A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy

by Bruce Catton

  In the dwelling houses the blinds were all drawn, and here and there an expressionless face could be seen peering out through parted curtains. Men remarked that there was not a woman to be seen; only a few old men, and an occasional cripple, and of course an awed concourse of colored folk. One officer saw Grant standing in a doorway, gesturing with his cigar as he dictated orders to his staff, utterly matter-of-fact, displaying rather less emotion and pride than the ordinary brigadier would show at a routine review of troops, and looking “as if the work before him was a mere matter of business in which he felt no particular enthusiasm or care.” 1

  In refusing to allow the army to relax and celebrate Grant was simply following common sense. From his viewpoint he had not actually won anything yet. From the moment when he headed down to the Rapidan fords, eleven months and many thousands of lives ago, he had had just one idea in mind: to destroy Lee’s army. Now Richmond had fallen, and so had Petersburg, but Lee’s army still lived and if it was to be destroyed it must first be caught. It would never be caught by pursuers who let days or hours go to waste; not that army, led by that general. So the Army of the Potomac would keep moving, and if there was to be a celebration it could come later.

  Beaten and reeling in flight, the Rebel army was still dangerous. Proof that its men still wanted to fight came this morning at the prisoner-of-war stockade. Nearly 5,000 of the men captured at Five Forks were herded together there, and the Federal provost marshal had them paraded and made a little speech to them, pointing out that their cause was doomed and inviting everyone to step up, take the oath of allegiance, and then go home and fight no more. Out of the 5,000 present, fewer than 100 moved out to take the oath—and they were bitterly derided by all the rest, who profanely denounced them as cowards and traitors.2

  So although the grim Petersburg trenches were empty and harmless, and troops from the Army of the James were in Richmond putting out the fires that threatened to destroy the whole city—the Confederate rear guard had fired arsenals and storehouses, and the flames had got out of hand—nothing had really been settled. The Army of the Potomac had not yet brought its adversary to bay, and it would have to march long and fast to do it.

  There were certain advantages. Leaving Petersburg, Lee had gone north of the Appomattox River. Somewhere above that river he was picking up the troops that had come down from Richmond and was collecting the fragments that had been sent flying when Sheridan took Five Forks and the VI Corps broke the Petersburg line. With everybody assembled, he would try to join Joe Johnston in North Carolina, and to do that he would have to go west and south. The Army of the Potomac was nearly as far west as he was, and it was a good deal farther south. Properly handled it ought to be able to head him off because it had a shorter distance to travel.

  The railroads were important. There were two lines that mattered: the familiar Southside Railroad, and the Richmond and Danville, which latter went slanting down into Joe Johnston’s territory and bisected the Southside line halfway between Petersburg and Lynchburg. Lee’s quickest route would put him on the Richmond and Danville at Amelia Court House, sixteen miles northeast of the point where the two railroads intersected.

  If the Federals moved west by the shortest route, they should strike the Richmond and Danville road at or near the junction before Lee’s people could get down there via Amelia Court House. If that happened, it would be impossible for Lee to meet Johnston. He would have only two alternatives: to stand and make a finish fight of it, a fight that could end in but one way, or to keep on going west in the hope that he could reach Lynchburg, where he might get supplies and win some sort of breathing space in the wooded folds of the mountains.

  So the task was not to overtake his army but to get ahead of it. Every march was to be a forced march. Sheridan and his cavalry were leading the way. Meade and three infantry corps were following close behind, and Ord and three divisions from the Army of the James were moving on parallel roads just a little farther south. The men carried extra rations, for there would be no waiting for supply trains, and a thirty-mile hike—ordinarily a perfect prodigy of a march—would be considered no more than a fair day’s work. Officers in the V Corps called out to the men: “Your legs must do it, boys!”3

  Spring had come, and the world was turning green and white and gold with new leaves and blossoms. The cramping misery of the trenches had been left behind, and men’s spirits were so high that even dogtrotting along in the wake of the cavalry did not seem a bad assignment. The rank and file was not entirely clear about just what had happened, but it was clear that the Johnnies were on the run at last. Grant summed it up in a telegram to Sherman: “This army has now won a most decisive victory and followed the enemy. That is all that it ever wanted to make it as good an army as ever fought a battle.”4

  They might be victorious, but the men were still cagey. Midway of the first day out, excited staff officers rode down the columns shouting the news—Richmond taken, the Union flag flying over the Confederate capital! The veterans perked up, and then they remembered that they had been had before. When an especially hard march was to be made, staff officers often circulated false announcements of good tidings just to keep everybody stepping along briskly. So the men jeered at each bearer of good news, calling out: “Put him in a canteen! Give him a hardtack! Tell it to the recruits!” But pretty soon the bands began to play, and the colonels formally announced the news to their own regiments, and up and down the line of march the men began to realize that for once the good news was true.

