A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  There was much fighting that day. The opposing lines lay in a great rambling curve, and off toward the Federal right some divisions from Hancock’s and Warren’s corps made a savage and costly assault on the Rebel trenches, coming up through a grove of spiky dead pines as tangled as anything in the Wilderness and being rebuffed with heavy loss. Half a mile or more north and east of the place where they fought, Upton massed his twelve regiments late in the afternoon.

  The spot that had been picked for him was not promising. Upton’s men faced east, looking toward a wood. There was a little road going off through the trees, and it came out into a field which sloped up for 200 yards to the enemy’s works, which were formidable. Out in front there was a heavy abatis of felled trees, the sharpened branches pointing toward the Federals, and the main trench line was several dozen paces beyond. This trench was solidly built of logs and banked-up earth, and along the top there ran a head log, blocked up a few inches above the dirt so that Confederate riflemen could stand in the trench, aim and fire their pieces through the slit under the log, and enjoy almost complete protection. Heavy traverses—mounds of earth running back at right angles from the main embankment—had been built at frequent intervals as a protection against enfilade fire. This line was strongly manned with first-rate troops, and a hundred yards in the rear of it there was a second line, not yet wholly completed but also held by good troops. Here and there along the front line there were emplacements for artillery, so that all of the slope out in front could be swept both by rifle fire and by canister.

  The obvious fact here—at least it was obvious to Upton—was that an assaulting column’s only hope was to get a solid mass of riflemen right on the parapet as quickly as possible. If the men stopped on open ground to exchange volleys with those thoroughly protected Confederates they would be destroyed in no time. So Upton formed his men in four lines, three regiments side by side in each line, and he issued explicit orders: every man was to have his musket loaded and his bayonet fixed, but only the men in the three leading regiments were to cap their muskets. (To “cap” a Civil War musket was to put a copper percussion cap in the breech so that it could instantly be fired. With uncapped weapons, the men could not fire as they charged but would have to keep on advancing and so would reach the trench with loaded muskets which could then very quickly be capped for close-range firing.) When the first three regiments reached the trench they were to fan out to right and left and drive the defenders off down the line, while the second wave swarmed in behind them to open fire on any reinforcements that might try to come up from the Confederate second line. The remaining two lines were to lie down just short of the trench for use as they might be needed.

  Officers were taken out to the edge of the open space and were shown the ground, everything was carefully explained, and then the twelve regiments moved forward. They got to the edge of the woods, Upton took them out into the open, and they set out up the slope on a dead run, yelling like maniacs.

  A sharp fire greeted them, and getting through the abatis was tough, but the solid column kept on going and swept up to the trench without a halt. At the parapet there was brief, desperate, hand-to-hand fighting. As Upton remarked in his report, the Confederates “absolutely refused to yield the ground,” and the first Yankees who got up on the parapet were shot down or bayoneted. Others pitched their bayoneted rifles over the parapet like deep-sea harpooners spearing whales, or held their pieces out at arm’s length, pointing downward over the parapet, and fired. Then men began to jump over into the trench, clubbing and stabbing, the weight of numbers began to tell, the defenders were killed or driven away, and Upton’s leading regiments swept down the line to right and left while the next wave dashed across the open ground and seized the second trench. All in all, the thing had worked, and the twelve regiments had broken the Confederate line wide open right where it was strongest, taking prisoners and waving their flags and shouting with triumph.2

  But to break the line was only half of it. Upton’s men were three quarters of a mile away from the rest of the Union army, and the Rebels were bringing up strong reinforcements and opening a heavy fire from in front and from both flanks. Now the twelve regiments must hold on while their comrades in the rear came up to exploit the break-through.

