A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  We’ll cross de mighty river,

  We’ll cross de River Jordan,

  We’ll cross de danger water …

  My army cross over.20

  Most of the men were straight from the plantation. On many matters their ignorance was absolute. Yet they were men without doubts, and always their faith reached out to the future. A man in the VI Corps, talking to one of them, learned that men who could not read one word of Scripture could cite Biblical authority for their belief that the North would win the war. There was a prophecy, they said, which foretold that while the South would prevail for a time, in the end it would be overthrown. The VI Corps soldier searched his own Bible and at last concluded that the reference was to words in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Daniel:

  “And in those times there shall many stand up against the King of the South: also the robbers of thy people shall exalt themselves to escape the vision; but they shall fall. So the King of the North shall come, and cast up a mount, take the most fenced cities; and the arms of the South shall not withstand, neither his chosen people, neither shall there be any strength to withstand.” 21

  A Rhode Island soldier who had served along the Carolina coast remembered how a group of fugitive slaves had come within the Union lines after a harrowing nine-day flight through swamps. One man explained his perseverance: “I seed de lamp of life ahead and de lamp of death behind,” and another said that, on coming up to the Federal outposts, “When I seed dat flag, it lift me right up.” Even before they left slavery, they had their own idea of what the war was about. A Pennsylvania soldier on that same Carolina expedition asked a slave if he knew why the Yankees had come, and the slave replied that of course he knew—“to kill Massa and set de darkeys free.” A Wisconsin man who escaped from a prison pen in the Deep South took refuge in the hut of an aged slave who had never before seen a Union soldier, and he asked the old man if he would betray him. “No sah,” replied the old man emphatically. “There’s not a slave in South Carolina who would betray you.” One officer discovered that before the war the Southern slaves had known about the Frémont campaign of 1856, and the campaign of 1860. Some of them told him that they had refused to work on March 4, 1861, expecting their freedom to date from that day.22

  A Connecticut soldier who watched contrabands at work unloading ships at the Alexandria piers noticed that whenever there was a breathing spell some of the men would stretch out on the nearest pile of barrels or boxes, take out a spelling book, and laboriously study it. As a general thing, he said, they worked very hard: “All they want to encourage them is talk of freedom, and then the dirt will fly high and fast.” They disliked to be called “contrabands,” and when they were made soldiers they were intensely proud of their status as combat men. A white woman who visited her husband at army headquarters near Petersburg told about meeting a wounded Negro soldier who was trudging along the road toward the base hospital at City Point, loaded down with his musket, cartridge box, and haversack. Her husband told him to throw his load away, but the man begged to be allowed to carry it all the way to the hospital: “I don’t want de fellows at de hospital to mistake me for a teamster.” 23

  A Regular Army enlisted man watched some of Ferrero’s men marching up toward Petersburg and noted that many of them had taken off their shoes and were carrying them on their bayonets, going along barefooted. In the evening he went to their camp and observed evening roll call: “There were so many Jacksons and Johnsons that the first sergeant numbered them as high as ‘Johnson Number Five.’ They appeared to be very proud of being soldiers and serving with white troops.” 24

  From the beginning it was realized that the effectiveness of colored troops would depend largely on the way the regiments were officered, and what would now be called an officer-candidate school was set up in Philadelphia. Non-commissioned officers and privates in the Army of the Potomac could apply for admission to this school, and if recommended by their own officers and approved by an examining board they would get thirty days of training and then would be commissioned to command colored soldiers. The rank and file seems to have been of two minds about this arrangement. Some felt that it was a good idea, that the standards were high and the training thorough—one man said he knew colonels in white regiments who could not get an examining board recommendation for a second lieutenancy—but others believed that the examinations and instructions “were not practical, but scholastic and theoretical,” and that most of the men who were commissioned were not up to their jobs.25

