A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  Yet they had not met just to discuss means of insuring victory. They had held the war firmly in their hands for nearly a year now; a few more weeks of vigilance and driving energy and it would all be over. They were thinking not so much about the ending of the war as about the new beginning that must lie beyond that. They were almost incredibly different, these three—Sherman quick, nervous, and volatile, Grant stolid and unemotional and relentless, Lincoln ranging far beyond them with brooding insights, his profound melancholy touched by mystic inexplicable flashes of light—but each held the faith that the whole country, North and South together, must ultimately find in reunion and freedom the values that would justify four terrible years of war.

  The discovery of those values would by no means be automatic. Much hatred and bitterness existed, and there could easily develop a program of revenge and reprisal that would make real reunion forever impossible. There was talk of hangings and of proscription lists and of conquered provinces. There were powerful leaders in the North who meant to see these threats carried out in all their literal grimness, and it was not in the least certain that they could be kept from having their way. So the principal order of business for the President and the two generals was not so much to checkmate the Confederacy as to checkmate the men who would try to make peace with malice and rancor and a length of noosed rope.

  When the Southern armies surrendered the two generals would be the ones to say what the terms of surrender must be, and they would take their cue from Lincoln. If the terms expressed simple human decency and friendship, it might be that a peace of reconciliation could get just enough of a lead so that the haters could never quite catch up with it. On all of this Lincoln and Grant and Sherman agreed.

  It was a curious business, in a way. The Confederacy had no more effective foes than these men. Lincoln had led the North into war, had held it firmly to its task, and had refused to hear any talk of peace that was not based on the extinction of the Confederate Government. Grant seemed to be the very incarnation of the remorseless killer, and Sherman was destruction’s own self, his trail across the South a band of ruin sixty miles wide. Yet it was these three who were most determined that vindictiveness and hatred must not control the future. They would fight without mercy as long as there must be fighting, but when the fighting stopped they would try to turn old enemies into friends.

  They spoke for the soldiers. The Northern and Southern armies had less bitterness now than they had had when the war began. On every picket line the cry “Down Yank!” and “Down Reb!” always preceded an outburst of firing. A veteran in the V Corps spoke for the rank and file when he said that the opposing troops in front of Fort Hell “decided that we would respect one another, as the lines at this point were very close and to keep up constant firing would make it very uncomfortable for one or the other.”8 These were the men who climbed on the ramparts to give three cheers for peace, and then gave three cheers for each other, and then returned to their fighting, and they did not need to be told that it would be well to make peace mean comradeship. All they needed was to see somebody try it.

  So Lincoln and Grant and Sherman had their talk and agreed that it must be tried, and at one point there was a faint, ironic echo from the days of McClellan, forever critical of Washington. This came when Lincoln abruptly asked Sherman:

  “Sherman, do you know why I took a shine to Grant and you?”

  Sherman confessed that he did not know, and he added that he had received from the President kindness beyond his due.

  “Well,” said Lincoln, “you never found fault with me.” 9

  Back to North Carolina and his restless, destructive army went Sherman, and as he went out Sheridan’s cavalry came in, Phil Sheridan at its head, and the Army of the Potomac was ready to begin its last campaign.

  Sheridan and his cavalry had wintered near Winchester, and as February ended they moved up the Valley to Staunton, two divisions of veteran mounted troops, 9,400 officers and men. The weather was vile, rain on the mountains and slush on the roads, every little stream over its banks, mud on everything, the burnt-out region looking more Godforsaken than ever. At Staunton, Sheridan learned that Early and a pitiful remnant of an army were entrenched on a knoll near Waynesboro, by the western entrance to Rockfish Gap, and he rode over there to get them. His men came into Waynesboro through a two-day rain, men and horses all dripping and plastered with mud, and Sheridan sent Custer’s division up to obliterate the last Confederate force in the Shenandoah Valley.

