A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  Back on his knoll, Grant read these dispatches and he reached out for the nearest troops. These happened to be Brigadier General George W. Getty’s division of the VI Corps—6,000 soldiers as cool and as tough as any, including in their number a Vermont brigade which is still remembered as one of the two or three best in the army. Getty was told to get his men over to the Plank Road at top speed and clear the Southerners out of there. At the same time gallopers were sent off to Hancock to tell him to double back on his tracks and get to that vital crossroads as fast as he could.

  Getty made it with seconds to spare. He rode ahead of his troops, his staff and mounted orderlies trotting at his heels, and the last of the cavalry had gone and the advancing Confederates were clearly visible. It would be a few minutes before the Federal infantry could get up, so Getty coolly planted himself and his mounted people in the middle of the road, to make it look as if cavalry reinforcements or artillery or somebody of consequence was making a stand here. The bluff worked, briefly; the advancing Confederates slowed down and sent skirmishers creeping forward to find out what was going on, and in the minutes that were bought Getty was able to get his leading regiments into line of battle and start them moving west.21

  There was enough to keep them busy. The Confederates here belonged to A. P. Hill, and he had a way of piling his men in fast and hard, and the rival battle lines ranged deeply into the woods and fired as fast as they could handle their muskets. Getty could see that he was outnumbered, and he wanted to fight at long range and wait for help. But Grant felt that the day was made for fighting, and he sent down word to wait for nothing—pitch in and attack, and if any reinforcements show up we’ll send them to you.

  So Getty’s bugles sounded, high and thin over the noise of the firing, and the Federal battle line went crashing forward through the timber. It got to close quarters at once, and in the pathless tangle on both sides of the Plank Road there was an enormous shock and crash of battle, Federals and Confederates shooting at each other at fifty paces, artillery on both sides firing down the narrow road and making it a place where no man could live.

  One officer noted that this was like no fight he had ever heard of. Usually, he said, when two rival lines of infantry met at close range the fight was quite brief, one Une or the other quickly giving way. But here there was no giving way whatever. The men simply lay on the ground or knelt behind logs and stumps and kept on firing, and the very intensity of their fire pinned both sides in position—the only chance for safety was to crouch low or lie flat; if a man stood up either to advance or to run away he was almost certain to be shot.22

  In a way, the fact that the men could rarely see what they were shooting at made it even worse. They simply pointed their rifles into the rolling smoke and the thick stunted trees and blazed away, shooting low by instinct, and a sheet of flame swept over the desolate intricate woodland, hitting anything that stood three feet off the ground. So this fight went on for no one knew how long—an hour, two hours, an eternity—and the battle zone grew wider and wider as Confederates came groping blindly forward on the flanks. The woods took fire, just as they had done farther north, and the crackle of flames mingled with the wild yelling and cursing of men and the swinging, whacking crash of rifle fire, and the dense forest seemed to trap the roar of battle and press it close to the ground so that the noise became unendurable, more terrible than anything that had ever been heard before. Getty had all of his men in action and there were not enough of them, not by half, and the Vermont Brigade hung on with a thousand of its men killed or wounded, and the terrible little flames came snaking forward through the dead leaves and dry pine thickets. Wounded men were seen to load and cap their muskets so that they could shoot themselves if the fire reached them.23

  Somewhere to the north old Wadsworth was ordered to swing his battered division around and come down to help. He was in a good spot to land on the Rebel flank and he was only a mile away, but his regiments and brigades were trying to wheel around in the densest part of the Wilderness and he was taking a good deal of care because he did not want to drift into battle by the flank a second time—and, all in all, he might as well have been north of the Rapidan. By prodigious effort he got his men faced south and they started to move, but they could reach no one but isolated Confederate skirmishers. They stood squarely in front of a great gap in the Confederate line, but they could not come close to finding it, and they drifted down through the blinding forest like a hulk gone out of control, to run aground at last a few furlongs away from the place where they were needed.

  In the rear, Hancock’s men were at last coming up the Brock Road. Hancock was in the lead, shoving the winded men out of column and into line in the miserable second growth, prudently putting some of them to work building a log breastwork at the edge of the road for use in case anything went wrong.

  There was a nightmare slowness about it all. The Brock Road was no better than a narrow lane, bordered closely by all but impenetrable woods—it had taken Stonewall Jackson two mortal hours to form a battle line in this area, just a year ago—and the road was clotted with artillery and confused moving troops and men felling trees and piling up log barricades. The day grew old and the sun was going down, the western light coming all red and tarnished through the blowing clouds of heavy smoke, and Getty’s exhausted line was about ready to fall clear out of the war; and at last Hancock got a couple of brigades lined up and he sent them in to the attack.

  When they hit they hit hard—they were veterans, and they believed that when Hancock told them to charge he meant for them to keep on going—and as Hancock slid new troops in behind them and on both sides they swept into the littered woods like a tornado. They overran Getty’s tired men and bent the Confederates back, and now it was the enemy’s turn to feel that they were outnumbered, outflanked, and forsaken. But if the Yankees had one of their crack combat outfits in here, so did the Confederates, and in these murky woods any little knot of determined men could cause much trouble, and there was a titanic wrestle in the darkening woods, and it is possible that in all the war the men of the North and the South did no more desperate fighting than they did right here, on the two sides of the Plank Road.

