A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  There had been one other failure, and in some ways it was the worst of the lot. When Beauregard pulled his troops out of the Bermuda Hundred lines in order to save Petersburg, Butler’s inactive army was released. For twenty-four hours the way was open for it to move forward, cut the railroad and highway from Petersburg to Richmond, and sever all communications between Beauregard and Lee. Butler’s front-line commanders saw the chance and tried to do something about it, and Grant saw it and sent Wright and two divisions of the VI Corps over to help, but Butler flubbed the shot completely. He hesitated and considered and then launched a spate of orders which looked good on paper but which served only to confuse the generals who had to do the fighting, and before he could get himself rounded up Lee sent Pickett’s division in, shoved the irresolute Federals back, and closed the gap for good.

  Somewhere, in the tangled mesh of politics that lay between Washington and the fighting fronts, Butler possessed influence that even the commander of the armies could not break. Grant tried to have him removed, and failed. Then he worked out a scheme by which Butler would retain his command but would do all of his work down at Fortress Monroe, where there was administrative routine to be handled, leaving all military operations to Baldy Smith, his second-in-command. That could not be done, either. Butler held his job and he held it on his own terms, although Grant warned Halleck that relations between Butler and Smith were so bad that if Butler stayed Smith probably would have to go.

  In the end, Smith did go; and in the end, when he went, it was Grant who sent him away. While he fought his losing fight to get rid of Butler, Grant seems to have done a good deal of thinking about Smith’s performance on June 15, when he captured the Confederate forts and then sent his soldiers to bed instead of into Petersburg. In the end Grant concluded that Smith was a man he could do without, Butler or no Butler, and when he came to this conclusion he acted on it. Smith was quietly removed and sent up to New York—indignant, protesting bitterly, writing long afterward that the real trouble was that Butler had got Grant drunk and then had used his knowledge of the fact as blackmail to make Grant do as Butler wished.9

  The tale can be taken or left alone, at anyone’s choice. The chief trouble is that it is too simple, explaining too much with too little. There is of course no reason to suppose that Butler would have been above blackmailing Grant or anyone else if it would have served his purposes, but something much more intricate than a threat to let one small cat out of a bag was unquestionably involved in the fact that Butler could not be fired. His political power had been moving mountains long before he had any opportunity to lay Grant under threat of exposure.

  Everything about Butler was fantastic, beginning with his personal appearance: lumpy oversized body, arms and legs that looked as if they had been attached as an afterthought, eyes that refused to mesh. As a Democratic politician, he had in 1860 been an ardent supporter of the extreme Southern viewpoint; two years later the Southerners were announcing that Ben Butler was the one Yankee who, if captured by Confederate forces, would be shot without trial. Abolitionists made a hero of him and considered him a great friend of the Negro, although at the beginning of the war he had said that he would not interfere with slavery in a slave state, and when the idea of enlisting Negroes as soldiers was first suggested to him in New Orleans he turned it down flatly. A private in the 25th Massachusetts wrote that “as a military governor he is a none-such … but as a commander of troops in the field he is not just such a man as I should pick out.” 10

  Butler was the archtype of the fixer, the influence man, the person on whom nothing much is ever proved but who is always suspected of everything. Devout Confederates believed that in addition to committing an illegal hanging and insulting Southern womanhood he had in New Orleans personally stolen silver spoons with his own hands. A Northern general who served under him for a time in Virginia reported that Butler had become a dictator who “made laws and administered them, dealt out justice and inflicted punishment, levied fines and collected taxes,” and he added that the air about him was thick with rumors and hints of corruption. A good part of Butler’s territory in the Norfolk-Hampton Roads area was a queer no man’s land in which contraband trade seemed to flourish, with cotton shipped into the Union lines in return for war goods which went to support Lee’s army. Nobody was ever quite sure just who got the rake-off, but it seemed obvious that someone must be getting a good deal. A tremendous scandal was always on the edge of breaking, but the break never quite came. There was always something soiled about the man, but he remained uncanny and untouchable.11

  There were times when it was all but impossible for a good man to work under him. He could send a subordinate an order phrased so as to constitute the most cruel of insults; then, when the officer protested, Butler would write a smooth letter insisting that no insult was intended and that he had the highest personal and professional regard for the man he had insulted. A brilliant lawyer, he knew how to handle words, and none of the professional soldiers who tangled with him could match phrases with him.

  Just at the end of the period when his troops might have broken out of the Bermuda Hundred lines he sent to General Wright a curt order to attack the Rebel troops in his front at once. The situation at the front was not at all as Butler imagined it and Wright wired back that the proposed attack was impossible, suggested an alternative approach, and asked further instructions.

  Immediately Butler replied: “At 7:10 this evening I sent an order to you and General Terry to do some fighting. At 10:30 I get no fighting, but an argument. My order went out by direction of the lieutenant general.” When Wright, somewhat baffled, protested against what he termed an unmerited reproach, Butler blandly replied: “No reproach is given; a fact is stated,” and added loftily that victory could not be won if orders were not obeyed.12

  In his campaign to keep his job this summer Butler held one prodigious trump card which Grant could not see. This was a presidential election year, and just when Grant was trying to rid himself of this incompetent general the leaders of the Republican party, very much against their will, were in the act of renominating President Lincoln for a second term. It was no time to rock the boat, and Butler was just the man who could rock it to the point of capsizing it.

