A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  If it was possible for anything to be worse than what was happening to Hancock’s and Wright’s men, it was what was happening to Smith’s undermanned brigades. At the right and left of his line Smith had found the ground so bad that a major assault hardly seemed possible, but in the center a shallow ravine offered some protection and he put the weight of his attack there. The men ran out of the sheltering hollow in column of regiments, with the 12th New Hampshire in front, its colonel waving a ramrod for baton in place of his sword, and like the other columns the men felt that they were charging into the center of a great flaming crescent, with guns and musketry hitting them from three sides at once.

  A New Hampshire captain confessed afterward: “To give a description of this terrible charge is simply impossible, and few who were in the ranks of the 12th will ever feel like attempting it. To those exposed to the full force and fury of that dreadful storm of lead and iron that met the charging column, it seemed more like a volcanic blast than a battle, and was just about as destructive.” A sergeant said that the men involuntarily bent forward as they advanced, as if they were walking into a driving hailstorm, and he related that they fell “like rows of blocks or bricks pushed over by striking against one another.”

  One man remembered that as he ran forward he suddenly saw all of his comrades drop to the ground, and he thought that someone had passed the order for everyone to lie down, so he did the same. His company commander came over, indignant, and began prodding the prostrate men with his sword, trying to get them to rise and resume the charge. He got nowhere, because they were all dead, and as another officer remarked, “nothing but the judgment trump of the Almighty would ever bring those men upon their feet again.” Another man, marching forward at the right of his company, glanced to his left, saw no comrades, and assumed he had fallen a few paces behind. He hurried forward, only to find himself in another company; everybody else in his own line had been shot down.

  In the dust and the smoke the men of this assaulting column never once saw their enemies, although they were charging across open ground. They saw nothing but a line of flashing fire and billowing smoke that seemed almost to close behind them as they advanced, and the musketry fire was so unbroken that it seemed “like one continual crash of thunder.”

  Altogether, it took the Confederates rather less than a quarter of an hour to break this attack and destroy the attacking column, and it is quite conceivable that in this particular fight the Rebels lost no men whatever. A few days later, when men met between the lines during a truce to bury the dead, a Confederate officer told one of the New Hampshire men: “It seemed almost like murder to fire upon you.” 25

  And this, strangely and terribly enough, was the battle of Cold Harbor—a wild chain of doomed charges, most of which were smashed in five or ten minutes and none of which lasted more than half an hour. In all the war, no attack had ever been broken up as quickly or as easily as this, nor had men ever before been killed so rapidly. The half hour’s work had cost the Union army 7,000 men.26

  Yet if the attack was quickly over, the fighting did not end. For the most amazing thing of all in this fantastic battle is the fact that all along the front the beaten men did not pull back to the rear. They stayed where they were, anywhere from 40 to 200 yards from the Confederate line, gouged out such shallow trenches as they could, and kept on firing. Behind them the artillery continued to hammer away relentlessly, and all day long the terrible sound of battle continued. Only an experienced soldier could tell, by the sound alone, that the pitch of the combat in midafternoon was any lower than it had been in the murky dawn when the charges were being repulsed.

  The fighting went on and on, only now it was carried on by men who had just taken the worst beating of the war, men who lay on their bellies in the dust, a sheet of Rebel bullets just overhead, piling little mounds of earth in front of them, rolling behind these to load, and firing as best they could. Now and then orders came up from the rear—brought by officers or couriers who crept across the open on their hands and knees—to renew the assault. When such orders came the men would fire a little faster than before, but no one would get up to charge. They were not being mutinous about it; getting up was simply impossible.

  The long day wore away, and the heat and the flaming guns seared the great plain, and wounded men between the lines were hit and broken apart by the flying bullets and the exploding shell. One of Grant’s staff officers rode up on a little hill and looked forward through his field glasses. An officer of a battery of field artillery posted on the hill asked him, sarcastically, if he could see Richmond. The staff man said that he could not, but that he expected to be able to do so very soon.

  “Better get the barrels of that glass rifled, so they’ll carry farther,” said the gunner.

  That night a private in the VI Corps wrote to his parents:

  “If there is ever again any rejoicing in the world it will be when this war is over. One who has never been under fire has no idea of war.” 27

  3. Secondhand Clothes

  Life began with the darkness. All day long the men out in front huddled close to the ground, dust in their teeth, a glaring sun pressing on their shoulders. To peer over the rim of earth that lay between the firing line and the enemy was to ask for a bullet, and it was almost certain death to try to go to the rear for any reason at all—to have a wound dressed, to get food, to fill a canteen with muddy warm water, or to attend to a call of nature. Death was everywhere, its unspeakable scent in every breath men drew, the ugly whine of it keening through the air over the flat whack of the sharpshooter’s rifle. On distant elevations, obscure in the quivering haze, there were the guns, cleverly sited, and the gunners were prompt to fire at anything that moved. From one end of the army to the other, men endured heat and thirst and nameless discomforts and waited for night.