  The Federals had had much close-order drill, and they were used to fighting in solid ranks, where each man could see his comrades at his side. This was not like that at all. It was Braddock and his British Regulars fighting the Indians all over again, and the scrub pines, the brush piles, and the massed saplings broke the advancing lines apart, leaving fragments that felt isolated and alone. As one veteran recalled it, “the troops were so scattered and disorganized by the straggling way they had got forward that there was no central discipline to bind the men together.” So this advance was no triumphal march; it had wide gaps in it, and terrible routs and defeats, and desperate deeds of bravery and of cowardice which no one ever knew about. The veteran 1st Massachusetts, shock troops if there ever were any, was cut up into squads and platoons, and the fragments came up toward a little rise of ground and got a close-range volley from Rebels lying prone just beyond the ridge, and broke and ran for it in wild fright. Their panic spread to right and left, for cohesion and spirit were gone, and in a moment a whole division was running away—Gershom Mott’s men, who had been Joe Hooker’s division long ago, famous as one of the stanchest divisions in the army, shattered and useless now.24

  But Hancock had more men than Hill had, and in the end they made their weight felt. The fugitives lost their panic when they got back to the log breastworks by the Brock Road, and the men who had not run kept on advancing, and the Confederates along the Plank Road were on the edge of final disaster when night and sheer breathlessness and muscle weariness at last came down and stopped the fighting. The armies did not draw apart. They simply stopped where they were, and regiments and brigades lay all over the Wilderness, facing in every direction, nobody knowing where he or his neighbors or his enemies might be. Northerners and Southerners were all intermingled in the dreadful n
ight, so close together that men were constantly blundering into the wrong camp and being made prisoners. Skirmishers were awake, firing at any sound or movement, and afterward it seemed to some men that the battle really went on all night without much letup. Deep in the woods many fires sparked and smoldered.

  There were horrors in the night. An officer from a New England regiment, out hunting stragglers, groped through the fathomless dark and somewhere far in the rear a wakeful battery sent over a casual, unaimed shell. It burst near him, and its sudden flare lit up a dogwood tree right before him, white blossoms waxen and mystically motionless in the quick red light. Half blinded, the officer moved on in the succeeding darkness, missed his path, stumbled, and kicked a heap of smoldering leaves into flame; and the flame caught in the hair and beard of a dead sergeant lying in the path, lighting up a ghastly face and wide-open sightless eyes.25

  2. Shadow in the Night

  Never before had there been a night like this one. A reek of wood smoke, powder smoke, and the dreadful odor of burned bodies hung in the air, soiling the night and dimming the stars. There was no silence. Pickets and skirmishers were nervous, firing at everything and at nothing, and from the rear there was a steady rumble and murmur as troops marched up to take new positions. From miles of scorched ground, up front, there was an unceasing crying of wounded men.

  Usually wounded men on the battlefield did not make a great deal of noise. The bad pain generally came later on, and while men here and there might moan and cry out and call for water, most of them took what they had to take in a stunned, half-dazed silence. But this night was different. The underbrush was aglow with stealthy fires, and the ground was matted with dead leaves and dry pine needles, and the terror of the flames lay upon the field so that men who could not move screamed for comrades to come and help them. On both sides, stretcher-bearers tried to do what they could; but it was very dark and the woodland was a creepy maze, and anyway a man who went out to help the wounded was very likely to be shot. A Federal wrote that “the Rebels were fidgety and quick to shoot,” and a Confederate officer said the Yankee skirmishers made it impossible for his troops to help wounded men who lay only a dozen paces outside of their lines.1

  Behind the front there was ceaseless movement: steady tramp of long columns getting into place for the next day’s fighting, and a confused coming and going of stragglers and broken squads and companies hunting their proper commands. In all of this, too, there was a restless stirring by veteran soldiers who were operating a strange, unofficial, and highly effective little system by which the enlisted man kept himself informed about things.

  After every battle, men by twos and threes would slip away from their bivouacs and wander up and down the lines, visiting other campfires to exchange information. They were always welcomed, and they were always watched quite closely, because they were notoriously light-fingered and would steal any haversacks that were within their reach. The army called these men “news walkers,” and they were in fact amateur and self-appointed reporters, hunting the information by which they could judge how the battle was going, what army morale was like, and what the prospects were for the morrow. They were on the prowl tonight, and one of Hancock’s gunners told how he and his mates would look up from their campfires to see “shadowy forms hurrying rapidly through the woods or along the roads.” The gunner described their method of operation:

  “Frequently these figures would halt, and then, seeing our fire with men around it, they would issue forth from the woods and join us. They would sit down, filling their pipes, light them with glowing coals, and then, with their rifles lying across their knees, ask for the Second Corps news, inquire as to our losses and whether we had gained or lost ground, and what Confederate command was opposed to us. They would anxiously inquire as to the truth of rumors of disaster which they might have heard during the day. They would listen attentively to what we said, and it was a point of honor not to give false information to these men. And they would briefly tell the Fifth or Sixth or Ninth Corps news, and quickly disappear in the darkness.”