  From the beginning, Lincoln’s real problem had been political. He had a war to win and he had to find generals who could win it, but above everything else he had to control the war—not merely the fighting of it, but the currents which would finally determine what it meant and what would come of it all. So far, the war had brought nothing but death: death by wholesale, death in all its forms, death in hospitals, in blazing thickets, on ridges swept by exploding shell, in ravines where dust and battle smoke lay thick and blinding. Unless the whole thing was no better than fever and madness, all of this death must finally be swallowed up in a victory that would justify the cost. The spirit that would infuse this victory must have infinite breadth, because the country was fighting no enemy: it was simply fighting itself. The death of a South Carolinian, brained by a clubbed musket butt in a fort in front of Petersburg, was fully as significant as the death of a Pennsylvanian killed by a Minié ball in a swamp at Cold Harbor. If what those men had bought, by dying, was to be principally hatred and smash-’em-up, then both deaths had been wasted and dust and ashes were the final truth.

  There were strong men in the North who wanted revenge. The old technique of plowing up the site of a conquered city and sowing the ground with salt had fallen into disuse, since the fall of Carthage, but they would do the best they could with some modern variant. The Ben Wades and the Thad Stevenses and the Zach Chandlers had great capacity for hatred, and the South was not part of the country as they saw it. Lincoln stood in their way, and because they could not budge him they cried that he was soft and irresolute, and they would put one of their own kind in his place if they could. Standing with them were the men whose minds were laudably high but deplorably narrow—the abolitionists, the men who had taken sca
rs in the long fight in the day when the odds were all against them and who now were disposed to judge a man by the iron which he was willing to put into the matter of punishment for the slaveowners.

  There was something to be said on their side. They could remember Bully Brooks and his murderous assault on Sumner, and the taunts and jibes of men like Texas’s Wigfall, who would have turned the Senate into a place where only an expert duelist could speak freely. If they were grim and implacable, it is at least possible to see how they got that way; and in addition they were that part of the Union cause which would never surrender or stop to haggle over costs. They provided a good part of the nerve and sinew which enabled the North to bounce back from Fredericksburg defeats and Wilderness casualty lists, and neither Lincoln nor any other Republican was likely to win the election if they went actively on the warpath.

  What had kept them off the warpath so far was partly the fact that Lincoln did seem to have most of the people with him, and partly the old political truism: You can’t beat somebody with nobody. To date, only nobodies had offered themselves against him, men like John Charles Frémont, who was heading a rickety third-party slate. But Butler was a somebody. Soldiers might know him as a cipher, but with abolitionists and bitter-enders he was a mighty hero. He had boundless ambition and a total lack of scruples, and he saw himself as a presidential possibility. If the army suddenly dropped him he would land in the arms of the political extremists. What that would mean, to the war and to the things that would finally come out of the war, was nothing good men could speculate about with easy hearts.

  So the truth of the matter probably is that in the infinite, complicated economy of the Civil War it was better to keep Ben Butler a major general, even though soldiers were needlessly killed because of it, than it was to inject him back into the political whirlpool. Washington saw it so, at any rate, and Washington had to balance fearful intangibles when it made its decision. And although there was not, fortunately, anyone else quite like Butler, there were many other cases where similar intangibles had to be balanced—cases where the Administration had to ask, in effect: Where will this man do the least harm—as a general, or as a politician out of control? Often enough the wrong guess was made, but that was the kind of riddle the times were asking.

  Halleck understood these matters, and when Grant first began suggesting that it would be easier to win the war with Butler a civilian, Halleck tried to explain to him that political considerations must at times override even the professional judgment of the general in chief. A little earlier, Halleck had frankly confessed in a letter to Sherman that “it seems little better than murder to give important commands to such men as Banks, Butler, McClernand, Sigel and Lew Wallace, and yet it seems impossible to prevent it.” 13 Halleck was right. It was impossible to prevent it. The trouble was that the army had to carry these costly misfits on its shoulders.

  But the political generals were only part of the story, as far as the army was concerned. As the army settled into its trenches after four days of battle in front of Petersburg—four days which cost, roughly, as many killed and wounded as had been lost in all twelve days at Cold Harbor—some of its professionals were giving cause for worry.

