A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  “By God, sir, tell General Warren he wasn’t in that fight!” he shouted. The chief of staff was dumfounded. Warren had been doing his best, no one in the Army of the Potomac ever spoke that way about a distinguished corps commander—but Sheridan was clearly implacable, his face black, his eyes flashing. The officer managed to say at last that he disliked to deliver such a message verbally—might he take it down in writing?

  “Take it down, sir!” barked Sheridan. “Tell him by God he was not at the front!”

  Warren’s man rode away, stunned. The next to come up was General Griffin, ranking division commander in the V Corps—Regular Army to his fingertips, rough and tough and gifted with a certain magnetism—a man, in fact, cut somewhat after the Sheridan pattern. Bluntly, Sheridan hailed him and told him that he was now in command of the V Corps. Then he sent a courier to find Warren and deliver a written message relieving him of his command and ordering him to report to General Grant at headquarters.12

  Pickett’s force was wholly wrecked, by now, with the front broken in and victorious Yankees charging in from the flank and rear to make ruin complete. Yet Sheridan still was not satisfied. The enemy must be annihilated, all escape must be cut off, that railroad line must be broken, no one must relax or pause for breath as long as there was anything still to be accomplished.… He was in a little clearing in the forest, directly behind what had been the main Confederate line, and through the clearing went the road that led from Five Forks to the Southside Railroad, the railroad Lee had to protect if his army was to live; and just then there came up to Sheridan some now unidentified officer of rank, to report triumphantly that his command was in the Rebel rear and had captured five guns.

  Sheridan gave him a savage greeting:

  “I don’t care a damn for their guns, or you either, sir! What I want is that Southside Railway!”

  The sun was just disappearing over the treetops, and the clearing was dim with a smoky twilight. Many soldiers were in and about the road through the clearing, their weapons in their hands, conscious of victory and half expecting to be told that they had done a great thing and were very fine fellows. Sheridan turned to face them, and he suddenly stood up in his stirrups, waving his hat, his face as black as his horse, and in a great voice he roared:

  “I want you men to understand we have a record to make before that sun goes down that will make Hell tremble!”

  He waved toward the north, toward the position of the railroad, and he cried: “I want you there!”

  He turned and rode to the north. Meeting Griffin and Ayres and Chamberlain, he called to them: “Get together all the men you can, and drive on while you can see your hand before you!”

  While the officers formed the men into ordered ranks and prepared to move on, a pale, slight man rode up to Sheridan and spoke to him quietly: General Warren, the written order clutched in his hand, asking Sheridan if he would not reconsider the order that wrecked a soldier’s career.

  “Reconsider, hell!” boomed Sheridan. “I don’t reconsider my decisions! Obey the order!” Silently, Warren rode off in the dusk, and Sheridan went on trying to organize a force to break through to the railroad.13

  Actually, no more could be done that night. No more needed to be done. To all practical purposes, Pickett’s force had been wiped out. Thousands of prisoners were on their way back to the provost marshal’s stockades, and there were so many captured muskets that Sheridan’s pioneers were using armloads of them to corduroy the roads. Some of the Rebel cavalry elements which had got away were swinging about to rejoin Lee’s army, but the infantry that had escaped was beaten and disorganized, drifting off to the north and west, effectively out of the war. Sheridan could have the railroad whenever he wanted to march his men over to it, and he might just as well do it tomorrow as tonight because the force which might have stopped him had been blown to bits. There was no need to put exhausted troops on the road before morning, and in the end even Sheridan came to see it. Cavalry and infantry went into bivouac where they were.

  Around General Griffin’s campfire the new commander of the V Corps talked things over with division and brigade commanders. These men were deeply attached to Warren. They felt that his troubles today had mostly been caused by General Crawford, and it seemed very hard that Warren should be broken for mistakes and delays which had not, after all, affected the outcome of the battle. This was the first time in the history of the Army of the Potomac that a ranking commander had been summarily fired because his men had been put into action tardily and inexpertly. Sheridan had been cruel and unjust—and if that cruel and unjust insistence on driving, aggressive promptness had been the rule in this army from the beginning, the war probably would have been won two years earlier.…

  As the generals talked, a stocky figure stepped into the light of the campfire—Sheridan himself.

