by Bruce Catton
Two Confederate armies Grant had captured entire, in this war, and now the third and greatest of them was stricken, limping pathetically in its effort to get away from him. The increasing signs that the army was ready for destruction simply made Grant drive his own troops all the harder. Sheridan’s cavalry ranged west, untiring, and Griffin’s and Ord’s troops followed as if the mounted men were pulling them on. North of the Appomattox, the II Corps continued to press the Confederate rear. Since this corps was miles away from the rest of the Union army, there was danger that Lee might turn suddenly and destroy it, and so Grant ordered the VI Corps to cross the river and march with Humphreys’s men.
It was April 7 now, and Grant was in the little town of Farmville by the Appomattox. Evening had come, and the troops in Farmville had lighted bonfires all along the main street, and Grant was sitting on the veranda of the homely country hotel there when the head of the VI Corps came marching through on its way to the north side of the river. As they marched between the fires the men saw the unassuming little general on the porch, and they suddenly realized that this man was at last leading them to the victory they had dreamed of so long. They broke ranks briefly, seized brands from the bonfires and made torches, and then paraded past Grant, waving the burning torches and yelling hysterically. Brigade bands materialized, and the VI Corps marched by to music. Men who had no torches waved their caps, and the corps went on out of the firelight into the darkness, crossing the Appomattox. After they had passed, Grant went inside the hotel and wrote a formal note to be delivered to Robert E. Lee under a flag of truce, inviting Lee to surrender.14
Of this note the soldiers knew nothing. They knew only that in all of its existence the Army of the Potomac had never been driven as hard as it was being driven now. Wagon trains were left far behind, whole brigades and divisions marched without food, and every rod of the way the army dribbled stragglers. These stragglers found the foraging in this part of Virginia very good, since marching armies had not previously been here, but the land’s plenty was of little help to the men who remained in the ranks. The army was moving too fast to bother with foraging details.
A soldier in the 20th Maine said that “we never endured such marching before,” and another man in the V Corps remembered making a forty-two-mile march that went clear through from one sunrise to another. Whenever the column stopped for a five-minute rest, he said, men would drop in their tracks and go instantly to sleep, and when the column moved on many of the men who stumbled to their feet, shouldered their muskets, and went lurching down the road would still be sound asleep. The very utmost men could do was demanded of them now, and the only reality was the road itself.15
It was a bad road to march on, like all the roads of war—deeply rutted, fouled by the march of the cavalry up ahead, by turns heavy with mud or deep with the dust that would make marching a gray choking agony. Yet this was the road the army had been marching toward from the very beginning, and many thousands of men had died in order that this road might at last be marched on; for this was the road to the end of the war, and on over the horizon to the unimaginable beginnings and endings that would lie beyond that. Also, and more intimately, it was the beginning of the long road home.
It was April 8, by now, and tomorrow would be Palm Sunday, and the land was rich and warm with spring. Below the Appomattox, that day, the road wound interminably through deep woods, so that dusk came down early. Ord’s divisions were on the road, and all of the V Corps, together with much artillery, and the artillery was supposed to have the road while the infantry filed along on each side. But the road was very narrow, so that there was much crowding and confusion, and the men were very tired and quarrelsome, and some time after dark a tremendous fight broke out between infantry and artillery. Infantry complained that the gunners were driving their six-horse teams recklessly, forcing men off the road and causing injuries. Gunners declared that infantrymen were hitting artillery horses over the head with musket butts. Everybody was hungry, irritable, and half out of his mind with fatigue, and the yelling and cursing and hitting and general uproar went up from the dark lane for an hour or more.
When it was finally settled it was after midnight, and the troops were led off the road to make a supperless bivouac. They got very little rest—one regiment at the tail of the column complained that it was roused just fifteen minutes after it turned in—because couriers came riding in from Phil Sheridan, who was a few miles farther on, near a little place called Appomattox Court House. He had his cavalry squarely in front of the Rebel army, and he was writing that if the infantry could be there first thing in the morning they could probably wind the whole business up.16
Sheridan’s scouts had come to him earlier in the day with word that several freight trains with food had pulled in at Appomattox Station, a mile or so from the courthouse town, and that Lee’s wagons would presently be alongside, loading up. Sheridan sent Custer off at a gallop, and Custer’s division took the Confederates by surprise, seizing the trains just as they were ready to unload. There were former railroad men among the Yankee troopers, and these flung themselves from the saddle and raced for the locomotives, climbing into the cabs with much clumping of heavy boots and clanking of sabers. They threw out the Southern train crews, blew whistles and rang bells, and bumped the trains back and forth in aimless celebration until someone finally had them run the cars up the track a few miles so that they would be out of reach of any Confederate counter-thrust.
Custer took the main body of his troops on past the station, seized a big wagon park and artillery train, and chased fugitives eastward along a road that led uphill through deep woods. He came out into the open just at dark, and saw a rude breastwork cutting across the highway with gray-clad infantry behind it. Beyond, many campfires put a soft red glow on the sky. They were the campfires of Lee’s army—and Custer’s cavalry was due west of them.17
Sheridan came up soon after, with the rest of the cavalry. He sent hurry-up messages for the infantry, put half of his men in line, dismounted, facing the Rebel breastworks, and ordered the rest into bivouac near the railroad a mile to the south.
