A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  Next morning Early tapped harder, just to make certain that the reinforced defenses were as solid as they looked. The VI Corps sent a whole brigade out to meet him, and in Fort Stevens and nearby Fort De Russey the long-range cannon came to life, plowing up the slopes where the Rebel skirmishers were in line and knocking down the houses where the sharpshooters were hiding. The noise echoed and rolled across the open country north of the city, a blanket of ragged white smoke slid down into the hollows, and a trickle of wounded men began to flow back to the rear. Then a carriage pulled up by the barracks that had been built just behind Fort Stevens, and a tall man in frock coat and stovepipe hat got out—an unmilitary figure among all of these soldiers, but moving nonetheless with the air of one used to exercising command—and here was Abraham Lincoln, out to see for himself a little of the death and destruction which he had been living with for three years and more.

  General Wright was in the fort, and he greeted the President; and without stopping to think, never imagining that the invitation would be accepted, he asked if Mr. Lincoln would care to get up on the parapet with him and watch the battle. The President said he would like to very much, and while Wright wished earnestly that he could recall his thoughtless words the President clambered up on top of the parapet. He was tall and gaunt, towering over everybody, an obvious target, standing right where Southern sharpshooters were peppering the place with Minié bullets.

  Wright begged him to get down, but Lincoln refused, the idea of personal danger seeming not to enter his head. A surgeon who had got up on the parapet was struck, just a few feet away from where Lincoln was standing, and other bullets flicked up the dirt near him, and Wright in desperation moved around to stand between the President and the enemy fire. His entreaties having no effect, Wright at last bluntly told the President that he, General Wright, was in charge of operations here at the fort and that it was his order that the President get down out of danger; and when Lincoln still failed to move, Wright threatened to get a squad of soldiers and remove him by force. This seemed to amuse the President, and while Wright gulped at his brashness in threatening to arrest the commander in chief, Lincoln got down obediently and sat with his back to the parapet.

  He was safe enough now, unless some Rebel gunner happened to burst a shell overhead, and Wright felt better. He noticed, however, that Lincoln was forever spoiling the effect by jumping up and peering over the ramparts for another look, and Wright later wrote to a friend: “I could not help thinking that in leaving the parapet he did so rather in deference to my earnestly expressed wishes than from any consideration of personal safety.”13

  Meanwhile the fight was getting warmer. Wright’s infantry went forward, taking losses, and Lincoln saw men killed and watched while wounded men were carried to the rear. But Early realized that the situation was hopeless, and after a while he called in his skirmishers, and at dusk he ordered a retreat. He was in an acrid, festive humor, and as his troops fell into column for the march back to Virginia Early turned to an aide and remarked: “Major, we haven’t taken Washington, but we’ve scared Abe Lincoln like hell!” The aide agreed that this was so, but he suggested that when the VI Corps line moved out to drive back Early’s skirmishers there might have been a few Confederates who were equally scared. Early chuckled. “That’s true,” he said, “but it won’t appear in history!”14

  It had been a brisk scrap while it lasted, but one of Wright’s veterans confessed that he supposed the Confederates had retired “more we think from the sight of the VI Corps flag than from the number assailing them.” A man in the Vermont Brigade wrote that “the dignitaries in the fort returned to their homes, having witnessed as pretty and well-conducted a little fight as was seen during the whole war,” and the War Department recorded that the whole business had cost the VI Corps some 200 in killed and wounded. General Meigs took his quartermaster details back to town, proudly writing that he had had command of a battle line two miles long containing 5,000 troops, and he presently got from Secretary Stanton a letter containing a brevet major general’s commission and thanking him for his services. The Rebels drew off through Rockville, heading for the Potomac River fords, and some of General McCook’s men advanced as far as the Sligo Creek post office, capturing a field hospital containing seventy-odd wounded Southerners plus a corporal’s guard of surgeons and orderlies. Washington relaxed. The big scare was over.15

  It was up to the VI Corps to pursue the enemy, and the pursuit was extremely vigorous. The Vermont Brigade remembered the first night’s march out of Washington as one of the worst it ever made. The weather was hot and the roads were dusty, clogged with any number of stragglers and with obstructions which Early’s men had thoughtfully left in their wake. By the time the veterans had seen the Confederates out of Maryland they were fully ready to call it quits and take a little rest.

