A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  Yet in making this move Grant was not simply gambling that Lee could be hoodwinked. Lee or any other general could be fooled briefly, in this country of obscure roads and concealing swamps and woods, but it was not likely that he could be fooled for very long. What Grant was really banking on was the belief that the terrible pounding of the last six weeks had taken something out of the Army of Northern Virginia—that it was no longer the quick, instantly responsive instrument that had made such deadly thrusts in the past, and that it would not lash out today as it had done in 1862, when it discovered its opponent in the act of making a flank march across its front. Those tawny gray legions were still unconquerable behind trenches, but they had lost the incomparable offensive power of the old days: that, in essence, seems to have been the bet Grant was really making.23

  The different Federal moves were intricate, this night of June 12, but the timing was good. Hancock and Wright took their men back to the inner trench line as insurance against accidents. Smith led his XVIII Corps back to White House, where the transports were waiting. Burnside followed, turning off a few miles short of White House to follow a road down to the James. Wilson’s cavalry, left behind by Sheridan, moved down to a Chickahominy crossing at Long Bridge—the bridge had long since been destroyed and the name merely designated a place—and went splashing across the river in the midnight dark, laying a pontoon bridge immediately afterward. Warren’s V Corps promptly crossed on this bridge and marched boldly in the direction of Richmond along the fringe of historic White Oak Swamp.

  By dawn of June 13 there was nobody left at Cold Harbor. Even the inner line was empty, for it needed to be held only long enough to protect: the withdrawal of the rest of the army, and by daylight the VI Corps was following Burnside’s men and Hancock was taking his corps down over the Long Bridge crossing. When Confederate skirmishers crept forward across the strangely silent rifle pits they found nothing but empty trenches and the indescribable unseemly refuse left behind by a departing army. Since the Yankees did seem to be moving toward Richmond below White Oak Swamp, Lee pulled his own army out of its lines and moved down to cover the capital, occupying roughly the ground that had been fought over so hard during the McClellan retreat in 1862, from Glendale to Malvern Hill. Meanwhile, Warren withdrew his own corps—he had moved forward simply to protect the rest of the army during the early stages of the march—and headed for a spot known as Charles City Courthouse, close to the James. Wilson’s cavalry remained behind, holding all of the road crossings and driving back the inquisitive Rebel patrols. A curtain was drawn between the two armies, and for the first time in a month and a half Federal and Confederate infantry were out of contact.

  Thoroughly delighted to get away from Cold Harbor, the men of the Army of the Potomac were also deeply surprised. For once, no camp rumor had warned of the move, and up to the last the men had been busy elaborating their trench system as if they were to stay there all year. Things had changed, one veteran mused, “and it was not now the custom to inform the rank and file, and the newspapers and the enemy, of intended movements.” Another man was reminded by this march down to the river of the similar march two years earlier, under McClellan, and it seemed to him that everything was much better now than it had been then. Cold Harbor had been terrible, and what led up to it had not been much better, but morale was good and the men proved it by their looks and actions. On the earlier march they felt that they had been beaten, and were depressed; now they felt that they were on the way to victory, and they stepped out with a springy step.24

  Late in the afternoon of June 13 the advance guard reached the James River, coming down to it past an impressive plantation once owned by the late President Tyler—the “Tyler too” of the rowdy campaign song. The river was broad and it glinted in the afternoon sun, and it was the first really pleasant-looking body of water anybody had seen since the campaign began. Yankee warships were anchored in the stream, white awnings spread against the heat, small boats coming ashore with rhythmical dip and swing of dripping oars.

  An officer on Meade’s staff found himself blinking and gaping at these Navy people as they came ashore. There seemed to be something wrong about them, and at last he realized what it was. They were all clean, their persons washed, their uniforms whole, unfaded, and unsullied. The officer discovered that he had got to the point where he was suspicious of anyone who was not dirty and in rags. He was used to soldiers, and where soldiers were concerned, “the more they serve, the less they look like soldiers and the more they resemble day-laborers who had bought second-hand military clothes.” 25

  Only the leading echelons of the army reached the river that evening. They included a swarm of engineers who immediately went to work to lay a pontoon bridge over to the southern shore. The army had never built such a prodigious bridge before. It would be nearly half a mile long and it would require more than a hundred pontoons, and three schooners had to be anchored in the deep water out in midstream to support the central section of the bridge. The sappers got to work without delay, tugboats and barges bringing men and material to each shore, and along the bank where the advance guard was camped there was a great chopping and shoveling, because a grove of huge old cypress trees had to be cut down and it was necessary to build a causeway across a swamp to provide an approach to the bridge. Other details went to work to put a half-ruined wharf in proper shape, a little upstream from the place where the bridge was being built, and the transports were anchored just offshore to take men aboard as soon as the wharf was repaired. As many of the soldiers as could get down to the water went in swimming, whooping and splashing as they began soaking off the sweat and grime of weeks of fighting.