  This had been arranged for. On high ground off to the left and rear Mott’s division from the II Corps was lined up ready for the word, and it was sent forward as soon as Upton’s men got their grip on the Rebel position. But Mott’s was an ill-fated division, and most of the fire was burnt out of it. Its morale had been ruined when it was transferred from the defunct III Corps, early that spring, and in the Wilderness fighting it had been shot up and driven in panic, and Mott seems not to have been the officer who could pull the men together. In addition, the division had to advance down a broad open glade, half a mile long and 400 yards wide, and at the end of the glade the Confederates had twenty-two cannon in line, waiting. These guns had a direct Une of fire down the glade, and they could not miss, and they broke Mott’s division before it got fairly started. Better troops might have got farther, but the artillery would probably have taken charge anyway, and this assault went entirely awry and never got within a quarter of a mile of the Rebel line.3

  Down to the right were the troops which had made the unsuccessful attack earlier in the day, and it was resolved to send them in again. The men had just succeeded in re-forming their lines after their repulse when a staff officer came galloping up, riding from brigade to brigade with orders for a new attack. One of the men who had to make this charge wrote afterward that “there was an approach to the ridiculous” in the way in which these orders were given. He specified:

  “No officer of higher rank than a brigade commander had examined the approaches to the enemy’s works on our front, and the whole expression of the person who brought the message seemed to say, ‘The general commanding is doubtful of your success.’ The moment the order was given the messenger put spurs to his horse and rode off, lest by some misunderstanding the assault should begin before he was safe out of range of the enemy’s responsive fire.” 4

  That kind of spirit never broke any Confederate lines, and this charge was beaten before it was made. The men moved out sluggishly, convinced that their job was hopeless. After a brief advance they halted and opened fire, but before long they seem to have concluded that there was no sense in it, and everybody turned and ran for the rear. Rebel fire followed them, and the dead pines in the thicket took fire, and what began as a fairly orderly retreat ended as a rout. The soldier who wrote so bitterly about the way the charge was directed confessed that some of the best men in the army “not only retired without any real attempt to carry the enemy’s works, but actually retreated in confusion to a point far in the rear of the original line and remained there until nearly night.” Staff officers sent to recall them found the men quietly grouped around their regimental flags, making coffee.5

  So Upton’s regiments were left out on a limb, with a good part of the Rebel army gathering to destroy them and no help coming up; and the young colonel at last had to lead his men back to their lines, with a thousand of them left dead or wounded on the ground. They brought a thousand prisoners back with them, and they had made an authentic break in a formidable line, but in the end it had all been a failure.6

  Yet when night came down the high command felt that the general picture was encouraging. These cruel trenches were not invulnerable, after all, and what twelve regiments had done could perhaps be repeated with a bigger force. An Ohio cavalryman who was serving as orderly at Grant’s headquarters saw Grant talking with Meade about it, puffing his cigar as he talked, and he heard Grant say: “A brigade today—we’ll try a corps tomorrow.” A little later the new commander of the VI Corps, General Horatio Wright, came in. Wright was stocky and bearded, slow-moving, competent rather than brilliant, not beginning to fill the place in the soldiers’ affections that Sedgwick had filled; but he was the man Sedgwick himself had once designate
d as his successor, and he felt that the whole trouble today had been failure of the supporting troops. He said earnestly to Meade: “General, I don’t want Mott’s troops on my left; they are not a support; I would rather have no troops there.” 7

  In the end, the generals concluded that Lee’s army might be utterly defeated if Upton’s technique were used on a larger scale, properly supported, and Meade’s staff immediately went to work to plan an enormous blow that would send Hancock’s entire corps through the lines and would bring all of Wright’s and Burnside’s men up as supports.

  It would take time to mount an attack of this size, and it could not be done overnight. So on May 11 the troops held their lines, and another great train of wounded was started back toward Fredericksburg. Yet although the front was comparatively inactive there was a steady firing all day long, and the toll of killed and wounded on both sides crept constantly higher. In midafternoon it began to rain—a sullen, persistent drizzle that looked as if it might go on for days—and when the sun went down the air turned chilly, and the battlefield was smoldering with little brush fires and wreathed in flat layers of smoke that hung low in the rain. When night came it was dull and starless, and long after dark there began a tramping of great columns of troops as the men followed obscure roads to their new positions.8

  More than half of the army was on the move. Grant and Meade had chosen a new spot for their break-through—the very spot that Mott’s men had so ingloriously aimed at, made inviting in spite of its banked-up cannon by an accident of geography.