  The 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery came trailing back to Washington, and to its delight learned that it was to get back its original assignment as heavy artillery—it had been front-line infantry beginning with Spotsylvania Court House, and it had had fearful casualties—and it snuggled down in a fort near Tenallytown, dispossessing an Ohio National Guard outfit “with its gawky officers” and luxuriating in new uniforms, new shoes, and regular rations. It was especially delighted to get, at last, crossed cannon to put on its caps, for these insignia belonged to heavy artillery and the men felt that this made the new incarnation official. They looked fondly at the comfortable living quarters in the fort and told one another that they were going to sleep for a week. However, the very next morning orders were changed and the regiment was put back in the VI Corps infantry column, crossed cannon and all, and it went off on a grinding hike to the Shenandoah Valley to keep Early from launching a new invasion, and it never saw the Tenallytown fort again.16

  For the VI Corps the next two weeks were a nightmare. The men forded the Potomac and went up through Leesburg and Snickers’ Gap to the banks of the Shenandoah, and down at City Point Grant concluded that the danger was over and sent orders for the corps to come back to Petersburg. So there was a hard forced march, and just as the troops reached Washington and prepared to board the transports Early sent his cavalry riding hard up into Pennsylvania, where the men burned the city of Chambersburg—another little dividend on Hunter’s depredations in the upper Valley—so once again orders were changed and the corps marched back to Harper’s Ferry as fast as it could go, crossing the Potomac there and starting up the Valley again.

  There was much straggling on this march, due to heat and general exhaustion and, as a brigade surgeon confessed, to “bad whisky from Washington.” The corps had no more than started up the valley than orders were changed once more and everybody had to hurry back into Maryland. In the first days of August the men made a bivouac along the Monocacy River not far from Frederick, wondering bleakly what the people in Washington were going to think of next.

  Corps morale was down at low-water mark for the war. Originally the men had been delighted to leave Petersburg and come up to Washington, and their appearance as saviors of the capital, the only troops who had ever fought under the eye of Lincoln himself, made them think very highly of themselves. But the marching since then had been harder than anything they had had in all their experience—it was even worse than the man-killing marches they had made in the Gettysburg campaign, which they had always supposed were the worst possible—and when they got to the Monocacy the men were so dead-beat that most regiments made camp with no more than twenty men around the colors. The series of aimless marches and countermarches showed clearly that Washington did not know what it was doing, and one veteran admitted that by this time “the Sixth Corps was, in army parlance, ‘about played out.’ ” Another man wrote that “the thinking soldiers about their campfires felt a discouragement the gloom of the Wilderness had failed to produce.”17

  Still, the campsites by the Monocacy were pleasant, and for a few days there was rest, and with the rest men’s spirits rose again.
One of the 2nd Connecticut heavies, adjusted at last to the fact that the comforts of the Washington forts would be forever unattainable, grew almost lyrical when he considered the present bivouac:

  “The clear, sparkling river ran along the lower edge of it, and the surrounding woods abounded in saplings, poles and brush, for which soldiers can always find so many uses. Regular camp calls were instituted, company and battalion drills ordered, and things began to assume the appearance of a stay.” An officer died while the corps was camped here and he was given a full-dress military funeral, whereat all the men wagged their heads. They had seen so many men of all ranks put under the sod without any ceremony at all that this seemed to be an infallible sign that they would stay here for a long time, resting, drilling a little, and regaining their strength.18

  Emory’s men in the XIX Corps felt the same way. They had spent all of the war in the humid heat of Louisiana, and when they made camp by the Shenandoah a few miles from Harper’s Ferry they felt that they were in a new world. One soldier wrote glowingly of “the bracing air, the crystal waters, the rolling wheat fields and the beautiful blue mountains,” sick men in the field hospitals returned to duty, straggling diminished, and the men looked about them at the open country and the excellent roads and felt that marching in this region might almost be a pleasure.19

  While the soldiers caught their breath and hoped for the best, Grant had been living through what were probably his most trying moments of the war. He was at City Point, and some sort of curtain seemed to have come down between his headquarters there and the War Department in Washington. He had a good many things on his mind—the tragedy of the mine and the attempted break-through came right when all of this frenzied, useless countermarching was going on—and when he sent orders north to govern the use of the troops that were supposed to be rounding up Early’s army the orders had to go through Washington, and on their way through things happened to them.

  The pursuit of Early had been ineffective because too many men were in position to give orders to soldiers like Wright and Emory. All lines of authority were crossed, and the War Department was buzzing and fretting and issuing innumerable orders, taking time along the way to modify, alter, or countermand the orders other people were issuing. Looking back long after the war, Grant wrote his verdict: “It seemed to be the policy of General Halleck and Secretary Stanton to keep any force sent there in pursuit of the invading army moving right and left so as to keep between the enemy and our capital; and generally speaking they pursued this policy until all knowledge of the whereabouts of the enemy was lost.” 20

  The first step, obviously, was to put one competent soldier in charge of the whole operation with definite, overriding authority, and this step Grant took. He sent orders to pull Major General William B. Franklin out of retirement and give him command over everybody, and for a day or two he assumed that he had settled things. Then he got a fussy telegram from Halleck explaining that this just would not do. Franklin had been a McClellan man in the old days, and the grim Committee on the Conduct of the War considered that he was really responsible for Burnside’s failure at Fredericksburg, and he was in very bad odor at the War Department—and Grant’s order was nullified and Franklin was not appointed. It appeared that Halleck and Stanton were exercising a veto power over Grant’s authority and substituting their own ideas of strategy for his.21

  Now this was the old McClellan situation all over again, and in a sense it was the crisis of the war. This was a presidential election year and by every sign men could read the Northern people were tired and discouraged. Sherman had not taken Atlanta and Grant had not taken Richmond, casualty lists had been heavy beyond all previous experience, and now the Confederates had an army in the lower Shenandoah Valley, ravaging Northern towns and apparently quite as irrepressible as in the Stonewall Jackson days. Unless the general in chief could somehow regain control and put an end to the fumbling and meddling, the bottom might fall out of the whole war effort, with failure in the field leading to defeat at the polls, and with independence for the Confederacy coming along in due course.

