantage over infantry, in that gun carriages and caissons offered handy places to carry such extras. The more experienced gunners warned their mates not to be hasty. If they waited for heat and fatigue to become a little more oppressive, some of the straw-feet would begin discarding even their haversacks, and those must be collected at all costs. If this march was like most others, they would leave the supply trains far behind, and it was important to lay in a surplus of food.6

  The road wound and climbed slowly for several miles, and at last it came out into an open space by a crossroads. Off to the left there was a run-down, abandoned stage station, still known as Wilderness Tavern, a ruinous place with its yard full of weeds, half hidden by scraggly trees. Behind it was a meadow where, just a year ago, the Confederates had had a field hospital during the battle of Chancellorsville, and in that field the doctors had amputated the arm of Stonewall Jackson.

  A general who came down from Germanna Ford and stood here by the deserted tavern facing south was practically in the middle of the northern fringe of the Wilderness. To get through the Wilderness he could turn right, turn left, or go straight ahead, and no matter which way he went he had about six miles of Wilderness to cross. Squarely across his path lay the region’s principal east-west highway, the Orange Turnpike, which ran from Fredericksburg through Chancellorsville to Orange Court House. Two or three miles to the south there was a companion road roughly parallel to the Turnpike, the Orange Plank Road, a narrow track with a strip of planking running beside a strip of dirt. (The rule in the old days was that a loaded wagon was entitled to stay on the planking; unloaded wagons had to yield the right of way and turn off into the mud.)

  The road south from Germanna Ford crossed the Turnpike, slanting off toward the east as it went south, crossed the Plank Road, and finally got to the southern border of the Wilderness and the open country beyond. About halfway between the Turnpike and Plank Road crossings it became known as the Brock Road. The names of these three highways were presently to be written in red on the annals of the Army of the Potomac.

  Thus, of the three main highways here, two ran east and west and one went north and south. Interlaced across them were various minor roads and lanes, mapped imperfectly or not at all, giving the appearance of going nowhere and, often enough, actually doing it. Only on the three main roads was any sense of direction to be had. All of the minor roads just wandered.

  Somewhere to the west lay the Army of Northern Virginia. Presumably it was moving south, in order to get below the Wilderness and head the Yankees off. If by any chance it proposed to make trouble here in the Wilderness, the Turnpike and the Plank Road were the avenues by which trouble would come. Hence before the army halted for the night it was important to picket those roads, and late in the afternoon of May 4 it was so arranged, with cavalry riding west on the Plank Road and infantry solidly planted on the Turnpike.

  While Warren’s and Sedgwick’s troops were making their bivouac along the Germanna Road and around the Wilderness Tavern, Hancock and the II Corps were making camp half a dozen miles to the east. They had crossed the Rapidan at Ely’s Ford, and their route had led them to the historic Chancellorsville crossroads, where the ruins of the old Chancellor house lay charred amid the vines and the creepers, and where the bones of many unburied dead men took on a pallid gleam in the dusk. According to the plan, Hancock’s men were to move on in the morning, swinging south and west in a wide arc, getting far down on the lower edge of the Wilderness. They could have gone farther this day, and it might have been well if they had done so, but the belief was that the army had the jump on its enemies. So Hancock’s men camped in a haunted gloaming, where Hooker’s men had fought a year earlier, and eerie omens were afloat in the dusk.

  The army was spraddled out over a wide expanse of country. Burnside’s IX Corps was coming down to the Rapidan from the north, the great wagon trains were trundling up behind Hancock at Chancellorsville, and scores of silent guns were parked by the Turnpike. There was something uncanny and foreboding in the air, and when night came seeping up out of the blackness under the low trees the camps were invaded by memories and premonitions.

  It was the last night for many young men—the last night, in a sense, for the old Army of the Potomac, which had tramped down many roads of war and which at last was coming up against something new. The men were bivouacked on the sharp edge of a dividing line in the war, and it appears that somehow they sensed it. After tonight, everything was going to be different. The marching and the fighting were going to be different, and the comradeship around the campfires was going to be thinned out and changed, and nothing they had learned was going to help very much in the experience that lay just beyond the invisible treetops, where a wind made a stir and rustle in the branches.

