A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  Dusk came at last, with smoke and a muffled crying in the air, and still the battle was not over. Lee had a pugnacity to match Grant’s, and just a year ago on the edge of this Wilderness he had flanked a Federal army quite as large and as confident as this one and had sent it scurrying back across the Rapidan in utter defeat. Now, as the day ended, one of Lee’s brigadiers pointed out that up north of the Turnpike the right flank of John Sedgwick’s line was exposed, and in the gathering dark a Confederate striking column came whooping down on this naked flank and drove it headlong.

  As so often happened, the Confederates had found a soft spot. The Union flank here was held by Sedgwick’s 3rd Division, two brigades which had not been with the VI Corps very long. Their earlier experience had mostly been in the Shenandoah Valley under the command of a flamboyant and remarkably inefficient general named Milroy, who had led them to a number of defeats. The rest of the corps dubbed them “Milroy’s weary boys,” and considered them something less than full-fledged members of the club.

  They had been posted in the woods facing west, with several miles of unoccupied country between the end of their line and the Rapidan River, and during the day Sedgwick had worried about them. He had sent a cavalry regiment over to keep an eye on the flank—a regiment of recruits, unfortunately, which failed to do its job—and a bit later he had a staff officer go on a long scout to make sure that the Rebels were not up to anything sinister. Everything had been quiet at the time, but now at dusk the Confederates broke these two luckless brigades into splinters, and throngs of disorganized excited men went rushing through the thickets past Sedgwick’s headquarters.

  Sedgwick was on his horse at once, galloping over to the scene of the disaster, and he sent his staff flying along the dark woods trails to bring up reinforcements. The men who had run away kept on running, and before long they were scudding back past army headquarters, bearing wild tales of ruin and collapse, while a mighty sound of musketry and cheering went up from the woods to the north.20

  The news that came to Grant and Meade had an alarming sound. Sedgwick held the army’s extreme right, and if the Confederates once broke his line and got well around it the whole army was cut off and utter disaster might be in the cards. A couple of Sedgwick’s brigadiers who tried to rally the defeated troops were captured, as were several hundred of Milroy’s weary boys, and at one time Grant and Meade were told that Sedgwick himself had been captured and that his whole corps had gone to pieces. Various officers from the beaten brigades, their nerve wholly gone, had wild tales to tell, but Grant and Meade seemed quite unshaken.

  Meade was coldly furious with two staff officers who came rocketing in to tell him that all was lost. “Nonsense!” he shouted. “If they have broken our lines they can do nothing more tonight”; and he sent the Pennsylvania Reserves over to stem the tide. Another officer came up to Grant, crying that he had seen this sort of thing before and that he knew just what was happening: Lee was getting around to where he could cut the army’s communications, and if something weren’t done about it they were all in a terrible pickle. Grant heard him out, and then he blew up, ceasing for once to be the phlegmatic sphinx of legend. He was sick and tired, he declared with heat, of being told about what Lee was going to do: “Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault and land in our rear and on both our flanks at the same time.” As for the panicky officer himself, Grant had a curt order: “Go back to your command and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do!” 21

  Sedgwick, meanwhile, was competently busy. He pulled unshaken troops out from the left of his line and without fuss or apparent haste got them faced north and sent them in to halt the triumphant Rebels. (One of these soldiers remembered how his own colonel, taking his cue from Sedgwick, went along the line telling the men: “Don’t be in a hurry, boys—let them come well up before you let them have it!”) The Confederate attack was checked, at last, at substantial cost, and once things were stabilized Sedgwick put in the rest of the night drawing a new line more to the right and rear and getting troops into it so that the army’s flank could be more firmly anchored. Just at dawn, with the job finished, the Vermont Brigade came tramping up from the scene of its two-day fight along the Plank Road, and as the column came by Sedgwick the soldiers let out a wild cheer. Sedgwick waved his hat, and a staff officer noticed that he “blushed like a girl” with pleasure at the cheering.22

  There had been some anxious moments at headquarters, for all of the outward calm. After the needful measures had been taken, and there was nothing to do but wait for an hour or so to see whether those measures would work, Grant went into his tent, lay down on his cot, and had a very bad ten or fifteen minutes of it. One of his staff wrote later that Grant went to sleep at once and slept as quietly as a baby, but that was just part of the legend. The army had rubbed elbows with sheer catastrophe that night and Grant knew it, and when he was alone he could be as much tormented by suspense as anyone else.23

  Yet the catastrophe had never materialized, and on the morning of May 7—forty-eight hours after the battle began—the two armies were just about where they were at the start. It was a foggy morning, and there was heavy smoke from the brush fires, and officers on reconnaissance could see very little, even on the roads or in clearings. Along the Turnpike, rival skirmishers had little spats now and then, although nobody seemed ready to bring on a real fight.24 On the Plank Road the Confederates had drawn back—the burnt-over acres where there had been so much fighting the day before were no place for a battle line—and the hot day wore away with little active contact between the armies.

