A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  From the foot of the knoll the ground ranged down into a little valley, with the road to Spotsylvania Court House cutting squarely across it. A quarter of a mile away, on the far side of the valley, there were woods on the rising ground. These woods were not as dense as those in the Wilderness, and in them the general could see a fairly long line of Rebel soldiers, working feverishly to throw up a low breastwork of fence rails and earth. Most of his own division was trailed out behind him over several miles of road and he had just one brigade in line, and it seemed to him that he should let the men rest, wait for the rest of the division to come up, and then if he had to fight go in with everybody together. But then Warren came up, all eager and impetuous, and Warren told him to keep going.

  It was hardly seven o’clock but the morning was hot already, and Robinson did not think his beaten-out men could make it. He asked for more time, so that he could at least mass his division for the assault, but Warren was impatient and told him to go ahead without waiting. Orders were orders.

  Robinson took a last look at the Rebel position—it looked pretty strong, with the trench line stretching along the crest of the opposite hill—and he consoled himself by thinking that if the attack were made now the Rebels at least would not have time to bring up artillery and make the job completely impossible. So he gave the word, and his men got to their feet and went down into the valley.

  There was a chance that they might make it. The Confederates had marched all night, too, and were in no better shape than Robinson’s men, and they were still busy trying to finish their trenches. A mile beyond them lay the courthouse and the vital road crossing, and a rattle of carbine fire came faintly over the treetops from a dispute the rival cavalry patrols were having there. If Robinson’s men could push this one line of Confederates out of the way, the town and the crossing belonged to the Union and Lee was cut off, and the war would take a very different turn.

  But the going was very hard, and there were mean little gullies cutting across the ground, and the Confederates began to lay down a scorching fire of musketry, so that the advancing brigade took heavy losses. The men forced their way through an entanglement of felled pines, started up the farther slope, found the Rebel fire too heavy, and hugged the ground in lee of a steep little bank that gave some protection, waiting for the support troops to come up.

  Looking back, they could see Robinson’s second brigade, Maryland troops, mostly, falling into line on the knoll and starting forward, and for a moment they took heart. But more Confederates had come up, and these fired over the advanced brigade’s heads and hit the Marylanders hard, so that the support wave fell into confusion and began to break for the rear. Robinson himself came along the slope to rally them, but a bullet hit him in the knee and he went down with a wound that would cost him his leg and take him out of the war for keeps. The Maryland brigade ran away and the rest of the division had got into a fruitless fight off to the right somewhere, too far away to lend any help here.

  The Federal attacking line hung on for a while, and then a new Confederate brigade appeared off to one side, driving in a fire that went lengthwise along the huddled line and killed men who crouched flat against the slope, and it was too much. The men made a final, desperate attempt to charge the Rebel line, and a few of them reached the breastworks and got into a leaden-armed bayonet fight with men as weary as themselves. Then at last they gave up and ran —a queer, slow, stumbling flight, because they were simply too tired to run fast, even when discipline was gone and they were running for their lives.

  The brigadier commanding these troops wrote later that he himself very much wanted to run at top speed, but could do no more than hobble along using his unsheathed sword as a cane. He fell in a field before he got very far, and he was carried off, unconscious, and the Rebels kept on firing as the men retreated. The remnant of Robinson’s division at last regrouped itself back of the knoll from which it had started. Its division commander and every brigade commander had been put out of action, more than 2,000 enlisted men had been shot, there were stragglers all over the place, and there was no more fight left in anybody. The division had fought its last fight. A day or so later army headquarters broke it up and assigned its remnants to other units.4

  The rest of Warren’s corps came up, followed by Sedgwick’s, and the fight that had begun as an advance-guard scrap for possession of an insignificant little ridge spread all across both sides of the little valley and began to pull two whole armies into it. The troops which had been racing for Spotsylvania Court House were running a dead heat to this rolling, half-wooded area a mile west and north of the hamlet, and as fast as the men came up they were strung out on the firing lines, each line unrolling to north and south as more troops arrived. Batteries were brought up, their gun crews glad to see open ground again in place of the impossible Wilderness tangle, and the guns took position on the high ground and began hammering.

