A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  They understood also, however, that the war was never going to be won by the aimless sort of maneuverings which had been going on during the last three weeks. Direct action might not be so bad if the man who was directing it knew what he was doing. As one man wrote, “We knew we were there for other purposes than a traveling procession, and the cause had been for a long time a failing one.”12

  So here was Sheridan, and they would see about him.

  The first things they saw were the little things. When the army marched Sheridan was always up near the front, taking personal charge. If traffic jams or road blocks developed, the officer who galloped up to straighten matters out was Sheridan himself. Sometimes he stormed and swore, and sometimes, when others were excited, he was controlled and soft-spoken; either way, he struck sparks and got action. If infantry was ordered to march in the fields and woods so that wagons and guns could have the road, Sheridan got off the road too and went with the foot soldiers. Marches went more smoothly, and camp life ran as if someone was in charge again, and it began to dawn on the men that many of the pesky little annoyances of military existence were disappearing. Before long, VI Corps veterans were paying Sheridan one of the highest compliments they knew. Having him in command, they said, was almost as good as having Uncle John Sedgwick back.13

  It was noticed, too, that army headquarters was managed without fuss and feathers. Headquarters in the Army of the Potomac had been elaborate and formal—many tents, much pomp and show, honor guards in fussy Zouave uniforms, a gaudy headquarters flag bearing a golden eagle in a silver wreath on a solferino background; the whole having caused U. S. Grant, the first time he saw it, to rein in his horse and inquire if Imperial Caesar lived anywhere near. Sheridan made do with two tents and two tent flies, and he had no honor guard. Instead he had a collection of two-gun scouts dressed in Confederate uniforms, who were probably the toughest daredevils in the army.

  There were perhaps a hundred of them, the outgrowth of a small detail originally selected for special jobs from the 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry. They were a peculiar combination of intelligence operatives, communications experts, counterespionage men, and sluggers. They spent nearly as much time within the Rebel lines as in their own—they had “learned to talk the Southern language,” as one of them put it, and they made themselves familiar with every regiment, brigade, and division in Early’s army—and the biggest part of their job was to keep Sheridan at all times up to date on the enemy’s strength, movements, and dispositions. If captured, of course, they could expect nothing better than to be hanged to the nearest tree, and they always ran a fair chance of being potted by Yankee outposts, since they did look like Rebels. They tended to be an informal and individualistic lot.14

  In part, the existence of this group reflected one of Sheridan’s pet ideas—that daring and quick reflexes were worth more than muscle. Standing by a campfire with his staff one evening, Sheridan remarked that the ideal cavalry regiment would consist of men between eighteen and twenty-two years of age, none weighing more than 130 pounds and not one of them married. Little, wiry men could stand the pounding better than the big husky ones, Sheridan felt, and a Pennsylvanian who heard him agreed. He had noticed that skinny little chaps from the coal breakers usually outlasted the brawny deer hunters and bear trappers who came down from the mountains. And only young bachelors were properly reckless.15

  Even more, however, these scouts were the product of the kind of war that was developing in the Valley. Yankee soldiers here were not only up against Early’s troops. They were also up against guerillas, some of them Colonel Mosby’s, some of them answering to nobody but themselves, and guerilla warfare was putting an edge on the fighting that had been seen nowhere else in Virginia.

  In modern terms, the Confederacy had organized a resistance movement in territory occupied by the hated Yankees; had organized it, and then had seen it get badly out of hand.

  The Valley was full of men who were Confederate soldiers by fits and starts—loosely organized and loosely controlled, most of them, innocent civilians six days a week and hell-roaring raiders the seventh day. They owned horses, weapons, and sometimes uniforms, which they carefully hid when they were not actually using them. Called together at intervals by their leaders, they would swoop down on outposts and picket lines, knock off wagon trains or supply depots, burn culverts and bridges behind the Federal front, and waylay any couriers, scouts, or other detached persons they could find. They compelled Union commanders to make heavy detachments to guard supply lines and depots, thus reducing the number of soldiers available for service in battle. To a certain extent they unintentionally compensated for this by reducing straggling in the Federal ranks, for the Northern soldier was firmly convinced that guerillas took no prisoners and that to be caught by them was to get a slit throat.

  So the guerillas gave the Federal commanders a continuing headache—and, in the long run, probably did the Confederacy much more harm than good.

  The quality of these guerilla bands varied greatly. At the top was John S. Mosby’s: courageous soldiers led by a minor genius, highly effective in partisan warfare. Most of the groups, however, were about one degree better than plain outlaws, living for loot and excitement, doing no actual fighting if they could help it, and offering a secure refuge to any number of Confederate deserters and draft evaders. The Confederate cavalry leader, General Thomas L. Rosser, called them “a nuisance and an evil to the service,” declaring:

  “Without discipline, order or organization, they roam broadcast over the country, a band of thieves, stealing, pillaging, plundering and doing every manner of mischief and crime. They are a terror to the citizens and an injury to the cause. They never fight; can’t be made to fight. Their leaders are generally brave, but few of the men are good soldiers.” 16

  Jeb Stuart, not long before his death, endorsed this sentiment, saying that Mosby’s was the only ranger band he knew of that was halfway efficient and that even Mosby usually operated with only a fourth of his supposed strength, while Lee wrote to the Confederate Secretary of War strongly urging that all such groups be abolished, asserting: “I regard the whole system as an unmixed evil.”17

  The worst damage which this system did to the Confederacy, however, was that it put Yankee soldiers in a mood to be vengeful.