  So it went tonight, with the smoky tainted air heavy under the trees, and men who had fought all day were hiking for miles to find out what had really been happening. Their system was effective. It was notorious that no headquarters announcement was believed unless it jibed with what the news walkers picked up. Often enough the soldiers had a better line on the situation than the generals had, and when they criticized strategy or tactics they usually knew what they were talking about. As the movement finally died out and the men turned in for such sleep as they could get, the army had a pretty fair notion of what had been happening and what was apt to come next.2

  What would come next, indeed, was fairly obvious: a big attack along the Plank Road, where the disordered pieces of A. P. Hill’s Confederate corps lay crisscross in the darkness. Lee had fought with part of his army missing, and the missing portion—Longstreet’s corps—would not be up until midmorning or later. What was in the cards therefore was a hard smash at Lee’s right, to overwhelm it before Longstreet’s rough veterans could get on the scene, and the fighting was apt to begin as soon as the first faint light broke over the eastern sky.

  Grant wanted the attack made at four o’clock, but the corps commanders were having much trouble getting their disordered divisions sorted out and Meade persuaded the general to allow a postponement. Burnside’s IX Corps was south of the Rapidan now, and Burnside was under orders to get his men down to the Plank Road and join in the assault. Meanwhile, by a little after five in the morning, Hancock got his own troops and Getty’s thinned division from the VI Corps lined up for action, and he immediately sent them west on both sides of the Plank Road.

  They ran into action at once. Hill’s Confederates had hardly so much as tried to straighten their lines during the night—all of the ordinary difficulties of moving troops in this jungle were infinitely intensified in the darkness—and they were not in the best shape to meet an attack. But they were very tough characters and they started firing as soon as the first Yankee skirmishers came crashing through the underbrush, and beneath the low branches the gray half-light of dawn became spectral with wispy layers of smoke. The skirmishers waited to let the main battle line catch up with them, and then everybody went plunging forward and the battle of the Wilderness was on again.

  Hancock was a driver, and he sent his men on like a flood tide. From their dark bivouac north of the road, Wadsworth’s division from the V Corps fell into line and came tramping down at an angle, flanking some of Hill’s men and knocking them out of the way. The Federal battle line was more than a mile wide and it moved with enormous weight, overrunning the islands of stubborn resistance and shooting down the Rebels who were groping for new positions, and an unearthly racket of musketry went rolling up the sky.

  Back by the crossroads Hancock was elated. The wound he had received at Gettysburg still hurt him, and he had official permission to go about in an ambulance if he chose, but he was astride his horse today and as reports came back he felt that everything was going as it should. To one of Meade’s staff officers he called out gaily: “We are driving them, sir—tell General Meade we are driving them most beautifully!” He was robust and handsome and the joy of battle was on him, and to look at him as he sat his horse in this moment of triumph was to understand why the war correspondents liked to tag him “Hancock the superb.”

  Yet even as he exulted in his success he was beginning to fret. Burnside’s men were coming down much more slowly than had been expected. They were supposed to take part in this big attack and they should be here now, but they were not showing up and Hancock began to worry. He told Meade’s man that with their weight added to his own column of attack “we could smash A. P. Hill all to pieces!” 8

  Yet things were going well, regardless. Two miles west of the crossroads where Hancock was waiting, the cheering Federals were sweeping in on the edge of a meager little clearing around the Widow Tapp’s farm, where Lee himself s
tood among his guns and tried to patch up a dissolving battle line. Just beyond him the white tops of the Confederate wagon trains were visible, and if Hancock’s men could just go driving on across this clearing Hancock’s goal would be won.

  And there was a moment, just here by the Tapp farmstead, with dawn coming up through the smoke and the Northern advance breaking out of the trees, when the authentic end of the war could be glimpsed beyond the ragged clearing. If Hancock’s men could go storming on for another half mile, Lee’s army would be broken and it would all be over. It may be that the Army of the Potomac never came nearer to it than this—neither above the Antietam, nor at Gettysburg, nor anywhere else—and final victory was just half an hour away. But the magical half hour flickered and was lost forever, and if any Northern soldier saw victory here he saw no more than a moving shadow distorted by the battle smoke.

  Confederate artillery was massed in the open ground, and the guns fired before the last fugitive Rebels had time to get out of the way, and for a moment the pursuing Federals were knocked back into the woods. Then west of the clearing there rose the high, quavering scream of the Rebel yell, and Longstreet’s men—here at last!—came running in, gripping their rifles in their tanned fists. Lee was in their midst, swinging his hat and trying to lead them until they made him go back (for they knew that the Confederacy could live no longer than that man lived) and there was a staggering shock as the Northern and Southern assault waves dashed together. Above and below the Plank Road, far off into the dark murky wood, the fighting swelled and rolled as more and more of Lee’s last-minute reserves came running into action, and the counterattack broke the force of the Federal charge.4