  A mile or so from the water, Gibbon’s division was camped on the plantation of Tyler-too. The enemy was many miles away, and the officers announced that the camp need not be fortified. Nevertheless, as soon as the men had stacked their muskets they began to dig a long trench all across the western edge of the plantation, and before they went to bed they had the place in shape to resist a regular assault. Meade’s assistant adjutant general looked on their handiwork and concluded that the enlisted man was convinced that a rifle pit was “a good thing to have in a family where there are small children.” 26

  4. Lie Down, You Damn Fools

  Major General William Farrar Smith was a professional soldier who had nearly all of the qualitites needed for success except a sense of the value of time and the ability to get along with his superior officers—to whom, as an admirer confessed, he was at times “a perfect Ishmaelite.” His subordinates liked him immensely. He was kindly and courteous without condescension, he “looked after his men,” in the army phrase, and his headquarters tents were a fabulous place to visit. Champagne was commonly served at dinner—it was so even at Cold Harbor, where Meade dropped in for lunch the day after the big assault and found things so pleasant he remained until dusk—and an overnight guest could expect to be awakened in the morning by a servant bearing a champagne cocktail. Yet with all of this, and the innumerable card games that were played, neither Smith nor his staff ever acquired the rake-hell reputation that clung about such a general as Joe Hooker.

  Smith had been “Baldy” ever since his days as a West Point cadet, partly because of a thinned spot on his crown, but mostly, as a friend explained, because there were so many Smiths in the army that each one had to have an identifying nickname. Even men who did not like him—and, in the end, this included nearly all of the generals under whom he had served—admitted that he was brilliant. He ranked fourth in his class at the Academy on his graduation in 1845, he had gone into the engineers, and he had served for a number of years on the West Point faculty. On a tour of duty in Florida in the 1850s he had contracted malaria, from which he still suffered at times, and when the fever took him he was gloomy and morose. He had a sharp tongue and he never bothered to control it when he observed shortcomings in a superior officer, and this had done him much harm.1

  In this war he had been up, an
d then down, and finally up again. He had organized and been first colonel of the 3rd Vermont Infantry, serving at the first battle of Bull Run and winning appointment as brigadier general and command of a division shortly thereafter. He fought well under McClellan on the peninsula, won promotion to major general and command of the IX Corps, which he led at Fredericksburg, and then he fell into trouble by giving vent to pointed public criticism of General Burnside.

  Practically everybody was criticizing Burnside just then, but Burnside was backed by the powerful Committee on the Conduct of the War, which was suspicious of Smith anyway because he had been a close friend of McClellan. The upshot was that Smith lost both his corps command and his promotion, with the Senate refusing to confirm his nomination as major general, and for a time he dropped into obscurity. He showed up in Chattanooga in the fall of 1863 as chief engineer for the Army of the Cumberland, and in the dark days following Chickamauga he did a first-rate job of organizing and running the famous “cracker line” which saved the beaten army from starvation. (He had an extended row about this, later, with General Rosecrans, his commanding officer at the time, with both men claiming credit for the job.) When Grant moved in and put Thomas in Rosecrans’s place he was highly impressed with Smith’s capacities, and when Grant took command of all the armies he ordered Smith east and gave him an army corps under Ben Butler.

  This brought Smith new troubles. It would have brought them to anybody, because serving under Butler was hard, but Smith was probably the last man in the army to adjust himself quietly to that officer’s ruinous eccentricities. (To Grant, about this time, Smith burst out furiously, asking how he could retain in army command a man who “is as helpless as a child on the field of battle and as visionary as an opium eater in council.”)2 Since Butler was even more disputatious than Smith, and in addition possessed immense political influence, Smith’s difficulties had been increasing by geometrical progression.

  Probably no campaign in all the war was as badly mishandled as that of the Army of the James in the spring of 1864. While Grant was coming down through the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, Butler was taking his army up the James to menace Richmond from the south. He could have walked in and occupied Petersburg then almost without opposition, but apparently the idea did not appeal to him. Instead he wandered around the country, started for Petersburg and then turned back, lunged ineffectively toward Richmond, and wound up by letting a much smaller Confederate army lock him up in the formless peninsula of Bermuda Hundred—James River on the north and east, Appomattox on the south, and stout Rebel entrenchments running completely across the neck.3

  When Smith was ordered to take his army corps away from there and help the Army of the Potomac at Cold Harbor, he went gladly, figuring that the fewer troops Butler commanded, the less harm was likely to result. But he found his reception in the clique-ridden Army of the Potomac lacking in warmth, and he was bitterly critical of the way Meade was running things, and when he brought his troops back to Bermuda Hundred he was not in a happy frame of mind.4

  At Bermuda Hundred, however, new orders awaited him. Grant made a quick trip to see Butler, to outline the new campaign plans in person, and when Smith got his men off the transports he was told to take them over to the south side of the Appomattox and march on Petersburg without delay. Petersburg, he was informed, was held by a skeleton force and if he moved fast he could seize it, and the Army of the Potomac would follow to provide all necessary reinforcements. Smith’s corps was badly thinned down—it had had heavy losses at Cold Harbor, there had been a great deal of straggling, and one division was to be left at Bermuda Hundred—and to bring him up to strength he was allotted a slim division of colored troops commanded by Brigadier General Edward W. Hinks.

