A Stillness at Appomattox

by Bruce Catton

  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 comprehensively mixed up in it all.

  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 crumble 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."

  Down by the roadside near Appomattox Court House, Sheridan and Ord and other officers sat and waited while a brown-bearded little man in 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?"

  Sheridan replied that he was, and Grant said: "Very well. Let's go up."

  The little cavalcade went trotting along the road to the village, and all around them the two armies waited in silence. As the generals neared the end of their ride, a Yankee band in a field near the town struck up "Auld Lang Syne."

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IT would be harder to write this kind of book, and the final result would be poorer, if one did not get so much help from so many kindly people. In listing the sources from which material was drawn the writer must express his abiding gratitude for a great deal of generous assistance.

  Of particular value has been the opportunity to study various collections of unpublished letters written by Federal soldiers. These letters not only provide useful source material; they leave one feeling that he somehow had personal friends in the Union army—and, now and then, give him the odd illusion that he actually served in that army himself.

  The following manuscript collections were made available:

  Letters of Edwin Wentworth, of the 37th Massachusetts Infantry, loaned by Miss Edith Adams, of Auburn, Maine. These letters provide a singularly appealing glimpse at the experiences and emotions of a typical New England soldier, and one feels a sense of personal loss upon discovering that the last letter in the collection is a note to next of kin announcing Private Wentworth's death at the Bloody Angle.

  Letters of Lewis Bissell, of the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery, loaned by Mr. Carl H. Bissell, of Syracuse, New York. Extremely valuable as an unrevised, day-to-day account of the experiences of a VI Corps veteran, these letters also provide a useful check on the formal regimental history of this Connecticut regiment, whose author is frequently mentioned in Private Bissell's letters.

  Letters of Henry Clay Heisler, of the 48th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers, loaned by Mr. Donald M. Hobart, of Philadelphia. Written by a soldier in the regiment which dug the famous Petersburg mine, these letters shed a revealing light on that operation and on the reaction of Burnside's soldiers to Burnside's last battle. (Interestingly enough, this regiment apparently blamed the fiasco on Burnside's subordinates rather than on Burnside himself.)

  Letters of Sebastian Muller, of the 67th New York Infantry: in the manuscript collection of the Library of Congress. Quaint and stilted in their formal, old-world phraseology, these letters show how the war looked to an immigrant who supposed he had enlisted to fight "the rebels of South America."

  Manuscript diary of Corporal S. O. Bryant, of the 20th Michigan Infantry, loaned by Mr. Donald C. Allen, of Washington. In this diary another of Burnside's soldiers expresses himself about the war, and in a complaint about Spotsylvania foreshadows the disaster at the crater.

  Letter of Sergeant George S. Hampton, of the 91st Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers, loaned by Mr. J. Frank Nicholson, of Manassas, Virginia. Written some years after the war, this letter contains a priceless glimpse of men of the two armies at the moment of the cease-fire at Appomattox Court House.

  The writer's especial thanks are due to Mr. Ralph Happel, historian, the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County National Military Park, for the loan of his excellent manuscript studies of the Wilderness-Spotsylvania battles, and for guidance in study of the terrain.

  Dr. James Rabun, of the Department of History, Emory University, kindly forwarded a reprint of his article, "Alexander Stephens and Jefferson Davis," in the American Historical Review.

  Major General U. S. Grant, III, was most helpful in recalling anecdotes and family recollections about his distinguished grandfather.

  Colonel Charles G. Stevenson, state judge advocate, New York National Guard, provided interesting material on the history of the famous "14th Brooklyn" Regiment, and traced that regiment's lineal descent to the 955th Field Artillery Battalion recently active in Korea.

  Finally, a substantial debt of gratitude for many acts of helpfulness is owed to various librarians—specifically, to Dr. David Mearns and Dr. Percy Powell of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; to Colonel Willard Webb of the Stack and Reader Division and to Mr. Legare Obear of the Loan Division in that library; to Mr. Paul Howard, librarian of the Department of the Interior, and to Miss Georgia Cowan of the History Division of the Public Library of the District of Columbia.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  CHIEF reliance of course has been placed on the invaluable War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, published by the War Department in 1902. Unless otherwise noted, volumes cited
in the footnotes are from Series I of this compilation. Reference has also been made to Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography, edited by James Grant Wilson and John Fiske and published in 1888, and to the more modern Dictionary of American Biography, edited by Dumas Malone and published in 1943. In addition, the following works were consulted:

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  A Diary from Dixie, by Mary Boykin Chesnut, edited by Ben Ames Williams. Boston, 1949.

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  The Life and Letters of Emory Upton, by Peter S. Michie; introduction by James H. Wilson. New York, 1885.

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  REGIMENTAL HISTORIES, SOLDIERS* REMINISCENCES, ETC.

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