A Stillness at Appomattox

by Bruce Catton

  The whole history of the Army of the Potomac passes in review in Mr. Lincoln's brief dispatch: the history of the army, and the most exasperating problem of the war itself. Over and over the war had been prolonged because of the timid, restrictive caution that could paralyze action—the habit of mind that was always too busy weighing risks to grasp opportunities. It developed now that that habit of mind had never been eradicated because when all was said and done it had its final roots in the War Department itself. The War Department could not act and the President could not make it act. The most he could do was support a general who was bold enough to ram action down the department's throat.

  Now Lincoln was giving Grant the final tip-off, just as he had so often and so vainly tried, two years earlier, to give McClellan a similar tip-off. Tables of organization and lines of authority meant nothing in themselves. In the end everything depended on the general, and it was up to the general to act. McClellan had never been able to rise to this challenge. Grant was the last chance.

  Two hours after he had received this wire from President Lincoln, Grant was on a fast steamer, coming up the Potomac. When the boat docked at Washington he stopped off neither at the White House nor at the War Department. Instead he went directly to the railroad station and took a special train to Monocacy Junction, and as soon as he got there he went to see General Hunter.

  Technically, Hunter commanded the military department in which all of these troop movements were going on, and so technically he was responsible for everything that was being done. Grant had no intention of letting Hunter have control over the attempt to destroy Early's army but he was quite willing to let him down easy. Hunter could shelve himself in a Baltimore office if he wished, retaining nominal command of the department while Sheridan did the actual work, and Grant told Hunter this in so many words. But Hunter had had enough. He was getting on in years and he was not much of a soldier, and there was something mean in him which had led him to burn college buildings and homes when he should have been fighting Confederate armies, but during the last fortnight he had been more sinned against than sinning. He told Grant frankly that he had been pulled and tugged around so much by War Department orders that at this moment he simply did not know where Early and Early's troops were— and, in short, he would prefer to be relieved outright and let Sheridan carry the whole load.

  Grant wasted no further time. "Very well, then," he said. Hunter was relieved, and without even waiting for Sheridan to arrive Grant ordered all of the Union troops in the vicinity to move at once to Halltown, a little village at the lower end of the Shenandoah Valley a few miles away from Harper's Ferry. No matter where Early was, a concentration of Federal soldiers in the Shenandoah was something the Confederacy could not endure. Early would come back quickly enough, once blue-uniformed troops displayed themselves in force around Halltown.24

  Sheridan reached Monocacy Junction the next morning, after most of the troops had moved. Grant met him, outlined the job he wanted done, and took off for City Point, with very few people knowing that he had ever left the place, and Sheridan took a one-car special train for Harper's Ferry and rode from there to Halltown to take over his new command. There was a great deal of work to be done and it was going to take Sheridan a month or more to get acclimated and learn how to do what he had to do, but from now on the road led upward. This was the beginning of the end.

  2. To Peel This Land

  There may be lovelier country somewhere—in the Island Vale of Avalon, at a gamble—but when the sunlight lies upon it and the wind puts white clouds racing their shadows the Shenandoah Valley is as good as anything America can show. Many generations ago the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe climbed the Blue Ridge to look down on it in wonder, and ever since then it has been a legend and the fulfillment of a promise. There is music in its very name, and some quality in the region touched the imaginations of men who had never even seen it. The sailors on deep water sailing ships made one of their finest chanteys about it, and sent topsail yards creaking to the masthead in ports all over the world to the tune of "Shenandore":

  O Shenandore,

  I love to hear you

  — Away, you rolling river.

  During the war it was known simply as the Valley: an open corridor slanting off to the southwest from the gap at Harper's Ferry, broad land lying between blue mountains with the bright mirror of a looped river going among golden fields and dark woodlands, pleasant towns linked along a broad undulating turnpike and rich farms rolling away to the rising hills.

  Queerly enough, although it had been a vital factor in the war, in a way the war had hardly touched it. Stonewall Jackson had made it a theater of high strategy, and there had been hard fighting along the historic turnpike and near quaint villages like Front Royal and Port Republic, and most of the fence rails on farms near the main highway had long since vanished to build the campfires of soldiers in blue and gray. Yet even in the summer of 1864 the land bore few scars. East of the Blue Ridge and the Bull Run mountains the country along the Orange and Alexandria Railroad had been marched over and fought over and ravaged mercilessly, and it was a desolate waste picked clean of everything an army might want or a farmer could use. But the Valley had escaped most of this, and when Phil Sheridan got there it was much as it had always been—rich, sunny, peaceful, a land of good farms and big barns, yellow grain growing beside green pastures, lazy herds of sheep and cattle feeding on the slopes.