  He was in a different mood, now, the battle fury quite gone, and he spoke very gently: If he had been harsh and demanding with any of them that day he was sorry, and he hoped they would forgive him, for he had not meant to hurt anyone. But—“you know how it is; we had to carry this place, and I was fretted all day until it was done.” So there was this apology for hot words spoken in the heat of action, and there was the general’s thanks for hard work well done; and then Sheridan went away, and the generals gaped into the dark after him. General Chamberlain, who was one of the circle, reflected that “as a rule, our corps and army commanders were men of brains rather than magnetism”; but Sheridan, now—well, “we could see how this voice and vision, this swing and color, this vivid impression on the senses, carried the pulse and will of men.”14

  Several miles to the east, one of Grant’s staff officers who had been with Sheridan this day finished a tiring ride over crowded, watery roads, and pulled up his horse by the open fire at Grant’s headquarters. His fellow officers there crowded around him before he had dismounted, eager for news, and he shouted it to them in breathless sentences—complete victory, Rebels utterly routed, the way to Lee’s railroad and Lee’s rear wide open, roads all clogged with prisoners—and they shouted, tossed hats and caps in the air, slapped one another on the back, capering in wild enthusiasm; all but Grant himself, who stood in their midst impassive, cigar in his teeth, and as soon as he could make himself heard in the din asked the staff officer the question that seemed to be his private gauge for measuring a victory: How many prisoners? The officer said that the best estimate was about five thousand, and for a moment Grant looked pleased, almost enthusiastic. Then he went over to the telegraphers’ tent, coming out a moment later to remark: “I have ordered an immediate assault all along the lines.”15

  Great things might have been done on the flank, but the Army of Northern Virginia still lay directly in front, and from the moment he crossed the Rapidan River Grant’s basic idea had always been, not to make that army retreat, but to break it. Now the time had come when it could be broken. Yet “immediate” did not actually mean “right away.” Orders had to go from Grant through Meade and Ord to corps and division commanders. Artillerists had to frame and distribute orders to batteries and gun pits. Orders for the infantry had to filter down from army to corps to division to brigade and regiment; and it was likely to be dawn, or close to it, before the assault could really be made.

  On the right, where the lines were close together and where the Confederate defenses were most tightly knit, Parke would send his IX Corps straight in from their trenches. Farther around, west of Fort Hell, the big push would be made by the VI Corps, with Ord holding his men ready to follow the moment there was a sign of success. In this part of the front the lines were a mile or more apart, and in the counterblow after Fort Stedman the Federals had taken the Confederate picket lines; so in here there was a little room to maneuver, and around midnight the men of the VI Corps filed out of their trenches to go into position.

  General Wright had gone out ahead of them to pick the target. There was comparatively high ground here, and along part of the front ther
e was no water in front of the Confederate works. There were five lines of abatis to be crossed, very stout and formidable, but the pickets had reported a singular fact: there was a pathway through these entanglements, used by enemy details which came out to get firewood or go on picket duty, and at night the Rebels kept a bonfire alight toward the rear in line with this pathway. If the Federals who formed on the higher ground would simply guide their advance on this bonfire, then, they would get through the abatis and up to the trenches.

  Wright formed his corps wedge-shaped, with the third brigade of the second division as the thin end of the wedge—1,600 men in six veteran regiments, the rest of the corps in echelon to right and left. With the advance there would be a detail of gunners with rammers and primers, ready to turn captured guns on the defenders. It was understood that the advance would begin as soon as a signal gun was fired from Federal Fort Fisher, in the rear.

