A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  So when Burnside came in with this new idea, Meade was prepared to be receptive. The same could not be said for his engineers, who pooh-poohed the whole proposal and said it was clap-trap and nonsense. They said loftily that there was nothing novel about mining the enemy’s works—it was standard operating procedure, once the besieging party had brought its own trenches up to within a lew yards of the objective point—but they declared that no army on earth had ever tried to do it at anything like the distance involved on Burnside’s front. A mine shaft of that length, they went on, could not possibly be ventilated and the men who had to dig it would all be suffocated, if they were not first crushed under falling earth. Besides, the Rebels would find out about it and would interfere. The army’s engineers, in short, would have none of it.

  Meade himself felt much the same way, but Grant was anxious to get on with the war and he was pressing Meade to see if there was not some way to break the Rebel front. Meade had to confess that there did not seem to be any way, but he did tell Grant that Burnside had some men digging a mine “which General B. thinks when exploded will enable him by a formidable assault to carry the line of works.” So with this cautious endorsement, and largely because there was nothing else in sight, the Schuylkill miners suddenly began to be very important people.7

  Pleasants began by getting from each of his company commanders a list of all the men who were actually coal miners. He organized these men into shifts, with a non-com named Harry Reese as mine boss, precisely as if he were going to mine for coal, and he put them to work round the clock, seeing to it that each man got a dram of commissary whisky when he finished his stint. Picks and shovels were supplied, and although the picks were not the kind used in coal mines, there were plenty of blacksmiths in IX Corps artillery units and Pleasants persuaded them to remodel the implements. The work went faster than he had anticipated, and in a short time he needed timbers to shore up the ceiling and walls.

  At this point he found that the army was letting him do this job rather than helping him do it. Meade had promised Burnside to send a company of engineers and any other aid that might be needed, but the company never showed up and when Pleasants asked for some timber nothing seemed to happen. So Pleasants sent a detail from his regiment down into the ravine behind the lines, tore down a railroad bridge, and used those timbers as long as they lasted. Then he discovered an abandoned sawmill four or five miles to the rear. He got Burnside to issue a pass and provide some horses and wagons, and he sent two companies back to operate the mill and cut the necessary lumber.

  Pleasants also needed handbarrows to carry the dirt out of the tunnel and dispose of it in some place where Rebel lookouts would not see it. Army headquarters had promised sandbags, but the sandbags never arrived, so Pleasants collected cracker boxes, reinforced them with iron hoops taken from pork barrels, nailed stout handles on them, and detailed parties to lug these in and out of the shaft.

  After a week progress came to a halt when the miners struck a belt of wet clay and the ceiling sagged, breaking the timbers and nearly closing the tunnel. Pleasants retimbered the shaft, shored up the ceiling with stouter props, and drove on. Next he struck a bed of marl which had a way of turning to rock soon after the air struck it. The soldiers amused themselves by carving tobacco pipes out of this in their spare time, but it was mean stuff to tunnel through and the colonel finally had to increase the tunnel’s angle of climb so as to get into a softer earth stratum. He was making his tunnel five feet high, four feet wide at the bottom, and some two and one half feet wide at the top, and it was strongly timbered all the way—ceiling, both sides, and floor. Cutting and transporting all of this timber and getting it inside the mine, and taking all of the dirt out and concealing it in the ravine under fresh-cut bushes, kept calling for more and more hands, and before long practically the entire regiment was at work.8

  When the shaft had gone a couple of hundred feet into the hillside, Pleasants felt that it was time to make some exact calculations about the spot where the powder magazine ought to go. (Obviously he would accomplish nothing if he dug past the Rebel fort or stopped short of it.) So he applied to the engineers for the instruments with which he could make the necessary triangulations. The engineers laughed this off, and a plea to Meade’s headquarters was lost in the shuffle somewhere, and at last Burnside—who seems to have been the only important officer in the army who was disposed to be helpful—wired to a friend in Washington and had him send down a theodolite.

  Pleasants had to take this into the front line to make his observations, and of course Rebel snipers were apt to shoot him while he was doing it. He got around this by having half a dozen soldiers put their caps on ramrods and raise them just above the parapet. While the sharpshooters peppered away at these, hitting them quite regularly and no doubt imagining that they were hitting human heads inside of them, Pleasants draped some burlap over his head and his instrument, got unobserved over the parapet level a few yards away, and made his observations.9

  Farther and farther into the hillside went the tunnel. As the engineers had prophesied, ventilation was a problem, but Pleasants solved it. Close beside the tunnel, at a point just behind the main Federal trench, he dug a vertical shaft whose lower end opened into a little recess in the tunnel wall and whose upper end discharged unobtrusively into a clump of bushes. Then he built a square tube of boards, reaching from the mouth of the tunnel all the way to its inner end, and he prepared a door by which the outer end of the tunnel could be sealed shut, leaving the open end of the wooden tube protruding out into the air. The rest was simple: close the door and build a fire in the little recess at the bottom of the vertical shaft. The smoke and heated air went up this chimney, the resultant draft pulled the bad air out of the tunnel, and fresh air from the outside was drawn in through the wooden tube.

