A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  But the charge was still on. Back by the Brock Road Hancock was still driving reinforcements forward. Almost half of the army was under his command this morning, and he proposed to use every man who had been given him. Wadsworth’s men struggled out of the jungle at last and the Plank Road lay across their way, and they surged forward in a great crowd, yelling mightily. They got into the path of Getty’s division, which was driving west along the road, and there was a heavy traffic jam, two divisions all intermingled, men swearing, officers thwacking about with swords, and the disordered mob sagged off toward the south; and Lee’s guns in the Tapp farm clearing caught the right flank of Wadsworth’s uneven line and blasted it with fearful effect. Wadsworth was galloping desperately up and down the Plank Road, his old Revolutionary War saber in his hand, trying once again to get his line wheeled around so that it could face the firing instead of getting it all in the flank. Back to the right and rear the leading division of Burnside’s corps was at last creeping down through the woods, and far to the north by the Orange Turnpike Warren’s and Sedgwick’s soldiers opened a hot fire on Ewell’s men, to keep the Confederates from sending help from their left to their right.

  The focus of it all was the narrow Plank Road and the deadly woods on both sides of it. Never before had the Army of the Potomac thrown so many men into one assault as were thrown in here. Twenty-five thousand soldiers were moving up in one stupendous charge, and most of them were battle-trained veterans. Yet what they had learned in other battles seemed to be of little use here, and in the Wilderness numbers did not seem to count. They were fighting a strange, desperate fight, without color and without drama. The whole thing was invisible. It was smothered down out of sight in five miles of smoking wilderness, and even men who were in the storm center of it saw no more than fragmentary pictures—little groups of men moving in and out of a spooky, reddish luminous haze, with rifles flashing indistinctly in the gloom, the everlasting trees and brush always in the way, the weight of the smoke tamping down everything except the evil flames that sprang up wherever men fought.

  In other battles these soldiers had known the fearful pageantry of war. There was none of that here, for this was the battle no man saw. There was only the clanging twilight and the heavy second growth and the enemies who could rarely be seen but who were always firing. There was no more war in the grand style, with things in it to hearten a man even as they killed him. This was all cramped and close and ugly, like a duel fought with knives in a cellar far underground.

  Up from the forest came a tumult such as none of the army’s battles had made before. It had a higher pitch, because so little artillery was used, but more rifles were being fired than ever before and they were being fired more rapidly and continuously, and the noise was unbroken, maddening, beyond all description. A man in the VI Corps called it “the most terrific musketry firing ever heard on the American continent,” and a New Yorker said that from the rear it sounded like “the wailing of a tempest or the roaring of the ocean in a storm.” Groping for the right superlative, another soldier wrote that “the loudest and longest peals of thunder were no more to be compared to it in depth or volume than the rippling of a trout brook to the roaring of Niagara.” Far back by Wilderness Tavern Meade’s chief of staff tilted a professional ear and commented that the uproar “approached the sublime.” 5

  Always the little flames sprang up, as the blast from rifle muzzles hit the dried leaves and the brittle pine twigs, and the fear of these flames haunted every soldier. Often, when they were hit, men cried at once for help—anything was better than to lie in a firetrap and wait for the flames. It may be that the heavy blanket of stifling smoke that drifted on ahead of these fires was a mercy, for there were men who believed that it often suffocated the wounded, quickly strangling the life out of them before the fire could torture them to death.6

  Behind the lines, far to the rear where the smoke-fog and the noise came rolling down the wind, there was a constant movement of walking wounded looking for field hospitals. Some came alone, using muskets as canes or crutches. Others came in little groups, supporting each other, the halt leading the maimed and the blind. All of them were bloody. Cavalry patrols ranged all approaches to the rear areas and when a straggler appeared their curt demand was: “show blood!” The man who could not do it was arrested as a runaway.

  The wounded came back with tight, bloodless lips, and in most cases their clothing was disarranged. Unless he was totally disabled, the wounded man’s first act, usually, was to tear his clothing open and look at his wound, to see whether it was going to be mortal. The examination over, some men would look relieved, confident that they had little to worry about. Others would turn pale and stare blankly at nothing, convinced that they could not recover. These men had seen many gunshot wounds, and they were pretty fair diagnosticians.

  On this day the wounded brought discouraging tales back to the dressing stations. They said the fighting was not going well, and one man remarked glumly that “the Confederates are shooting to kill, this time.” Hospitals were alive with rumors of disaster: the right wing had crumbled, Lee had seized the Rapidan crossings, the army would soon find itself surrounded. The adolescent drummer boys had been pressed into service, along the firing lines, as stretcher-bearers. Properly, this was not drummer boys’ work, but as one man said, “It was in the Wilderness, under Grant,” where “even boys counted.” 7

  Along the Plank Road there was complete pandemonium. The narrow lane was choked with moving men—regiments and bits of regiments trying to re-form, hundreds of Confederate prisoners who had been disarmed and told to hike to the rear and who were trying hard to get back out of range, stretcher-bearers and walking wounded moving along with the same idea in mind, dazed stragglers and lost men hunting in vain for their regiments or for some quiet place to hide or for a safe road to the back country. There was such a tangle in every great battle, of course, and during every attack there were places just behind the front where it looked as if the army were coming apart. Yet the confusion in the Wilderness this morning was something special.8 The commanders behind the lines—Grant, smoking and whittling and noting all the dispatches, Meade near him talking busily with staff officers, Hancock at the crossroads ordering men forward—they had no conception of what was really going on up in front. They could not have one. The battle was out of their control, fighting itself, a great curtain of distance and forest and choking smoke cutting them off from contact and knowledge. Things were going wrong, and they could not know about it—nor, if they did know, could they do anything about it.

  In this forest it was almost as bad to win as to lose. Either way, a battle line was certain to get thrown into hopeless disorder. Along five miles of fighting front there was hardly one brigadier who could really control his own line, because there was hardly one brigadier who could put his hand on more than a fraction of his own command. The lines had been jumbled as they had never been jumbled before. Divisions and brigades were all divided. Along the zone of the heaviest firing there was not a single regiment which had on either flank a regiment which so much as belonged to its own army corps.9

  Commands were broken into moving fragments which floated blindly about trying to reassemble without the faintest idea where their comrades might be. Reinforcements lost their way as they tried to go forward and made the trouble worse, so that instead of adding weight to the attack they crippled it. In one place, men would be standing ten ranks deep, and a few hundred yards to right or left there would be a complete gap in the line, with nobody at all to hold the ground and only the bushes and the blinding haze to keep the Confederates from seeing what an opening lay in front of them. Brigades got in behind one another and shot blindly into the ranks of their own friends.10

  One of Hancock’s best brigadiers was ordered to move up the road and support Getty’s division, but before he could get started Getty’s division had been crowded over to some other part of the battlefield, so that the support troops moving in withou
t skirmishers ran head on into a Southern battle line, which opened a deadly fire before the Federals realized that they were anywhere near the enemy. The brigadier did not know whether he was within half a mile of the place where he was supposed to be—nor did he know what he was supposed to do, now that he was wherever he was, except fight, which he could not help doing with Rebels all around him. Long after the war he wrote that he still did not know what had been expected of him. What he had actually done was to get several hundred of his men shot to no purpose at all, and it seemed improbable that that was quite what Hancock had wanted.11

  Near the road, Wadsworth was still moving his regiments about so that they could renew the attack. The old man was tired and he felt unwell, and he told an aide that he really ought to turn command of the division over to someone else and go to the rear, but there was too much to do just now and he would wait for a lull. Somewhere behind him, men from the IX Corps were pushing forward; the men said afterward they made the final fifty yards of their advance crawling on hands and knees through a pine thicket, and when they got through the thicket they had a terrible hot fight with some Rebels behind a fence-rail breastwork. South of Wadsworth’s division, soldiers said that all morning long they had seen neither a general officer nor a staff officer to tell them what to do. They were without commanders, and each regiment was fighting entirely on its own.12

  This sort of thing could last just so long before something gave way. Nobody knew what was happening because nobody could see 100 feet in any direction, but suddenly, without any warning, the sprawling line across the Plank Road began to come to pieces. Out of the smoke came men who had stopped fighting and were unhurriedly going back out of action, and nothing that anyone said to them seemed to make the slightest difference. One of Wadsworth’s soldiers said it was the strangest sight ever seen: the men pressing to the rear did not seem to be demoralized or scared, and yet they did not quite look like organized troops retreating under orders, either. They were just going back, looking like “a throng of armed men who were returning dissatisfied from a muster.” One of Meade’s staff officers noticed that the men were not running, and were neither pale nor frightened, nor had they thrown away their weapons: “They had fought all they meant to fight for the present and there was an end to it.” A New Jersey soldier noted the same baffling traits and said the only explanation he could make was that “a large number of troops were about to leave the service.” 13

  Whatever had happened, there it was—an unpanicked but irreversible retreat by the army’s shock troops, thousands of men turning their backs and sauntering calmly toward the rear. Wadsworth’s men caught the infection, and as they turned to go the Rebels hit them with hard volleys that turned the retreat into actual rout, and the whole division dissolved, thousands of men streaming off through the woods. Wadsworth stormed along trying to rally them, but a Confederate bullet killed him and for the time being his division simply went out of existence; of 5,000 men who advanced with it in the morning, fewer than 500 could be rallied that evening, the rest all scattered over five square miles of unplumbed forest. (It might be noted that 1,100 of the 5,000 had been shot.) 14

  So the whole advance crumbled, and back by the Brock Road it looked as if this half of the army had broken up. Hundreds of men were pouring down the Plank Road, and other hundreds were breaking out of the woods, and the whole Wilderness seemed to be leaking beaten Yankees. Hancock’s inner thoughts just then were not recorded, but he must have thanked the god of battles that the evening before he had had his men build a stout log breastwork all along the western side of the Brock Road, a heavy fence of piled-up saplings standing three feet high and running north and south for two miles or more.

  It was just the dike that was needed to check this retreat. Disorganized men who reached it looked about them, fell in behind the barricade, loaded their muskets and peered into the blank woodland from which they had just emerged. Shattered regiments and brigades, crawling over this rude fence, managed to form new ranks on the east side of it, and stood there waiting for orders, their panic gone. Off to the north the roar of battle continued, for Burnside’s men at last were making their presence felt, but they had come in too late and their attack was not heavy enough, and nothing that they could do could change the situation on the south side of the Plank Road.

  What had happened was perfectly simple, and it had turned into catastrophe largely because nobody could see what was going on.

  When Hancock made his advance that morning he had been plagued by a report (which happened to be false) that some or all of Longstreet’s men were apt to come up into action from the south. On his extreme left, therefore, he held one division out of action as flank guard. All sorts of wild rumors about approaching Confederates had been circulating that morning, and the result was that some 8,000 of Hancock’s best soldiers had been immobilized. Furthermore, as the rest of the corps advanced along the Plank Road, a gap two miles wide had opened between the assaulting column and this reserve division.

  Eventually Hancock decided that all of the rumors were false, and he sent word to this idle division to advance so as to come up on the left flank of the men who were making the attack on the Tapp farm. If this had been done, Longstreet’s counterattack would probably have been blunted. But all of Hancock’s messages seem to have gone astray—couriers hit by stray bullets, or captured by Confederates, or just plain lost in the battle turmoil—and John Gibbon, the highly competent soldier who commanded the reserve division, never got the orders. So the division stayed out of action, and when the Federals began to fight with Longstreet’s troops in the wild chaos two miles to the west their southern flank was unprotected.15

  Longstreet discovered this, and mounted a cunning flank attack. This hit the left end of the Yankee firing line and broke it just at the moment when the confusion of the whole line was at its worst. The effect was like tipping over the first in a row of dominoes. The men who were driven in by the flank attack went north, toward the Plank Road, retreating across the immediate rear of all the troops that were in line. Blind and bewildered, and quite unable to see anything, the men in front knew only that the troops on the left were running away; and in the invisibility out of which they had emerged there sounded much musketry and the jeering, triumphant sound of the Rebel yell. The fight had not been making much sense for half an hour or more; now it was ceasing to make any sense at all, and one after another the men headed back for the Brock Road—not panicky, for the most part, but not doing any more fighting just now, either.

  For a while there was a lull. The Confederates were as much disorganized by their victory as the Federals had been by their own a little earlier. In the confusion Longstreet was shot by his own men, and he was carried to the rear coughing blood, out of action for months to come, and it was going to take an hour or more to get his brigades unscrambled so that the advance could be resumed. So Hancock was given precious time to organize his defenses along the Brock Road, and when the Rebel attack was at last renewed the men were ready for it.

  Not too ready, possibly: the men had fallen in behind the log barricade willingly enough, yet it was noticed that in some places they simply cowered close to the earth, pointed their muskets up toward the treetops, and maintained a fire that could hurt no one except birds. Yet by this time the forest fire was just about taking charge, anyway. The Rebel battle line that charged up to the Brock Road came splashing through little pools of fire, and here and there the log breastworks themselves caught fire and blazed up hotly, so that neither side could hold possession, and attackers and defenders stood a dozen yards apart and fought each other through a sheet of flame. In some places cannon had been put into line, their muzzles protruding out over the logs, and the gunners tried to work these in spite of the fire. Some of these men were horribly wounded when cartridges were exploded at the gun’s muzzles.16

  In a few places the Rebels came through the line. But there were reserves to deal with them—Samuel Carroll’s brigade, w
hich had driven Jubal Early’s men out of the guns on Cemetery Hill at Gettysburg, on the night of the second day’s battle there—and these men rammed the attackers back. The Southerners finally retreated out of sight through the burning woods, and all that had been accomplished—about all that was possible, under the circumstances—was to increase the casualty lists on both sides.

  Grant had spent most of his time on the knoll over by the Turnpike, and there had not been much that he or anyone else could do to control this insane battle that slipped out of sight every time the fighting lines went into action. Yet somehow he had created a new atmosphere around headquarters, and around noon he sent word to Hancock to put on a new offensive, early in the evening, with the same men who had been driven back in the morning. The Rebel assault on the Brock Road had of course canceled this plan, but if anyone cared to make a note of it, there it was—the commanding general’s only reaction to news of a reverse had been to call for another attack.17

  It had been somewhat the same, once that day, when Ewell’s men bent the Union line back near the Turnpike and got some guns far enough forward to shell the very knoll where Grant was sitting. An anxious staff officer came up and asked if it would not be prudent to move the whole headquarters setup back out of range until they knew whether this position was going to be held. Grant took a quiet drag on his cigar and said that it would be even better to wheel some guns of their own up on the knoll and make certain that the position was held; so the guns were brought up, and the general kept on whittling twigs—completing the ruination of his tan gloves, in the process—and the Confederate attack was beaten off.18

  Now and then the grim news that came back from the firing lines had a personal touch. An aide came over from Hancock’s front once to tell Grant that the Rebels had killed Brigadier General Alex Hays—red-haired, coarse-grained, hard-drinking, and hard-fighting, who had spent three years with Grant at West Point, had served in the old 4th Regulars with him after graduation, and had been with him in Mexico, where Hays had marveled at Grant’s ability to get his supply train through in spite of all obstacles. Hays commanded a brigade in the II Corps, and he had helped to beat off Pickett’s great charge at Gettysburg, and now a bullet had found him in the wild mix-up along the Plank Road. Grant took the news quietly, saying that he was not surprised to learn that Hays had been in the front line of action when he was killed: “It was just like him.” 19