  Certain it was that these strange new regiments needed good leadership. They were reluctant to take orders from non-coms of their own color—it was common to hear the complaint, “I don’t want him to play de white man over me”—and a company commander had to be careful to treat his sergeants with formal military courtesy, always addressing them by their titles and in general following precise Regular Army routine. The colored enlisted man who had a complaint or a problem was quite likely to try to by-pass his company officers and go direct to his colonel, and one of the colonels meditated on the reason for this: “The Negroes have acquired such a constitutional distrust of white people that it is perhaps as much as they can do to trust more than one person at a time.” He added that in training and disciplining the men it was vital “to make them feel as remote as possible from the plantation,” and said that the habit of obedience was worthless unless the officer managed to instill a stout feeling of self-respect along with it. An officer of polished manners could do better with colored troops than with white volunteers, who preferred a certain roughness of manner in their officers.26

  In camp, the colored men made excellent soldiers. They picked up the drill quickly, learning it more easily than white recruits did. The different companies in a regiment would vie with each other for excellence on the parade ground, and sometimes would get into furious fist fights while arguing as to which company was the best. During that Carolina expedition, where local contrabands were organized into a regiment, there was one day a parade of colored soldiers through the city of Beaufort, with the band of a Maine regiment leading the way, and it was a big experience. A colored sergeant said afterward: “When dat band wheel in before us and march on—my God! I quit dis world altogedder!” And a private related: “We didn’t look to de right nor to de left. I didn’t see nottin’ in Beaufort. Every step was worth half a dollar.”

  Some of the ordinary problems of army discipline seemed to be non-existent. Desertion was utterly unknown, and there was very little drunkenness. The men especially enjoyed practice on the target range. When one made a good shot there would be a gleeful chorus of “Ki! Old man!” and if an unskilled recruit fired his piece into the dirt there would be “such infinite guffawing and delight, such rolling over and over on the grass, such dances of ecstasy” that the colonel would remember it and put it in his memoirs.27

  There were a few little subsidiary problems connected with the use of colored troops. The colonel of the 36th U.S. Colored Infantry told how a detachment from his regiment in the spring of 1864 was sent across from Point Lookout to the Rappahannock River area to destroy certain Rebel installations. One group, commanded by colored non-coms and with no white officers present, had a fight with some Confederates and did very well, capturing certain prisoners; and the problem was that the men wanted to kill all of the prisoners forthwith, being restrained only by their sergeant. On the other side of the ledger there was the example of Fort Pillow, a Mississippi River post held by colored troops, which had been stormed in recent months by Bedford Forrest’s command. After the surrender some of Forrest’s tough troopers got out of hand and turned the occasion into something like a lynching bee. The colored troops with the Army of the Potomac could read no newspapers and got their information of far-off events Heaven knows how, but every one of them knew about Fort Pillow. General Hinks, with colored men in his command, urged that all of them be armed with repeating rifles in place of the regulation muzzle-loaders. His men, he said, “cannot
afford to be beaten and will not be taken,” and ought to have the best arms the country could provide. His request was ignored, but the making of it was significant.28

  As a general thing the Negro soldiers seemed to hold very little personal animus against their former masters. A white officer discovered, rather to his surprise, that they had neither hatred nor affection for the men who used to own them. They never mentioned their masters except as natural enemies, yet it was the class they hated, not the individuals in the class. They saw slavery, said this man, as “a wrong which no special kindnesses could right.” 29

  When Ferrero’s troops were brought up the Confederates in the Petersburg line quickly learned about it, and they despised the whole IX Corps because of it. On Burnside’s front the fighting became vicious. There were no picket-line truces and no lulls in the fighting. Off to the left, where Warren’s men held the line, tolerant Southerners might call, “Down, Yank!” before opening fire, but there was no more of that in Burnside’s sector. Sharpshooters kept their pieces trained on the firing slit and they were shooting to kill.30

  The men in Ferrero’s division, meanwhile, were immensely proud of their new assignment. As they sat about their campfires in the evening they made up a new song:

