The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  “Ah! that’s well,” Lee said, “we may need them.”62

  George Pickett stared numbly at the bloodied battlefield, tears welling in his eyes.

  “Great God,” he said, “where, oh! where is my division?”63

  A soldier watched the tears stream down his cheeks and heard him sob, “My brave men! My brave men!”64

  William Poague had himself been staring at the field in disbelief, watching the small clumps of men stagger back toward Seminary Ridge, and wondering what he ought to do now. Suddenly Pickett was beside him on horseback.

  “General,” Poague said to him, “my orders are that as soon as our troops get the hill I am to move as rapidly as possible to their support. But I don’t like the look of things up there.”

  Pickett neither replied nor turned his head to see who was speaking, but continued to gaze across the valley with eyes brimming with sadness and pain. At that moment a Virginia flag was borne rapidly aloft along the stone wall by a horseman.

  “General,” Poague exclaimed, “is that Virginia flag carried by one of our men or by the enemy?”

  Pickett still did not reply.

  “What do you think I ought to do under the circumstances?” Poague asked urgently. “Our men are leaving the hill.”

  At last Pickett spoke. “I think you had better save your guns.”

  He rode away leaving Poague wondering exactly what that meant. But now the gunner knew what he must do. He must prepare to meet the Union advance certain to follow.65

  To Longstreet, Pickett said, “General, I am ruined; my division is gone—it is destroyed.” He exclaimed, bitterly, that if he had had his two missing brigades left in Richmond and Petersburg he could have broken the Union line.66

  Lee said to him, “General Pickett, place your division in rear of this hill, and be ready to repel the advance of the enemy should they follow up their advantage.”

  “General Lee,” Pickett said, “I have no division now, Armistead is down, Garnett is down, and Kemper is mortally wounded.”

  “Come, General Pickett,” Lee said, “this has been my fight and upon my shoulders rests the blame. The men and officers of your command have written the name of Virginia as high to-day as it has ever been written before.”67

  It was high praise from the great man, glory enough for one hundred years, thought Captain Robert Bright, who was standing with Pickett. But for Pickett it was empty consolation. His magnificent division had been hopelessly shattered in one brief hour in which “glory and disaster rode arm in arm.”68

  A litter bearing a wounded officer covered with a blanket was carried past by four soldiers, one of them the ubiquitous Erasmus Williams.

  “Captain,” Lee asked Robert Bright, “what officer is that they are bearing off?”

  “General Kemper,” Bright answered.

  “I must speak to him,” Lee said, reining his horse toward the litter.

  The bearers halted and Kemper opened his eyes.

  “General Kemper,” Lee began, “I hope you are not very seriously wounded.”

  “I am struck in the groin, and the ball has ranged upwards,” Kemper replied. “They tell me it is mortal.”

  Lee was distressed. “I hope it will not prove so bad as that,” he said. “Is there anything I can do for you, General Kemper?”

  Kemper raised himself painfully on one elbow. “Yes, General Lee,” he said, “do full justice to this division for its work today.”

  “I will,” Lee promised.69

  Both glory and disaster were at an end for that day. Meade did not intend to follow up the repulse. He had thrown off the enemy attack and that was enough. Even as Lee and Longstreet braced for his counterassault, Meade was issuing orders to his army to reform and keep their places in the event of another Confederate attack.70

  But Lee was reeling. This invasion of Pennsylvania had cost him a third of his army—and perhaps the war. He couldn’t have attacked again if he wanted. The battle of Gettysburg, the invasion, was over.

  At muster of Pickett’s division the next morning the toll was evident. Not a thousand survivors answered the call. Four of every five of Pickett’s men had been either killed, wounded, or captured. Two of his three brigadiers were gone, probably dead, the third perhaps mortally wounded. Every one of his regimental commanders had been killed, wounded, or captured.

  “We gained nothing but glory,” one surviving officer sighed, “and lost our bravest men.”71

  For some reason nobody could explain, the Confederates had pulled their punch. They had not thrown the full power of the Army of Northern Virginia at the Union army. Only eleven infantry brigades had carried the fight. Another twenty-seven had not been used; many had merely watched. It had been the grandest charge ever made by an army on this continent, and it had all been a forlorn hope.