  In a New York regiment, in Warren’s corps, it was remembered that the ordinary songs and campfire chat were missing, and the men were uneasy. They felt that they were far down in the enemy’s country, and this dank Wilderness did not seem a good place to be, and they carried “a sense of ominous dread which many of us found it almost impossible to shake off.” In one of the cavalry regiments the chaplain brought a group together for divine service, and he read a text about buckling on the whole armor of God and urged the men to “be prepared to stand an inspection before the King of Kings,” and the usually irreverent troopers listened in silence, standing with firelight flickering on brown young faces, and some of them wept.7

  In Hancock’s artillery park the gunners found many unburied skeletons from last year’s fight, and the old-timers recalled the horror of that fight, where men with broken backs or shattered thighs lay in the underbrush and watched the flames that were going to burn them alive creep closer and closer. One man predicted that “these woods will surely be burned if we fight here,” and others said that they did not fear being killed nearly as much as they feared being wounded and left helpless for the forest fires. A soldier stood by a campfire and abstractedly prodded a grinning whitened skull with his toe: moved by a gloomy impulse, he turned to his comrades and cried: “This is what you are all coming to, and some of you will start toward it tomorrow.” Off in the woods the whippoorwills began their remote mournful whistling, and near Wilderness Tavern pickets in the dark wood could hear a dull featureless rumbling far away to the west and they knew that somewhere in the night the Rebels were moving in great strength.8

  Morning came in clear, with a promise of warmth later in the day, and the army began to move before sunrise. Warren’s corps was to go south, sidling toward the west as it went, with Sedgwick’s men following close behind and Hancock’s corps swinging around farther to the left, and the troops got under way promptly. As they moved, Warren sent one division west on the Turnpike, just to make certain the flank was protected, and the colonel who had the advanced skirmish line in this division rode to the top of a rise and looked westward. The roadway here was like an open glade pointing straight toward Lee’s army, its dusty white floor lying empty in the dawn, shadowy woods on either side; and far down this avenue the colonel dimly saw a column of moving troops, with men filing off into the forest to right and left, and he
sent a courier hustling back to his division commander with the message: Rebels coming this way! 9

  His division commander was Brigadier General Charles Griffin, a lean man with a big walrus mustache and a knack of exuding parade-ground smartness even when he was unbuttoned and dirty: an old-time Regular Army artillerist and, like many such, a hard case. His troops liked him very much—once when he came back from sick leave the men pulled him off his horse and carried him to his tent on their shoulders, which did not often happen to generals—and he had very advanced notions about getting his guns well to the front in battle. It was said that in one fight a battery commander whom he was sending forward looked at the approaching enemy and protested: “My God, General, do you mean for me to put my guns out on the skirmish line?” To which Griffin answered impatiently: “Yes, rush them in there—artillery is no better than infantry; put them in the line and let them fight together.”10 So this morning, with Rebel skirmishers approaching, Griffin pulled a section of guns out of the nearest battery and sent it rolling west on the Turnpike to support his own skirmishers. He had the rest of his division form a line of battle astride the Turnpike, and when the line was formed he ordered it to advance. If the Confederates wanted to start something here he would find out about it soon enough.

  This was mean country for a moving line of battle. One hundred feet from the Turnpike a man lost sight of the road entirely, and there seemed to be no other landmarks whatever. No regiment could see the troops on its right or left unless an almost literal elbow-to-elbow contact was maintained, and no general could see more than a small fraction of his troops, or control them except by sending aides and couriers stumbling off through the woods—amid which, in most stretches, it was quite impossible to ride a horse. The going was tough, with scrubby thickets and clumps of saplings breaking the lines apart and all manner of tangled dry stuff underfoot, but the men struggled along and by and by they heard scattering shots from the skirmishers in the woods ahead.