  From end to end of the Union line there were breastworks—stout affairs of piled logs, on the Brock Road; lighter constructions of heaped wood and earth, deeper in the forest—and the men made themselves as easy as they could behind these works and speculated about what was likely to happen next. They did a great deal of talking about it, and mostly it boiled down to the simple question: Had they just fought a second battle of Chancellorsville?

  The two battles were very much alike. They had been fought in very nearly the same place. Each time, a Union army with a great advantage in numbers had plunged into a forest where numbers did not help much, had seen its flanks broken in, and had had very heavy losses. (The toll for the two days in the Wilderness was more than 15,000 casualties, about equal to Chancellorsville.) After Chancellorsville, the army had admitted defeat and had gone back across the river. Would it do the same thing now?

  In the Philadelphia Brigade the men were cynical. They agreed that by all precedents the army would retreat, would grant furloughs lavishly to restore morale, would spend weeks reorganizing and ordering new equipment, and—after getting reinforcements—would probably think about making some new move. That afternoon the wagon trains got under way, creaking slowly off toward Fredericksburg. A Massachusetts soldier admitted that “most of us thought it was another Chancellorsville, and that next day we should recross the river,” and a cavalryman said his comrades “supposed they were on another skedaddle.” 25

  Night came at last, and couriers sped to corps and division headquarters, and the men in Warren’s corps—unspeakably weary, after two days of fighting and practically no sleep—left their trenches, fell into column, and started marching. They found themselves on the Brock Road, and in the darkness they were filing south immediately in rear of Hancock’s men, who still held their charred log barricades; and as they marched the men realized that they were not heading toward the river crossings at all but were going south toward the lower edge of the Wilderness. The road was crowded, and nobody could see much, but as the men trudged along it suddenly came to them that this march was different. Just then there was a crowding at the edge of the road, and mounted aides were ordering: “Give way to the right!” and a little cavalcade came riding by at an easy jingling trot—and there, just recognizable, was Grant riding in the lead, his staff following him, heading south.r />
  This army had known dramatic moments of inspiration in the past—massed flags and many bugles and broad blue ranks spread out in the sunlight, with leadership bearing a drawn sword and riding a prancing horse, and it had been grand and stirring. Now there was nothing more than a bent shadow in the night, a stoop-shouldered man who was saying nothing to anyone, methodically making his way to the head of the column—and all of a moment the tired column came alive, and a wild cheer broke the night and men tossed their caps in the darkness.

  They had had their fill of desperate fighting, and this pitiless little man was leading them into nothing except more fighting, and probably there would be no end to it, but at least he was not leading them back in sullen acceptance of defeat, and somewhere, many miles ahead, there would be victory for those who lived to see it. So there was tremendous cheering, and Grant’s big horse Cincinnati caught the excitement and reared and pranced, and as he got him under control Grant told his staff to have the men stop cheering because the Rebels were not far away and they would hear and know that a movement was being made.26

  It was the same on other roads. Sedgwick’s men backtracked to Chancellorsville, and as the men reached that fatal crossroads the veterans knew how the land lay and knew that if they took the left-hand fork they would be retreating and if they turned to the right they would be going on for another fight. The column turned right, and men who made the march wrote that with that turn there was a quiet relaxing of the tension and a lifting of gloom, so that men who had been slogging along quietly began to chatter as they marched. Here and there a regiment sang a little.27

  Back by the wagon trains one of Sedgwick’s officers came upon Burnside’s division of colored soldiers, so dust-colored the men looked white. They were heading south like everyone else, and the officer saw a big colored sergeant prodding his men on with the butt of his rifle and ordering, “Close up dere, lambs.” 28

  3. All Their Yesterdays

  This was the night when everybody was dog-tired. The whole army was on the march, the wood smoke hung in the still air on the windless roads, and the only noise was the endless shuffle and scuffle of feet in the dirt, and now and then the clank of bayonets rattling against canteens. The men were drunk with fatigue, and nerves were as frazzled as muscles. The dust rose in choking clouds, so that blue uniforms looked gray when the columns passed campfires, and the men in the ranks staggered against each other and tripped on one another’s heels. Looking back on it afterward, a man in the VI Corps felt that the whole night was “a medley of phantasmagoria,” and the one sustaining thought was that at the very least they were going to get out of the Wilderness.1

  The main road south was the Brock Road, and Warren’s men had the lead. They came around midnight to an obscure crossroads where Todd’s Tavern was situated, and there they ran into an insane traffic tie-up. This had many causes, most of which could be blamed on the attempt to make a forced march, along inadequate forest roads, with an army that was almost out of its head with weariness; but it was one of the most expensive traffic tie-ups in American history, because in the long run it cost many lives.

  It was a bad time for delay. Off to the southeast was the tiny hamlet of Spotsylvania Court House; a sleepy village where a few stores and houses stood grouped about a little park containing a brick box of a building with Greek-revival pillars across the front, the whole place as insignificant and as unknown to the world at large as Chickamauga and Antietam creeks had been a year or so earlier. Now the village was about to take on a sinister and enduring fame, because in this region of meandering unpaved highways it was an important road crossing. The outcome of the war might depend on which army got there first. If the Army of the Potomac could win the race, it would stand between Lee’s army and Richmond, and the outnumbered Confederates might be forced to destroy themselves attacking Yankee breastworks. Thus there was need for haste, and the march was pressed.

