A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  The doctors did their best, and some of the stretcher-bearers finally turned out to be fairly useful, and it might not have been so bad if they could once have got the situation stabilized. But the army kept pumping new streams of wounded men in on them faster than the ones they already had could be cared for, and although the men who were trying to cope with this in-gathering of misery worked until they were gray-faced and stupid with fatigue, they kept falling farther and farther behind. It was as if war, the great clumsy machine for maiming people, had at last been perfected. Instead of turning out its grist spasmodically, with long waits between each delivery, it was at last able to produce every day, without any gaps at all. Since the medical service had never been up against anything like this before—had never dreamed of anything like it, in its wildest hallucinations—there was bound to be trouble.

  One doctor wrote that for four days in a row—including most of the intervening night hours—he did nothing whatever but amputate arms and legs, until it seemed to him that he could not possibly perform another operation. Yet hundreds of cases were waiting for him, and wounded men kept stumbling in, begging almost tearfully to have a mangled arm taken off before gangrene should set in. “It is a scene of horror such as I never saw,” he cried. “God forbid that I should ever see another.” A day or two later he had found no end to it: “Hundreds of ambulances are coming into town now, and it is almost midnight. So they come every night.” 10

  For the fighting at Spotsylvania began before any of the men who had been wounded in the Wilderness had been got back to Fredericksburg. The job of cleaning up after one battle had barely been begun when a brand-new battle was opened. Robinson’s men had their bloody fight for the approaches to the courthouse crossroads while the army’s ambulances were still full of men who had been hurt two or three days earlier, and these ambulances were getting farther and farther away from the army right when the army was developing an urgent new need for them. Some 1,500 men were wounded in Robinson’s fight, and they were collected at dressing stations not far behind the front. This collection was made easier by the fact that the army was having an unprecedented amount of straggling. Medical directors estimated that from two to four able-bodied men were leaving the ranks with each wounded soldier, and while that made it almost impossible for the army to fight successfully, it did solve momentarily the problem of getting wounded men back out of danger. The trouble was that very few of these volunteer helpers of the afflicted went back to their regiments afterward. They faded away, following wagon trains north or simply dematerializing in the general confusion, and most of them showed up sooner or later in Fredericksburg.

  And so that tragic little city, already completely swamped with wounded men, became equally swamped with men who wandered about on foot, stole food, got in everybody’s way, and in general succeeded in doubling the size and complexity of the problem which existed here at the Rappahannock crossing. The stragglers mingled with the walking wounded. A great many of them picked up bloodstained bandages and put them on so that they could pose as wounded men and, if their luck held out, get aboard the hospital steamers and ride back to Washington. Some of them carried realism even farther, and the harassed doctors eventually discovered about a hundred cases of self-inflicted wounds.

  Up at the front, Meade was desperately trying to find more ambulances. Most general officers had commandeered one or more ambulances for personal use. They made comfortable living quarters, as a matter of fact, and generals were using them much the way auto-trailers were used in the 1940s, and now Meade ordered all of these turned over to the army’s medical director at once. From general headquarters and from the three army corps upwards of fifty ambulances were thus acquired, and with these and with empty ammunition and forage wagons a regular shuttle service back to Fredericksburg was established.11

  Just in time to avert complete chaos, the first steamers from Washington came down the Potomac. These could not come around to Fredericksburg yet—guerillas made the Rappahannock unsafe, and the Navy was sending a couple of light-draft gunboats to see about it—and they tied up at the old Potomac River landings, Aquia Creek and Belle Plain. These landings were twelve or fifteen miles from Fredericksburg, via villainous corduroy roads, which meant an extra spell in purgatory for any wounded man who made the trip. (A ride in a springless wagon over a corduroy road was about as bad as anything war had to offer.) Yet once a man was put aboard one of the steamers the worst was over, and in a few hours he would be in a regular hospital around Washington: a poor enough place, perhaps, by modern standards, but paradise itself compared with lying unfed and unattended in a springless wagon or on the wet gummy floor of a half-roofed warehouse.

  There was a good deal of a jam at the river landings, for the piers were inadequate, and before the boats could take wounded men aboard they had to unload their own cargoes, and usually the narrow makeshift dock that was to receive the cargo was crammed with long lines of stretchers and a huddled mass of walking wounded. The stragglers and malingerers got in the way very badly, and the good civilian doctors who came down with the hospital ships could be imposed on by these men as regular army surgeons could not have been, so that transportation needed by suffering men was often pre-empted by men whose only trouble was a desire to get away from the zone of fighting. The army caught on to this, eventually, and in a few days no man could get aboard any of the steamboats until he had been examined by a hard-boiled army doctor who knew all of the dodges.12

  The steamers brought down the things the impromptu Fredericksburg hospitals needed—foods, medicines, bandages, doctors, and hospital attendants—and they came just in time to keep the situation from becoming completely impossible. But mostly they brought down supplies for the army itself. The emphasis was on the job ahead, not on the wreckage that was being left behind, and it was obvious to everybody that the army was not going to stop to lick its wounds. If the lot of the wounded men could be made endurable, that would be fine, but the only thing that really mattered was the fighting.

