A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  On this nineteenth of May the Confederates made another of their patented blows at the Yankee flank. Ewell’s corps went out beyond the Union right and came down through the woods heading straight for a road where the vast wagon trains were unloading, and all that stood in the way was an untested division made up of some of those heavy artillery regiments which had been uprooted from their comfortable berths in the Washington forts.

  The veterans had not been kind to these men. As they were marched up to go into their first fight, the ex-artillerists passed a batch of wounded men who were awaiting medical attention. These men exhibited their wounds, some of which were pretty ghastly, and pointed out that the heavies would very soon be getting hurt as badly as this or even worse. Some called out, “Dearest, why did you leave your earthworks?” Others pulled a covering blanket from a dreadfully mangled corpse that lay by the road and invited the green soldiers to look at what happened to combat soldiers. There was nothing for the heavies to do but swallow hard and keep marching, and before long they formed line of battle and went off through the underbrush to fight with Lee’s veterans.

  The heavies knew nothing about fighting, but they were willing to learn. For an hour or more they had it out with Ewell’s men, back and forth across a series of wooded hollows and little ravines, and at the end of that time the Confederates were in full retreat, with 900 dead and wounded left on the ground. About an equal number of the heavies had been shot, and when a newspaper correspondent asked how they had behaved, one of their officers explained: “Well, after a few minutes they got a little mixed and didn’t fight very tactically, but they fought confounded plucky.” It is recorded that ever after that the Army of the Potomac had no more jeers for heavy artillerists but admitted them to full comradeship.26

  A day or so after this the army began to move again. It was not just edging a little farther around the Confederate flank, this time, but was really taking to the road, heading south. The soldiers’ spirits rose with the move—the Spotsylvania area was one any soldier would be glad to leave—and although a light rain was falling, it merely served to lay the dust, and as they marched a number of the battle-thinned regiments did what veterans rarely did: they began to sing while they marched.

  Yet moods could change fast, and the singing did not last long. A regiment would be trudging down the road, singing as if all of war’s trials were far away. Then, inexplicably, the song would come to a sudden stop. There would be a brief silence, and then from one end of the regiment to the other, spurred by a common impulse, the men would yell: “I want to go home!” 27

  CHAPTER THREE

  One More River to Cross

  1. The Cripples Who Could Not Run

  THE drama no longer lay in the great events that took place down by the footlights. At the back of the stage there was a silent unbroken procession of young men who looked old and tired, wearing uniforms much the worse for weather and hard wear: a procession that moved eternally out of life and into death or mutilation, compelling the attention simply because there were so many men in it that it was hard to think about anything else. Lincoln had to see it, and he paced the halls of the White House without sleep, a grotesque lanky figure who could feel the lash on another man’s back, and he considered the sound and fury which Macbeth had heard on his own stage and he listened for something beyond it. If that something was there it would come out someday, and if it was not there then the sooner the idiot’s tale was told and finished the better for everyone. Always the silent procession kept moving, and there were off-stage sounds of hoarse cheers, and bursts of musketry and the thudding of the guns, and the maddening imperious command of the bugles.

  In the old days there would have been a lull. There had been continuous fighting or marching for more than two weeks, and the soldiers had neither taken off their clothing nor had an unbroken night’s rest since they crossed the Rapidan. Losses had been appalling. Many brigades were no bigger than regiments ought to be, and any number of regiments were down to normal company strength. Two whole divisions had been cut up so badly that they had to be discontinued, the remnants consolidated with other units. Behind the army there was a litter of broken human bodies extending all the way back from Fredericksburg to the crowded hospitals around Washington.

  The casualty lists told a story. The army moved south from Spotsylvania Court House a little more than a fortnight after it had crossed the Rapidan. In that time more than 33,000 men had been lost. Averaged out, this meant that 2,000 men were being killed or wounded every twenty-four hours. Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville together had taken no such toll as this. Now, instead of pulling back for a breathing spell, the army was going to plunge even more deeply into action, with every prospect that the killing would go on and on without a respite.

  Grant had had to change his plans, for this move south had not been on his program. In the heat of the fighting around the little courthouse town he had told Washington that he would fight it out along this line if it took all summer, and when he said it that promise made sense. Lee’s army was smaller than the Army of the Potomac, and in the fighting thus far the two armies were losing just about the same percentages of the numbers engaged. If they were applied long enough these percentages meant certain doom for the weaker army. The mathematics were ugly but inexorable: sooner or later, Lee’s army would be too thin to stand the hammering.

  But the picture had suddenly changed, and instead of forcing a decision where it was, the Army of the Potomac now had to march for the open country, trying to get into such a position that Lee would have to stop digging invulnerable trenches and come out to attack. Those deadly percentages would work for the Federals only as long as Lee was deprived of reinforcements. Grant had made certain arrangements to bring that deprivation about, and those arrangements had unexpectedly collapsed.

  In the Shenandoah Valley there was a little Union army under Franz Sigel, moving south to close that granary and highway of war to the Confederacy, and south of the James River Ben Butler was leading two army corps up toward the Rebel capital. It did not really matter very much whether either of these generals actually reached his goal, so long as both of them kept diligently trying to reach it. But both men had failed.

