A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  Famous old fighting units ceased to exist. At the end of June Gibbon’s adjutant published orders consolidating what was left of the once mighty 15th, 19th, and 20th Massachusetts—there were about enough men left to make a slim battalion and thereafter they would serve as a unit, although separate regimental rolls would still be kept. The Philadelphia Brigade was broken up, the men in its five skeleton regiments being parceled out to regiments in other brigades. The survivors were angry, and jeered the next time they saw General Gibbon, and one man in the 106th Pennsylvania lamented that he and his comrades would no longer carry their prized regimental flag, which had been pierced (they had counted carefully) by thirty-nine bullets in its three years of service.22

  The II Corps had been hit the hardest, but nobody had been on a picnic. General Lysander Cutler commanded what had been Wadsworth’s division in the V Corps, and when he wrote his report for the campaign he explained why the report was going to be incomplete. Two regiments had been lost by expiration of their terms of service, he wrote, and one whole brigade had been transferred to another division. The regiments which still remained with the division had, when the campaign began, 3,742 enlisted men, and now they had 1,324, and the regiments which had been transferred had suffered in proportion. Furthermore: “The changes in the command have been so frequent, and the losing of nearly every original brigade, regimental and company commander render it impossible to make anything like an accurate report.” 23

  In the 24th Michigan, which now had fewer than 100 men, there was one company with a total strength of two—one sergeant and one private—and on drill or parade a man remembered that “it afforded amusement to witness the evolutions of this little company.” A man in the 12th New Hampshire said that his regiment had been under fire every day, and every night but one, over a period of seventy-two days, and a headquarters clerk in the V Corps wrote the age-old complaint of the soldier: “How often the words ‘cruel war’ are uttered, and how glibly people beyond the reach of its influence talk of the misery caused by it … but not one-thousandth part of the real misery is even guessed at by those who are not eyewitnesses of its horrors.” 24

  Many men who had not been hit became unfit for service simply because they were worn out. Colonel Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin, appointed to a board to pass on officers’ qualifications, recalled numerous cases of self-inflicted wounds. He remembered one captain whose fertile imagination led him to drink “a decoction of powdered slate pencils in vinegar” in order to unfit himself for further duty, and he reported sadly that “the excitement, exhaustion, hard work and loss of sleep broke down great numbers of men who had received no wounds in battle.” Some men, he said, who had been noted for their bravery and leadership when the campaign began, became timorous, unstable, and all but useless toward the end of it. For a time the 150th Pennsylvania contained a unique detachment known as “Company Q,” made up of line officers from other regiments who had been court-martialed and broken for cowardice but who were given the chance to serve as private soldiers and, if they could, redeem themselves. Company Q turned out to be a good fighting unit, and most of the men in it ultimately regained their commissions.25

  Even the chaplains seemed to be showing the strain, and many of them quietly gravitated toward safe jobs far behind the lines. (“Undue susceptibility to cannon fever,” a New England soldier complained, “ought to be regarded as a disqualification.”) A surgeon in the 39th Illinois, on duty at a base hospital at Fortress Monroe, felt that the chaplains there were “pharisees who made it a business to pray aloud in public places … rotten to the core, not caring half as much for their souls’ welfare or anybody else’s as for the dollars they received.” One chaplain ruined morale in his ward by coming in half a dozen times a day, sitting on the edge of some soldier’s cot, and telling the man he looked bad and must prepare to die; a patient threw a plate at him one day and told him to go to the devil. The doctor added stoutly that he himself had “stood beside hundreds of soldiers when dying from disease or wounds, and he has never yet seen one manifest the least fear of death.” 26

  In the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery it was said that the chaplain got into a poker game one night and cleaned out an entire company, coming into regimental headquarters later to show a fat roll of bills and say, “There is my forenoon’s work.” An officer remembered seeing some dignified clergymen of the Christian Commission moving up toward the front, carpetbags in hand. They passed some soldiers, one of whom called out: “Hullo! Got any lemons to sell?” Gravely, one of the frock-coated contingent replied: “No, my friend, we belong to the army of the Lord.” And from a blue-uniformed scoffer there came back: “Oh yes—stragglers! stragglers!” 27

  As usual, there were complaints that not all of the goods sent down for Christian and Sanitary Commission workers to distribute to the soldiers ever actually reached the men for whom they were intended. A soldier detailed as hospital orderly said that grafters and scroungers got most of these delicacies: “The articles to be distributed are first turned over to the surgeon in charge, he keeping out enough for himself and assistants, then the cooks take out enough for themselves and friends. The balance, should there be a balance, goes to the soldiers. I know the above to be true from personal observation.” 28

  Underneath the grousing and the bills of complaint the army was trying to maintain a sense of the continuity of its own experiences and traditions. It had to do this, because actually this simply was not the army it used to be. Something like 100,000 combat men had come down across the Rapidan early in May (the flags were all flying and everything was bright and blowing and the dogwood blossoms lit the shadows in the woods) and 60,000 of them had been shot while many other thousands had been sent home as time-expired veterans, and so much the greater part of the men who had started out were not with the army any more. There were 86,000 men in the ranks at the end of June, and most of them were new men. What those who were gone had left behind them was the confusing raw material out of which a new morale would have to be made.