  Custer dismounted most of his men and attacked Early’s flanks with carbines sputtering, and then he took the 8th New York and 1st Connecticut and drove them straight in on the middle of the line, charging in a galloping column of fours, bugles sounding in the raw March air. Straight over the breastworks went the mounted squadrons, and the flankers broke in the ends of Early’s line, and all resistance collapsed, while the mounted men rode hard through the town of Waynesboro, sabering fugitives on the streets. Early and some of his officers and the merest handful of men hid out in friendly houses and escaped. When the fighting ended Sheridan counted 1,600 prisoners, 11 guns, 200 loaded wagons, and nearly a score of battle flags.10

  Prisoners, guns, and wagons he sent back down the Valley, with a mounted brigade for escort. The battle flags he took with him, and as he rode into the Petersburg lines his band of scouts came cantering at his heels proudly bearing these trophies11—and if the North wanted a soldier who knew how to wear a conqueror’s pride, perhaps Sheridan was the man for it. The Valley was dead, and Lee’s army was half immobilized because the forage for cavalry and artillery horses that used to come from there was no longer available. Grant pulled the cavalry around to the extreme left of the long Union line and made ready to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia.

  As always, that army was dangerous. Month after month it had been perfecting its defenses—raising parapets, digging deep ditches, mounting new guns and mortars, building double and triple lines of abatis, tying everything together with a crisscross of support and approach trenches—and when these lines were properly manned it was quite impossible to carry them by assault. But Lee had come to the end of his resources, and his lines were stretched to the very limit. His right flank rested along the marshy banks of a little stream called Hatcher’s Run, eight or nine miles southwest of Petersburg in an air line, substantially farther by road. Grant’s plan now was to send a strong force prowling around that flank. The chance was good that this would either induce Lee to pull his army out in the open for a finish fight—which Grant had vainly been trying to bring about for ten months—or compel him to stretch his thin line until it snapped.

  There remained to the Confederates in Petersburg one vital railway line—the Southside Railroad, which ran west from Petersburg to Lynchburg, crossing the Richmond and Danville line at the junction town of Burkeville, fifty miles west of Petersburg. The Petersburg end of this line ran only a few miles in rear of Lee’s outposts at Hatcher’s Run, and a blow past the flank which broke the Southside Railroad would break Lee’s principal supply line and force him to retreat.

  Obviously, therefore, Grant’s best move was to extend his left flank once more—a repetition of the move that had been made so many times since the army crossed the Rapidan. In preparation, Grant was shifting men about even before Sherman got to City Point.

  In the Bermuda Hundred lines and directly before Richmond was the Army of the James, now under General Ord. This army was composed of two infantry corps, one containing three divisions of white troops and the other, three divisions of colored troops. Unnoticed by the Confederates Ord quietly took two white divisions and one colored division out of the trenches one evening and led them down to Petersburg on a grueling thirty-six-mile hike.

  To occupy the lines facing Petersburg, Grant detailed Ord’s three divisions plus the IX Corps and the VI Corps. For a movable force to menace Lee’s flank he thus had two full army corps—Humphreys and the II Corps and Warren and the V Corps. He also ha
d three superb divisions of cavalry under Sheridan, and from the moment he began to plan this move he seems to have concluded that the operation as a whole would be pretty largely under Sheridan’s command.

  He would start by sending Sheridan and the cavalry to the little hamlet of Dinwiddie Court House, half a dozen miles south and slightly west of the Hatcher’s Run area. While Sheridan made this move Humphreys and Warren were to take their men up through the flat, wooded country closer to Hatcher’s Run. They were not supposed to attack Confederate trenches there, but their presence might induce Lee to make a new extension of his line. At the very least it would cover Sheridan—who, from Dinwiddie Court House, could march northwest ten or twelve miles and strike the Southside Railroad. After that Sheridan might go on and break the Richmond and Danville road as well, and in the end he might even go down cross country and join Sherman. Plans were fluid. The chief idea was to shake things loose and end the long deadlock.12