  The night was bewilderingly dark, and there was a mist that made the gloom even thicker. The VI Corps these days was known as the army’s high-morale outfit—the men had shared in the great Shenandoah Valley victories, and they were cocky about it—but they were glum and silent as they left their trenches and took their places. The high command might know that when Lee detached troops to operate under Pickett at Five Forks he left his main line so badly undermanned that it could at last be broken, but the infantry knew nothing of this. All that the veterans understood was that these terrible fortifications which they had learned to consider unconquerable were at last to be attacked, and they took it for granted that the hour of doom had arrived.16

  When company commanders read off the orders, soldiers here and there were heard to mutter: “Well, good-by, boys—this means death.” As always, the men got ready for the fight in their different ways. Some scribbled hasty letters home, others threw away decks of playing cards, still others examined cartridge boxes and canteens to make sure that they were filled, a few put pipe and tobacco within easy reach. And tonight a good many did what they never did except when they figured they were about to be slaughtered. They wrote their names and addresses on slips of paper and pinned these to their uniforms, so that their bodies could be identified after the battle.17

  Huddled close to the ground in the creepy no man’s land between the armies, utter darkness and graveyard silence all around, the men waited nervously for the signal gun that would send them on their way. But once again there had been a mix-up in the arrangemerits. What finally came, jarring and stunning them and seeming to pin them down by sheer weight of violence, was not the report of one cannon but the crash of a tremendous bombardment, with every gun and mortar in the Federal lines opening fire.

  There were miles upon miles of gun positions, all the way from the Appomattox to the works near Hatcher’s Run, and from every weapon in this crescent there came the most intense and sustained volume of fire the gun crews could manage. Never before, not even at Gettysburg, had the army fired so much artillery so fast and so long. The whole sky pulsed and shuddered with great sheets of light. Jagged flames lit the horizon as the Confederate guns replied. In the blackness overhead the battle smoke piled up in monstrous thunder-heads, fitfully visible in the flash of exploding shell.

  A gunner wrote proudly of “a constant stream of living fire” pouring from the flaming gun pits, and a front-line infantryman said that the very ground shook and trembled with the concussion. Miles away to the west, men in the V Corps said the sky was lighted up as if by aurora borealis. How long it all lasted, nobody ever knew. After a time men realized that the Confederate batteries had stopped firing, and then the crash of the Union guns seemed definitely lighter—and now, as the bombardment slowly tapered off, staff officers from corps headquarters were going to brigade and regimental commanders asking why the men were not moving: the signal gun had been fired, somewhere in the midst of all of this uproar, and the attack should have been made ten minutes ago.18

  Officers prodded men to their feet, and the smoky sky began to turn gray, although it was still too dark to see anything a hundred yards away, and presently the whole great wedge of infantry was moving. And then the guns stopped altogether, and there was silence on the battlefield, and in this silence an officer realized that there was a mysterious, pervasive noise that seemed to be the sound of a deep, distant rustling, “like a strong breeze blowing through the swaying boughs and dense foliage of some great forest.” He realized at last that this was the noise made by 14,000 soldiers tramping forward over soft damp ground.19

  Rebel pickets came to life and began to shoot, and then rolling volleys of musketry lit the main line of Confederate works, and the guns opened heavily. The VI Corps raised a cheer and began to run forward. The leading brigade lost sight of the path through the abatis, but the whole corps was running now, details with axes were smashing at the entanglements, sheer weight of numbers was breaking a dozen openings—and the tide flowed on, past the abatis and into the ditch, with the black loom of the fortifications rising just ahead.

  Far to the rear, on the parapet of a Union fort, an army surgeon had been watching, and in the predawn gloom he could see a twinkling, flashing line of fire half a mile wide—the rim of the Confederate works, lit by musketry. As he watched he saw a black gap in the center of this sparkling line, and then there was another gap a little to one side, and then a third one, and as he watched these gaps widened and ran together, and suddenly the whole chain of lights was out and he knew that the line had been captured.