The road his cavalry was on was the main road to Lynchburg, which lay twenty miles to the west. Of all the world’s roads, this was the only one that mattered now to the Army of Northern Virginia. If, when morning came, that army could knock the Yankees out of the way and march west on this road it might still hope to live for a while—a day or two, a fortnight, a few months. If it could not do that, it would cease to exist within twenty-four hours. Cavalry alone could not bar the way very long, but if the blue infantry came up in time then it would be taps and dipped flags and good-by forever for Lee’s army.
Federal infantry was on the road in the dark hours before dawn, with very little sleep and no breakfast at all. The men were told that if they hurried this was the day they could finish everything, and this inspired them. Yet they were no set of legendary heroes who never got tired or hungry or thought about personal discomfort. They were very human, given to griping when their stomachs were empty, and what really pulled them along this morning seems to have been the promise that at Appomattox Station rations would be issued. Most of the men who made the march that morning, one veteran admitted, did so because they figured it was the quickest way to get breakfast. Even so the straggling was abnormally heavy, and there were regiments in the column which had no more than seventy-five men with the colors.18
It was Palm Sunday, with a blue cloudless sky, and the warm air had the smell of spring. The men came tramping up to the fields by the railroad station with the early morning sun over their right shoulders, and they filed off to right and left, stacked arms, and began collecting wood for the fires with which they would cook the anticipated rations. The divisions from the Army of the James were in front, Ord and John Gibbon in the lead, and the V Corps was coming up close behind. Gibbon and Ord rode to a little house near the railroad where Sheridan had his headquarters, and Sheridan came out to greet them and e
xplain the situation.
The Lynchburg Road lay about a mile north of cavalry headquarters. It ran along a low ridge, partly concealed by timber, with a boggy little brook running along a shallow valley on the near side, and a couple of miles to the east it dipped down to a little hollow and ran through the village of Appomattox Court House. In and around and beyond this village, with its advance guard holding the breastworks half a mile west of it, was what remained of the Army of Northern Virginia. Off to the east, out of sight beyond hills and forests but not more than six or eight miles away, was Meade with the II Corps and the VI Corps, coming west on the Lynchburg Road to pound the Confederate rear. In effect, the Federals occupied three sides of a square—cavalry on the west, infantry on the south, Meade and the rest of the army on the east. The Rebel army was inside the square, and although the north side was open that did not matter because the Confederates could find neither food nor escape in that direction. Their only possible move was to fight their way west along the Lynchburg Road.
So Sheridan explained it, warning the generals that he expected the Rebels to attack at any moment and that they had better get ready to bring their troops up in support.19
While he was talking the sound of musket fire came down from the ridge. It was sporadic, at first, as the skirmishers pecked away at each other, but it soon grew much heavier and there was the heavy booming of field artillery. The big push was on, and Sheridan sprang into the saddle, ordering the rest of his cavalry up into line and telling the officers to bring their infantry up as fast as they could. Then he was off, and the generals galloped back to put their men in motion.
The hopeful little breakfast fires died unnoticed, nothing ever cooked on them, and the infantry took their muskets, got into column, and went hurrying north to get astride of the Lynchburg Road. The crossroad they were on led through heavy timber and the men could see nothing, but the noise of the firing grew louder and louder as they marched. Then, for the last time in their lives, beyond the trees they heard the high, spine-tingling wail of the Rebel yell, a last great shout of defiance flung against the morning sky by a doomed army marching into the final sunset.
The Federals got across the Lynchburg Road, swung into line of battle facing east, and marched toward the firing and the shouting. As they marched, dismounted cavalry came drifting back, and the troopers waved their caps and cheered when they saw the infantry, and called out: “Give it to ’em—we’ve got ’em in a tight place!” 20
In a clearing there was Sheridan, talking with Griffin and other officers of the V Corps; Sheridan, talking rapidly, pounding a palm with his fist; and the battle line marched on and came under the fire of Rebel artillery. One brigade went across somebody’s farm, just here, and as the firing grew heavier a shell blew the end out of the farmer’s chicken house, and the air was abruptly full of demoralized chickens, squawking indignantly, fluttering off in frantic disorganized flight. And here was the last battle of the war, and the men were marching up to the moment of apotheosis and glory—but they were men who had not eaten for twenty-four hours and more, and they knew Virginia poultry from of old, and what had begun as an attack on a Rebel battle line turned into a hilarious chase after fugitive chickens. The battle smoke rolled down over the crest, and shells were exploding and the farm buildings were ablaze, and Federal officers were waving swords and barking orders in scandalized indignation. But the soldiers whooped and laughed and scrambled after their prey, and as the main battle line swept on most of this brigade was either continuing to hunt chickens or was building little fires and preparing to cook the ones that had been caught.21
The Confederates had scattered the cavalry, and most of the troopers fled south, across the shallow valley that ran parallel with the Lynchburg Road. As the last of them left the field the way seemed to be open, and the Confederates who had driven them away raised a final shout of triumph—and then over the hill came the first lines of blue infantry, rifles tilted forward, and here was the end of everything: the Yankees had won the race and the way was closed forever and there was no going on any farther.