  The wounded men themselves realized this, and they took a sardonic pleasure in the sight of reinforcement troops moving south through Fredericksburg. One day a heavy artillery regiment, fresh from the Washington barracks, came marching through—muskets polished, uniforms neat and unfaded, band playing in front—and the wounded men on the sidewalks and in doorways set up a derisive cheer. One man called out: “Go it, Heavies—old Grant’ll soon cut you down to fighting weight!” Another man sourly eyed the band and cried: “Blow—you’re blowing your last blast!” 13

  Days after full steamboat connection with Washington had been established, a nurse in a II Corps hospital in Fredericksburg wrote that the wounded men were still getting nothing to eat but hardtack and coffee, and when she contemplated the lot of the average private she exploded: “O God! such suffering it never entered the mind of man or woman to think of!” What she saw in Fredericksburg, she added, was worse than what she had seen in the hospitals at Gettysburg, the sole improvement here being that most of the men were at least under cover.14

  The men at the front were given no time to worry about what happened behind the lines. For a long time they had told one another that the one thing they wanted (aside from an end to the war) was a fighting general in command. Now they had him, and they were learning that there were elements in the bargain on which they had not counted. The trench lines in the country around Spotsylvania Court House grew longer and longer, and as they did so the men began to see that the heavy fighting had hardly so much as started, and that what had begun in the Wilderness was to go on and on with no end to it. There was no more maneuvering for position, no more tapping a line cautiously to find a soft spot. Men were simply lined up and sent forward, and sometimes it was like the Wilderness fighting all over again, rival lines colliding drunkenly in the dusk of pine thickets, no order or plan to the battle, armies fighting like infuriated mobs.

  There was an obscure bit of ground here called Laurel Hill, and both s
ides wanted it, and a man in the 20th Maine recalled how they fought for it:

  “The air was filled with a medley of sounds, shouts, cheers, commands, oaths, the sharp reports of rifles, the hissing shot, dull heavy thuds of clubbed muskets, the swish of swords and sabers, groans and prayers.… Many of our men could not afford the time necessary to load their guns … but they clubbed their muskets and fought. Occasionally, when too sorely pressed, they would drop their guns and clinch the enemy in single combat, until Federal and Confederate would roll upon the ground in the death struggle.” 15

  John Sedgwick had brought his corps up into action, and after he got the men to the spot where Robinson’s luckless men had made their attack his staff officers felt that the general was gloomy and depressed. One of them recorded a general impression “of things going wrong, and of the general exposing himself uselessly and keeping us back, of Grant’s coming up and taking a look, of much bloodshed and futility.”

  Yet no mood of depression ever lasted very long with Sedgwick. He had had all the war he wanted, to be sure, and in his letters to his sister in Connecticut he was writing longingly of the day when he could get out of the army and come home to stay—“Can any spot on earth be as beautiful as Cornwall Hollow?” he asked her—but he never let gloom get the better of him for long. The morning after he got his corps to the front he was up early, and when he called briefly at Grant’s headquarters, men there remembered that he seemed especially cheerful and hopeful. Grant had compliments for the way he had been handling his troops, and Sedgwick presently returned to his own tents, which were pitched on a little hill close to the place where Robinson’s men had formed for their fight the day before. When he got there Sedgwick found that random shots from Rebel sharpshooters were causing trouble, so he sent his young Major Hyde to advance the pickets a little, to end this nuisance.

  Major Hyde came back, after a while, and Sedgwick was seated on a cracker box under a tree; and Sedgwick had the major sit down by him, and pulled his ears for him, and joked with him while Hyde reported on his mission. Then Sedgwick walked over to an artillery emplacement to give the battery commander some directions, and the sharpshooters’ bullets were pinging around and the gunners were ducking, and Sedgwick laughed at them and told them not to worry—the sharpshooters were so far away “they couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”

  A minute after this there was a sharp cry from the gun pits—“The General!” The headquarters people ran over and there was Sedgwick on the ground, a bullet hole under the left eye, killed by one of the sharpshooters whose aim he had derided. They put his body in an ambulance and carried it back to army headquarters, where it was laid in an evergreen bower with the Stars and Stripes wrapped around it. When Grant was told, he seemed stunned. Twice he asked, “Is he really dead?” Later he told his staff that to lose Sedgwick was worse than to lose a whole division of troops.16

  Washington was many miles away, and little was known there about how the fighting was going, except that the army was constantly calling for more men and more food and ammunition. But the real storm center was the White House. Here was Lincoln, sleepless and gaunt and haggard, his tough prairie strength tried now as never before. He had once characterized another man, who could see no wrong in human slavery, by musing that he supposed that man did not feel the lash if it were laid on another man’s back instead of on his own. That kind of insensitivity he himself did not have, and the fact that he lacked it was his greatest asset and his heaviest cross.