  At night the front came alive. Along the lines men took the shovels and picks and axes which details brought out to them and worked to make their trenches deep and strong. Where there were trees, they cut them down, put the slashed branches out in front for an abatis, and used the logs to make the breastworks solid. They dug their trenches deep, so that a man could stand erect in them without being shot, and they cut zig-zag alleyways through the earth back toward the rear, so that they might go to and from the front without being killed.

  Being very human, the soldiers on both sides often dug their trenches so deep that while they offered almost perfect protection against enemy fire they were quite useless for fighting purposes. In each army it was found that there were long stretches of trench in which a man could not possibly point his musket toward the enemy, and from both blue and gray headquarters orders went out to frontline commanders warning that there must always be fire steps on which riflemen could stand to shoot their foes.1

  Along much of the line the trenches were so close that the men could hear their enemies chatting together. In many places the lines were not far enough apart to give the pickets proper room, and in these places there was constant skirmishing all the way around the clock. Even where there was a decent distance, the lines were seldom quiet. Half a dozen shots from the skirmish lines could bring great rolling salvos from the guns, so that at times it sounded as if an immense battle were rocking back and forth over the desolate bottomlands. Most of this cannonading did no great harm, for the men in the deep trenches were well protected against missiles fired with relatively flat trajectory, and fuses were so imperfect that even the best gunners could rarely explode a shell directly over a trench. To get around this difficulty the artillerists brought up coehorn mortars—squat little jugs of iron that rested on flat wooden bases and pointed up toward the sky, which could toss shells in a high arc so that they might fall into a distant slit in the earth. At night the fuses from these shells traced sputtering red patterns across the sky.2

  The infantry hated the mortars, regarding them, as one veteran said, as “a contemptible scheme to make a soldier’s life wretched.” The weapons were us
ually out of sight behind a bank of earth, and when they were fired the men in the trenches could neither hear the report nor see the flash and puff of smoke. They had no warning: nothing but the hissing spark that rose deliberately, seemed to hang in the air high overhead, and then fell to earth to explode. Even more than the mortars, however, the soldiers hated sharpshooters. They had a feeling that sharpshooters never really affected the course of a battle: they were sheer malignant nuisances, taking unfair advantages and killing men who might just as well have remained alive. One artillerist wrote that the sharpshooters would “sneak around trees or lurk behind stumps” and from this shelter “murder a few men,” and he burst out with the most indignant complaint of all: “There was an unwritten code of honor among the infantry that forbade the shooting of men while attending to the imperative calls of nature, and these sharpshooting brutes were constantly violating that rule. I hated sharpshooters, both Confederate and Union, and I was always glad to see them killed.” 8

  So much of the killing these days seemed to be meaningless. In a great battle men died to take or defend some important point, and it could be seen that there was some reason for their deaths. But there were so many deaths that affected the outcome of the war not a particle—deaths that had nothing to do with the progress of the campaign or with the great struggle for union and freedom but that simply happened, doing no one any good. There was one day when a Federal battery took position in the yard of a farmhouse and began to duel with a Confederate battery a mile away. The firing grew hot, and the people who lived in the farmhouse huddled inside in desperate fear; and presently a poor colored servant in the house, driven beside herself with terror, sprang up in a lunatic frenzy, scooped up a shovelful of live coals from the hearth, ran to the doorway, and threw the glowing coals out in a wild swing. The coals landed in an open limber chest, which blew up with a mighty crash. Two or three gunners were killed outright, two or three more were blinded forever, the woman was quite unhurt—and there were more names for the casualty lists, testifying to nothing except that war was a madman’s business.4

  Now and then higher authority considered making a new assault. One day a note from II Corps headquarters came up to General Barlow, asking if he thought that the works in his front could be carried. Barlow was one of the few general officers in the army who actively enjoyed a good fight, but this time he advised against an attack, explaining that “the men feel just at present a great horror and dread of attacking earthworks again.… I think the men are so wearied and worn out by the harassing labors of the past week that they are wanting in the spirit and dash necessary for successful assaults.” 5

  The men had become very war-wise. They knew better than anyone else the impossibility of carrying the Rebel trenches, and as Hancock said, when they were ordered to attack “they went as far as the example of their officers could carry them”—no farther. Officers who could persuade them to do the impossible were becoming scarce. There had been more than a month of fighting, and the best company and regimental officers were getting killed off. The best officers were always going into the most dangerous places, and there had been dangerous places without number in the past month, and the law of averages was working. The famous II Corps had lost noticeably in efficiency, not merely because its best enlisted men had been shot, but also because it was no longer officered as it had been. A brigade which was commanded by a lieutenant colonel, its regiments led by captains, and its companies commanded by junior lieutenants and sergeants, just was not able to do the things it had done before. The old leadership was gone.6