  At about 1:00 the next morning, Lee rode weary, dejected, and alone to his headquarters. Waiting for him there in the warm, moonlit night, on the grass under a tree, was John Imboden, commanding the army’s rear guard. Lee spoke to him, reined in, and started to dismount. The effort betrayed such physical exhaustion that Imboden stepped forward to help. But before he could reach Lee’s side, the general had alighted.

  There he sagged with one arm across his saddle, leaning heavily against his horse, his eyes fixed on the ground. The moon shone full on his haggard face, illuminating an expression of sadness deeper than Imboden had ever seen. After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, Imboden spoke.

  “General, this has been a hard day on you.”

  Lee looked up and said, “Yes, it has been a sad, sad day to us.” He fell silent again.

  Imboden waited, but said no more.

  After a moment or two, Lee suddenly straightened to his full height, as Imboden would recall a generation later, and said: “I never saw troops behave more magnificently than Pickett’s division of Virginians did to-day in that grand charge upon the enemy. And if they had been supported as they were to have been,—but, for some reason not yet fully explained to me, were not,—we would have held the position and the day would have been ours.”

  He paused. Then in a loud and sorrowing voice he cried, “Too bad! Too bad! OH! TOO BAD!”72

  PART 6

  CLOSING

  OUT

  THE WAR

  The Meeting

  on the

  Court House Steps

  It was worse than Lee imagined. It was the beginning of the end. There would be no more stunning victories for him such as Chancellorsville. There would be instead dramatic Union victories in the West—the surrender of Vicksburg the day after the defeat at Gettysburg, the fall of Atlanta, and Major General William T. Sherman’s march to the sea. For Lee in the East it would just be more fighting: the grim scorching, man-killing defensive battles in the Wilderness, the bloody encounter at Spotsylvania Court House, the senseless Union charge at Cold Harbor—all leading to the tedious standoff in the trenches at Petersburg.

  In March 1864, Abraham Lincoln made a lieutenant general of Sam Grant. Grant had come far since that early summer twenty-three years before when as a first-classman he had watched the plebes of the class of 1846 struggle up from the steamboat landing. On April Fools’ Day in 1865, Grant finally succeeded in doing something to Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia that Lee had done so often to Union armies in the past—when Tom Jackson was still alive. He turned his right flank.

  After months of denying Grant victory in the trenches before Petersburg, Lee’s army was suddenly in peril. His right had been smashed at Five Forks, Petersburg and Richmond were lost, and time was running out for the Confederacy. There was nothing he could do now but retreat west along the line of the Appomattox River. The one hope was to slip the noose Grant was tightening about him and make for Danville. From there he might yet unite with Joseph E. Johnston’s remnant of an army in the Carolinas.

  Lee lit out in that direction on the run. Instantly the Union cavalry under Major General Philip H. Sheridan leaped
to the pursuit, paralleling his retreat, striking at him as he ran. Grant’s armies of the Potomac and the James followed in full cry. It became a running fight toward a little town in the middle of Virginia called Appomattox Court House.

  From that moment on Lee’s ragged, hungry army knew no rest. “Not only was my command in almost incessant battle as we covered the retreat,” said Lee’s combatative little corps commander, John Gordon, “but every portion of our marching column was being assailed by Grant’s cavalry and infantry. The roads and fields and woods swarmed with eager pursuers.”1

  Like a fox chased by hounds, a tattered Confederate division would turn to snap at the pursuers, checking them momentarily to let some other Confederate command move on. Lee was everywhere, watching everything. But it was a grim, depressing business. His once proud army was but a battle-weary remnant of what it had been, reduced to two consolidated corps under Longstreet and Gordon. Jackson was nearly two years dead. A. P. Hill had been gunned down and killed on April 2 attempting to rally his corps at Petersburg. Ewell, back fighting again on his wooden right leg, had been taken prisoner during the retreat, at a fight in the bottomlands of Sayler’s Creek on April 6. The Confederates called the Sayler’s Creek disaster Black Thursday. Eight thousand rebels, including six generals—a quarter of Lee’s rebel army—were captured.