The blue lines grew longer and longer, and rank upon rank came into view, as if there was no end to them. A Federal officer remembered afterward that when he looked across at the Rebel lines it almost seemed as if there were more battle flags than soldiers. So small were the Southern regiments that the flags were all clustered together, and he got the strange feeling that the ground where the Army of Northern Virginia had been brought to bay had somehow blossomed out with a great row of poppies and roses.22
So the two armies faced each other at long range, and the firing slackened and almost ceased.
Many times in the past these armies had paused to look at each other across empty fields, taking a final size-up before getting into the grapple. Now they were taking their last look, the Stars and Bars were about to go down forever and leave nothing behind but the stars and the memories, and it might have been a time for deep solemn thoughts. But the men who looked across the battlefield at each other were very tired and very hungry, and they did not have much room in their heads for anything except the thought of that weariness and that hunger, and the simple hope that they might live through the next half hour. One Union soldier wrote that he and his comrades reflected bitterly that they would not be here, waiting for the shooting to begin, if they had not innocently believed that tale about getting breakfast at Appomattox Station; and, he said, “we were angry with ourselves to think that for the hope of drawing rations we had been foolish enough to keep up and, by doing so, get in such a scrape.” They did not mind the desultory artillery fire very much, he said, but “we dreaded the moment when the infantry should open on us.” 23
Off toward the south Sheridan had all of his cavalry in line again, mounted now with pennons and guidons fluttering. The Federal infantry was advancing from the west and Sheridan was where he could hit the flank of the Rebels who were drawn up to oppose that infantry, and he spurred over to get some foot soldiers to stiffen his own attack. General Griffin told Chamberlain to take his brigade and use it as Sheridan might direct. Men who saw Sheridan pointing out to Chamberlain the place where his brigade should attack remembered his final passionate injunction: “Now smash ’em, I tell you, smash ’em!”
Chamberlain got his men where Sheridan wanted them, and all of Ord’s and Griffin’s men were in line now, coming up on higher ground where they could see the whole field.
They could see the Confederate line drawing back from in front of them, crowned with its red battle flags, and all along the open country to the right they could see the whole cavalry corps of the Army of the Potomac trotting over to take position beyond Chamberlain’s brigade. The sunlight gleamed brightly off the metal and the flags, and once again, for a last haunting moment, the way men make war looked grand and caught at the throat, as if some strange value beyond values were incomprehensively mixed up in it all.24
Then Sheridan’s bugles sounded, the clear notes slanting all across the field, and all of his brigades wheeled and swung into line, every saber raised high, every rider tense; and in another minute infantry and cavalry would drive in on the slim Confederate lines and crumple them and destroy them in a last savage burst of firing and cutting and clubbing.
Out from the Rebel lines came a lone rider, a young officer in a gray uniform, galloping madly, a staff in his hand with a white flag fluttering from the end of it. He rode up to Chamberlain’s lines and someone there took him off to see Sheridan, and the firing stopped, and the watching Federals saw the Southerners wheeling their guns back and stacking their muskets as if they expected to fight no more.
All up and down the lines the men blinked at one another, unable to realize that the hour they had waited for so long was actually at hand. There was a truce, they could see that, and presently the word was passed that Grant and Lee were going to meet in the little village that lay now between the two lines, and no one could doubt that Lee was going to surrender. It was Palm Sunday,
and they would all live to see Easter, and with the guns quieted it might be easier to comprehend the mystery and the promise of that day. Yet the fact of peace and no more killing and an open road home seems to have been too big to grasp, right at the moment, and in the enormous silence that lay upon the field men remembered that they had marched far and were very tired, and they wondered when the wagon trains would come up with rations.
One of Ord’s soldiers wrote that the army should have gone wild with joy, then and there; and yet, he said, somehow they did not. Later there would be frenzied cheering and crying and rejoicing, but now … now, for some reason, the men sat on the ground and looked across at the Confederate army and found themselves feeling as they had never dreamed that the moment of victory would make them feel.
“… I remember how we sat there and pitied and sympathized with these courageous Southern men who had fought for four long and dreary years all so stubbornly, so bravely and so well, and now, whipped, beaten, completely used up, were fully at our mercy—it was pitiful, sad, hard, and seemed to us altogether too bad.” A Pennsylvanian in the V Corps dodged past the skirmish line and strolled into the lines of the nearest Confederate regiment, and half a century after the war he recalled it with a glow: “… as soon as I got among these boys I felt and was treated as well as if I had been among our own boys, and a person would of thought we were of the same Army and had been Fighting under the Same Flag.” 25
Down by the roadside near Appomattox Court House, Sheridan and Ord and other officers sat and waited while a brown-bearded little man in a mud-spattered uniform rode up. They all saluted him, and there was a quiet interchange of greetings, and then General Grant tilted his head toward the village and asked: “Is General Lee up there?”