  By this time the Union authorities had had a good deal of experience with guerillas and they were getting very grim about it. Much of this conditioning had been gained in states like Tennessee and Missouri, where neighbor was bitter against neighbor and barn burnings and the murderous settlement of old grudges went hand in hand with attempts to discomfit the Yankee invader, and most Federal generals considered guerillas as mere bushwhackers, candidates for the noose or the firing squad. An exception was generally (though by no means always) made in the case of Mosby’s men, who were recognized as being more or less regular soldiers, but the attitude toward the rest was summed up by a Union general along the upper Potomac, who said: “I have instructed my command not to bring any of them to my headquarters except for interment.”18

  This attitude spread rapidly to the rank and file, particularly when the guerillas took to killing any Union stragglers they could catch. Overlooking the fact that lawless foraging and looting by stragglers and bummers could easily provoke angry reprisals, the soldiers simply argued that if a Southerner wanted to fight he ought to be in the Confederate Army. If he was not in the Army, but fought anyway, they considered that he was outside the law. Since the guerillas could not often be captured—they usually struck at night, vanished in the dark, and became innocent farmers before the pursuit got well organized—the tendency was to take it out on the nearest civilians, on the broad ground that if they let guerillas operate in their midst they would have to take the consequences.

  Most Federal soldiers would have endorsed the words and acts of a Union officer in northern Alabama, where troop trains were fired on and railroad telegraph lines were cut by anti-Unionists in a little country town. T
his officer assembled the townsfolk and told them that henceforth “every time the telegraph wire was cut we would burn a house; every time a train was fired on we should hang a man; and we would continue to do this until every house was burned and every man hanged between Decatur and Bridgeport.” He went on to put the army viewpoint into explicit words: “If they wanted to fight they should enter the army, meet us like honorable men, and not, assassin-like, fire at us from the woods and run.” He concluded by warning that if the citizens let the bushwhackers continue to operate, “we should make them more uncomfortable than they would be in Hell.” Having said all of this he burned the town, arrested three citizens as hostages for the good behavior of the rest, and went his way. He wrote that this action was spoken of “approvingly by the officers and enthusiastically by the men.” 19

  Now it should be remembered that ordinarily the soldiers were the least bloodthirsty of all the participants in the war. Secretary Welles might write fondly of hangings, and the Chicago Board of Trade might ask that Confederate prisoners be allowed to die of hunger or disease, and it could be washed off as part of the inevitable idiocy of superpatriotism in time of war. But when the soldiers themselves began to feel an interest in creating a hell on earth for enemy civilians the moon was entering a new phase. The tragic part about it now was that this was happening in an army one of whose functions was to ravage and lay waste a populous farming area until even a crow could not support himself in it. The hand that was about to come down on the Shenandoah Valley was going to be heavy enough anyway. What the guerillas did was not going to make it come down any more lightly.

  It was mid-August, and the Army of the Shenandoah had marched more than a third of the way up the Valley. Lee sent reinforcements to Early, and the number of them was exaggerated by rumor, and Sheridan—still feeling his way with his new command, and behaving with unwonted caution—decided to move back to Halltown and wait for a better time and place to strike. The army paused, and then it moved slowly back in retreat, and as it moved innumerable squadrons of Federal cavalry spread out from mountain to mountain in a broad destroying wave and began methodically and with cold efficiency to take the Valley apart.

  They were not gentle about it. The chaplain of the 1st Rhode Island Cavalry wrote grimly: “The time had fully come to peel this land and put an end to the long strife for its possession,” and he had found the precise word for it.20 The cavalry peeled the Shenandoah Valley as a man might peel an orange. The blue tide ebbed, leaving wreckage behind it, pillars of smoke rising by day and pillars of fire glowing by night to mark the place where they had been.

  The general idea was simple. All barns were to be burned, and crops were to be destroyed. Farmers were to be left enough to see themselves through the winter, although the definition of “enough” was left to the lieutenants and captains commanding the detachments which had the matches, and there was no right of appeal. Anything that could benefit the Confederacy was to be destroyed, whether it was a corncrib, a gristmill, a railroad bridge, or something that went on four legs. It was hoped that nobody would starve to death, and no violence was to be offered to any civilian’s person, but the Valley was to feed no more Confederate armies thereafter.

