A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  So once more the Confederate line had been broken, and Beauregard wrote afterward that it then seemed to him that “the last hour of the Confederacy had arrived.” But the Union command system just was not functioning this day, and the story at twilight was a repetition of the story at dawn: it had occurred to no one to have troops ready to follow up a success, and there had not even been any routine arrangements for getting ammunition up to the firing line, and the strategy which had enabled the army to fight for Petersburg with eight-to-one odds in its favor was totally wasted. The day ended and the fighting ended, and in the darkness Beauregard retired his entire line to a final position within easy gunshot of the town.21

  There was still a chance. Lee was getting his Army of Northern Virginia down to Petersburg with driving speed—lean men in faded uniforms or no uniforms hurrying on through the night, desperately in earnest and handled by a soldier who knew precisely what he was doing and how to do it—but he had not got there yet and he would not be able to get there until several hours after daylight on June 18. A dim awareness of this fact seems to have been astir in the headquarters tents of the Army of the Potomac, and during the night Meade issued orders for an attack all along the line at the moment of dawn.22

  When light came on June 18 it brought only more confusion. The Federals now were posted on a long ridge, with the Hare and Shand house hills in their possession, and Beauregard’s last line was on an opposite ridge, and the different Federal commanders seem to have felt that they ought to explore this new position with some care before they attacked. Up near the river Baldy Smith’s troops seized a Confederate skirmish line, took a number of prisoners, and then halted. Birney found himself unable to get his men moving until nearly noon, when he attacked with one division and was quickly repulsed. Burnside managed to edge some men forward and consolidated the position he had won the evening before on the far side of the railroad cut, but he waited for Warren to go into action on his left and this wait turned out to be rather long.

  Warren began to move at dawn, as ordered, with all four of his divisions abreast, and he had the power to go sweeping through to the Jerusalem Road, wheel toward the north, and break things up once and for all. But he ran into skirmish fire, found the ground unfamiliar, and at six o’clock halted his men and told them to dig in while patrols examined the ground in their front.

  In the rear Meade was in a foul temper, which kept growing worse, and he emitted a furious stream of orders in a completely futile attempt to bring about the united attack which had been designed. Hours passed, and the breakdown in the command system became complete, and by early afternoon Meade was wiring to his corps commanders: “I find it useless to appoint an hour to effect cooperation … what additional orders to attack you require I cannot imagine.… Finding it impossible to effect co-operation by appointing an hour for attack, I have sent an order to each corps commander to attack at all hazards and without reference to each other.” 23

  Late in the afternoon, the attacks were finally made. It was too late, by now, for Lee’s veterans were in the trenches at last and the eight-to-one odds had vanished forever; this was Cold Harbor all over again, with its cruel demonstration that trench lines properly manned could not be taken by storm. The chance had gone, and an attack now could result in nothing but destruction for the attackers.

  The soldiers knew this even if their generals did not. In midafternoon Birney massed his troops for a final attack. His principal column was formed in four lines, with veteran troops in the first two lines and oversized heavy artillery regiments, untried but full of enthusiasm, in the last two.

  The men were lying down when the order to charge the Rebel works came in, and as the officers shouted and waved their swords the inexperienced artillerists sprang to their feet while the veterans ahead of them continued to lie prone. The veterans looked back, saw the rookies preparing to charge, and called out: “Lie down, you damn fools, you can’t take them forts!”

  One of the artillery regiments, 1st Massachusetts heavies, accepted this advice, lay down again, and made no charge. The other one, 1st Maine, valiantly stayed on its feet, ran forward through the rows of prostrate men, and made for the Confederate line. It was a hopeless try. The Confederate gun pits had been built low and the black muzzles of the guns that peered evilly out of the embrasures were no more than a foot or two above the ground, and when they fired the canister came in just off the grass so that nobody could escape. The whole slope was burned with fire, and in a few minutes more than 600 of the 900 men in the regiment had been shot down, the ground was covered with mangled bodies, and the survivors were running for the rear.24

  In another part of the II Corps front, what remained of the veteran Excelsior Brigade of New York troops was moving up to the attack. The men passed through a line of artillery, and a gunner called out to ask if they were going to make a charge. A soldier answered him: “No, we are not going to charge. We are going to run toward the Confederate earthworks and then we are going to run back. We have had enough of assaulting earthworks.”