  It was March 29, at last, three o’clock of a clammy damp morning, with low clouds blotting out the stars, and behind the Union lines the grim columns began to move. Many times since they reached Petersburg different parts of the army had marched toward the left, and each time the result had been, if not an actual rebuff, nothing more exciting than a mere extension of the Union lines. But now men seemed to feel that the last act was beginning. Lincoln had been at City Point (was still there, as a matter of fact, to wait for news) and Sherman had been there, and Sheridan had come down from the Valley, and spring was in the air—and, altogether, perhaps this was it. A general in the V Corps wrote that men felt it so, and he said that as they took to the road it was almost as if, overhead, they saw “a great light filling the sky.”13

  Yet there were skeptics. A private in the 11th Pennsylvania wrote that “there was nothing borne on the wings of the wind” to hint that this move was going to be any different than all the earlier ones had been. “Four years of war,” he said, “while it made the men brave and valorous, had entirely cured them of imagining that each campaign would be the last.” Many times in the past high hopes had been disappointed. This morning as they moved out of winter quarters a soldier raised the butt of his musket to knock down the stick-and-clay chimney of one of the shacks. A contraband serving as company cook begged him not to destroy it: “We’ll be back ag’in in a week, and I’ll want to use it.”14

  The infantry reached their designated position, and had a sharp little fight with Confederate infantry which came down to see what the Yankees were up to. Farther west and south, Sheridan pushed Rebel skirmishers out of the way and put his men in bivouac near Dinwiddie, making his headquarters in a big frame tavern opposite the courthouse building. As evening came down it brought rain, the rain continued all night long, and there was no letup with the dawn. All of the country around Hatcher’s Run and Dinwiddie Court House was low, covered with second-growth timber and seamed by many little brooks and creeks, and by noon of March 30 the whole area was a swamp. Sheridan put Custer’s entire division to work corduroying the roads in rear of his position, the roads having become all but totally impassable for wagons and guns. A trooper remembered spending an atrocious night “with rations all soaked and blankets all wet, and spongy beds under leaking shelters.”15

  The rain refused to stop. Grant moved headquarters from City Point out to a waterlogged field near Gravelly Run, toward the left end of the line, and he remembered that the ground was so soggy that a horse or mule, standing quite motionless, would suddenly begin to sink out of sight and would have to be pulled out by a squad of soldiers. Men asked each other when the gunboats were going to come up and suggested that what the army needed now was Noah rather than Grant. The top echelons in the Army of the Potomac, remembering an occasion near Fredericksburg when the army had got hopelessly stuck in the mud, urged Grant to call everything off, get everybody back to camp, and start again a week or two later when the ground was drier. Grant himself seems to have wavered, for a time. First he told Sheridan to forget about the railroads and smash straight for Lee’s flank and rear; then he sent another message suggesting that all forward movement be suspended until the weather improved.16

  When he got this last letter Sheridan rode over to Grant’s headquarters. The rain was still coming down and the mud was so deep that even Sheridan’s horse could manage nothing better than a walk, sinking to his knees at every step, but Sheridan was all for action. To Grant’s staff he expounded on the iniquity of delay—now was the time to move, Rebel cavalry could be knocked out of the way any time the commanding general pleased, and if Lee sent infantry out he was writing his own doom. Sheridan tramped back and forth in the mud and rain, striking his hands together. An officer asked how he would get forage for his 13,000 horses if the roads remained impassable.

  “Forage?” echoed Sheridan. “I’ll get all the forage I want. I’ll haul it out if I have to set every man in the command to corduroying roads, and corduroy every mile of them from the railroad to Dinwiddie. I tell you I’m ready to strike out tomorrow and go to smashing things.”