  For those who were left it continued to be “march, march, march night and day,” as one Confederate officer described it, “no sleeping, no cooking, save a piece of cornbread and a slice of bacon, stuck on a stick and held to the fire.” Yankees were everywhere, before and behind, on both flanks, forcing them from a line of railroad over which they might get supplies, to another on which they could get nothing. The ration was two ears of parched corn a day, and a day’s supply of raw bacon for an entire week.2 Not only were feet and body weary and sore, but so were gums and teeth.3

  Sheridan’s cavalry, supported by the Army of the Potomac’s Fifth Corps commanded by Major General Charles Griffin, raced to get around in front of the retreating Confederates. The way was shrouded in constant smoke and dust. Firearms rattled and artillery roared in an unending counterpoint, threatening at any moment to break out in yet one more general engagement. A pace behind Sheridan and Griffin marched Major General John Gibbon’s Twenty-fourth Corps of the Army of the James. The rest of Major General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac pressed hard on Lee’s rear. There was no letup, no relief, nowhere to go but ahead. And how long would even that be possible?

  Pattie Guild was caught in the path of the Union juggernaut. She had been traveling with her husband, Dr. Lafayette Guild, the chief surgeon of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. In the chaos of the flight, her husband had left her in a house on the way that seemed safe at the time. But suddenly it, too, was besieged, like everything else Confederate, and filled with marauding Union troops. As she wondered what was to become of her, she heard a soldier mention John Gibbon’s name. Gibbon was near—a ray of hope. She asked the Union soldiers if she could send him a note.

  As she hastily wrote, the memory of Gibbon, such a dear friend of her and her husband in the Old Army, came flooding back. Could he help her now? Would he help her?

  The reply came almost instantly from Gibbon, saying he would come to her immediately. Even as she was reading his note, he appeared at her door, “the same kind old friend” he had always been. He ordered a guard thrown around the house to protect her, and then pushed on in pursuit of her fleeing husband.4

  On the night of April 8, Sheridan’s cavalry got around in front of Lee’s army at about sundown and captured four railway trains of supplies and twenty-six pieces of artillery that had been sent to Lee from Lynchburg. There, just beyond Appomattox Station, Sheridan threw his cavalry across Lee’s front, blocking his one way of escape.

  It was late when George A. Forsyth, one of Sheridan’s young colonels, swung wearily down from his saddle. It had been a hard day. But it was now a mild spring night under a cloudy sky, and the soft mellow smell of earthiness was in the air, the kind of feel to it that so often foreshadows a coming rain. Sheridan had urgently sent for the infantry to come up, to put the seal on things, for he could not contain Lee’s army without help.

  As one of Forsyth’s men started to lead the colonel’s horse away to be fed, groomed, and saddled before daylight, he asked, “Do you think, Colonel, that we’ll get General Lee’s army tomorrow?”

  It was not a question Forsyth could answer. But he did feel certain about one thing. One way or the other, tomorrow’s sun would rise big with the fate of the Southern Confederacy.5

  Lee must have shared this feeling of grim inevitability. Suddenly there was nowhere for him to go. Sheridan was across the road in front of him. Union infantry were on his flanks and rear. His army was at bay. That night he met with his generals and talked about what they should do next. He had been in touch with Grant; surrender had been suggested. Would it be that, or would they try to break through? It was decided they would attempt to break through. It would be done in the morning, and it must be done quickly while only Sheridan’s cavalry still stood in their way. If the Union infantry got up it would be too late.

  At dawn on April 9, Gordon moved forward with his footsore, starving, but willing remnant, supported by Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry, as Longstreet turned to hold off the Union Second and Sixth corps. Gordon rammed his way through the front line of Sheridan’s cavalry. But beyond this outer layer, he hit bedrock; a powerful column of John Gibbon’s infantry had already arrived. “Large bodies of the enemy were visible, crowding the hill tops like a blue or black cloud,” a rebel soldier wrote.6

  The Confederate line hit Gibbon’s corps and shuddered to a stop. They “staggered back,” a Union officer said, “as Don Giovanni does before the ghost.” Palsied by surprise, they “rolled back like a receding wave which has spent the force of its assault against the earth-works of the shore.” Longstreet’s corps was hit at the same time.7

  From a short distance in the rear, Lee sent his aide-de-camp, Colonel Charles S. Venable, ahead with a question for Gordon: Could he break through?