  The gunner who asked the question went to the rear shortly after this with a caisson to get more ammunition. He got his load and on his return he noticed that the road led over an open hill in such a way that he and his wagonload of explosives would be in clear view of a distant Confederate battery. While he was reflecting that he would undoubtedly draw Confederate fire, he noticed that in a field on the reverse slope of the hill several hundred stragglers were lounging about little campfires, boiling coffee and enjoying themselves. He mused that these were the worthless bounty men and conscripts who had fled from the firing line, and whose mere presence in uniform weakened the entire corps, and he wished earnestly that something bad would happen to them: and just then the Rebel gunners caught sight of him, swung their guns in his direction, and let fly with a salvo.

  The range was long and their aim was imperfect, and the shells missed the caisson and skimmed down into the very middle of the coffee boilers, where they exploded and sent campfires and coffee pots up in flying dust and sparks and smoke. On the ground were screaming men, fearfully wounded, and those who had not been hurt were running desperately for the woods; and the gunner reined in to enjoy the scene, and hugged his knees and rocked in wild laughter, and when he got back to his battery he told his mates it was “the most refreshing sight I had seen for weeks.” 25

  The afternoon’s attacks came to nothing at all. Warren and Burnside finally sent their men forward at three o’clock—the morning’s opportunity gone with the morning’s mists—and the Army of Northern Virginia was waiting for them in secure trenches, and the men were repulsed with heavy loss. The day ended, finally, and Meade wired Grant that nothing more could be done. He added piously that “our men are tired and the attacks have not been made with the vigor and force which characterized our fighting in the Wilderness; if they had been, I think we should have been more successful.”

  Grant replied that they would make no more assaults: “Now we will rest the men and use the spade for their protection until a new vein has been cut.” 26

  So the men huddled in their trenches, and after dark they could hear the mocking sound of the belfry clocks in Petersburg striking the hours, and a man in a Connecticut regiment wrote that “this was the most intolerable position the regiment was ever required to hold.” 27

  The men were used to occupying trenches under fire, and in that respect the situation here was no worse than it had been at Cold Harbor or half a dozen other places. What made it truly intolerable was the realization, running from end to end of a tired, heartsick army, that the greatest chance of the war had been missed—and that, as a military critic expressed it years afterward, “the blame of the failure to take Petersburg must rest with our generals, not with our army.” 28

  CHAPTER FOUR

  White Iron on the Anvil

  1. Changing the Guard

  THE trenches ran south from the Appomattox for five miles, following the tops of the l
ow ridges, and for all anyone could see the armies might stay there forever. There had been no rain for two weeks (nobody knew it, but another month would pass before there was as much as a light shower) and the dust was inches deep: a fine, powdery dust, like soiled flour, so light that every footstep sent up a cloud of it, and half a dozen men walking together along a trench or on open ground in the rear moved, invisible, in a choking mist of their own creation.

  Sometimes the dust seemed to be the chief enemy. A Connecticut man wrote that taking a stroll was like walking in an ash heap, and he said that after a short time “one’s mouth will be so full of dust that you do not want your teeth to touch each other.” A gunner said that whenever a grasshopper hopped it raised so much dust that Rebel lookouts reported the Yankee army on the move, a New Yorker found the combination of 110-degree heat and 4-inch dust “is killing more men than the Johnnies,” and a private from Michigan—remembering the cool pines and clear streams of his homeland—wrote despondently: “I think of the hottest days, in harvest time, away north in Michigan, and oh! how cool, compared with these.” Every day men toppled over with sunstroke and were carried to the rear. Uniforms, faces, trees, shrubs, and grass were all a dull, ugly yellow gray. The air was heavy with the odor of unburied bodies, and the sun beat down day after day on men who cowered in deep slits in the earth.1