  He could feel what hit somebody else, and however remote the quiet rooms in the White House might be from the fearful jungles below the Rapidan, all of the lines led back here, because here was held the terrible power to still the tempest or make it go on to the very end. Lincoln could pardon condemned soldiers who fell asleep at their posts, or who broke and ran for it in the heat of action—he called these latter his “leg cases,” saying that a brave man might be cursed by cowardly legs which he could not keep from bearing him back out of danger—and he was the man who with a word could have stopped all of the killing, and he had to will that the killing go on.

  Now John Sedgwick was dead, and the great wagon trains were lumbering down to Fredericksburg, every day and every night, and the white ash and charred twigs of the Wilderness were dropping on disfigured bodies which no one would ever name, while long columns of weary men went blindly into new fights that would be worse than what they had just come away from; and Lincoln sat late at night with a volume of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and to a friend he read the lines of Macbeth’s despair:17

  Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

  To the last syllable of recorded time,

  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

  The way to dusty death.…

  This was in the White House. The young men of the Army of the Potomac had had many yesterdays to light their dusty way, but they did not talk about them. They simply lived by the remembered light those days had given them, and the days were various, and nobody can say just where all of the light came from or what it finally meant. (Take a morning in Ohio, for example. The land is flat, and when dawn begins there is a thin mist everywhere, and it glows with the first light so that the green trees begin to come out black in the distance, and the earth rolls gently off to meet them, and the truth about many things lies not quite veiled in the hollow places where the mist lies the longest; and a man who sees it knows something, but what sort of light is that for a soldier?)

  One of the things these men had got out of their long yesterdays was a toughness and a jaunty humor. On the morning after the Laurel Hill fight, Grant came riding past the littered slopes to a new place that had been picked for his headquarters. A fife and drum corps was somewhere about, and when the musicians saw the general they suddenly, on inspiration, struck up a rollicking little tune.

  Many soldiers were near, and when they heard the tune they looked about them and saw Grant, and then they all began to cheer and laugh. Grant noticed it, and he was quite unable to tell one tune from another—he had a feeble jest, to the effect that he knew just two tunes: one was Yankee Doodle, and the other wasn’t—and he asked an aide what the band was playing to cause all of this commotion. The aide explained that it was playing a popular camp-meeting ditty which the whole army was familiar with: a little number entitled, “Ain’t I glad to get out of the wilderness!” 18

  4. Surpassing All Former Experiences

  There were many young men in the army and one of them was a colonel named Emory Upton. He was thin, wiry, freckled, with unruly hair and a trim goatee and mustache; an intense passionate man, a Regular Army officer who was impatient with the army’s way of doing things and especially with the ways of its higher officers. None of these, he said contemptuously, knew how to lead men. They commanded the best soldiers in the world but they did not know what to do with them.

  Like John Sedgwick, in whose corps he served, Upton poured out his thoughts in long letters to his sister. To her he spoke his mind about generals:

  “I have never heard our generals utter a word of encouragement, either before or after entering a battle. I have never seen them ride along the lines and tell each regiment that it held an important position and that it was expected to hold it to the last. I have never heard them appeal to the love every soldier has for his colors, or to his patriotism. Neither have I ever seen a general thank his troops after the action for the gallantry they have displayed.”

  Having written this, young Colonel Upton added that when he meditated on all of the incompetence in starred shoulder straps, and then considered his own qualifications, “there is no grade in the army to which I do not aspire.”

  Upton was the son of a New York farmer. He had spent a couple of his teen-age years at Oberlin, in Ohio, just in time to absorb the fervid religious and abolitionist sentiments that yeasty place was germinating then. He was a sober youngster, worrying about his soul, a
bout the Union, about slavery, about his own health—at one stage he refused to sleep on a pillow for fear it would make him round-shouldered—and he entered West Point in 1856 and was graduated shortly before the war began, number eight in his class. He could have gone into the engineers, the army’s corps d’élite, but for some reason he chose artillery instead. He had various staff and line appointments in the early days of the war, and then went over into the volunteer service and became colonel of the 121st New York, whose boys found him stiff on the matter of discipline but, on the whole, a man they could like.1

  Because he was a good leader of men and also a thoughtful scientific soldier, he had risen to brigade command, although (and the fact irked him) he had not yet been made a brigadier general. In the fall of 1863, when Meade and Lee maneuvered fruitlessly back and forth across the Rapidan country, Upton had led a surprise attack on a Confederate fort at Rappahannock Station, winning a sparkling little victory and capturing more than a thousand prisoners. Now he was restlessly observing what happened when the army butted up against the solid trenches that appeared like magic whenever the Rebels drew their lines, and it seemed to him that there was a better way to do things.

  Upton, in short, felt that he knew how to break through those Rebel entrenchments, and he spoke up about it, and on the afternoon of May 10 they gave him twelve picked infantry regiments, his own 121st New York among them, and told him to go ahead.