  Sigel met a scratch Confederate army at a town called Newmarket and was driven back in wild rout, a devoted and unskilled soldier failing in a task he should never have been given. (How differently John Sedgwick might have done it, if the demotion Stanton had planned had been accomplished!) Butler had done no better. With much ceremony and scheming he managed to let inferior numbers drive him into a broad peninsula jutting out into the James. The Confederates promptly dug in across the neck of the peninsula, leaving him locked up as securely as if he and all his soldiers had been in prison.

  With these two disasters, everything came unstitched. Grant got the bad news while he was still hammering at the Spotsylvania lines, and the evil part of it was the certain knowledge that, because Sigel and Butler had been beaten, the Confederates who had been fighting them would immediately move up to reinforce Lee. That meant that to “fight it out along this line” was no longer a good move. The Confederates had had heavy losses in the past fortnight—in the first week of the action, 7,000 Rebel prisoners had been sent north, and more were coming in—and up to now the terrible percentages had been working for the North. But now the defeats along the James and the Shenandoah meant that Lee’s losses would all be made good. In effect, the Army of Northern Virginia was going to be about as strong after three weeks of fighting as it had been before the fighting began. Plans which had been based on the assumption that it would be a great deal weaker would have to be changed.

  So Grant sat down at his field desk and wrote orders for another move by the left flank: a move like the one which took the army out of the Wilderness, a shift east and south, maneuver in place of continued fighting. In a way this might be playing Lee’s game, but there was no help for it. Reinforced, Lee could hold his Spotsylvania lines indefini
tely. If there was such a thing as a road to victory, it led around those trenches, not over them.1

  As the army began to move, Grant and Meade studied the casualty lists together. They were in contrast, those two soldiers. Men who had long since lost their enthusiasm for generals looked at them curiously when they appeared side by side. There was a gunner who remembered how his battery was brought forward one day to beat in some Rebel strong point which was holding up an infantry advance. Shortly after the guns opened Grant and Meade rode up and posted themselves under a nearby tree to watch the fight. Meade was nervous, moving about, constantly stroking his beard, fretting when the fight went badly. Grant stood quietly, a cigar in his teeth, his face utterly expressionless in its wreath of tobacco smoke, and he seemed like a man forced to watch something that did not interest him at all. The fight failed, and the open field in front was stained with blue bodies, and the two generals mounted and rode off, Grant still looking as if he had seen nothing in particular.

  “The enlisted men looked curiously at Grant,” wrote the gunner, “And after he had disappeared they talked of him, and of the dead and wounded men who lay in the pasture field; and all of them said just what they thought, as was the wont of American soldiers.” 2

  Yet the contrast between the two generals was not quite what it seemed to be. Grant was the stolid, remorseless killer and Meade was the sensitive man who sparred and drew back and tried at all times to conserve the lives of his men; yet of the two it was Grant who winced in agony at the price men were paying for the fighting. It was he and not the other man who felt the compulsion to look at the unbroken column moving across the back of the stage, the men who marched from life to death and carried the war on their bowed shoulders. It seems that the thought of this wrung some kind of outcry from him—must there be all of this killing?

  It was Meade who laconically gave him such comfort as could be given,

  “Well, General,” said Meade, “we can’t do these little tricks without losses.” 8

  The whole army had grasped this point, accepting it without enthusiasm but with a minimum of complaint. Yet the burden of the losses lay everywhere, and now and then it caused an outcry, unheard at the moment, echoing faintly down the years. In a Wisconsin regiment a devout chaplain somehow found a quiet hour and managed to hold divine services, and to the tanned veterans who were grouped about him in the firelight he preached a thumping sermon full of hell-fire and eternal punishment, predestination darkly illumined by grace abounding, and the regiment’s colonel was rubbed where it hurt. He called the chaplain to his tent after the services and told him off.

  “I don’t want any more of that doctrine preached in this regiment,” said the colonel sternly. “Every one of my boys who fall fighting this great battle of liberty is going to Heaven, and I won’t allow any other principle to be promulgated to them while I command the regiment.” 4

  A Michigan infantryman, looking back on the fighting, noted in his diary that General Lee must be a great strategist. No matter where the army went, the Rebels were always there in front of it, and the Rebel line always seemed to hold firmly no matter how hard it was hit. And the soldier mused: “Now what is the reason that we cannot walk right straight through them with our far superior numbers? We fight as good as they. They must understand the country better, or there is a screw loose somewhere in the machinery of our army.”

  Commenting on the Bloody Angle fight, the same soldier was moved to a protest:

  “Surely, we cannot see much generalship in our campaign so far, and the soldiers are getting sick of such butchery in such a way. Half the time the men are fighting on their own responsibility, and if there is anything gained so far it is by brute force and not by generalship.” 5

  Whatever the ins and outs of it might be, the soldier had touched on a basic point. The only value that seemed to amount to anything any more was the simple courage of the enlisted man. In different ways the various units of the army recognized the fact and reacted accordingly, and the soldiers found their own direct and brutal ways to punish the men who did not measure up.