  The Confederate lines covering Spotsylvania Court House were uneven and they did not run in straight lines for more than a few rods at a time, but in general they formed two tangents—a long one, opposite the Federal right, facing roughly toward the north, and a Shorter one somewhat to the east of this facing northeast and east. These two lines did not intersect. Instead, they were joined by a great loop of entrenchments that bulged out toward the north to cover some high ground: a huge salient nearly a mile deep and half a mile wide, dubbed by the Confederates, from its outline on the map, the Mule Shoe. It was the western side of this salient that Upton had attacked on May 10, and the guns that had broken up Mott’s dispirited formation were placed at the northernmost tip of the salient where the lines of the Mule Shoe came to a blunt angle.

  If this salient could be broken, Lee’s army would be cut in half. By military teaching, the point of a salient was a hard place to defend, since the fire from the defenders on the two sides of the point tended to diverge. It was for that reason that the Confederates had stacked up so many guns at the broad tip, and since there was a clear field of fire in front of this place the guns were extremely effective. But it was believed that if a solid corps of infantry made a sudden rush at the very moment of daybreak—a rush patterned after Upton’s, with no firing and no stopping until the parapet was reached—the men could overrun the tip of the salient before the guns could hurt them very badly. Then, with the end of the salient punched in, the support troops could come piling in on either side—and there, it might be, was the recipe for victory.

  So Hancock’s corps was to take position three quarters of a mile north of the tip of the salient, and at the first light of day it was to go into action. On Hancock’s left Burnside’s corps was in line, and Wright’s corps was lined up on Hancock’s right, and they were to come in the moment Hancock’s men needed help. On the extreme right of the army was Warren’s corps, and it was to be on the alert also, ready to smash the Confederate left down below the salient. Thus virtually all of the troops would be thrown into the offensive, which was a new note: never before had the army tried to put its entire weight into one co-ordinated smash.

  There have been worse battle plans, and although neither Grant nor Meade realized it they were helped by a thumping piece of good luck. During that rainy afternoon of May 11, Rebel scouts had seen Federal trains moving off toward the northeast, and it seemed to Lee that Grant was beginning to shift around the Confederate right. It would be necessary to move fast to meet the shift, and during the evening Lee ordered that all artillery which was posted where it could not move quickly should be pulled out of the line and held in readiness for a quick start. This applied principally to the twenty-two guns in the nose of the salient, and sometime before midnight all of these guns were limbered up and taken back to the rear. General Ewell, who commanded the Confederates who held the salient, was left without his ace of trumps.9

  A good plan, then, and unexpected good luck to go with it; and yet, as that black wet night unrolls its story, one gets the impression of a queer, uncertain fumbling, as if there mysteriously existed in the army a gap between conception and execution which could never quite be bridged. Meade’s chief of staff was General Andrew A. Humphreys, and Humphreys was very capable; the column of attack belonged to Hancock, who was by all odds the army’s best corps commander; but with good men to plan and lead, and ample staffs to aid them, what finally came out of it all was a blundering lunge which hit the right spot largely by accident and which missed turning into an incredible disaster only because those twenty-two guns had been taken away.

  Never before had the soldiers and their leaders gone into action so completely ignorant about where they were supposed to go and what they were going to find when they got there. Hancock wrote that he had sent a couple of staff officers out the afternoon before, with an officer from Grant’s staff, to look the ground over, “but owing to the uncertainty as to the exact point to be attacked no very definite information was obtained.” 10 He tried to use Mott’s dejected soldiers to drive in the Rebel picket line so that he could get a better view of things, but the attempt was a flat failure and when it came time to move the corps up to the jump-off point the best corps headquarters could do was to lay a map on a farmhouse table and study it. Here where the troops were forming there was a house, clearly shown on the map; off to the south the map showed another house, which seemed to be approximately in the middle of the Rebel salient; draw a line, then, from house to house on the map, see what compass point the line hits, and give that to the division commanders for a guide.