  We looks like men a-marching on;

  We looks like men o’ war—

  and they sang it on every possible occasion. Ferrero drilled them in the maneuvers that would be expected of them. After the mine was exploded, they were to charge straight ahead. White divisions would follow them, wheeling to right and left to protect their flanks, but they were to go straight on and seize the long ridge that overlooked Petersburg. That would come very close to ending the war, and for these colored men it would be a new beginning, and the soldiers were buoyant and worked hard on their behind-the-lines rehearsals.31

  Yet there was a doom over the men, and an extra sense seemed to tell them that things were not going to be simple. A prodigious thing was happening, and it could not happen easily. Here were men who had been held on a level with the mule and the ox, animated property with no rights which anyone was bound to respect, and now they were becoming men, and the very word “American” was taking on a new meaning. The war had changed. The soldiers were different and the country was different, and only the dream that had possessed them would go on. It was a dream that nobody could ever quite put into words, but it was growing as men died for it, and now it appeared that colored men could share in it.

  But the road out of Egypt was long, and black men who were coming up to the unparted deep-sea waters looked ahead and made up a little campfire song to tell how they felt about it:

  For death is a simple ting,

  And he go from door to door,

  And he knock down some and he cripple up some

  And he leave some here to pray.32

  3. Like the Noise of Great Thunders

  The ridge behind the Confederate trenches was not very high, and its slope was gentle and grassy, with dips and hollows here and there, and occasional clumps of trees. It lay naked under the July sun, and no one had ever climbed it (except for a few Confederate artillerists, who had parked some guns in the Jerusalem Plank Road), and it was like a mocking challenge to the Federal soldiers. If they could once reach the crest of that ridge, the war was over, for if they stood there they would be in rear of the entire Confederate line, and they would control Petersburg and everything that was in it, which meant that they could certainly capture Richmond and could probably destroy Lee’s army. The crest was less than half a mile from the Union line, and between the crest and the Army of the Potomac there was nothing in particular except the Confederate trench which was about to be blown sky-high.

  The Pennsylvania miners had brought the end of the war within whispering distance. Never before had there been a chance like this. A trench properly built and manned by a sufficiency of Southern riflemen and gunners could never be stormed, and by now everybody knew it; but if the trench and everyone in it could suddenly be obliterated the case would be very different, and if this business were handled right men could walk through and take the crest.

  Grant finally saw it, and while he had certain doubts about this stunt of Burnside’s, he was determined that it must at least be given a fair chance. He was commander of all the armies of the United States and he was not directly responsible for the tactics involved in an assault along half a mile of one front, but if strategy could insure success of this attack he proposed to use it, and so he laid a plan.

  North of the James River, squarely in front of Richmond, there were miles of Confederate trenches held by a thin string of cavalry pickets. Potentially, this was the most sensitive part of Lee’s entire line, and a Union attack there was certain to pull Confederate strength into the area just as fast as Lee could get it there. When Grant thought about ways to help Burnside’s assault his mind naturally turned to those empty fortifications north of the river.

  His plan was simple. He would send Hancock and the II Corps north of the James, accompanied by Sheridan and the cavalry. They would cross the Appomattox below Petersburg, march north back of Butler’s lines, and cross the James by a new pontoon bridge at a place called Deep Bottom, and it would not hurt in the least if Lee saw them going. Presumably, Lee would take troops from the Petersburg lines to meet this threat. If Hancock and Sheridan could actually break the lines in front of Richmond, that of course would be all to the good. If they could not it would probably be because Lee had reduced strength in front of Petersburg in order to hold in front of Richmond. In that case Burnside’s chance of success would be just so much better.1