  On July 17, three weeks after the job had been begun, the inner end of the tunnel was squarely beneath the Confederate redoubt, twenty-odd feet underground and 510 feet from the entrance, and the miners could hear Confederate soldiers tramping about overhead. Pleasants then had his men dig a 75-foot shaft running across the end of the tunnel; a diagram of his work now would look like a capital T with a very long shank, with the crossbar of the T running along directly beneath the Confederate works.10

  Pleasants then reported that the mine was ready for its charge of powder—at which point further operations were temporarily suspended because the Rebels had discovered that the Yankees were digging a mine and were sinking shafts of their own trying to find it.

  Confederate luck right here was bad. Their engineers misjudged the direction the tunnel was taking, and their countermining shafts failed to intersect it. When Pleasants had his men stop working, the Rebels in underground listening posts could hear nothing, and in the end all of their protective measures failed. Meanwhile, the Southern privates who were going about their business directly above the dark sinister gallery began to treat the whole affair as another camp rumor, and now and then they would call across and ask the Yankees when the big show was going to begin.11

  After a pause, with the digging and timbering all finished, Pleasants went to work to lay the powder charges. Burnside wanted to use eight tons of powder, but the army engineers had one good suggestion here—the use of explosives in quantity was a subject they really knew something about—and they pointed out that a smaller charge would actually be more effective. In the end, Burnside settled for four tons, and Pleasants had his men build eight open-topped wooden boxes in the lateral gallery for magazines. The powder was delivered behind the lines in 320 kegs, each containing 25 pounds, and there was day-and-night work carrying these into the mine and pouring the charges into the magazines.

  All of the magazines were connected by wooden troughs half filled with powder, and these troughs met at the place where the gallery crossed the inner end of the main shaft. The engineers had promised Pleasants a supply of wire and a “galvanic battery” to touch off the charge, but this was another deliv
ery that was never made, so Pleasants got a supply of ordinary fuses, spliced them together, introduced one end into the powder in the trough, and strung the rest of the fuse back along the tunnel for about one hundred feet. As a final step, earth was solidly tamped into place, filling the main shaft for thirty-eight feet from the place where it met the lateral gallery. All that remained now was to light the outer end of the fuse:12

  Pleasants never doubted that the mine would blow a big hole in the Confederate line, but the only other officer of any consequence who really believed in it seems to have been Burnside himself, and according to his lights Burnside did his best to make a success of the attack that would follow the explosion.

  His army corps contained four divisions. Three of these had been in action more or less continually since the army crossed the Rapidan, and they had had a solid month of trench duty in front of Petersburg. Each of these divisions contained about 3,000 men, all of whom by now were very battle-weary. The fourth division had never been in action to speak of, having spent practically all of its time guarding wagon trains and doing other back-area jobs, and its 4,300 men consequently were fresh. Obviously, a fresh division ought to be used to spearhead the attack, and so—about the time Pleasants was beginning to dig the lateral gallery—Burnside brought this division forward and told its commander, Brigadier General Ferrero, to give it special training for the assault; it was the outfit that was going to break the Rebel line and march into Petersburg and win the war. (Burnside himself was so confident the attack would succeed that he had all of his headquarters baggage packed so that he could move right into Petersburg on the heels of his victorious troops.)

  Burnside’s plan was perfectly logical. The three divisions which had been holding the trenches were worn out—during the last ten days of June and the month of July they lost more than a thousand men, altogether, just from sharpshooter and mortar fire—and the men had adjusted themselves to trench life so completely that they looked on soldiering as being largely a business of getting behind a protective bank of earth and avoiding enemy bullets. If unbloodied troops were available it was only common sense to use them, and in picking Ferrero’s division Burnside was exercising perfectly sound judgment.13

  The difficulty was that an imponderable entered into things here, deep as the ocean and unpredictable as a tornado at midnight. Ferrero’s division was made up entirely of colored soldiers.

  The use of colored troops was an experiment to which the Administration had been driven partly by the demands of the abolitionists and partly by sheer desperation, the supply of white manpower having slackened. The implications of this experiment were faced by few people, and there probably would be time enough to worry about them after the war had been won. At the moment the great riddle was whether it was possible to turn colored men into good soldiers.

  Most of these ex-slaves were illiterate, used to servile obedience, and living (presumably) in deep awe of Southern white men. They were husky enough, and yet they somehow lacked physical sturdiness and endurance,14 and they had been held at the bottom of the heap for so long that they seemed to be excessively long-suffering by nature. Somewhere, far back in dim tribal memories, there may have been traditions of war parties and fighting and desperate combat, but these had been overlaid by generations of slavery, and most colored folk saw themselves as pilgrims toiling up the endless slopes of heartbreak hill—pilgrims whose survival depended on the patient, uncomplaining acceptance of evil rather than on a bold struggle to overthrow evil.

