A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  At the end of January there was an odd, revealing incident.

  Over the Rebel parapet near the old mine crater came a white flag, with a bugler to blow a parley, and a message came over for General Grant. As it happened, Grant was away just then, and there was a twenty-four-hour delay before the message reached him. During the delay, by the mysterious army grapevine, word went up and down the rival lines: the Confederacy was sending a peace commission to meet Lincoln and Seward to see whether they could not agree on terms to end the war.

  The peace commissioners were men of note. One was John A. Campbell, former justice of the United States Supreme Court, now the Confederacy’s Assistant Secretary of War. Another was Senator R. M. T. Hunter, former Confederate Secretary of State. The third was the Vice-President of the Confederacy, wizened Alexander Stephens, who had been in Congress with Lincoln and who, in 1848, made a speech which caused Lincoln to write to his law partner, Herndon, that “a little, slim, pale-faced consumptive man” had just made the best speech he had ever heard, a speech which moved him to tears. He and Stephens had been drawn to each other, somehow. Members of the Whig party, they had worked together in 1848 to help nominate Zachary Taylor.

  Jefferson Davis once had used words of poetry to refer to Stephens as “the little pale star from Georgia.” He would not use such tender language about him now, for he and Stephens had drifted far apart. Davis considered Stephens a defeatist, and Stephens considered Davis a despot, and said so in public; and now, against his will, Stephens was head of a mission sent to confer with Lincoln “for the purpose of securing peace to the two countries.”

  By the time Grant got the message, consulted Washington, and made arrangements to get the commissioners through the lines, it was the afternoon of January 31. Both armies knew what was up, and when the carriages came out the Jerusalem Plank Road from Petersburg, bearing the three dignitaries and any number of anxious private citizens, the parapets of Union and Confederate trenches were jammed with soldiers as far as the eye could see.

  There was an expectant hush. The commissioners’ carriage turned and made for an opening in the Confederate lines—and suddenly all of the soldiers who could see it, blue and gray alike, swung their hats and raised a tremendous cheer. A gunner who looked on remembered: “Cheer upon cheer was given, extending for some distance to the right and left of the lines, each side trying to cheer the loudest. ‘Peace on the brain’ appeared now to have spread like a contagion. Officers of all grades, from lieutenants to major generals, were to be seen flying in all directions to catch a glimpse of the gentlemen who were apparently to bring peace so unexpectedly.”

  Slowly the carriage came through, jolting over the uneven ground. The cheering died down. Having yelled, the men seemed to be holding their breath in nervous anticipation. The Federal soldiers now saw something which they had never seen before, or dreamed of seeing—a large number of ladies, dressed in their frilly best, standing on the Confederate parapet.

  The carriage stopped and the commissioners got out, tiny Stephens weighed down and made almost helpless with an enormous overcoat. The Confederates began to cheer again, and the three civilians walked across no man’s land to the place where Grant had ambulances waiting for them. As they reached these a couple of soldiers helped Stephens climb in, and the Northern troops cheered. The ambulances drove away, and as they passed from sight a Confederate picket sprang out, turned to face his comrades, and proposed three cheers for the Yankee army. These were given, after which a Union man led his side in three cheers for the Confederates. When this shouting died down somebody proposed three cheers for the ladies of Petersburg and both sides joined in, and the ladies fluttered their handkerchiefs prettily.24 Then the winter day ended, and the ladies went back to town, and the men climbed down from the parapets, and there was a quiet buzz of talk all up and down the lines. No soldier on either side seems to have asked what sort of peace terms were apt to come out of the conference. On this one afternoon, nobody was thinking of victory or defeat. It was enough to think that perhaps the war could end with no more killing.