  Always the army reflected the nation, and the nation itself was changing. Like the army, it contained many new people these days. The war had speeded everything up. The immigrant ships were coming faster, there were more factories and slums and farms and towns, and the magical hazy light that came down from the country’s past was beginning to cast some unfamiliar shadows. The old unities were gone: unities of blood, of race, of language, of shared ideals and common memories and experiences, the very things which had always seemed essential beneath the word “American.” In some mysterious way that nobody quite understood, the army not only mirrored the change but represented the effort to find a new synthesis.

  What was going on in front of Petersburg was not the development of a stalemate, or the aimless groping of frozen men stumbling down to the last dead end of a cold trail. What was beginning meant more than what was ending, even though it might be many years before anyone knew just what the beginnings and the endings were. Now and then there was a hint, casually dropped, as the country changed the guard here south of the Appomattox River, and the choking dust hung in dead air under a hot copper sun. The men who followed a misty dream had died of it, but the dream still lived, even though it was taking another form.

  There was in the 67th New York Infantry a young German named Sebastian Muller, who got off an immigrant ship in 1860 and walked the streets unable to find work because he could speak no English and because times in this land of promise were harder than he had supposed they would be. The war came and in 1861 a recruiting agent got him, and to his people back in the fatherland Muller wrote: “I am a volunteer soldier in the Army of the United States, to fight the rebels of South America for a sacred thing. All of America has to become free and united and the starry banner has to fly again over the new world. Then we also want to have the slaves freed, the trading of human beings must have an end and every slave should be set free and on his own in time.… Evil of all kinds, thievery, whoring, lying and
deception have to be punished here.”

  Muller served in the 67th and on June 20, 1864, the regiment’s time expired and it was sent back for muster-out. But he had enlisted a couple of months late, and he and a few others were held in service and were transferred to the 65th New York to serve out their time, and two days after the 67th went back home Muller was a picket in an advanced gun pit on the VI Corps front, and a Rebel sniper drew a bead on him and killed him. A German comrade wrote a letter of consolation to Muller’s parents: “If a person is meant to die on land, he will not drown. If death on the battlefield is to be his lot, he will not die in the cradle. God’s dispositions are wise and his ways are inscrutable.” The chaplain added a note saying that Muller had died without pain and had been given “a decent Christian burial.” 29 That was that.

  In the 19th Massachusetts there was an Irish sergeant named Mike Scannell—the same who won his chevrons by carrying the flag at Cold Harbor—and in the II Corps debacle over by the Jerusalem Plank Road Mike and his flag were out in front and were taken by the Confederates, one of whom came at Mike with leveled bayonet, ordering: “You damned Yankee, give me that flag!” Mike looked at the Southerner and he looked at the bayonet, and he replied:

  “Well, it is twenty years since I came to this country, and you are the first man who ever called me a Yankee. You can take the flag, for that compliment.” 30

  Nothing much had happened. A German who could not tell Virginia from South America had seen a sacred thing in the war and had died for it, and an Irishman after twenty years of rejection had been accepted, at the point of a bayonet but in the language of his time and place, as a full-fledged American.

  The synthesis was taking place.

  2. I Know Star-Rise

  The ravine was broad and it ran north and south, and along the bottom of it there were a little brook and what remained of the Norfolk and Petersburg Railroad. On the western crest, which was the side toward the Rebels, there was a line of Federal entrenchments, and the center of this line was held by the 48th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Infantry.

  The trench was high-water mark for the IX Army Corps—the extreme limit of the advance, the place where tired men who had fired all of their ammunition lay in the dark to build little breastworks out of earth scooped up with bayonets, tin plates, and bare hands.

  Since the fight the line had been made very strong. There was a deep trench now, with a high parapet on the side toward the Rebels, and out in front there was a cunning tangle of abatis. A quarter of a mile in the rear, on the eastern crest of the ravine, there were gun pits, with artillery placed so that it could knock down any hostile parties that might try to storm the trench. The slope just behind the trench offered protection from Southern fire, and to make traffic toward the rear even safer, there was a deep covered way, which left the trench almost at a right angle, crossed the ravine, and ended behind the guns.

  On the Confederate side things were much the same. The trench was deep and strong, and the point directly opposite the place where the 48th lived had been made into a fort, with brass cannon em-placed. Like the Federals, the Confederates had an abatis out in front, and covered ways leading to the rear, and batteries posted to beat back any attack. Five hundred yards behind the Confederate trench the ground rose to a long, rounded ridge, and just over this ridge was the Jerusalem Plank Road, which had once been an undefended avenue leading into Petersburg but which was undefended no longer.