  General Grant had said that they would use the spade, and they did. Each regiment in the line would dig a broad trench, and on the side facing the enemy there would be a solid wall of logs, with dirt banked up beyond it. Several yards in front of this there would be a ditch, six feet deep by ten feet wide, with the earth that came out of it added to the pile in front of the logs until the embankment was six or eight feet high and a dozen feet thick. Sandbags or logs would be arranged on top of the embankment, with slits or loopholes for men to stick their rifles through, and just behind the log wall there would be a fire step—a low ledge of packed earth, built so that a man who stood on it could put his musket through the loopholes. At intervals, leading to the rear, there would be covered ways, which were deep trenches zig-zagged to take advantage of the ground, built so that men could walk to the firing line from the rear without being exposed.

  Out in front of the trenches, fifty or one hundred yards nearer to the enemy, there was an abatis. Much of the ground had been timbered, and the trees were felled with their bushy tops pointing toward the foe. The butts were embedded in shallow trenches to hold them in place, and the branches were sharpened and bound together so that it was almost impossible to get through them. In places there were several rows of these entanglements, with narrow lanes cut here and there so that pickets could go out to their stations. This abatis was supplemented very often by what were called chevaux-de-frise: heavy logs laid end to end and bound together with chains, bristling with six-foot stakes sharpened to a point and projecting in such a way that a man who tried to scramble over was certain to find his person or his clothing jagged and held fast.

  On every hill or knoll there was a fort, a square enclosure of earth and logs with openings for the guns. These were arranged so that there was no place in front of the trenches that could not be reached by artillery fire. Farther to the rear there were pits like unroofed cellars where coehorn mortars were mounted. In these forts and pits, and adjoining all of the trenches, there were bombproofs—square holes in the earth roofed with logs and dirt, in which the men could hide when the enemy fired shells.2

  That was the front. It was five miles long and the Rebel line was exactly like the Union line, and there was not the remotest chance that any part of either line could be taken by storm so long as a handful of defenders remained on duty and stayed awake. The dust and the sickening air and the killing sunlight lay on everything, and the sharpshooters and the gunners were always alert, and by day and by night there was intermittent heavy firing. A good many men were killed and wounded every day, to no particular end except to warn the survivors that they had better dig deeper and stronger trenches and hide in them every moment of their lives.3

  On most of the line the trenches were not far apart, and in front of Burnside’s corps there were hardly 150 yards between them, and the firing there was almost continuous. On each side sharpshooters with long-range rifles found vantage points a little behind the lines and kept their weapons trained on the firing slits in the opposing trenches, so that a man who looked out to see what he could see was quite likely to get a bullet in the face.

  Toward the southern end of the line, however, where the V Corps was stationed, the works diverged. Here the Rebel trenches curved over toward the west and the Federal trenches continued in a southerly direction, and the rival lines were half a mile apart, and so there was much less shooting. Along here the pickets had made their usual arrangements with each other, and between the lines there was a little stream to which men from both armies came, in full light of day, to fill their canteens. When an officer came down the enemies would warn each other, because most officers had strong ideas about the need for keeping up a constant fire, and the general feeling was that officers were interlopers who ought to stay farther in the rear. One day the Union General Crawford came out to the picket line and stood up on a parapet and began examining the Rebel line through field glasses. A Reb scribbled something on a sheet of paper, wrapped the paper around a stone, and tossed it over into a Union rifle pit. The Federal soldier who picked it up found that the Southerner had written: “Tell the fellow with the spy glass to clear out or we shall have to shoot him.”