  In a very similar situation, McClellan wrote bitter letters to his wife, told his officers that Washington was villainously conspiring against him, and drifted on down to defeat. It remained to be seen what Grant would do.

  On August 1—while he was still digesting the dismal story of the fiasco at the crater—Grant made his move. He ordered Phil Sheridan to go up to the Monocacy and take control of all the troops in that area, and he wired Halleck that he was instructing Sheridan to “put himself south of the enemy and follow him to the death.” 22

  The emphasis here, of course, was on the instruction to get south of the enemy. Whenever the Confederates invaded the North they were actually offering the Federals a priceless opportunity, and the real job of the Federal commander at such times was not to repel the invasion but to destroy the invading army. Lincoln had always seen it so, but he could never make his generals see it, and both Antietam and Gettysburg had been barren victories. Now there was a general with iron in him, who saw things as Lincoln did; and yet the old viewpoint still prevailed in the War Department, and the War Department had muscled in between general and President, on the one hand, and opportunity, on the other.

  Grant’s order was not at all the sort of thing Secretary Stanton was apt to approve. Under all his bluster, Stanton was timid, and the idea of following a pugnacious enemy to the death was just too much for him. Also, he felt that Sheridan was too young for an important independant command, and it appears that he did not like him very much personally, and what would happen to Grant’s order regarding Sheridan was likely to be very similar to what had happened to his order regarding Franklin.

  But just at this moment President Lincoln took a hand. He had been reading all of the correspondence, and now he sat down to send a telegram of his own to General Grant.

  Grant’s instructions to Sheridan, said the President, were just exactly right, and what Grant wanted done was precisely what the President wanted done. But Grant was invited to look over all of the dispatches he had received from Washington, and to consider everything he knew about the way the War Department did things, “and discover, if you can, that there is any idea in the head of anyone here of ‘putting our army south of the enemy’ or of ‘following him to the death’ in any direction.”

  Mr. Lincoln closed with the blunt warning:

  “I repeat to you it will neither be done nor attempted, unless you watch it every day and hour and force it.” 23

  The whole history of the Army of the Potomac passes in review in Mr. Lincoln’s brief dispatch: the history of the army, and the most exasperating problem of the war itself. Over and over the war had been prolonged because of the timid, restrictive caution that could paralyze action—the habit of mind that was always too busy weighing risks to grasp opportunities. It developed now that that habit of mind had never been eradicated because when all was said and done it had its final roots in the War Department itself. The War Department could not act and the President could not make it act. The most he could do was support a general who was bold enough to ram action down the department’s throat.

  Now Lincoln was giving Grant the final tip-off, just as he had so often and so vainly tried, two years earlier, to give McClellan a similar tip-off. Tables of organization and lines of authority meant nothing in themselves. In the end everything depended on the general, and it was up to the general to act. McClellan had never been able to rise to this challenge. Grant was the last chance.

  Two hours after he had received this wire from President Lincoln, Grant was on a fast steamer, coming up the Potomac. When the boat docked at Washington he stopped off neither at the White House nor at the War Department. Instead he went directly to the railroad station and took a special train to Monocacy Junction, and as soon as he got there he went to see General Hunter.

  Technically, Hunter commanded the military department in which all of these troop movements wer
e going on, and so technically he was responsible for everything that was being done. Grant had no intention of letting Hunter have control over the attempt to destroy Early’s army but he was quite willing to let him down easy. Hunter could shelve himself in a Baltimore office if he wished, retaining nominal command of the department while Sheridan did the actual work, and Grant told Hunter this in so many words. But Hunter had had enough. He was getting on in years and he was not much of a soldier, and there was something mean in him which had led him to burn college buildings and homes when he should have been fighting Confederate armies, but during the last fortnight he had been more sinned against than sinning. He told Grant frankly that he had been pulled and tugged around so much by War Department orders that at this moment he simply did not know where Early and Early’s troops were—and, in short, he would prefer to be relieved outright and let Sheridan carry the whole load.

  Grant wasted no further time. “Very well, then,” he said. Hunter was relieved, and without even waiting for Sheridan to arrive Grant ordered all of the Union troops in the vicinity to move at once to Halltown, a little village at the lower end of the Shenandoah Valley a few miles away from Harper’s Ferry. No matter where Early was, a concentration of Federal soldiers in the Shenandoah was something the Confederacy could not endure. Early would come back quickly enough, once blue-uniformed troops displayed themselves in force around Halltown.24