  For anti-climax, the conference came to nothing. One side insisted on an independent Confederacy and the other side insisted on a restored Union, and the conferees presently were reduced to nothing much more than an interchange of expressions of personal good will. It developed that Stephens’s nephew, a Confederate officer, had for twenty months been a prisoner of war on Johnson’s Island, in Sandusky Bay. Lincoln made a note of it, and a few days later that surprised young officer found himself called out of prison and sent down to Washington, where he was taken to the White House for a chat with President Lincoln; after which he was sent through the lines to Richmond. The Confederates returned the favor, picking at random a Union officer of the same rank, and so the 13th New Hampshire presently welcomed the return of its Lieutenant Murray, who was delighted and surprised by the whole business.

  So the conference ended, and in the North the radicals reacted to it with bitter suspicion, shouting their fear that Lincoln was trying to revive “the old policy of tenderness toward the rebels.” Congressman George W. Julian of Indiana, to whom, long ago, Burnside had confided that the real trouble with the Union soldiers was that they did not hate their enemies sufficiently, took the floor to warn that the sole purpose of the war now was subjugation, crying: “Both the people and our armies, under this new dispensation, have been learning how to hate Rebels as Christian patriots ought to have done from the beginning.”

  Lincoln meanwhile called a cabinet meeting and coolly proposed that the Federal government offer to the Southern states four hundred million dollars in six per cent government bonds, as compensation for the property values which would be destroyed by emancipation, on condition that the Southern states return to the Union within two months. The Cabinet was stunned and slightly indignant. In vain Lincoln pointed out that if the war lasted only another hundred days it would cost all of the money he was now proposing to spend. No one would agree that this was the way to get peace and reunion, and at last Lincoln put away the draft of his proposal, saying: “You are all opposed to me.”

  In Richmond, Davis addressed a patriotic rally, inviting all Southerners to “unite our hands and hearts” in the fond belief that before midsummer it would be the Yankees who would be crossing the lines to ask for terms. Stephens conceded that Davis made a brilliant speech, although he considered it “not much short of dementation,” and when Davis asked what he proposed to do next the little Vice-President was blunt: “Go home and stay there.”25

  No peace, then, except by the sword, and the eerie light that had so briefly touched the winter sky faded out. It had been building up to this for four years, and here it was, visible and final: the war would end only when one side or the other had been pounded into helplessness, for men had passed beyond the point where they could negotiate or compromise. It was up to the soldiers, after all.

  The soldiers were hopeful, but sober, for the war had worked on them. In the Petersburg trenches and camps, no one was ever heard to sing “Tenting Tonight,” once the favorite campfire song: “That song is especially dedicated to the brave and stalwart homestayers.” There was little horseplay, little joviality, few campfire jokes and pleasant yarns—not, as one man wrote, because men had grown discouraged, but simply because the wide range of a regiment’s personal characteristic now “is narrowed to almost the definiteness of one special class: the steady and sober men.” Yet there was little complaining, and very little self-pity: “The army laughs far more than it weeps.” 26

  A Massachusetts gunner sat down and figured that in another 200 days his battery would reach the end of its enlistment and could go home, and he tried to write down what the rest of his term of service would amount to:

  “… only 200 more days of service, of which 33 are guard duty and the same of regular fatigue; three times mustered for pay—marching, fighting, perhaps; 2,000 hard tack, 75 pounds of pork, 125 pounds of beef to eat, 72 gallons of co
ffee to drink, part of it every day, and it will be done.” 27

  2. Great Light in the Sky

  Fort Stedman was a square box of a place, with solid walls enclosing a space for the guns. Inside the enclosure were sodded mounds over the dugouts in which the soldiers slept and kept their stores. In front and on each side were the spiky entanglements of the abatis, and to right and left were the trenches which tied Fort Stedman into the main line of Federal works facing Petersburg.