  It was a confused fight that grew by what it fed on, with separate regiments colliding briefly here and there as they struggled for favorable positions. There was a whole series of little assaults and counterassaults which cost lives and drained away reserves of strength and endurance but which were buried in the reports as incidental to the general process of getting the battle lines established. Toward evening, though, Grant felt that there were enough men on hand to make a real fight of it, and the Federals staggered forward for an attack.

  Gruff General Crawford got his Pennsylvania Reserves ahead so that they overlapped the right end of the Confederate line and for a moment it looked as if they might break something loose, but the men were simply too exhausted to drive their attack home. Also, at the last minute they collided with Robert Rodes’s division of Confederates, which had just come on the scene in a state of equal exhaustion. For a time the worn-out troops blazed away at each other at short range, and then the Pennsylvanians pulled back and the day ended with the rival armies spread out in a great crescent, the concave side to the east, with Spotsylvania Court House nestled on the Confederate side of the curve. Sedgwick’s and Warren’s men were in line side by side, and Hancock was coming up behind and Burnside was bringing his corps down through the night from somewhere off to the north.

  The infantry lines were restless as the darkness came down, and patrols and skirmishers were forever prodding at one another and firing sharply at the sight or sound of movement, and now and then the chat-chatter of their firing provoked the artillery to add its own voice. Farther back, the immense column of Yankee cavalry was all astir. It was taking off on a ponderous move that might turn into a very big thing, and while there were certain military reasons for the move the controlling factor in all of it was the fact that two very hot-tempered men had just had a violent argument.

  George Gordon Meade commanded the Army of the Potomac, and when he rebuked a man he did it with angry words that struck sparks. On this day he was furiously dissatisfied with the job of his cavalry. The tangle which his own escort troops had kicked up was the least of his worries. What bothered Meade was that the cavalry corps itself, Sheridan’s command, had failed in the early morning hours to clear the road from Todd’s Tavern down to Spotsylvania. Sheridan had issued certain orders for this movement, and Meade had canceled some of them without bothering to tell Sheridan, and it appears that neither man had planned the business very well anyway. The upshot had been that the army was delayed and missed a big chance. So when Sheridan came to Meade’s headquarters, around noon, Meade greeted him with angry words that resounded all over the place, loudly denouncing him for letting his cavalry get in infantry’s way.

  Phil Sheridan was an uncomplicated man whose chief trait, for good or for evil, was a driving combativeness, and he replied in words just as hot. It was Meade’s fault, he shouted, because Meade had countermanded his orders; he was fed up with it, and if he could just pull his cavalry together and use it the way cavalry ought to be used, he could go out and whip Jeb Stuart out of his boots. So it went, back and forth, with st
aff and orderlies pretending to be deaf and drinking it all in, and at last Meade stalked off to tell Grant about it.

  Back of this row was something more than a mere clash of temperaments. Meade was correct in blaming most of the delay on Sheridan, but Sheridan did have a proper complaint. Army headquarters still held more than a trace of the crippling old theory that the cavalry corps after all was pretty much a staff outfit like the signalers, its commander in effect ranking as a member of the general’s staff rather than as a leader of combat troops. McClellan had seen it so, and only the departed Hooker had disagreed with him. Sheridan wanted to use his men the way Stuart used his—as a hard, compact, striking force—and it was not possible. What the generals were really arguing about was whether cavalry was to be regarded as a fighting corps or as a collection of train guards, scouts, and couriers, and Grant saw the point as soon as Meade began to talk to him.

  When Meade reported how Sheridan had said he could whip Stuart if he could take his men and go off on his own, Grant looked up.