  There were veteran outfits, of course, in which the men more or less led themselves. Yet the enlistments of many of these were about to expire, and the men were becoming very cautious. Every man in the army knew the exact date on which he would be released from service, and as that date drew near he resented being asked to run risks. Members of a Rhode Island battery complained that on their last day of service they were thrown into an exposed position and compelled to keep up an expensive artillery duel, and the battery’s historian exploded in anger: “It was clear to everyone’s mind that some mean, malignant villain, not worthy of wearing shoulder straps, had got the battery into this dreadful position purposely, for our term of service expired the next day, and we had long range guns, while short range guns were fired a quarter of a mile in our rear, the shells exploding over our heads instead of reaching the enemy’s works.” 7

  A week passed after the day of the disastrous assaults, and another week began, and as far as the men could see there was no change; perhaps they were to remain here at Cold Harbor forever, fixed in impregnable trenches that could never be captured and would never be abandoned. The trench system imposed its routine, which was not pleasant. These sandy ditches caught and held all of the sun’s heat, so that the scanty supply of water in canteens became hot and distasteful, and the men tried to rig little awnings out of shelter-tent halves and cowered under them, hot and unwashed and eternally thirsty. A New Hampshire soldier predicted that trench life by itself “would soon become more dangerous to the Federal army than rebel bullets,” and a Pennsylvanian remembered that what his outfit wanted most in those days was a complete issue of new clothing—what they wore had got beyond washing, and there was no water to wash it in anyway.8

  When Cutler’s division was briefly taken out of the line on June 8 for a short stay in the rear, its commander noted that this was the first day in more than a month in which no man in the division had been reported killed or wounded. One of his colonels wrote that he had had neither an unbroken night’s sleep nor a change of clothing since May 5, and another remarked that he was so groggy with fatigue that it was impossible for him to write an intelligent letter to his family: “I can only tell my wife I am alive and well. I am too stupid for any use.”

  And General Warren, sensitive and high-strung, turned to another officer one day and burst out:

  “For thirty days it has been one funeral procession past me, and it is too much!” 9

  Warren was showing the strain, and both Grant and Meade were noticing it. He had been a good friend of Meade for a long time, and Grant had been favorably impressed by him. When the army crossed the Rapidan, Grant even made a mental note that if anything should happen to Meade, Warren would be a good man to put in command of the army. But somehow he was not bearing up well. Details engrossed him, and he seemed to have a stiff pride which made it hard for him to accept direction and counsel. Worst of all, he was never quite able to get his corps moving promptly. It was felt that he was slow in bringing his men into action the first day at Spotsylvania, and when the attack was made at the Bloody Angle and Warren was supposed to hit the Confederate left there had been a three-hour delay—a costly thing, which led Grant to tell Meade to relieve Warren of his command if he delayed any longer. Meade replied that he was about to do it without orders, but Warren finally got his corps in motion just in time to save his job.10

  As a matter of fact, corps leadership throughout the campaign had been a good deal less than distinguished. Even Hancock seemed uninspired; it may be that the wound he got at Gettysburg, which was still very far from healed, was slowing him up more than anyone realized. John Sedgwick was gone, and Wright was not yet fully tested. He was obviously brave and diligent, but there were signs that he might be stiff and slow. Burnside was no more expert than he had ever been, and his relations with Meade were delicate. His IX Corps had at last formally been made a part of the Army of the Potomac. He ranked Meade, and was touchy about taking orders from him, and Meade was not a tactful person who would try to smooth down his ruffled feathers. Smith had served with Grant at Chattanooga and had won his confidence there, but he was not fitting smoothly into the Army of the Potomac.

  Looking back on the Cold Harbor assault, a staff man in the VI Corps wrote scornfully that “its management would have shamed a cadet in his first year at West Point.” 11 Emory Upton went into more detail in a bitter letter to his sister:

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bsp; “I am disgusted with the generalship displayed. Our men have, in many instances, been foolishly and wantonly sacrificed. Assault after assault has been ordered upon the enemy’s entrenchments when they knew nothing about the strength or position of the enemy. Thousands of lives might have been spared by the exercise of a little skill; but, as it is, the courage of the poor men is expected to obviate all difficulties.”

  Reflecting further on the matter, he wrote a few days later:

  “Some of our corps commanders are not fit to be corporals. Lazy and indolent, they will not even ride along their lines; yet, without hesitancy, they will order us to attack the enemy, no matter what their position or numbers. Twenty thousand of our killed and wounded should today be in our ranks.” 12

  Grant was well aware that there were grave shortcomings in command, but they were not too easily identified by a man who was looking down from the top rather than up from underneath. To Grant’s tent one day came young Brigadier General James H. Wilson, leader of one of Sheridan’s cavalry divisions, earlier in the war a member of Grant’s own staff and therefore a man with whom Grant might talk frankly. Wilson was one of the young, fire-eating, just-out-of-West Point officers, like Upton, who studied the older men with the eyes of impatient perfectionist youth. Also, he had served in the Western armies, where Grant had had lieutenants like Sherman and Thomas and McPherson.

  In the privacy of his tent, Grant asked the young brigadier: