A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  It would have been unfair to blame any of this on the Reserve lieutenant or the acting ordnance sergeant, since neither man was in any way responsible. But the condition of things in their part of the line was fairly typical of the condition elsewhere. The next bridge downstream, for instance, was Aqueduct Bridge in Georgetown, and it was guarded by two dozen men under a Reserve captain. This man said that if attacked he would close the gates of the bridge at the Georgetown end. He believed there were heavy bars lying around somewhere, although he had never tried them to see whether they would fit the staples in the gate and stockade. The inspector took the trouble to find them and test them. They did fit. Comforted by that much, he went his way.

  On the land front, the chief engineer of the Department of Washington reported with military horror that brush was growing all over the approaches to the line, in such quantities that attacking troops could easily get quite close to the parapet under cover. He urged strongly that details be assigned to cut this brush and provide the defense with a clear field of fire. At about the same time a War Department major general who had access to the White House told President Lincoln that the Rebels were really getting close and that “An enterprising general could take the city.” He said that when he mentioned all of this to General Halleck he was told that the responsibility was Grant’s and not Halleck’s. This worried the major general, because Grant was quite busy down in front of Petersburg, and he told the President that Halleck seemed very apathetic. Mr. Lincoln nodded.

  “That’s his way,” he said. “He is always apathetic.” 1

  It was a bad time for apathy, because the approaching Confederates were under the command of Jubal Early, who was nothing if not enterprising. He had been moving down the Shenandoah Valley ever since General Hunter retreated from the vicinity of Lynchburg, and he had perhaps 15,000 men with him—veteran troops as good as any in the land, their number magnified by panic rumor to practically any figure which a frightened imagination cared to think of.

  The Washington defenses were extremely strong if there were men to hold them. Much time and money had been spent on them, beginning ’way back in the McClellan era, and they had been laid out according to the best military standards of the day. From the banks of the Potomac northwest of Chain Bridge, all the way around the city to the Potomac shore opposite Alexandria, the lines ran in a ponderous unbroken horseshoe, with a fort on every hill, trenches connecting the forts, and heavy guns posted to cover all the ground out in front. Over on the Virginia side it was the same, with another semicircle of works running from above Chain Bridge down to the lower edge of Alexandria. No one could approach the city from any direction without running into powerful fortifications. Yet fortifications needed soldiers in order to be effective, and now the soldiers were lacking.

  If Grant had risked something by taking the soldiers away, the risk had been carefully calculated. What had thrown the calculations out of gear was the eccentric notion of strategy held by General Hunter.

  While the Army of the Potomac remained on the offensive, Lee could not bring his own army up across the border as he had done in 1862 and 1863. The only danger would come from lesser detachments advancing down the Shenandoah Valley, and as long as Hunter and his troops were in the valley that way was barred. As far as the security of Washington was concerned it did not matter much whether Hunter was advancing, retreating, or sitting down. If he and his men were in the Valley, that was enough.

  But when Hunter found Early ready to fight him in front of Lynchburg, and decided to run for shelter, he concluded for some incomprehensible reason that he had better run off through the West Virginia mountains instead of back down the valley toward Winchester and Harper’s Ferry. That took his entire army out of the war for more than a fortnight, and it left the valley wide open for any use the Confederates wanted to make of it. Of this opening General Early promptly took full advantage.

  Hunter could never see what was wrong with his move. He wrote to Stanton and he wrote to Lincoln, protesting that he had done everything for the best and complaining that he was unfairly blamed. Six months later he was still at it, writing to Grant, reciting all of his troubles with the undisciplined troops and unskilled generals he had inherited from the blessed Sigel and complaining that no one ever told him he had anything to do with the defense of Washington. After the war he was obtuse enough to write to Robert E. Lee, asking if Lee did not agree that the retreat into the mountains had been strategically sound. Lee, who detested him, replied with dead-pan courtesy that he hardly felt competent to pass on Hunter’s reasons for making that move, since he did not know what they were; but he said that the move itself had been a tremendous help to Lee personally and to the Southern Confederacy in general.2

  An aging Regular with sagging cheeks, a stringy mustache, and a habit of writing ill-tempered letters, Hunter had had rather an odd career. In February of 1861 he had been one of four army officers assigned to guard Mr. Lincoln on the President-elect’s trip from Springfield to Washington. Out of this experience Hunter got a dislocated shoulder, received when a crowd surged out of hand at Buffalo; but a little later, after Fort Sumter, he got a major general’s commission, and when Frémont was removed from command in Missouri that fall it was Hunter who was put in his place. He did not last very long in that important job, and presently he was on the shelf in Kansas, with few troops and fewer responsibilities, and he complained about it so gracelessly that even Lincoln, who could put up with almost anything, told him it was hard to answer “so ugly a letter” in good temper.

  Still later Hunter had been given command along the Carolina coast, where he had endeared himself to the radicals by proclaiming the emancipation of slaves some months before Mr. Lincoln was ready for such a policy. Naturally, he had been removed, and when the War Department this spring picked him to command in the Valley, Grant had approved on the simple theory that anybody would be better than Sigel.

  His stay in the Valley had been brief enough and his exit had been disastrous, but in one way he had made his presence felt—by burning Virginia Military Institute and the home of Virginia’s Governor Letcher. His troops took their cue from him and did a good deal of looting and house burning on their own hook, and when Early led his Confederates north of the Potomac the Southerners were not in a mood to be gentle with Northern civilians. One of Early’s officers who surveyed the damage Hunter’s troops had left behind them wrote that it was very hard to admit that vengeance belonged solely to the Lord.8 So the Confederates levied heavy cash contributions on such towns as Frederick, Maryland, and when they seized horses and cattle and forage they were less urbane and polite about it than had been the case during the Gettysburg campaign. By the end of the first week in July they were destroying railroad bridges and other property in Maryland east of the great South Mountain ridge, and the long-suffering Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was asking the Navy if it could send gunboats to protect railroad property in the upper reaches of Chesapeake Bay.

  This call took Secretary Welles over to the War Department, where to his disgust he found that nobody knew anything about Early’s army—“its numbers, where it is, or its destination.” He wrote in his diary that an attack on Washington probably could not be resisted, and he predicted that such an attack would be made very soon. A couple of days later, on a Sunday, a Navy Department clerk hurried to Mr. Welles’s office to tell him that Southern troopers had already crossed the district line and were prowling about in the outskirts of Georgetown. Welles had a low opinion of Halleck and Stanton anyway, and he wrote now that “on our part there is neglect, ignorance, folly, imbecility in the last degree.” 4

  The War Department had not been quite as neglectful as Mr. Welles supposed. At the beginning of July Halleck had warned Grant that Early was becoming a menace, and Ricketts’s division of the VI Corps had been sent up to Baltimore. There it joined a scratch contingent of miscellaneous troops pulled together by General Lew Wallace, the literary-minded soldier who eventually was t
o write Ben Hur, and Wallace took his command over toward Frederick, to fight the Rebels on the banks of the Monocacy. Early’s veterans outnumbered him heavily and they pushed him aside without much delay, but the rest of the VI Corps was embarking on transports at City Point to come north and take a hand in the game, and ocean steamers were coming up the bay with veterans from Emory’s XIX Corps, recently on duty in Louisiana. The situation would probably be all right if Early would just allow a few more days’ grace.

  Early was no time-waster, however. After routing Wallace’s command he drove his men on mercilessly in mid-July heat, and by the morning of July 11 his weary advance guard was coming south through Silver Spring, its skirmishers creeping forward toward Fort Stevens, well inside the district line on the Seventh Street Road. Old Francis P. Blair’s famous country home was occupied by Rebel officers, who took care not to damage the place unduly but did help themselves to the contents of Mr. Blair’s excellent wine cellar. Not far away there was a house owned by Blair’s son Montgomery, who was Postmaster General in Lincoln’s cabinet, and this house the Rebels burned to the ground, leading Blair to remark bitterly that nothing better could be expected so long as “poltroons and cowards” had control of the United States War Department.5

  To beat off Early’s advance Halleck had very few troops, but he did have plenty of general officers. Among these was dignified Major General Alexander McD. McCook, temporarily without a command, and McCook was sent out to Fort Stevens and told to assume charge of the capital’s defenses. He had very little to work with—a regiment of District of Columbia militia, some 4-F’s from the Veteran Reserve Corps, a Maine battery, a few National Guard troops on 100-day duty, and a scattering of gunners in the different forts. He put these men in the trenches and had them begin shooting at Early’s skirmishers. During the morning the military hospitals were combed out and a number of convalescents, representing nearly every regiment in the Army of the Potomac, was brought out the Seventh Street Road, together with some more Reserve Corps soldiers and odds and ends of dismounted cavalry. Meanwhile General Montgomery C. Meigs, the distinguished quartermaster general of the army, had donned his field uniform and was forming all of the clerks and detailed men of the Quartermaster Corps into a brigade and was marching them around to the arsenal to draw weapons. During the day he went trooping out to the scene of action with some 1,500 of these extemporized soldiers. At McCook’s direction he occupied a mile or more of trench to the right of Fort Stevens.6

  The forts and trenches were good, and this assemblage of soldiers might do well enough if nobody pushed very hard. General Early—closer to the Capitol dome than any other armed Confederate during all of the war—was peering south from the high ground a mile north of Fort Stevens, getting ready to push just as soon as he could figure out just what was ahead of him.

  He was a salty and a picturesque character, this Jubal Early, and a very dangerous opponent to boot. A West Pointer who had given up the Army for the law some years previously, he had been prosecuting attorney of Rockingham County before the war, and he was stooped and grizzled and sardonic, not greatly loved by other ranking Confederate officers because of his habit of blunt, sarcastic speech; an exceedingly capable soldier, grim as old Stonewall himself, a driver who could be counted on to get the last ounce of advantage out of the baffling, almost incomprehensible opportunity which faced him on this eleventh of July.

  When General Lee sent him north, neither he nor Early had much hope that Washington could actually be captured. The idea was principally to make trouble and to joggle Grant’s elbow. In former years the Lincoln administration had shown itself abnormally sensitive to any threat to the capital, and there was a chance that this thrust might force Grant to raise the siege of Petersburg and come back to save Washington.

  If this could not be done it was just possible that Early could slide clear around Washington on the northern side, strike down southeast, and capture the prison camp at Point Lookout on the shore of Chesapeake Bay, releasing some thousands of Confederate prisoners of war. Failing that, he could at least make a great nuisance of himself, collect supplies in Maryland, and in general disarrange Federal strategy. Early’s problem this morning was to determine exactly how much of an opening was in front of him now, while inexpert tacticians were assembling third-rate troops in the lines adjoining Fort Stevens.

  The balancing of risks and opportunities was delicate and perplexing, and if “Old Jube” swore and bit off another chew of tobacco—as he very probably did—it could hardly be wondered at. He knew that the trenches before him were too strong to be taken if any number of regular troops occupied them. He also knew that even if he broke the line and got all the way to downtown Washington he could not hope to stay there very long, since the country in his rear was all swarming with Federal troops—Wallace’s men, and Sigel’s, and Hunter’s dispirited army coming back from West Virginia—and in time the Yankees would undoubtedly form these into a compact mass that would bar the way home. Early’s own army was small and very tired, and a hard fight might cripple it so badly that it could never return to Virginia, and Lee was so pressed for manpower that he simply could not afford to lose these men. The forces that made for caution were strong.7

  But the possibilities also were good. No hasty collection of convalescents, casuals, and government clerks could hope to bar the way for the lean veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia—the prospect of looting the rich depots of Washington was enough to make these men fight like desperadoes—and the results that would flow from even a temporary occupation of the Federal capital might well be incalculable. If, after all that had happened this spring, a wing of Lee’s army could actually seize Washington, the whole course of the war might be different. Anyway, Early was a slugger who never listened to the voice of caution unless he had to, and at last he decided to make the assault. He put sharpshooters into farmhouses to pick off gunners in the Yankee forts, and he wheeled his artillery forward and pressed his skirmishers in closer, and he began to get ready for a big fight.