  That was the sticking point. The average Northern white man of that era might refuse to associate with the Negro and hold himself to be immeasurably the Negro’s superior—the superiority, of course, grew out of the natural order of things, and need not actually be proved—but there was a war on and the country needed soldiers, and if Federal corpses were the price of victory, it hardly paid to be finicky about the original color of the corpses’ skins. The real trouble lay in the assumption that while it was all right to let the Negro get shot it was foolish to expect him to do any serious fighting first.

  A young officer who left his place in a white regiment to become colonel of a colored regiment was frankly told by a staff officer that “we do not want any nigger soldiers in the Army of the Potomac,” and his general took him aside to say: “I am sorry to have you leave my command, and still more sorry that you are going to serve with Negroes. I think it is a disgrace to the army to make soldiers of them.” The general added that he felt this way because he was sure that colored soldiers just would not fight.15

  Most men felt the same way. In support of the belief it was pointed out that in many years of American bondage there had never been a really serious slave revolt. Even John Brown himself, carrying fire and sword below the Potomac, had been able to recruit no more than a dazed corporal’s guard of colored followers. Surely this proved that even though slaves might not be happy with their lot they had no real combativeness in them?

  There might be flaws in the argument. It quite overlooked the fact that for many years the fabulous underground railroad had been relieving the explosive pressures the slave system had been building up, and had been in fact a great deterrent to slave revolt, for it took out of slavery precisely the daring, energetic, intelligent slaves who might have planned and led an uprising if they had been unable to escape.16 The argument also overlooked the fact that if American slaves rarely made any trouble the people who owned them were always mortally afraid that they would do so some day. The gloomy island of Haiti was not far enough away to let anyone forget that black men there had risen in one of the most bloody, desperate revolts in human history, winning their own freedom and practically annihilating the master race in the process. Oddly enough, the general belief that colored men would not fight ran parallel with a conviction that they would fight with primitive viciousness if they ever got a chance.

  Yet whatever prejudice might say, the hard fact now was that colored men were being enlisted as soldiers in large numbers and that there were times when it was impossible to avoid using them in combat. The use of Hinks’s division was an example. They had stormed rifle pits and captured guns, and although Hancock’s veterans saw in that fact nothing more than evidence that the Confederacy had only second-rate troops in line, Baldy Smith—who was far from being prejudiced in their favor—said afterward that Negro soldiers under certain circumstances might be as good as any.17

  No matter how it might use them, however, the army certainly had not assimilated them. It had not tried to and if it had tried it would have failed, and it did not matter much anyway for it was no longer possible for this army to be homogeneous. It had become a representative cross section of an extremely mixed population; and now, as a final step, it contained long columns of colored men whose memories, as one of their officers said, were “a vast bewildered chaos of Jewish history and biography,” the residue of chanted spirituals and the preaching of untaught plantation clergymen, men who in their innocence attributed every historic event to the doings of the great Moses.18

  When Ferrero’s dark battalions came up to the sheltered area just behind the front, they added a new dimension to army life and gave it a strange wild flavor. Always there had been groups of soldiers to sit around campfires in the evening, singing about their homesickness and the girls they wanted to get back to, about their comradeship, and, occasionally, about their patriotism, but when these black soldiers sang there was a haunting and a mystery in the air. For if the white soldier looked back with profound longing to something precious that had been left far behind, the colored soldier’s homesickness seemed to be for a place where he had never been at all. He had nothing to look back to. Everything he could dream of lay ahead of him, and his dreams were apocalyptic, not to be expressed in ordinary words.

  So when the colored troops met by the campfire to sing—and it was their favorite way to spend the evening—they sang made-up, spur-of-the-moment songs, which had never existed before either in words or in
music, songs which grew out of the fire and the night and the dreams and hopes which hovered between fire and night forever.

  All of the colored troops were officered by white men, and these white officers listened, fascinated, to the campfire singing, and when they wrote about it they tried to tell why it moved them so deeply. There would be a hundred men sprawled in a fire-lit circle, dark faces touched with fire; and one voice would go up, rich and soft and soaring:

  I know moon-rise,

  I know star-rise———

  and half a dozen men would come in with a refrain:

  —Lay dis body down.

  The singer would grope his way two lines nearer to the thought that was drawing him on:

  I walk in de moonlight,

  I walk in de starlight———

  and now more voices would sound the refrain:

  Lay dis body down.

  Finally the song would be finished, and a white officer who listened said that the chanted refrain would sound like “a grand creation chorus”:

  I’ll walk in de graveyard,

  I’ll walk troo de graveyard

  To lay dis body down.

  I go to de judgment in de evening of de day

  When I lay dis body down.

  And my soul and your soul will meet in de day

  When I lay dis body down.19

  They were men coming up out of Egypt, trailing the shreds of a long night from their shoulders, and sometimes they sang in the wild imagery of a despairing journey through parted waters to a land of promise:

  My army cross over,

  My army cross over—

  O Pharoah’s army drownded—

  My army cross over.