  “Stack your muskets and go home!” yelled one of Ord’s men, when General Gibbon announced the fall of Richmond. As the army bivouacked that night, one veteran told another: “I feel better tonight than I did after that fight at Gettysburg.” 5

  Far out in front, fantastic outriders of victory, went Sheridan’s scouts. Sometimes they rode dressed as Confederate officers or couriers, and sometimes they wore faded jeans and rode decrepit horses or mules with makeshift bridles and saddles, pretending to be displaced farmers or roving horse doctors. Either way, they visited Rebel picket posts, rode blithely through cavalry cordons, ambled alongside Lee’s wagon trains, paused to chat in Confederate camps. Most of them got back alive, and they kept Sheridan informed about where the enemy’s people were and where they were going to be next.

  As they did all of this, riding under no man’s control, they appear to have found unheard-of opportunities for loot. They visited farms and plantations and collected much food for themselves, they got new horses when they felt that they needed them, and (as other cavalrymen reported enviously) they were not always above helping themselves to more substantial valuables, taking cash and jewelry from planters’ homes and leaving their victims quite at a loss to say just who had robbed them.6 They were a wild, lawless crew, carrying their own lives and other people’s property in their naked hands, and they feared nothing in particular except the black scowl of Phil Sheridan.

  They swarmed all around the head of the cavalry column, exploring the whole network of country roads and learning where every lane and cowpath led. Behind them came hard columns of questing cavalry, slashing through to nip at the flanks of Lee’s moving army, driving Confederate troopers off the roads, harassing the plodding columns with quick thrusts and then pulling away fast to strike again a mile or two farther on. Back of these, in turn, came Sheridan and the main body of cavalry; and two days out of Five Forks Sheridan led his men into a country town called Jetersville, which place was important then for two reasons—it was on the Richmond and Danville Railroad and Lee and his army had not yet reached it.

  Sheridan sent one division west and north to see what was to be seen and to cause as much trouble as possible for the Confederacy. The rest he led northeast, and after a few miles his men ran into Rebel cavalry patrols and drove them back. Then Sheridan called a halt and had his men build breastworks, and a little later General Griffin came up with the V Corps and threw his men into line of battle beside them, and the rest of t
he infantry was not far away. Meade himself was coming up, in an ambulance. He had taken ill, from indigestion and general nerve strain, after the fall of Petersburg, but he was coming along with the army regardless.7 So here was the Army of the Potomac getting ready to fight its old antagonist, and for the first time in its history its battle line was facing toward the northeast. It had won the race and if Lee was to go any farther south he would have to fight.

  Lee’s army was at Amelia Court House, half a dozen miles short of the spot where Meade’s infantry was going into line. It could not stay there because it had used up all of its rations and there was nothing in Amelia Court House for it to eat, and after surveying the Yankee line carefully Lee concluded that his army was not strong enough to fight its way through. Since the army could not retreat—there were Yankees in both Richmond and Petersburg now—only one move remained on the board: to go west, cross country, and strike the western part of the Southside Railroad. Provisions could be brought up from Lynchburg by this line, and if the army moved fast and had luck there was an outside chance that it could still slip around the Federal flank and get south. Failing that, it might at least reach Lynchburg and try to survive there for a time. There was nothing else it could even try to do.

  Sheridan did not believe it should be given any leeway. His whole instinct was to attack before anybody got six hours older, and he seems to have feared that Meade would be content to wait for Lee to start the fight. At any rate, Sheridan wanted the boss; so one of his scouts, dressed like a Confederate colonel, took a note which Sheridan scribbled on tissue paper, folded the tissue paper in tin foil, concealed that in a wad of leaf tobacco, and shoved the tobacco in his mouth—after which he went trotting off cross country to find U. S. Grant.

  Grant was with Ord that day, a dozen miles away, and the scout reached him toward evening, narrowly missing getting shot by Ord’s pickets as he came cantering in. So Grant got Sheridan’s message, which described the situation, suggested that Lee’s army might be captured, and urged Grant to come and take charge in person. With his staff and a small mounted escort Grant immediately set out, guided by the gray-uniformed scout, following rambling country roads in the dark—with his staff wondering uneasily just what would happen to the war if the little party should blunder into the Confederate lines by mistake. It was late at night when Grant reached Sheridan’s tent, and nothing could be done with the troops until morning.8

  If Sheridan feared that Meade would sit down and wait for the fight to be brought to him, he was mistaken. Meade wanted to fight and he started the infantry toward Amelia Court House at dawn, but Lee was no longer there. He had put his tired, half-starved troops on the road for a night march, trying the last chance that was left to him, striking due west for the town of Farmville, on the Southside Railroad. When the flight was discovered Meade ordered pursuit, but Grant modified the order: let part of the infantry follow in Lee’s rear, pressing him and making him stand and fight whenever it could, but let the rest follow the cavalry and get west as fast as possible, keeping always south of the Confederates. The idea still was to win a race, and if they could plant infantry across Lee’s path just once more it would all be over.

  So the foot race was on again and away they went, infantry and cavalry and the lumbering guns. It was April 6, and the Petersburg break-through was four days behind them, and some of the infantry units were doing thirty-five miles a day and more. In some ways it was like any other hard march—woods and swamps and wispy fields, muddy roads churned into quagmire by thousands of horses, a hard pull on the long hills and everybody too winded to say much. Yet now it was all different, because for all anyone knew the thing they had been marching toward for four years might lie just the other side of the next hill.