  Originally, the Valley had drawn many settlers from Pennsylvania and the Cumberland Valley, and these were mostly Bunkers, with a sprinkling of Quakers, Mennonites, and Nazareness devout, frugal, and industrious folk who held firmly to a belief that war was sinful—a belief for which there may be a certain amount of backing, both in Scripture and in racial experience—and their religion forbade the faithful to take up arms. As non-resistants these people had been a problem to the Confederate government, since they would not volunteer and, because of the stubbornness with which they held to their faith, could not well be drafted. But before the war was very old they became an asset instead of a problem. The Confederate Congress in 1862 provided that they might be exempted from military service on payment of a $500 tax, and as a result the farms of the Valley had no shortage of manpower. And because the men were good farmers and the soil was fertile, the Valley became an incomparable granary and source of supply for Lee's soldiers. Rations might be short now and then, because of poor transportation and an incompetent commissariat, but as long as these sober pacifists continued to till their lands and raise their flocks and operate their gristmills, Lee's army could not be starved out of Richmond.1

  An accident of geography made the Valley worth more to the South than to the North, strategically. Running from southwest to northeast, the Valley was the Confederacy's great covered way leading up to the Yankee fortress, the high parapet of the Blue Ridge offering concealment and protection. A Confederate army coming down the Valley was marching directly toward the Northern citadel, but a

  Yankee army moving up the Valley was going nowhere in particular because it was constantly getting farther away from Richmond and Richmond's defenders. Nor did a Confederate force operating in the Valley have serious problems of supply. The Valley itself was the base, and it could be drawn on for abundant food and forage from Staunton all the way to Winchester and beyond.

  Both Lee and Grant were thoroughly familiar with these facts. In the spring of 1862 Lee had used them, sending Stonewall Jackson down the Valley in such a way as to bring the North to stunning defeat. In the summer of 1864 he had used them again, and Early's foray had caused more trouble. From the moment he took command Grant had had to take these facts into consideration. Until he solved the problem of the Valley, the Army of the Potomac was never safe from an attack in its rear.

  When the 1864 campaign began Grant tried to solve it, and the solution then would have been fairly simple. All that he needed was to establish a Federal army in the upper Valley —at Staunton, say, or Waynesboro,
anywhere well upstream. That would close the gate and the Confederacy's granary and covered way would be useless. But nothing had worked out as he had planned. First Sigel went up the Valley, to be routed at Newmarket. Then Hunter took the same road, only to lose everything by wild misguided flight off into West Virginia. So now the problem was tougher, and the solution that would have worked in the spring was no good at all in midsummer.

  Grant studied the matter, fixing his eyes on the fields and barns and roads of the Valley, and he had a deadly unemotional gaze which saw flame and a smoking sword for devout folk whose way led beside green pastures and still waters. The war could not be won until the Confederacy had been deprived of the use of this garden spot between the mountains. If the garden were made desert, so that neither the Southern Confederacy nor even the fowls of the air could use it, the problem would be well on the way toward being solved.

  Grant put it in orders. In a message to Halleck, sent before Sheridan was named to the command, Grant was specific about what he wanted: an army of hungry soldiers to follow retreating Rebels up the Valley and "eat out Virginia clear and clean as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender with them." He spelled this out in instructions for the Union commander: "He should make all the Valley south of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad a desert as high up as possible. I do not mean that houses should be burned, but all provisions and stock should be removed, and the people notified to get out." 2

  Sheridan got the point. A soldier in Torbert's division of cavalry remembered the orders that came down from Sheridan's headquarters: ". . . you will seize all mules, horses and cattle that may be useful to our army. Loyal citizens can bring in their claims against the government for this necessary destruction. No houses will be burned; and officers in charge of this delicate but necessary duty must inform the people that the object is to make this Valley untenable for the raiding parties of the rebel army."3

  It could be written out concisely, and the telegraph instruments would click it off, and adjutants could read it before the troops at evening parade, with deep shadows dropping down through the rich dusk; and a grim eternity of war and the hardening of many hearts had gone into it, romance of war and knightly chivalry dissolved forever in the terrible acid of enmity and hatred, settlement by the sword coming at last to mean all-out war, modern style, with a blow at the economic potential cutting across the farmer's yard and dooming innocent people to the loss of a lifetime's hard-bought gains.

  There was a young fellow in the 2nd Ohio Cavalry who presided over some of this devastation: a lad who had seen values beyond life glimmering on the edge of the war when he enlisted, and who wrote in his diary about a talk he had with a farmer on the western fringe of the Valley whose farm lay in the road of military necessity:

  "He owned a farm, sterile and poor, of 200 acres in among the hills. Moved there 34 years since when all was a wilderness. Had never owned a slave. Had cleaned up the farm, built a log house and made all the improvements with his own hands. It made him almost crazy to see all going to destruction in one night—all his fences, outbuildings, cattle, sheep and fowls. An only son at home, an invalid. Had always been true to the government. Only wished that God would now call him, that he might be with his many friends in the church yard—pointing to it near by—and the aspect of suffering and starvation be taken from it."4

  The war had grown old, and it was following its own logic, the insane logic of war, which had been building up ever since Beauregard's cannon bit into the masonry of Fort Sumter. The only aim now was to hurt the enemy, in any way possible and with any weapon; to destroy not his will to resist but his ability to make that will effective. The will might remain and be damned to it: if the will and the bitterness could be made impotent, nothing else mattered.