  It was done so, by lamplight, while the rain came down in sheets outside, and the division commanders got their instructions, which were vague—the attack was supposed to hit the Rebel flank, it was a move of more than ordinary importance, and if it succeeded the country would owe a great debt to the officers responsible; that was about it, as men who were present recalled it. No one knew anything about the strength of the enemy or even about the enemy’s position, except that it was off to the south. When it was time to move, staff and engineer officers would be on hand to take the men to the spot where they were to begin their charge.11

  Hancock gave the lead to his first division, which was led by Brigadier General Francis Barlow. Barlow had been a New York lawyer before the war, knowing nothing about military matters, and after Fort Sumter he had joined a militia regiment as a private. He had a knack for leadership, and he liked to fight, and in the reshuffle that followed Bull Run he became a colonel. He had been badly wounded at Antietam and again at Gettysburg, and he was a slight, frail-looking man with no color in his cheeks, a loose-jointed unsoldierly air about him when he walked, with deadly emotionless eyes looking out of a clean-shaven face, and when he spoke his voice seemed thin and lackluster.

  To all appearances he was no soldier at all, but the man who went by Barlow’s appearance was badly deceived. He was hard and cold and very much in earnest, a driving disciplinarian who began by making his men hate him and ended by winning their respect because he always seemed to know what he was doing and because the spirit of fear was not in him. When he wrote his reports he often lapsed into legalistic jargon: his troops moved “on or about” a certain hour, and after various experiences they took “the aforesaid hill” or wood lot or whatever, and through it all there is the echo of a lawyer’s clerk preparing a deposition; but underneath everything there was a ferocious fighting man who drove
himself and his men as if the doorway to Hell were opening close behind them.12

  Barlow got his men together in the dripping night. Upton’s example had struck home, and the division was put into a solid mass one regiment wide and twenty or thirty ranks deep, everybody elbow to elbow and each line right on the heels of the line ahead. Orders were to advance in complete silence, nobody yelling or touching the trigger of his musket until they reached the Rebel trenches. On Barlow’s right, invisible in the inky wet, was the division led by General David Bell Birney, a pale, ascetic-looking man with a wispy beard and a Puritanical devotion to his duty, and somewhere back of these men were John Gibbon and his division, with Mott’s unhappy warriors still farther to the rear waiting to be called on if needed. Altogether, there were more than 15,000 men grouped together here in the leaking dark, their clothing as wet as if they had all fallen in a river, nothing ahead of them but the silent night and the loom of indistinct hills and forests in the downpour. Barlow was the guide, to take them up to the tip of the Rebel salient.

  After much blind galloping by couriers and staff officers, the immense mass of soldiers began to move, mud clinging to heavy feet at every step. Barlow had his compass points straight, and he set out confidently enough, with two staff officers beside him for guidance. But as they moved he learned that these officers knew no more than he did about what lay ahead of them. Indeed, they were complaining bitterly about being sent to conduct a move when they knew nothing whatever about it. They staggered and stumbled on—by Barlow’s orders all horses were left behind, and division commander and all other officers were tramping along on foot—and nobody could see anything and nobody knew anything, and presently the whole situation began to strike General Barlow as very funny in a horrible sort of way.

  At his side was Hancock’s chief of staff, and this man, Barlow wrote, was “a profane swearer” who as they plodded on kept making pungent remarks about the conduct of the war. As this officer made the high command’s utter ignorance about everything connected with this venture more and more obvious, Barlow asked him finally, and in straight-faced jest, if he could at least be sure that there was not an open canyon a thousand feet deep between the place where they then were and the place where the Confederates had built their trenches, and the officer frankly confessed that he had no such assurance; upon which firebrand Nelson Miles, one of Barlow’s brigadiers, voiced his disgust so loudly and bitterly that Barlow had to tell him to shut up. The rain stopped, and the sky began to grow dull and pale, and a thick clammy fog floated up from the lower ground. The vast column oozed along down a slanting field, and Barlow at last told the staff people: “For Heaven’s sake, at least face us in the right direction, so that we shall not march away from the enemy and have to go round the world and come up in their rear.” 13