  In a Pennsylvania regiment which fought at the Bloody Angle there was one man who ran from the fighting and found safety in the rear. He was fished out of his transient security, and next day the colonel devised a horrible punishment. He had the man bucked and gagged and deposited him, trussed up and helpless, in front of regimental headquarters. Then he had the man’s own company march past him in single file, and as they did so the colonel ordered them to spit in the face of the man who had run away. The men obeyed without a quibble and felt that the punishment was simple justice.

  A New York battery had a different system. This battery was in the IX Corps line during hard fighting to the east of the Bloody Angle, and a general who came by in the heat of the battle found one wriggling man tied up between two trees near the guns, a helpless target for all of the Confederate bullets. The general asked about it, and was told that the man was a notorious shirker, present for duty only when it was time to draw rations; the men had caught him this time and had spread-eagled him under fire, hoping that he would be hit. The general laughed and told the battery commander to keep the man tied up until sundown, and an infantry major who happened by burst out: “I’ll bet he is a big-bounty man. Keep the — —— — – - —– there and get him killed, if possible, for the good of the service!” In some miraculous way (for the Rebel fire was very heavy) the man escaped all harm. He was released at night and he vanished in the dark and the battery never saw him again.

  A Massachusetts soldier wrote that a straggler in his regiment was taken to the colonel, given a drumhead court-martial, and immediately shot to death—an event, he said, which noticeably discouraged straggling in the regiment thereafter. A company of Regular sharpshooters was paraded one evening, between fights, to see a runaway comrade drummed out of service in the old manner. The man’s head had been shaved and the buttons of his uniform had been cut off, and he was marched down between the facing rows of his fellows, each man standing with lowered musket and fixed bayonet; and a squad came along just behind the man with more bayonets to prod him on his way. As the scapegrace shaven figure shambled along, the fife and drum corps piped the “Rogue’s March”:

  Poor old soldier—poor old soldier—

  Tarred and feathered

  And then drummed out

  Because he wouldn’t soldier.

  At the end of the ceremony the man fled into the woods, and the men saw no more of him.6

  Yet, if the soldiers would readily kill or humiliate cowards, they could also laugh at them. A standard army joke was the story of the notorious slacker who bragged that when the battle was at its worst he could always be found where the bullets were thickest—far to the rear, safely hidden under an ammunition wagon. The army also liked the story about the Irish private (a good story was always pinned on an Irishman in those days, if possible) who used as his own means of escape from action the shopworn excuse that he had to help a wounded comrade to the rear. In one battle, according to this story, the soldier undertook to help a comrade who cried that his leg had been shot off. Bending down, he got the wounded man over his shoulder and started out. As he stumbled along a cannon ball came out of nowhere and took off the head of the man he was carrying. After a time the Irishman got to a dressing station and offered his burden to the doctors, who asked him what he expected them to do for a man who had no head. Dumfounded, the soldier looked at the corpse and cried indignantly: “The deceiving creature—he told me it was his leg!” 7

  Sometimes the army’s stories were told on Confederates. The Philadelphia brigade claimed that at Spotsylvania a ragged Rebel jumped out of the opposite trench and came running toward the Union lines. Just as he reached his goal a bullet hit him, and when the Federals came to pick him up he gasped: “I’m sorry you shot me—I was coming over to take the oath of allegiance.” His captors confessed that they had no copy of that famous oath, but one of them remarked that t
hey did have a canteen with a little whisky in it. Reviving, the Confederate sat up and said eagerly: “That will do just as well.” 8

  The mail service caught up with the army just as it was leaving the Spotsylvania Court House area, and for the first time since they crossed the Rapidan the men got letters from home. They also got newspapers, which they read with eager curiosity, and as they read these papers they discovered anew that the war as it was described for people back home bore very little resemblance to the war which they themselves were actually fighting. In a Massachusetts battery the men hooted at newspaper accounts which proclaimed that Lee’s army was “utterly routed and fleeing in confusion.” One of the gunners remarked disgustedly that this, “like so much of the trash published by the papers during the war, would have been decidedly important if true.” 9

  It did not really make much difference, for there was nothing the outside world could tell these soldiers anyway. The army’s world was enclosed by cavalry patrols and moving skirmish lines, and in the obscurity beyond those boundaries there was the Rebel army, sometimes out of sight but never out of touch. The normal state of all previous armies—the state in which most of the soldier’s time was spent—was neither marching nor fighting but quiet life in camp, barracks, or garrison. An army might march far and fight furiously, but when all of its days as an army were added up it would be found that most of them had been dull, monotonous days of inaction. But from the moment the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan on May 5 to the end of the war, eleven months later, there was no inaction whatever. Instead there was marching or fighting every day, and very often both together, and physical contact with the enemy was never wholly broken.10 The final grapple had begun, and the war had become a war of using up—using up men and emotions and the wild impossible dreams that had called the armies into being in the first place—and everything that Americans would ever do thereafter would be affected in one way or another by what remained after the using up was completed.