  These colored soldiers had been occupying City Point, a little steamboat landing on a low promontory on the south bank of the Appomattox at the point where that river flowed into the James. They had not yet been in any serious action, and most of the generals took it for granted that colored men would not make good soldiers, but Grant was in a hurry and there was no time to wait. So early on the morning of June 15 Smith’s men crossed the Appomattox on a pontoon bridge a mile or two above City Point, picked up Hinks’s soldiers, and set out for Petersburg. Altogether there were perhaps 10,000 men in the united column.

  By an air line Petersburg was eight miles to the west. The ground was broken, with a series of north-and-south ridges coming down to the Appomattox, and the city might not be too easy to capture. If the Confederates could not spare many men for its defense, they had had plenty of time and abundant slave labor to fortify it, and a great semicircle of elaborate defenses ran all around it, starting in low ground by the Appomattox two miles east of town, cutting south in a great horseshoe curve, and coming up to the river again on the west. A few determined men could make these defenses very formidable, and after their experience at Cold Harbor Smith and his men were likely to be cautious when they saw Rebel trenches. Nevertheless, as the corps marched westward, raising an enormous cloud of dust and brushing Southern skirmishers out of the way, Smith was approaching one of the brightest opportunities an ambitious general could ask.

  For the matter of that so was the Army of the Potomac, which was getting over to the south bank of the James as fast as it could, by pontoon bridge and by steamboat, in order to follow in his footsteps.

  Never had the army been in a better strategic position than it was getting into on this fifteenth of June. Behind it were six weeks of the worst campaigning anybody had ever imagined, but all that had been endured might be justified by what lay just ahead. The army now was squarely in the rear of its opponent, the Army of Northern Virginia, which was still holding its trenches around Malvern Hill and Glendale, prepared to defend itself against an attack that was not going to take place. Grant had taken the army entirely out of Lee’s reach, and in a few hours he would be able to strike where his enemy could not make an effective defense. Conclusive victory lay just ahead.

  During the next few hours everything was going to be up to Baldy Smith and his 10,000. Smith took the men toward Petersburg, with his own divisions on the right and the colored troops on the left, and as the morning wore on the Rebel resistance grew stiffer, until at last Hinks had to move his men out into line of battle and storm a little hill where infantry and a couple of guns offered more than skirmish-line opposition. The colored boys went up the hill with a rush, driving away the defenders and capturing one of the guns, but the fight caused a delay and it was nearly noon when Smith’s column came up against the main line of Confederate works.

  These looked dangerous. The City Point Railroad ran half a mile or more south of the river, and between the railroad and the river the ground was low and the Rebel trench line slanted back toward the northwest, the ground in its front covered by guns mounted on bluffs on the far side of the river. Just south of the railroad the ground rose, and a long, uneven crest ran south for several miles, and this high ground was covered with fortifications that appeared to be stronger than anything that had been seen at Cold Harbor.

  At intervals there were redoubts—square forts, solidly built, with embrasures for artillery. The redoubts were connected by ponderous raised breastworks, twenty feet thick at the base and six feet high. In front of the breastworks there was a ditch, fifteen feet wide by six or eight feet deep, and a few yards in front of the ditch there was an interminable slashing of felled trees anchored in place with branches all interlaced. From end to end of the line the ground in front of the slashing was open for half a mile so that it could be swept by fire from the forest and trenches. Close to the slashing there were deep rifle pits for the skirmishers.5

  All in all, it was no place to approach lightly. It seemed to Smith that the position was even stronger than the mountaintop line the Confederates had held at Chattanooga. That line, to be sure, had finally been stormed, but no one quite understood even yet how it had been done and one man who watched it wrote that the victory looked like
“a visible interposition of God.” Smith had to form his battle lines in deep woods and that took time, and it was two o’clock or later before he had everything ready.

  Even when the lines were formed Smith was not disposed to be hasty. It was clear to him that if these Rebel trenches were held in strength, no attack could possibly succeed. Potentially, the place was a worse deathtrap than Cold Harbor, and Smith was not going to order an attack until he had studied things very carefully. He went out in front personally to do his looking, exposing himself to dangerous sniper fire, and he spent two full hours making his survey, going from end to end of the lines and studying the situation with the canny eye of a skilled engineer.6

  Now these Confederate works were just as strong as they looked, but they had one glaring weakness: they contained hardly any soldiers.

  Confederate commander here was the famous General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, a vain and theatrical personality, but at the same time a very good soldier. He was responsible for the defense of everything south of the James River, and after he had bottled Butler’s army up at Bermuda Hundred he had to send some of his best troops across the river to help Lee, and on this day of June 15 he had no more than 7,000 soldiers in his command. Most of these were in the Bermuda Hundred lines, which was where most of the pressure had been so far, and in front of Petersburg there were barely 2,200 men, including home guards and cavalry. With several miles of trench to occupy, these were spread very thin, one infantryman to every four or five yards of trench. They could kill a certain number of Yankees but they could not possibly beat off a really determined attack, and no one knew it any better than Beauregard did. He had been calling for help, and a division of the troops that had been sent to Lee was on its way back to him, but it could not reach him until midnight or later and until then he was strictly on his own.7