  So Grant planned and so it was ordered, and on the evening of July 26 the II Corps took the road north. The column got to the Appomattox bridge around midnight, and a newspaper correspondent on the north side of the river watched, fascinated, as the line of march wound past a huge bonfire which had been lit to show the way. The men came up out of the dark, passed through the pool of wavering light, and moved on into more darkness, marching steadily for the James River crossing, silent enough except when some brigade staff rode by with a jingling of scabbards and other equipment. Batteries rolled by now and then, firelight gleaming off the polished guns, and the reporter sat and watched for two hours, bemused by “that flow of men, like a river, passing, still passing, but never passed.” 2

  Early on the morning of July 27 the corps crossed the James. Butler had laid two pontoon bridges at Deep Bottom somewhat earlier, and he had a detachment on the north bank to hold the bridgehead, and Sheridan took his cavalry over to strike the Charles City Road to Richmond, while the infantry fanned out along the banks of a little stream called Bailey’s Creek. There was skirmishing all day long in the underbrush and forsaken fields by this brook, the Rebels apparently present in some strength with more coming up.

  Back in front of Petersburg, Pleasants’s men were carrying the kegs of powder down the long tunnel, each man stooping low under the ceiling and hugging the 25-pound keg against his belly. Over their heads the Confederates had stopped hunting for the rumored Yankee mine—partly, it seems, because Lee’s engineers felt just the way Meade’s felt: no soldiers could burrow 500 feet under a hill. A correspondent for the London Times who was visiting Confederate headquarters at the time helped to confirm this delusion. British army experience, he said, showed that 400 feet was the absolute limit for a tunnel of this kind.3

  In any case, Grant’s feint worked perfectly. Hancock’s infantry and the dismounted cavalry gestured and skirmished and fought along a ridge back of Bailey’s Creek and made threatening motions on the Charles City Road, and it looked as if a big attack was coming. One after another, Lee called veteran divisions out of the Petersburg lines, and by the morning of July 29 he had more than half of his army north of the James, leaving only 18,000 infantry to hold the five miles of line in front of Petersburg. More than a third of Hancock’s people, meanwhile, had already gone back to Petersburg, and everybody else would go back as
soon as the darkness came;4 and Meade was sitting down with Burnside to draw up formal orders for the big attack, which was to begin at 3:30 o’clock the next morning, July 30.

  By now, Meade was ready to support Burnside with everything he had. Burnside was to use his entire corps, and two army corps would be on hand to help him—Warren’s corps, on the left, and Baldy Smith’s old corps, now led by General E. O. C. Ord, on the right. A powerful mass of artillery had been quietly moved up into position during recent nights—eighty field pieces, eighteen huge 10-inch mortars, twenty-eight of the lighter coehorn mortars, and eighteen 4½-inch siege guns, all dug in where they could sweep the Confederate position.

  Battle orders were precise. Burnside was to attack the moment the mine was sprung and he was to go straight for the crest of the ridge, pausing for no consideration whatever. The objective was a decisive break-through and final victory, and the only thing that counted was to get the troops up on the heights. They could get there only if they moved fast. Therefore they must be formed in columns of assault before the mine was exploded, and during the night Burnside’s parapets and abatis must be leveled so that those columns could advance in line of battle. There must also be engineer parties at the heads of the columns, to remove Confederate obstructions and prepare a way for Yankee artillery to follow.

  The plan was good, and it was about as Burnside had figured it. But Meade made one change in Burnside’s original plan. He told Burnside that Ferrero’s colored division must not be used as the first wave of the attack. The fight must be spearheaded by the white troops. If the colored troops were to be used at all they must go in later, as support.

  Burnside objected, with heat, pointing out that Ferrero’s was his biggest, freshest division and that it had been getting special training for weeks in the movements which would be involved in this assault. Meade refused to yield, and after a while Grant came in and Burnside appealed to him. Grant listened, and upheld Meade: the colored troops must not go in first. Profoundly disturbed, Burnside went back to his own headquarters to rearrange his plans and prepare new orders. The moment set for the explosion of the mine was now about twelve hours in the future.5