  Staff suggested that Grant liked to hear that sort of talk, partly because it was so different from anything he ever got from top generals in the Army of the Potomac, and urged Sheridan to go speak his piece to the lieutenant general. Sheridan demurred: Grant hadn’t asked him to come over, he was just sounding off to relieve his mind. A staff officer, however, slipped into Grant’s tent and suggested that it would be good for him to talk to his cavalry commander, and in another moment Sheridan was repeating his little speech to Grant, strongly backed by impetuous Chief of Staff John Rawlins, with his pale cheeks and feverish burning eyes.

  Grant made up his mind: the move would go on, bad roads or no bad roads, and it would not stop until there had been a final showdown. Long afterward he confessed that he believed the country to be so desperately tired of the war that unless the move to the left was a complete victory it would be interpreted as a disastrous failure.17

  On March 31, therefore, with rain still falling and the country looking like the bottom of a millpond, the advance was resumed. Sheridan still had Custer’s division at work behind Dinwiddie, fixing the bottomless road so that forage and provisions could be brought in, and he was holding most of a second division at Dinwiddie; and he sent the rest of the men marching north, and at a lonely country crossroads known as Five Forks they ran into the Rebels in strength.

  Five Forks was nowhere at all, but it was important because it was where the road from Dinwiddie Court House to the Southside Railroad crossed the east-and-west road that led to Lee’s right flank and rear. Lee’s army could not stay in Petersburg if the Yankees held this crossroads, and so Lee had scraped his last reserves to make a fight for the place. Dug in behind temporary breastworks were five brigades of infantry under the legendary George Pickett. With the infantry was practically all of Lee’s cavalry.

  Up against this powerful force came one division of Yankee cavalry led by General Thomas C. Devin, a former New York militia colonel who had become enough of a soldier to suit the most exacting of Regulars. He had been a favorite of tough John Buford in the old Gettysburg days, and nowadays he was dubbed “Sheridan’s hard hitter”—which, considering the general reputation of Sheridan’s cavalry, was a fairly substantial compliment. This day he had his hands full. When his patrols reported Rebel infantry at Five Forks he dismounted his division and got ready to fight on foot. Pickett immediately obliged him, rolling forward a heavier battle line than Devin’s men could handle, and before long the blue cavalry was in full retreat.

  The Federals fought hard, withdrawing as slowly as they could manage and maintaining a steady fire, but they were heavily outnumbered and Confederate cavalry kept curling in around both flanks, and presently Devin had to warn Sheridan that he was badly overmatched and that they might have trouble holding Dinwiddie itself. He kept his fighting line dismounted because the men could put up a more stubborn resistance that way, and as they fought the area immediately behind
the firing line was a howling madhouse.

  All of the division’s horses were here, four thousand and odd of them, one trooper to every four horses. The country was densely wooded, with few roads and many rail fences, and the air was full of smoke and bullets and shouting men, and the conditions under which one mounted man could easily lead three riderless horses did not exist. The horses became panicky and fractious, and they kept running on the wrong side of trees, or colliding with each other, creating fearful tangles of kicking, plunging animals and snarled reins and cursing soldiers—and, said one of the men afterward, the whole business was enough to make anybody understand why an exceptionally profane man was always said to swear like a trooper.18

  While Devin’s men gave ground Sheridan got the rest of his men strung out in line in front of Dinwiddie Court House, and at dusk the Confederates came storming up to drive the whole lot of Yankee cavalry back where it belonged. When Devin’s men came in Sheridan put them into line with the rest, and he rolled forward all the guns he could lay his hands on. Then he rounded up all of the regimental bands and put them up on the firing line and ordered them to play the gayest tunes they knew—play them loud and keep on playing them, and never mind if a bullet goes through a trombone, or even a trombonist, now and then.

  The late afternoon sun broke through the clouds, and all of these bands were playing, and there was a clatter of musketry and a booming of cannon and a floating loom of battle smoke. Sheridan got his little battle flag with the two stars on it and rode out in front of his lines, going from one end to the other at a full gallop, waving his hat and telling every last soldier—by his presence, by his gestures, and by the hard look in his black eyes—that nobody was going to make them retreat another step.