  Venable found Gordon at the front in the dim light of the early morning. “Tell General Lee I have fought my corps to a frazzle,” Gordon said, “and I fear I can do nothing unless I am heavily supported by Longstreet’s corps.”

  “Then there is nothing left me but to go and see General Grant,” Lee said sadly, “and I would rather die a thousand deaths.”8

  For John Gibbon it had looked to be another day of fighting. He had gotten his divisions up and was going at it as usual when suddenly all firing along the line ceased. Since this was highly irregular, he galloped rapidly to the front to see what was happening. He found his line of battle emerging from the wood into the cleared ground beyond. Not an enemy was in sight and no bullets were flying. He rode forward to within sight of the little village of Appomattox Court House. In the valley beyond he saw troops, Confederates apparently. To his right a party of horsemen appeared, riding past on the way to the town. Gibbon immediately recognized Major General E.O.C. Ord, commander of the Army of the James, and his staff and escort. Gibbon rode up to Ord, his boss, and was told that Lee was surrendering. They continued on together into Appomattox, which Gibbon saw was but “a little straggling place of a dozen or two houses.”9

  It was late morning and the contending armies were now ranged on either side of the town, with their picket lines out, but their guns silent. The Union soldiers stared at Lee’s ragged little army. “It was a sad sight,” one of Gibbon’s officers said, his sympathy overriding all the memories of desperate past killing and fighting, “—cavalry, artillery, horses, mules and half-starved soldiers in a confused mass. It was a scene to melt the bravest heart.”10

  In the town, in the square between the two armies, Gibbon dismounted in front of the courthouse steps and suddenly found himself in a cluster of other generals who had been drifting in from both sides of the line. Among them were the familiar faces of men
he had not met, but in battle, for four long years. They smiled and greeted one another, grasping hands as they had so often before when they were at peace. As their respective armies waited, suspended between peace and war, the old friends—fellow West Pointers mostly—stood together on the courthouse steps and wondered which way the scales would now tip. Were they grasping hands now only to part and fight again?

  Gibbon greeted Henry Heth, his old friend from the class of 1847, whom he had last seen as they were leaving Camp Floyd in Utah Territory. Longstreet was there, and John Gordon, a non-West Pointer, whom he was meeting for the first time. The group on the courthouse steps continued to grow as officers drifted in from both camps. From the Union army came Ord and Sheridan, and Generals Wesley Merritt, Rom Ayres, Charles Griffin, Joshua Chamberlain, William Bartlett, and George Crook. Sheridan introduced Ord to Longstreet and the two ranking generals stepped aside to talk. The other officers mingled in small groups.

  Someone said, “There is Cadmus.”

  Gibbon looked up to see Wilcox, the classmate of so long ago, riding into the square on a sorry-looking nag, its ribs showing through its gray hide. Of Wilcox little could be seen, for he wore a long thick overcoat. Together the rider and his horse appeared the perfect embodiment of the present pitiful plight of the Confederate cause.11

  It is doubtful that any of the men on the courthouse steps saw this specter from the class of 1846 without a smile—both for what he looked like and for who he was. Henry Heth would one day say, “I know of no man of rank who participated in our unfortunate struggle on the Southern side, who had more warm and sincere friends, North and South.”12

  Wilcox seemed born to be liked by both sides. His mother was a North Carolina beauty, his father a Connecticut Yankee. Born in Carolina, he grew up in Tennessee. U. S. Grant, now commanding the Union armies, liked him so much that he had asked him to be the best man at his wedding. Even inanimate objects appeared to favor Wilcox—bullets, for instance. Just as his onetime classmate Birkett Fry could not seem to dodge a bullet, Wilcox seemed unable to attract one. After the battle at Frayser’s Farm on the Peninsula, Wilcox counted six bullet holes in his clothing, but his body was untouched. He had fought in nearly every important battle the Army of Northern Virginia had waged, and never been scratched. However, despite this, he appeared to know bullets very well; he was an expert on rifles and rifle practice, having written the prevailing standard text on the subject in 1859.13