  It was not done easily, for if the defenders were few they died hard, and there was hand-to-hand fighting along the works. Storming parties got over in squads, stabbing and clubbing muskets. There was no cheering—everyone was too much out of breath for that—but the men coming up in the support brigades realized that the trenches had been taken when they saw Confederate cannon reversed, firing toward the Confederate rear. In some cases Union infantry refused to wait for the parties of artillerists who had been sent over to work the captured guns, and tried to operate them themselves. The 11th Vermont claimed to have fired twelve rounds from one battery, overcoming the want of primers simply by discharging muskets into the vents of the loaded pieces.20

  Dawn came at last, and the whole line of works was black with Union soldiers. Beyond the line lay the Confederate camps, with eager parties of VI Corps hot-shots pushing on through them, every man for himself—some of them running on to reach the unguarded rear areas, some looking through tents and huts for loot, some just going, kept moving by the excitement of victory. Far to the right, the IX Corps had stormed the whole first line of deadly trenches but met stubborn resistance on the second line, and the sound of artillery and musketry rolled across the pine flats. On the left, the entire line of defense had dissolved. Ord’s troops, and the II Corps, were breaking through on the west, cutting the defenders’ organizations into fragments and driving these broken units before them. By twos and threes and by disorganized squads, the Federals broke clear through past the railroad to the edge of the Appomattox. In a chance encounter by a bit of wood, some of these killed the famous General A. P. Hill.

  In the Confederate camps the VI Corps made merry. One man remembered seeing a burly buck private outfitting himself in the tinseled gray dress-uniform coat which some Confederate officer would never need again, and another soldier was wrapping a Confederate flag about his shoulders as if it were a toga. The whole corps was up, now, overflowing the trenches, scampering around among bombproofs and huts and tents, staring out over ground which no armed Yankee had previously seen. Up into their midst came a group of mounted men, Grant and Meade and Wright trotting over to reorganize the storming columns and make the break-through complete.21

  “Then and there,” wrote a Connecticut soldier exultantly, “then and there the long-tried and ever faithful soldiers of the Republic saw daylight!” And the whole corps looked up and down the Petersburg lines—broken forever, now—and took in what had been done, and caught its breath, and sent up a wild shout which
, the Connecticut man said, it was worth dying just to listen to.22

  4. The Enormous Silence

  The end of the war was like the beginning, with the army marching down the open road under the spring sky, seeing a far light on the horizon. Many lights had died in the windy dark but far down the road there was always a gleam, and it was as if a legend had been created to express some obscure truth that could not otherwise be stated. Everything had changed, the war and the men and the land they fought for, but the road ahead had not changed. It went on through the trees and past the little towns and over the hills, and there was no getting to the end of it. The goal was a going-toward rather than an arriving, and from the top of the next rise there was always a new vista. The march toward it led through wonder and terror and deep shadows, and the sunlight touched the flags at the head of the column.

  For a long time the Army of the Potomac had wanted to enter Richmond, and it almost seemed as if that was the object of everything that it did, but when Richmond fell at last the army did not get within twenty-five miles of it—not until long afterward, when everything was over and the men were going home to be civilians again. Most of the army did not even get into Petersburg, which had been within sight but out of reach for so long. Instead the troops moved off on roads that led to the west, pounding along in hot pursuit of Lee’s army—no victory was final as long as that ragged army still lived and moved.

  Only the IX Corps entered Petersburg, and it did so chiefly because the town lay right across its path. It moved in on the morning of April 3 a few hours after the last Confederate soldiers had moved out. The corps came in proudly, flags uncased and bands playing, but the town was all scarred by months of shellfire, the cheers and the music echoed through deserted streets, and there seems to have been a desolate, empty quality to it all that made the jubilation sound forced and hollow. Officers and newspapermen who had breakfast in Petersburg hotels found the fare poor, as was natural in a starved beleaguered city, and noticed that the hotel proprietors would not accept Confederate money.