  The Rhode Island chaplain looked back on it, a dozen years later, and wrote:

  “The 17th of August will be remembered as sending up to the skies the first great columns of smoke and flame from doomed secession barns, stacks, cribs and mills, and the driving into loyal lines of flocks and herds. The order was carefully yet faithfully obeyed.… The order led to the destruction of about 2,000 barns, 70 mills, and other property, valued in all at 25 millions of dollars.” The chaplain went on to say that many guerilla bands had lived in this region and that it had finally been “purified” by fire: “As our boys expressed it, ‘we burned out the hornets.’ ” 21

  A man in the 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry gave his picture of it:

  “Previously the burning of supplies and outbuildings had been incidental to battles, but now the torch was applied deliberately and intentionally. Stacks of hay and straw and barns filled with crops harvested, mills, corn-cribs; in a word, all supplies of use to man or beast were promptly burned and all valuable cattle driven off.… The work of destruction seemed cruel and the distress it occasioned among the people of all ages and sexes was evident on every hand. The officers and soldiers who performed the details of this distressing work were met at every farm or home by old men, women and children in tears, begging and beseeching those in charge to save them from the appalling ruin. These scenes of burning and destruction, which were only the prelude to those which followed at a later day farther up the Valley, were attended with sorrow to families and added horrors to the usual brutalities of war, unknown to any other field operations in the so-called Confederacy.” 22

  Not all of the people quite got the point of what was being done. Even General Hunter had felt obliged to point out to his men, a month earlier, that there were in the Valley many people of stout Unionist sympathy, who sheltered Federal wounded men and did their best to aid the Union army; such people, he pointed out, ought to be given a little protection, which unfortunately his own army did not seem able to provide. Now the Pennsylvania cavalryman said that “the few Union people, old men, women and children, could not be made to understand the utility or necessity of the measure, while the outspoken Confederates heaped upon us maledictions.… The common hatred of open foes seemed to deepen, and to blot out forever all hope of future goodwill between North and South.” 23

  The soldiers did not exactly enjoy their job. The historian of another regiment of Pennsylvania horse, the 6th, said that his regiment was lucky enough to avoid “the detail for this unpleasant duty,” and said that he rode that day with the last element of the rear guard, marching in the wake of the men who had been swinging the torch. “The day had been an unpleasant one,” he wrote, “the weather was hot and the roads very dusty, and the grief of the inhabitants, as they saw their harvests disappearing in flame and smoke, and their stock being driven off, was a sad sight. It was a phase of warfare we had not seen before, and although we admitted the necessity we could not but sympathize with the sufferers.” 24

  A Michigan cavalryman remembered riding past a little home and seeing, in the gate of the fence by the road, an old woman, crying bitterly, blood flowing from a deep cut in one arm. He rode up to her and she told him that some soldier had struck her with his saber and then had taken her two cows. He wheeled and spurred after his regiment, found the officer in charge of the herd of confiscated cattle, recovered the two cows—or, at any rate, two cows which might have been the ones—and with the officer he tried in vain to find the man who had used the saber. Then he took the cows back to the woman, who thanked him in tearful surprise and told him that if he was ever captured by Mosby’s men he should have them bring him to her home, and she would give testimony that would save him from being hanged.25

  So the army made its way back down the Valley, leaving desolation behind it, and the war came slowly nearer its end in the black smoke that drifted over the Blue Ridge. The war had begun with waving unstained flags and dreams of a picture-book fight which would concern no one but soldiers, who would die picturesquely and without bloodshed amid dress-parade firing lines, and it had come down now to burning barns, weeping children, and old women who had been hit with sabers. In the only way that was left to it, the war was coming toward its close. Phil Sheridan passed the word, and his scouts laughed and went trotting off to spy on the Rebels and play a clever game with the threat of a greased noose; and the guerillas met in dark copses on the edge of the army and rode out with smoking revolvers to kill the cripples, and now and then one of them was caught.

  It happened so with a group of Sheridan’s scouts, who captured a Captain Stump, famous as a Rebel raider, a man they had long been seeking. He had been wounded, and when he was caught they took his weapons away and brought him to Major Young, who commanded the scouts, and Major Youn
g had a certain respect for this daring guerilla, so he told him:

  “I suppose you know we will kill you. But we will not serve you as you have served our men—cut your throat or hang you. We will give you a chance for your life. We will give you ten rods’ start on your own horse, with your spurs on. If you get away, all right.… But remember, my men are dead shots.”

  Captain Stump was bloody and he had been hurt, but he was all man. He smiled, and nodded, and rode a few feet out in front of the rank of his captors—skinny young men, 130 pounds or less, unmarried, the pick of the Yankee cavalry. Major Young looked down the rank, and called out: “Go!”

  A cavalryman wrote about it afterward:

  “We allowed him about ten rods’ start, then our pistols cracked and he fell forward, dead.” 26

  3. On the Upgrade

  From the Shenandoah Valley to Chicago it is perhaps 500 miles, as one of General Grant’s unrationed crows might fly, and the binding threads of war spanned these miles and tied valley and city together in an invisible bond.

  In the Valley, as August came to an end, the winds from the mountains carried away the last of the smudge from charred barns and hayricks, and whether or not anybody could see it those winds came from the hour just before sunrise and there was a promise in them. In Chicago, the hour looked like the spectral twilight of collapse and defeat, and the passenger trains were unloading a large assortment of people who were prepared to stake a good deal on the belief that the great Union of the States was dying.