  In the forts and the trenches there were pallid men from hospital and office—“a mild-mannered set,” as one observer felt, who looked as if “they would never hurt anyone, not even in self-defense,” obviously uncomfortable in their unweathered uniforms, uneasy at the prospect of passing the night in the open air. Downtown there were nervous civilians in the streets, wondering what was going to happen next, listening to the fluttering, pulsing sound of the distant cannon, contemplating flight but not certain where to fly to or how to get there.8

  But down by the Seventh Street wharf fat-sided steamers were coming up the river, tarred heaving lines snaking ashore to be taken by waiting longshoremen, mates busy about the decks, whistles grunting hoarsely, ships’ timbers creaking against the pilings. Then the gangplanks were slung to the wharf, and long lines of tanned men in ragged, dusty, sun-bleached uniforms were coming ashore, forming up on the dock with elbow nudgings and right-dress craning of necks. Up Seventh Street they came, a solid column of soldiers with the Greek cross on their caps and their banners, men who slouched along casually without bothering about alignment, seeming to be in no hurry at all but somehow covering the ground very rapidly.

  They were hard-boiled and unemotional, and as they tramped along they looked cynically at the people on the sidewalks, and made mental note of the locations of saloons; and they marched behind tattered, faded, shot-torn banners, and the people on the sidewalk looked at them and set up a sudden cheer, and called out to one another in elated relief: “The Sixth Corps! That’s the Sixth Corps!”

  From time to time the column would halt for a breather, and every time it halted a certain number of the veterans would slip away and head for a barroom and a glass of something cold, and one of the men who made the march said that not even “the military genius of a Napoleon” could have taken them out that dusty street on a hot July day without loss. The men who did not fall out made caustic remarks about militia and quartermaster clerks
and well-fed civilians, and in midafternoon they got up to Fort Stevens and took charge. The amateurs could relax now; the professionals were taking over.9

  General Wright had galloped on ahead, and General McCook received him with feelings of great relief, and as the head of the corps came up the men of the Army of the Potomac filed right and left into the trenches. One of Wright’s men wrote that they found “a rattled lot of defenders, brave enough but with no coherence or organization,” and he mentioned seeing a surplus of brigadier generals and a vast number of home guards whose skins looked strangely white and untanned. Out beyond the trenches, he said, he and his mates could see Early’s Southerners—“as fine a corps of infantry as ever marched to the tap of a drum”—but the VI Corps was here now and the door was locked, and at the last minute of the last hour the Washington lines were occupied by men who knew how to hold them.10

  After that it was all over, except for the incidental drama and excitement.

  General McCook asked Wright to hold his corps in reserve but to relieve the picket line, and so several hundred of the VI Corps went out beyond the trenches to exchange shots with Early’s skirmishers. The fire seemed hot and heavy to the clerks and 100-day militia, but Wright’s veterans considered it light and scattering and they went out with nonchalant competence. One of them remembered, with an amused chuckle, that the troops that were being relieved were “astounded at the temerity displayed by these war-worn veterans in going out beyond the breastworks, and benevolently volunteered most earnest words of caution.” 11

  Early’s skirmishers were 600 yards away, and they were being supported by shellfire, and the veterans moved out and sparred with them, and after a while darkness came and the opposing armies settled down for the night. General Meigs, unused to field work, went along his line of trenches, saw that his men had rations and blankets, and himself went a few hundred yards to the rear, tied his horse to a tree in an apple orchard, and spread his poncho on the ground for a bed—feeling, one gathers, innocently thrilled and pleased with himself. Secretary Welles, who had come out to see what was to be seen, rode back to the city in his carriage, looking at the campfires and knots of lounging soldiers and groups of stragglers and musing: “It was exciting and wild. Much of life, and much of sadness.”12