  The fort had stood here for nine months, and there was nothing in particular to distinguish it from several dozen other forts in the Federal lines except that it was in bad repair. It was less than 200 yards from the Confederate works, and that was easy range even for average marksmen, and so when the fort’s walls settled that winter the authorities did not order them rebuilt because the men who worked on them would probably be shot. Behind the fort there was higher ground from which one could look into the fort, and there was no abatis in the rear, and all in all Stedman was one of the weakest spots in the whole Federal line. That did not matter much, however, for it seemed very improbable that the Rebels would ever make an attack. The New York heavy artillery regiment which held this part of the line kept pickets out in front—they were almost within handshaking distance of the Rebel pickets, the lines here were so close—but as long as these men stayed awake and the works behind them were adequately manned the weakness of Fort Stedman seemed nothing to worry about.1

  This was sensible enough, as good sense goes in wartime. But the old balances were falling, and suddenly now the war was going to go with a rush and a roar toward the final smashup, all of the tensions built up in nine months of strained equilibrium letting go in one comprehensive explosion. Fort Stedman had been built across the path of Fate, and its imperfect walls enclosed the spot from which a man who looked sharply might see the beginning of the end.

  It was four in the morning of March 25, 1865, black and still as polar midnight, with never a sound from the picket lines. Half a mile north of Stedman was another Union strong point, Fort McGilvery, and a sergeant in this fort peered off to the south, listened intently, and then went to rouse his commanding officer: “Captain, there is some disturbance on our left in the direction of Fort Stedman, but I can’t make out what it is.” The captain went to have a look, and the men could see a few pin-pricks of flame, and then they could hear scattered musket fire. Then they saw one of Stedman’s cannon fired—not in front, toward the Rebel army, but off toward the rear.2

  Several hundred yards south of Fort Stedman a Catholic chaplain had been saying predawn mass for sixty-odd communicants in Union Fort Haskell. He heard rifle firing, and the boom of cannon, and he got through the service as soon as he decently could, after which the worshipers took their weapons and ran to the parapets. And then there was a rising swell of firing, and the sound of men shouting, and there was a flashing of heavy guns in the Confederate lines—and Rebel infantry was past Fort Stedman, running out to seize Union trenches and batteries to right and left, and an assaulting column was swinging around to attack Fort Haskell while other troops were forming for a drive straight through to the Union rear.8

  This part of the line belonged to the IX Corps. Burnside had gone home long since, the attack on the crater having been his final contribution, and the corps was in command of his former chief of staff, a pleasant-faced, competent general named John G. Parke. Parke was asleep at corps headquarters, well to the rear, when the fighting began. When he was roused and learned that he had a fight on his hands he also was told that Meade was temporarily absent and that, by seniority, he himself was in command of the Army of the Potomac. He notified the other commands that the Rebels were attacking, and got troops moving toward the danger area. Also, he brought up his own third division which had been in reserve and sent it in to mend the break.

  This division was made up of six new Pennsylvania regiments, which had enlisted just before Christmas and were still under training. They seem to have contained good men—not all of the recruits were worthless bounty jumpers and substitutes—and they were commanded by a first-rate soldier, General John Hartranft, who as a colonel had led the successful attack on Burnside’s bridge at Antietam Creek in one of the battles of the long ago. Hartranft took his men forward, and Federal artillery began to open a heavy bombardment as soon as dawn brought enough light to make targets visible.

  The 200th Pennsylvania charged in against the Confederate advance, wrecking itself but blunting the spearhead of the Southern charge and forcing it to a halt. The garrison of Fort Haskell beat off the column that was attacking there, and in Fort McGilvery men hoisted cannon over the embankments by hand so that they could fire on the high ground behind Stedman. Hartranft got a solid battle line strung out across the open country to the rear—and before long it was clear that the crisis was over. The Confederates had punched a clean hole in the Union line but they could not widen the hole enough to mount a new attack that would break the secondary defenses, and by eight o’clock Lee sounded the recall.4

  Many of the Confederates never returned to their own lines. Yankee artillery was laying a heavy fire on the ground they had charged across and to retreat was as dangerous as to advance, and when Parke finally sent the Pennsylvanians smashing forward to recover Fort Stedman and the lost trenches and batteries hundreds of Confederates surrendered. In the end the attack cost Lee’s army 4,000 men—twice the total of Union casualties—and the lines were as they had been before.