  Meade was on the verge of removing Warren, just when Grant was sending Smith into exile. Warren was increasingly given to broad interpretation and spontaneous revision of his orders, and Meade could hardly fail to note that the all-out attack which he had told Warren to make at dawn on the crucial eighteenth of June had not actually been delivered until 3:30 P.M. At one time Meade had definitely made up his mind to send Warren away, but the trouble was reconciled somehow and by July 1 Assistant Secretary of War Dana wired Stanton that “the difficulty between Meade and Warren has been settled without the extreme remedy which Meade proposed last week.”14

  Meade himself was showing the strain. His temper was always bad, but as June wore on into sultry July and frustration followed frustration he became as savage as a wounded grizzly, and Dana was presently telling Stanton: “I do not think he has a friend in the whole army. No man, no matter what his business or his service, approaches him without being insulted in one way or another, and his own staff officers do not dare speak to him unless first spoken to, for fear of either sneers or curses.” Dana added that a change in command seemed probable.15

  There was probably some exaggeration in this. Meade and Grant were never intimates, but in the main they got along well enough. Nevertheless, there was trouble. Meade had handled the Petersburg assaults about as ineptly as they could have been handled, and his angry complaint on the fourth day, that since he had found it impossible to co-ordinate attacks each commander should go ahead and do the best he could on his own hook, went far to merit the comment it got from General Wright—that the different attacks had been ordered “without brains and without generalship.”16 Grant seriously considered taking Meade out of the top spot and sending him up to the Shenandoah Valley, and he appears to have felt that if this happened Hancock was the man to take Meade’s place.17

  Yet that would hardly do, either. Hancock’s wound still refused to heal. He returned to duty late in June, but a wound which remains open after nearly a year takes something out of a man, and Hancock’s great days were over. Like Meade, he was getting irritable, and he was quarreling now with General Gibbon, who had been one of his best friends.18 Worse yet was the fact that if Hancock was not himself his own immediate command, the famous II Army Corps, was in even worse shape.

  The II Corps had been fought out and used up. It had been the most famous corps in the army. It had stormed Bloody Lane at Antietam, it had taken 4,000 casualties at Fredericksburg without flinching, it had beaten back Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, and it had broken the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania. But now it was all shot to pieces, and instead of being the army’s strongest fighting unit it was the weakest. Nothing but a long period of recruiting, drill, and discipline would bring it up to its old level.

  Proof of this came in the latter part of June, shortly before Hancock returned to command, when the corps was sent out to the Jerusalem Plank Road in an effort to extend the army’s left. Lee saw the move and sent A. P. Hill’s veterans down to meet it, and these men caught the corps off balance, tapped at its flanks, crumpled it up, and sent it flying. The fight had not been a particularly hard one, and comparatively few men were killed or wounded, but the manner of the defeat was eloquent. No fewer than 1,700 men had been taken prisoner—more prisoners than the corps had lost at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville put together—and whole regiments had surrendered without firing a shot. Among these were the remnants of regiments which had once been among the very best in the army. There was the 15th Massachusetts, for instance, which had had more than 300 casualties in the West Wood at Antietam but which, when forced to retreat from that doleful little grove, had proudly brought out not only its own flag but also the flag of a Confederate regiment with which it had come to grips. In this latest fight the 15th surrendered almost entire, flag and all, after no more than a token resistance. Also, the corps had lost four pieces of artillery, and its attempt to retake these guns had been very feeble.19

  What had happened was clear enough. During the last two months almost all of the good men in the corps had been shot. The figures on Gibbon’s division tell the story. This division crossed the Rapidan on May 5 with a total of 6,799 men in its three brigades. During May and June it had 7,970 casualties—more men, by a large margin, than the entire number under arms when the campaign began. It had received heavy reinforcements, to be sure, but its losses for the two months amounted to 72 per cent of its original strength plus all of the replacements. It saw forty regimental commanders killed or wounded, and, as Gibbon wrote, the losses showed plainly why it was that “troops which at the commencement of the campaign were equal to almost any undertaking, became toward the end of it unfit for almost any.” 20

  Gibbon’s division had had it worse than the other II Corps divisions, but on
ly a little worse. Altogether, the corps had lost nearly 20,000 men in less than two months. More than a score of its brigadiers had been shot, and approximately a hundred regimental commanders. Naturally, the men who were lost were the best men—the officers who led the way, the enlisted men who ran ahead in a charge and were the last to leave when a position was given up. Numerically, most of the losses had been made good, but the new men were mostly substitutes and bounty jumpers, of whom a II Corps gunner said contemptuously that Lee’s veterans could, if they chose, drown the lot by taking bean poles and pushing them into the James River.21

  … There had been that dance for officers of the II Army Corps, in the raw-pine pavilion above the Rapidan on Washington’s Birthday, and it had been a fine thing to see; and it had been a long good-by and a dreamy good night for the young men in bright uniforms and the women who had tied their lives to them. Most of the men who danced at that ball were dead, now; dead, or dragging themselves about home-town streets on crutches, or tapping their way along with a hickory cane to find the way instead of bright youthful eyes, or in hospitals where doctors with imperfect knowledge tried to patch them up enough to enable them to hope to get out of bed someday and sit in a chair by the window. There had been a romance to war once, or at least people said there was, and each one of these men had seen it, and they had touched the edge of it while the music played and the stacked flags swayed in the candlelight, and it all came down to this, with the drifting dust of the battlefields blowing from the imperfect mounds of hastily dug graves.