  There was much bitterness abroad by now—everywhere, perhaps, except in the army itself—and kindly, God-fearing people were demanding that their enemies be made to suffer. An example of this feeling can be seen in a letter which President Lincoln received just about this time from the good businessmen who made up the Chicago Board of Trade.

  The president and the secretary of this organization wrote to Mr. Lincoln to recite the terrible evils which were befalling Union prisoners in the great Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia. In that overcrowded pen men lived in an open field without tents or huts, exposed to the hot sun and the driving rain, unclothed and badly fed, dying miserably of disease and malnutrition, all but totally uncared for, none of their sufferings minimized by wartime propaganda. So the Chicago civilians were soberly urging that the Federal government set aside an equal number of Confederate prisoners and subject them to the same treatment: that is, throw them together in such a way that most of them would die and the rest would lose their health and their minds, do it deliberately and with calculation, in order that there might be a fair extension of pain and death.

  "We are aware," wrote the Chicagoans, "that this, our petition, savors of cruelty"—but it was no time to be squeamish. There was a war on and they felt obliged to "urge retaliatory measures as a matter of necessity"; and, in sum, here was a black flag fluttering on the hot wind, a rallying point for any ill will which had not yet been properly organized.5

  Admittedly, Andersonville had a record which even today cannot easily be read without horror and sick disgust. So did most of the other prison camps in the Civil War, in the Confederacy and in the Union as well, and the terrible things which happened in them seem to have taken place not because anyone meant it so but simply because men were clumsy and the times were still rude.

  Even when they were camped in perfect safety behind their own lines, getting the best their governments had to give, the soldiers of that day got miserable food and defective medical attention, so that simply being in the army killed many more men than were killed in battle. Only when an army commander was a first-rate military administrator, willing and able to devote a large part of his time to such matters, did the lot of the troops become anything better than just barely endurable. Inevitably, prisoners of war fared a great deal worse. A certain combination of incompetence and indifference can cause almost as much suffering as the most acute malevolence.

  One does not need to read wartime propaganda to get a full indictment of the prison camps. Each side indicted itself, in terms no propagandist could make much more bitter.

  A Confederate surgeon, completing an inspection of Andersonville, reported to his superiors at Richmond that more than 10,000 prisoners had died in seven months—nearly one third of the entire number confined there. More than 5,000 were seriously ill. Diarrhea, dysentery, scurvy, and hospital gangrene were the chief complaints, and there were from 90 to 130 deaths every day. He found 30,000 men jammed together on twenty-seven acres of land, "with little or no attention to hygiene, with festering masses of filth at the very doors of their rude dens and tents." A little stream flowed through the camp, and about it the surgeon found "a filthy quagmire" which was so infamous that a man who got a slight scratch on his skin, or even an insect bite, was quite likely to die of blood poisoning. A South Carolina woman, learning about similar conditions in the prison camp at Florence, wrote to the governor asking: "In the name of all that is holy, is there nothing that can be done to relieve such dreadful suffering? If such things are allowed to continue they will surely draw down some awful judgment upon our country." 6

  Thus in the South. In the North, an army surgeon inspected the camp for Rebel prisoners at Elmira, New York, and said that the 8,347 prisoners there exhibited 2,000 cases of scurvy., He asserted that at the current death rates "the entire command will be admitted to hospital in less than a year and 36 per cent die." Like Andersonville, the Elmira camp contained a stream, which had formed a dreadful scummy pond —"a festering mass of corruption, impregnating the entire atmosphere of the camp with the pestilential odors . . . the vaults give off their sickly odors, and the hospitals are crowded with victi
ms for the grave." The camp surgeon had made repeated complaints but he could get no one in authority to pay any attention to them, and his requisitions for medicines had been entirely ignored.7

  A little later, when the rival governments worked out a deal for the exchange of certain prisoners who were too ill to fight but not too sick to travel, a trainload of 1,200 such men was made up at Elmira and sent down to Baltimore to take a steamer for the South. Federal doctors who met this pathetic convoy at the dock wrote indignantly that many of the men were obviously unfit to travel. Five had died on the train and sixty more had to be hurried to hospital as soon as they reached Baltimore. There were no doctors, orderlies, or nurses on the steamer, and the whole setup indicated "criminal neglect and inhumanity on the part of the medical officers in making the selection of men to be transferred." The commander at Elmira, meanwhile, was writing that he had hoped that getting rid of his 1,200 worst cases would relieve overcrowding at the camp hospital but that somehow it had not. Overcrowding was as bad as ever, and "if the rate of mortality for the last two months should continue for a year you can easily calculate the number of prisoners there would be left here for exchange." 8

  There was a smoky moonlit madness on the land in this fourth year of war. The country was striking blindly at phantoms, putting scars on its own body. People can stand only about so much, and they had been pushed beyond the limit, so that what was monstrous could look as if it made sense. Ordinarily decent, kindly citizens could seriously propose that some thousands of helpless prisoners be condemned to slow death by hunger and disease, and the fact that the authorities rejected this mad scheme did not help very much because the reprisal was in fact already being inflicted.