  As far as men could make them so, the opposing lines here were proof against assault. The soldiers who occupied them were always on the alert. They had to be, because the trenches here were closer together than at any other point along the front. Everyone kept under cover, and any man who exposed himself for an instant was immediately shot at—and usually was hit, too, for the sharpshooters were keen and the range was short. There were mortars back among the gun pits, and they were active. And although the trenches were deep and the men took care of themselves, it was very expensive to hold this part of the line and divisional losses could run to 12 per cent in one month just from sniper and mortar fire.1

  The 48th Pennsylvania came mostly from Schuylkill County, up in the anthracite region, and it fancied itself a crack regiment. When the IX Corps was sent West, in the spring of 1863, the 48th was briefly assigned to provost guard duty in Lexington, Kentucky, and the men proudly remembered that they had done the job so smoothly, and had kept themselves looking so trim and neat, with well-shined shoes, polished buttons, clean uniforms, and white gloves, that the citizens petitioned Burnside to keep them in that assignment. Burnside was willing, and so the 48th spent nearly six months in Lexington, living comfortably and missing a great deal of hard campaigning, including the latter part of the siege of Vicksburg. When the 48th was finally ordered away, the whole town turned out to say good-by, and a band paraded the boys down the street to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” while the girls on the sidewalks waved handkerchiefs and cried sentimentally and the soldiers said that leaving Lexington was harder than leaving home.2

  Early in 1864 the regiment had gone back to Schuylkill County to “veteranize.” The mine fields were supposed to be full of strong Copperhead sentiment, with coal miners demonstrating against the draft so violently that troops had to be sent in to keep order, but the 48th had no trouble getting recruits to fill its ranks. It mustered rather more than 400 enlisted men for duty nowadays, and about a fourth of these men had been coal miners before they enlisted.3

  Coming from mining country and having many miners, the 48th knew a thing or two about digging in the earth. One day its commander, passing along the trench, came on a soldier who was peering through the firing slit at the Rebel works. The man stepped down, turned to a comrade, and said: “We could blow that damned fort out of existence if we could run a mine shaft under it.”

  The commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, and that was talk he could understand because he was a mining engineer himself and before being a mining engineer he had done railroad construction work, and he had tunneled under obstructions before now. Born in the Argentine, the son of a Philadelphia businessman who married a Spanish woman and spent many years in South America, he was thirteen before he was brought to Philadelphia for a North American education. Trained as a civil engineer, he worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad in the early 1850s and he had had a hand in driving a 4,200-foot tunnel through the Alleghenies. A few years before the war he quit the railroad for coal mining and made his home in Schuylkill County. He was thirty-one now—slim, dapper, dark, and bearded—and as he passed along the trench he kept thinking about what the soldier had said. A little later he went down the ravine to a bombproof where the regimental officers lived, and he introduced the subject to them by saying bluntly: “That God-damned fort is the only thing between us and Petersburg, and I have an idea we can blow it up.” 4

  Not long after this, Pleasants passed the suggestion along, more formally, to his division commander, Brigadier General Robert Potter, and Potter sent a staff officer around to see what this was all about. Pleasants took the man to a place in the trench where they could get a good view of the Rebel fort. While they were looking over the parapet, the staff man unfortunately was hit in the face by a Confederate bullet, but after he had been carried away Pleasants drew a rough sketch of the terrain and sent it to Potter, and a few days later Potter sent for him and took him back to corps headquarters to see Burnside.

  It was a sweltering hot night, and the two officers found Burn-side sitting in his tent, coat off, bald head glistening in the candlelight, a long cigar cocked up at the side of his mouth. Burnside put the young colonel at his ease at once, and listened intently while the plan was explained, mopping beads of sweat off his forehead with a big silk bandanna while they talked.

  Modestly enough, Pleasants admitted getting his idea from a chance remark dropped by an enlisted man. He then went on to explain how they could begin a tunnel on a sheltered spot on the hillside, forty or fift
y yards behind their trench, where the Rebels would not be able to see what they were doing. The shaft would slant uphill, which would take care of the drainage problem, and although it would probably have to be more than 500 feet long, Pleasants thought he could devise a means of ventilating it.

  Burnside liked the idea and he said he would take it up with Meade. Meanwhile, he said, Pleasants should go ahead with it. So the next day Pleasants organized his coal miners into details, led them to a spot on the protected side of the ravine, and put them to work. Lacking picks, they began by using their bayonets, and in no time at all they were underground.5

  Meade took very little stock in the project, but he felt that it was good to keep the troops busy. Also, his engineers had just reported that “the new era in field works has so changed their character as in fact to render them almost as strong as permanent ones,” and every professional soldier knew that the only way to take permanent fortifications was through the long, ritualized processes of siege warfare.6 This involved an almost endless dig-and-fill routine—an advance by regular approaches, in military jargon—the general object of which was to inch one’s own lines forward far enough so that heavy guns could be mounted where they could flatten the enemy’s works at short range. The trouble was that the conditions which would make siege warfare successful simply did not exist here. Petersburg was by no means surrounded, and the Federals did not begin to have the necessary preponderance of force.