  On every side there were multiplying signs of Confederate defeat, littering roads and fields like driftwood dropped by an ebbing tide: broken wagons and ambulances, guns with broken wheels, discarded muskets and blanket rolls, stragglers bedded down in fence corners or stumbling listlessly through the woods—and, every so often, “dropped in the very middle of the road from utter exhaustion, old horses literally skin and bones, and so weak as scarcely to be able to lift their heads when some soldier would touch them with his foot to see if they really had life.” Every regiment had its congenital pessimists, as one soldier confessed, men who fought well but who always darkly prophesied ultimate Rebel victory; but now, this man said, “the utter collapse of the rebellion was so near that no one could fail to see it, and the croakers were compelled to cheer in spite of themselves.” 9

  Humphreys was driving the II Corps in on Lee’s rear guard, and the day was a long succession of savage little fights wherever the Confederates could find a defensive vantage point. On other roads the other corps struggled to gain ground, and up ahead and along the way there was the cavalry—always the cavalry, with Sheridan sending galloping columns in to skirmish, wheel, and dash away again, forcing weary Southerners to halt, form line of battle, and then go on with their march. He had three divisions doing this, probing always for a weak spot, slowing down the enemy’s march, relentless and seemingly tireless. In midafternoon he found, at last, the opening he was looking for.

  Custer spied a Confederate wagon train winding through hill country, the bleak woods glistening from the spring rains, and he whistled his squadrons in on the dead run with sabers swinging. Confederate infantry fell into line to repel the attack, but up ahead a gap developed in the moving column and Custer’s men went pouring through it, stopping the wagon train, cutting the traces and driving the teams away, sabering drivers, breaking wagon wheels with axes, and setting fire to the wreckage. More and more cavalry went into the gap, and Sheridan sent couriers back to bring up the infantry: here is a whole section of Lee’s army cut off, come on up quick and we can bag the lot!10

  Nearest infantry was the VI Corps, which had marched all night and all day without food and was just filing into some fields to make coffee and eat bacon and hardtack when Sheridan’s messengers came up. Down the lines went staff officers and colonels to tell the men the news: Sheridan is just ahead and he wants help, and we can all eat later perhaps. The men fell into ranks cheering and they stepped off eagerly, and before long they formed a battle line on a slope looking down to a little creek, on the far side of which there was a Confederate battle line. Sheridan rode up, and the VI Corps veterans who had followed him in the Valley pointed and told each other: “There’s Phil! There’s Phil!” and yelled their heads off. One of their officers mused: “The sight of that man on the field was more gratifying than rations, more inspiring than reinforcements.” 11

  On the horizon was the burning Confederate wagon train. Straight in front was a fair piece of the Rebel army, brought to bay at last, the men dangerous as so many wounded panthers; and off to the left were four brigades of Yankee cavalry, moving forward at a walk as if passing in review, heading for the Confederate flank. For a minute or two everything seemed to hang in suspense, as if the army had gone to great pains to pose a dramatic picture. Then the wild high notes of the bugles sounded from end to end of the line, and everybody went forward on the run, cavalry and infantry alike, and there was a great shouting and the smoke from thousands of muskets banked up over the valley. Then the cavalry had broken through, and the infantry was tussling in the shallows, and suddenly there was no more Rebel battle line, nothing but groups of men throwing down their arms, cavalry ranging far and wide to round up fugitives, thousands of Confederates surrounded and surrendering—among them, picturesque one-legged General Dick Ewell, who had been Stonewall Jackson’s lieutenant when the world was young. Far in the distance, Lee on a hilltop watched it all and told an officer beside him: “That half of our army has been destroyed.”12

  There was exaggeration in the remark, but not a great deal. What remained of two Confederate army corps had gone to pieces, with thousands of men taken prisoner, only a few escaping through the woods. The rear guard hung on until dark and then the Confed
erates followed their last fading chance to the north side of the Appomattox River, burning the bridges behind them. If they could keep the Federals south of that still unfordable river and go on with desperate forced marches it might yet be possible … just barely possible … to get away and join Johnston, or reach the mountains, or find somewhere a chance to rest and refit and make the war go on a little longer.

  Along the creek where they had won their triumph the Federals cheered and danced. Someone found barrels of Confederate paper money in a headquarters wagon not yet burned, and the men went scampering about with handfuls of it, tossing it in the air, using it to kindle fires, offering great bundles of it to the gloomy prisoners. All of the ground was covered with the debris of the broken army, and as the VI Corps moved away the men found the road for two miles so littered with discarded muskets that it was hard to move without stepping on them. A major of the 65th New York was mortally wounded when someone’s horse trod on one of these muskets and caused it to go off and shoot him.13

  If the VI Corps found a few hours to relax, Humphreys kept the II Corps moving, and it got to one of the river crossings just as a Rebel rear guard was firing the last bridge. Barlow had the advance, and he sent his men down to the bridge a-running, fighting Confederate skirmishers and beating out the flames at the same time. In the end they saved the bridge and drove off the Confederate guards, and the whole army corps went pouring over to the north side of the river and pushed on to harry the rear of the Army of Northern Virginia and make any breathing spell impossible.