  When they were left to themselves the men in this particular sector faithfully observed the rules of their informal truce. There was a day when some recently conscripted Southerner was assigned to duty down here, and being full of the ideas his officers had drummed into him he leveled his musket and fired at the first Yankee he saw. The other Federals jumped into their holes and prepared to shoot back, but the Confederates called out: “Don’t shoot—you’ll see how we fix him.” Thereafter, for the rest of the day, the ardent Southern recruit was seen pacing back and forth along the firing line ignominiously shouldering a fence rail, and the supposed enemies lounged on the grass, went for water, exchanged gossip, and kept a wary eye open for officers.4

  But this was the exception. Along most of the line the two armies were playing for keeps, and it was considered certain death to expose oneself for more than a moment. Men cooked, ate, and slept in the earth, and when mortars were fired they ran for the bombproofs, although they soon discovered that most of these did not offer much protection against a direct hit by a shell of large caliber. On one part of the line certain Pennsylvania soldiers—time-expired members of the famous Bucktails, mostly, who had re-enlisted in another regiment when the Bucktails were paid off—found that it was highly amusing to fire ramrods at the enemy, because of the peculiar whirring noise and erratic flight of these iron arrows. Many men had been killed in this sector and there were discarded rifles all over the place, so the supply of surplus ramrods was large and some of the Pennsylvanians got so they could actually hit people with them. The fun was mostly in the noise, however, for the ramrods would go “whirling end over end, and every way, whipping out of the air a multitude of sharp screeches and cutting sounds.” 5

  In some regiments men were under orders to fire a certain number of rounds per day, regardless. The more conscientious would try to find a good target before firing, but many of the men simply thrust their weapons over the parapet and fired at random.6

  There did not seem to be any especial reason why this could not go on forever. Not even the major generals supposed any longer that Petersburg could be taken by assault, and it had become equally obvious that whatever else an army under Grant might do, it was not going to retreat. The strategy by which Grant had hoped to apply pressure elsewhere so as to compel Lee to retreat had fizzled out, so there was nothing for the Army of the Potomac to do but stay where it was, stand the hammering, and hope for the best.

  Sheridan and his caval
ry had got nowhere with the plan to team up with Hunter’s forces at Charlottesville. Wade Hampton had gone in hot pursuit with Confederate cavalry, and he and Sheridan collided near Trevilian Station on the Virginia Central Railroad and had a desperate fight. Each general said afterward that he had beaten the other, but Sheridan had gone no farther west. He said this was because he had learned that Hunter was nowhere near Charlottesville and never would be, so that it was useless to go on. However that might have been, Sheridan rode north and east in a wide circle and got back into the Union lines.

  Hunter had tried to go to Lynchburg instead of to Charlottesville, and he had bumped into a strong Confederate force led by the redoubtable Jubal Early. Hunter conceived that he did not have enough ammunition to carry him through a serious battle; conceived also, it may be, that Early and his men were pretty tough; conceived finally that he had best retreat, and did so, fleeing across the mountains into West Virginia, taking his command entirely out of the war for several weeks and nullifying this particular part of Grant’s strategy as neatly as Lee himself could have wished. His departure left the Shenandoah Valley wide open, and Early promptly began to march down the valley toward the Potomac, taking a leaf from the Stonewall Jackson book of two years earlier.7

  It was the railroads that made Petersburg important, and about the time the two armies settled down to unbroken trench warfare, Wilson was told to take his division of cavalry and ride far south to destroy the line that led to North Carolina. His men tore up much track, burned stations and freight cars, and wrecked bridges and culverts, but Sheridan’s retreat from Trevilian had left Lee with a temporary surplus of cavalry and these rode hard and fast, overtaking Wilson, boxing him in, and coming close to destroying his entire command. He got back within the Union lines at last, minus his artillery and his wagons and a good many of his men, and his expedition looked like a flat failure. Actually, it had accomplished more than the Federal command quite realized. The break which it made in the vital Southern railway line was a bad one and it was not fully repaired for weeks, and while it lasted the Confederates were burdened with one of their worst supply problems of the war.8