  But it was like moving in a nightmare. The road was narrow and the darkness was absolute, and the men dozed stupidly as they walked. Somewhere off to the right was the Confederate army, a moving presence which every man could feel and which made itself physically known, now and then, through a spat-spat of skirmish fire somewhere ahead. Rebel cavalry had been ranging these parts and it had cut down trees and left them lying across the road, and men with axes had to go forward and cut these logs apart before the army could pass.

  Yankee cavalry was moving about in the night, too, and it was even more of a trial than the Confederates. It clogged the roads, and at Todd’s Tavern it seemed to be all bunched up, overflowing the highway and making a murmur of talk and clumping hoofs and clanking gear, and the infantry came to a halt and waited for someone to clear the way.

  Headquarters had gone on in front, as was proper, and headquarters included various detachments of enlisted men who had troubles of their own. Among the escort troops was the 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry, a veteran regiment which despised all recruits and had learned to look out for itself; and it happened that in the thick midnight the escort troops took a wrong turn and went off down a lane which would have landed them inside the Confederate lines if someone had not discovered the mistake and called a halt. The Pennsylvanians pulled up presently and began marching back toward the main road, troopers all very irritable. Nothing would have come of it if the Pennsylvanians had not been followed by a brand-new regiment of cavalry which had just come down from the Giesboro Point depot in Washington, brave with unused equipment and neatly groomed, unwearied horses—a regiment which, simply because it was new, the Pennsylvanians held in deep contempt.

  In the countermarch, then, the Pennsylvanians had to pass the long column of recruits, and as the two regiments overlapped it occurred to the veterans that a cavalryman, all in all, was no better than his horse, that their own horses were worn out and in bad order, and that the horses of the recruits were fresh and vigorous. Nobody said anything in particular, but just as the two regiments were stretched out side by side on a pitch-dark road the Pennsylvanians by a common impulse sprang to the ground, pushed the rookies off of their horses, sprang into the vacant saddles, and thus obtained remounts in the twinkling of an eye.

  The rookies had never been warned about this sort of thing, and for the vital seconds that really mattered they were too dazed to resist. They came to fast enough, once the exchange had been made, and a tremendous fist fight boiled up in the middle of the forest—men on foot trying to grapple with mounted men, nobody able to see so much as his clenched fist in front of his nose, the fight streaming out along the byway and spilling over into the main road and turning into a complete unregimented riot which nobody but the 3rd Pennsylvania understood and which nobody on earth could quell.

  It went on for an hour or more, and the advance of the whole Army of the Potomac came to a halt, infantrymen falling asleep in the dust while Yankee cavalry fought Yankee cavalry and the noise of the combat went up to the unheeding sky. It ended at last, with the Pennsylvanians getting away on their new horses and the rookies doing their grumbling best on the beaten nags they had inherited. Next morning the officers of the 3rd Pennsylvania looked their men over and remarked, sagely: “The horses look remarkably well after the night’s march,” and the first sergeants innocently said, “Yes sir,” and that was all there was to it. But the army had lost a couple of hours on the road to Spotsylvania Court House.2

  The escort troops were got out of the way at last, and cavalry skirmishers were trotting on in front, and in the gray of earliest dawn the infantry saw puffs of smoke rising from fields and wood-lots up ahead where Confederates disputed the right of way. The column halted, while officers went forward to see how the land lay, and the 12th Massachusetts had the advance, followed by the 9th New York. As they stood in the road a solitary horseman came back from the skirmish line and began ordering the regimental officers to deploy their men on the left of the road. The horseman was undersized and swarthy, and he wore a funny flat felt hat with a floppy brim, and
he talked as one having authority, and the infantry colonels bluntly asked him: Who are you, giving us orders like this?

  The horseman flipped up the brim of his hat so that his face could be seen—olive-dark face with heavy mustaches and hard eyes—and he barked out his name: “Sheridan!” He added that Rebel infantry was just ahead, strung out behind brush piles and cowsheds in the rolling farm land, and it was time for Yankee infantry to go in and chase them out. So the New Yorkers and New Englanders filed off the road, deploying into fighting formation, and Sheridan kept saying: “Quick! Quick!” 8

  Presently the lines were formed, and their officers told the infantry that nothing but dismounted cavalry lay in front, and the battle line went forward in the hazy dawn. It went for a mile or more, ground very rough, Rebels withdrawing very slowly, and a great many Federals fell out of ranks from sheer exhaustion. Those who kept on found the enemy resistance pretty stiff to be coming from any dismounted cavalry, and as the light grew and they could see better one man turned to his mates and grumbled: “Pretty dismounted cavalry—carrying knapsacks!” They pulled up at last on a wooded knoll, discarding their own knapsacks—they were at the last pitch of weariness, and the loads were heavy—and while the men caught their breath their division commander, bushy-bearded General John Robinson, rode forward and tried to make out what was in front of him.