  “Did Sheridan say that?” he asked. “Well, he generally knows what he is talking about. Let him start right out and do it.” 5

  So the cavalry corps had been collected in one imposing mass—13,000 mounted men, plus horse artillery, a sinewy column such as this army had never before mustered; and presently it set out on a wide swing that would carry it clear away from the camps and battle lines and take it down cross country on a beeline for Richmond. Stuart would not dare ignore it, the way he had ignored Stoneman’s raid in the Chancellorsville campaign, for if he did it had weight enough to go straight into the capital, or to work ruinous damage in the army’s nexus of transportation and supply. He would have to follow it and bring it to bay and get into a stand-up fight with it, and then it would be seen what came of it all.

  When it set out the cavalry did not go jingling off at a trot, pressing for stray minutes and wearing out its horses. It moved at a walk, conscious of its power, as if it had all the time in the world. Once the advance guard brushed into a Rebel skirmish line, and sent a few squadrons forward to tap the line and see what it was made of. The firing grew brisk and the squadrons came tumbling back. Up came Sheridan, hotly asking what was the matter here. Too many Johnnies up ahead, the men told him.

  “Cavalry or infantry?” he demanded. Cavalry, he was told.

  “Keep moving, boys—we’re going on through,” he ordered. “There isn’t cavalry enough in all the Southern Confederacy to stop us.”

  The men cheered, and Sheridan waved his hat, and they broke through the skirmish line and the column kept on going—slow, remorseless, powerful.6

  On their swing away from the army the troopers went back across the Wilderness, and on the Plank Road they met a great wagon train of wounded men, heading east toward Fredericksburg. It was a dreary procession. There were not ambulances enough to carry all of the men who had been wounded in the Wilderness, and empty ammunition wagons, ration wagons, and similar vehicles had been put into service. These wagons had no springs, and the roads were very rough, and a steady, monotonous sound of moaning and screaming went up from the long train and could be heard far away, long before the wagons themselves came into sight. For miles the wagons filled the road, so that the cavalry had to get off to the side and go trampling through the underbrush.

  Between and beside the wagons were the walking wounded, and these men begged for water as the cavalrymen went by, so that the column was slowed while troopers hastily offered their canteens. They were not supposed to do this, but as one trooper wrote, the calls of the wounded men were “an appeal that could not be denied.… We had water in our canteens and we took time to dismount and hold them to the lips of the thirsty comrades.” The wagons jolted on, an enormous cloud of dust lying in the air above and all around, and now and then the train would halt while some wounded man who had died was taken out and laid in the woods.7

  Never had the wounded men had it any worse. The fighting in the Wilderness had caused more casualties than Antietam itself had caused, and the medical corps was snowed under. First orders had been to send the trains northwest back across the Rapidan to a spot on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, so thousands of men had been loaded in wagons and started in that direction. But when the army moved down toward Spotsylvania those orders had to be changed, because the old route by Germanna and Ely’s fords was no longer being guarded and Mosby’s raiders would unquestionably capture any hospital train that tried to use it. So it had been decided to send the wounded over to Fredericksburg, and the clumsy procession had countermarched (giving the men an extra twenty-four hours in the graceless wagons) and new trains were made up to carry more of them, and thousands upon thousands of wounded were now making the agonizing trip to Fredericksburg.

  The medical corps that was taking charge of all this was fearfully shorthanded, because the army had marched off to fight new battles and most of its doctors, hospital attendants, and loads of medical supplies had to go along. A few could be spared for the men in the trains, but nobody knew what would happen when they finally reached Fredericksburg because that was a firmly secessionist town badly ravaged by war and it was not currently occupied by any Federal troops. An abundance of stretcher-bearers had been detailed, a party from each regiment, but most of them were quite useless. Human nature being what it is, the average colonel picked out for this detail the men who were least likely to be of any help if they remained with the regiment, the inevitable consequence being that the worst loafers and thieves in the army had been appointed to help care for the wounded. Doctors noticed that the pockets of nearly all of the dead men and most of the helpless wounded men had been slit open for the easier removal of purses and watches.