  Meade got back from City Point just as the fighting died down, and he reasoned that Lee must have weakened his forces elsewhere to make this attack. He ordered the II Corps and the VI Corps, accordingly, to attack the entrenched Rebel picket lines in their front. They did so, seizing the lines, taking hundreds of prisoners, and gaining excellent positions from which to assault the main Southern defenses if that should ever seem advisable.5

  The grimy Federals who cleared the recaptured trenches, sent wounded men and prisoners to the rear, and put the burial squads to work had had a bigger day than they could realize. They had beaten off the last great offensive thrust of the Army of Northern Virginia.

  That army had struck at its Yankee antagonists many times—at Gaines’s Mill and at Bull Run, at Chancellorsville and at Gettysburg, and on many other fields, and always it struck with terrible power, tough soldiers running forward under the shrill yip-yip of the Rebel yell, red battle flags sparkling above flashing muskets, cold fury of battle lighting the eyes of the gray warrior who directed the blows. It would never happen again. It was a new war now, and the end was coming.

  In the afternoon there were visitors on the battlefield—Abraham Lincoln and U. S. Grant, coming up by rattletrap military train from City Point, Meade and his staff officers going to meet them. Lincoln walked over the field, saw wounded men not yet removed to hospital, and dead men for whom graves were not yet ready. Grant had seen this many times and on many dreadful fields and Lincoln had never seen it at all except for a little at Fort Stevens; and these two men who were so very different were much alike in that neither one was ever able to forget the human cost of glorious victories, or his own responsibility for that cost. An army surgeon told how Lincoln once visited a hospital in Washington and afterward stopped to chat with the doctors. One of these was telling about a difficult operation just performed, in which a wounded soldier’s arm had been removed at the shoulder joint, and he went into much technical detail, the other doctors listening intently. At last, as he finished, and the others were asking this and that about the operation, Lincoln burst out with the one question that interested him, the one question which no doctor had thought to ask: “But how about the soldier?”6 Neither Lincoln nor Grant, who remorselessly held the country up to month after month of wholesale killing, ever got far away from that question.

  Back to City Point went Lincoln and Grant, to talk by headquarters campfires, their shadows falling longer and darker over the dwindling borders of a fading Confederacy. Presently there ca
me to join them another man who also cast a long and portentous shadow, a lean and wiry man with unruly red hair and a short stubble of a close-cropped beard, dancing lights in the alert eyes that peered out of a hard face—William Tecumseh Sherman, who had made his name terrible to the South, here now for a last conference before returning to the tough, devil-may-care army which he had left in the pine hills of North Carolina.

  In a sense, Sherman was responsible for the attack on Fort Stedman. What remained of the Southern Confederacy was the ground that lay between his army and Grant’s, and its doom was absolutely certain if he continued his relentless advance until the two armies made contact. If Lee could break away, get south fast, pick up the inadequate army with which Joe Johnston was opposing Sherman, beat Sherman by a quick, hard blow, and then turn to deal with Grant—if all of that could be done, then the Confederacy might survive. The blow at Fort Stedman had been an attempt to knock the Army of the Potomac back on its heels and cripple it just long enough to give Lee the start he would need on a move to the south.

  The odds against the success of any such program were fantastically long, and both Lee and Grant knew it. But they also knew one other fact—that the people of the North were weary of the war with a deep, numb, instinctive weariness, so that one more major disappointment might be too much for them. Whether or not he could beat Sherman, Lee might at least prolong the war for six months if he could get away from Grant, and if he could do that there was a fair chance that the North would give up the struggle.

  So Grant figured it, at any rate.7 Lee may have reasoned in the same way, or he may have followed nothing more subtle than the born fighter’s refusal to quit as long as he can stay on his feet and lift his fists waist high. In any case he was going to play out the string, and if the Northern generals did not watch him very carefully the triumph which was so near might drift off into nothingness like battle smoke blown down the wind. So Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman were taking counsel, in the armies’ nerve center at City Point.