  The surgeons had done what they could. They began by sorting the wounded men into three classes—those who could probably walk back, those who had to be carried, and those who could not be moved at all and so would have to remain in field hospitals in the Wilderness, which was still smoldering and which stank to the highest heavens, what with thousands of unburied bodies. A very few doctors could be spared to remain with these men—four of them, two regular hospital stewards, and twenty of the priceless detailed attendants, as it was finally worked out, for about a thousand totally disabled men.

  When the wagons were loaded there had been a further sorting out. Some of the men could sit up, and empty ammunition boxes were supplied for them to sit on, so that sometimes six or ten could ride in one wagon. With the amputees there was a different classification. It was quickly discovered that men took up less room if they lay on their sides than they required when they lay on their backs, so the leg cases were grouped accordingly: if each man in an ambulance had lost his right leg, each man could lie on his left side—for however many terrible hours the trip might last—and they could fit together nicely, like so many spoons, and it was so arranged.8

  It was about one in the morning of May 9 when the head of this great caravan of misery came creaking down into sleeping Fredericksburg, a wrecked, half-lifeless town that lay across the path of war, which had seen much suffering and now was to see more.

  It had been a drowsy pleasant place, once. In the old days the tubby English merchant ships drifted lazily up the river and moored here, and the grave men in knee breeches and silk stockings who traded in them had built formal homes of red brick on the quiet streets, and back of the town on the heights they had put up mansions with white pillars, so that an eighteenth-century air of order and certitude had given the place a special flavor. But the old days were long dead and now there was a bitter new flavor, and the very name of the town had taken on a hard ring, and in many homes North and South it was a name of death and deep shadows: a sinister word, carrying a shudder with it, one of the homely American place names made dreadful by war. The town had known violence and gunfire and screaming, and the meadows beyond had seen naked corpses turning blue under a frozen moon, with guns flashing from the hilltops and the wreckage of old houses littering the
streets. All of that, earlier in the war, and now this: seven thousand wounded men coming in at one in the morning, with no one riding on ahead to announce their coming or to get things ready for them, and not one sullen resident owning the slightest desire to help the Army of the Potomac in any way whatever.

  A regiment of dismounted cavalry had come along as train guard, and it sent men scurrying about to knock the town awake and find places to put the wounded. Churches were taken over, and warehouses, mills, public buildings, and the larger private homes, and all through the night the wagons were laboring up to these doorways and unloading. In some cases, wounded officers of rank were quartered with Fredericksburg families, and these men got along well enough. Nobody in town had any sympathy for Yankees, but the people were not brutal or callous, and so a very fortunate few of the wounded got into real beds.

  Most of them were simply laid on the floor—any floor that was handy. Many buildings were still half-wrecked from Burnside’s bombardment of December 1862 and contained puddles of stagnant rain water that had come in through gaping holes in the roof, and men were dumped down in this seepage so that the pools became bloody. One warehouse which had contained leaky barrels of molasses had a quarter inch or more of gummy treacle all over the floor. No straw was available for bedding. There was nothing for it but to put the men on the bare floor—in rain water, half-dried syrup, or whatever—and hope that they could make the best of it.

  The best was not very good. Washington had had no warning that this move was coming, and so no supplies had been sent down. There were just thirty army doctors on hand to look after the 7,000 wounded, all of whom by now needed attention very badly; needed at the very least to be bathed and given fresh clothing and hot soup, and to have their bandages changed. Practically none of these things could be done, partly because of a woeful shortage of help and partly because the medicines, fresh dressings, and food that were on hand were strictly limited to the little that had been carried in the wagons. The man who got so much as a hardtack and a drink of water that day was in luck. It took more than twenty-four hours just to get the men out of the wagons. A good many of them died, which meant that some of the attendants had to ignore the living and serve on burial details.9