A Stillness at Appomattox

by Bruce Catton

  Whatever was going to be done would have to be done very quickly. The whole idea was that at half-past four on the morning of June 2 the Confederates facing Cold Harbor would be off balance, unprepared to resist a solid blow. That assumption might well be correct; and yet it was as certain as anything could be certain that the Confederates would not stay off balance or unprepared very long, and that what was possible at dawn might be utterly impossible by midafternoon. The big attack that was set for dawn, in other words, had better take place at dawn and not at some other time.

  But the reflexes of the chain of command in the Army of the Potomac had never yet been trained for speed. There was power here, and bravery, and simple determination— but the furious, implacable insistence on doing simple things quickly was not there at all. It had been bred out of the army in the leisurely days of 1862, when half a month one way or the other did not seem to make very much difference and the delay of a mere day or so did not make any difference at all, and nothing that the tough little man from the West had been able to do had changed things very much.

  In all the history of this army, no general had yet been disciplined for being just a little bit late. Back of almost every defeat there was the story of chances lost because some commander had not done what he set out to do with the necessary vigor and speed. The assumption always seems to have been that the man on the firing line would somehow make up for all slackness and all delays.

  In other ways, too, the generals had been brought up wrong. The tradition they had learned was that of close-order fighting in open country, where men with bayonets bravely charged a line of men firing smooth-bore muskets. That used to work well enough, because the range at which defenders could begin to kill their assailants was very short. Between the moment when charging men got into that range and the moment when they actually reached the enemy line, the defenders could fire no more than one or two shots apiece. Given a proper advantage in numbers, a charging line was bound to get to close quarters provided the men could just stand the gaff during the last hundred yards of their advance.

  But the rifle came in and it changed all of that. The range at which charging men began to be killed was at least five times as great as it used to be, which meant that about five times as many of the assailants were likely to be hit. Furthermore, men on the defense had learned how to dig deep, solid trenches instead of standing up unprotected in the open; and the trench and the rifle put together meant that the old tradition was as dead as Hannibal. A few men, like young Colonel Upton, sensed that new tactics were called for, but most men could not quite get the idea. The way to beat the enemy was to pile into him head on, and if a great many men were killed that way it could not be helped because to get killed was the soldier's hard fate and it would never be any other way.11

  The hard fact was that by 1864 good troops using rifles and standing in well-built trenches, and provided with suitable artillery support, simply could not be dislodged by any frontal assault whatever. This fact had been visible on many previous occasions, if anyone had thought about it. At Gettysburg, Slocum's brigades held solid log trenches on Gulp's Hill, and in the reports their officers submitted after the battle there is evident a sort of dazed bewilderment that the men had been able to wreck a whole Rebel army corps at comparatively small cost. One Union general found 1,200 dead Southerners in front of his line, estimated that four times that many had been wounded, and noted that the trenches "rendered our casualties surprisingly incompatible with so terrible and prolonged an engagement." The same thing had been true, with the shoe on the other foot, at Spotsylvania. Meade's chief of staff assessed the fighting there and wrote that behind trenches "the strength of an army sustaining an attack was more than quadrupled"; then he revised his estimate upward and said that "there is

  scarcely any measure by which to gauge the increased strength" conferred by good earthworks.12

  Yet although this lesson was obvious it was not being applied. A subtle weakness infected the system of command. Something was always going wrong, someone was forever leaving something undone, the loose ends were never quite tied up in time. The experience at Spotsylvania was the classic example. When the big attack on the salient was made no one really knew where the enemy was, how the land lay, or what the defenses were like. The man who had to lead the charge was at last forced to ask, in bitter jest, that someone at least point him in the right direction so that he might not miss the Rebel army entirely.

  Taken as a group, the generals on whom the army's success depended so greatly seem to have slipped back during the campaign; or perhaps they simply stood still while the war moved on ahead of them. They were used to a war of successive broad panoramas, in which a corps commander could always find some spot from which he could get a fairly good general view of his whole line. Now there were no more panoramas and it was never possible for anyone to see more than a fraction of the field. If a general rode up front for a closer survey there was nothing for him to see but the backs of a few of his skirmishers. Trench warfare was new to everybody and it provided unheard-of complications for an army acting on the offensive. What used to be done visually had to be done nowadays with maps. (Just to make things worse, practically all of the maps owned by the Federal commanders contained very bad errors.)

  In effect, the army was fighting blindfolded and most of the generals knew little more than the men in the ranks knew. A IX Corps soldier wrote that the whole campaign was confusing: "Of the previous movements we had been able to form some conception; but the operations since crossing the Pamunkey, conducted rapidly in jungles, swamps and labyrinths of forest; in storm and darkness; by marches and counter-marches, advances and withdrawals—all seemed to us to be conducted without consistent plan or purpose." The generals could have said the same thing. Indeed, Meade did say it, complaining that in this country he had to fight a regular battle just to conduct an ordinary reconnoissance.13

  Meade's temper was getting worse than ever. At Cold Harbor on June 1 he was denouncing Warren and Wright —the one for moving without orders, the other for moving too slowly with orders—and he was complaining angrily that the corps commanders ought to act for themselves and not lean constantly on army headquarters. At this untimely moment, one of Baldy Smith's staff officers came in to report that Smith had arrived with his troops but had brought little ammunition and no transportation and considered his position precarious.

  "Then why in hell," demanded Meade, "did he come at all?"14

  The big job on the evening of June 1 was to get Hancock and his II Corps around to Cold Harbor in time for the dawn attack, and the orders breathed unusual urgency: "You must make every exertion to move promptly and reach Cold Harbor as soon as possible. . . . Every confidence is felt that your gallant corps of veterans will move with vigor and endure the necessary fatigue." An engineer officer was sent to lead the march, and just after sunset the movement began.

  The II Corps had no better luck with its guide here than at Spotsylvania. Since the march would be long the engineer officer undertook to lead the corps on a short cut along an unmapped woods road, and this road was not good. There was profound darkness under the trees, and the dust rose in unbelievable clouds, and the road grew narrower and narrower until it was no more than a path and the corps artillery finally got jammed in between the trees and could go neither backward nor forward.

  The long column piled up, and in the dusty darkness regiments and brigades intermingled, and the still air was very hot. Officers rode back and forth, colliding with trees and falling down invisible banks, and it was too dark for anyone to identify them or for them to see the troops they were trying to straighten out, and organization dissolved completely. Eventually, most of the troops had to countermarch by another road, and what was supposed to be a nine-mile hike turned out to be fifteen miles.15

  The corps was to be in position to assault at daybreak, which at that time of year meant around 4:30 in the morning, but by seven o'clock it was just beginning to come up
to Cold Harbor, blue uniforms all Rebel gray with dust, stragglers strewn all over the line of march, everyone too blown to do more than put one heavy foot ahead of anothero One of Meade's staff commented that a fifteen-mile march at night was more tiring than a twenty-five-mile march by daylight, and he added that these soldiers were all worn out before the march even began: "Our men no longer have the bodily strength they had a month before; indeed, why they are alive I don't see." 16 To make an immediate attack was plainly out of the question, and Meade ordered the fight postponed until four in the afternoon.

  But in the afternoon things looked no better. The battered VI Corps was in place along the Richmond road, ready to go, but General Smith on the VI Corps' right was telling headquarters that what with battle losses and heavy straggling he had only 9,000 men in line of the 16,000 soldiers he had brought up from Bermuda Hundred, and if the Rebels should attack him he was not sure that he could hold his position. "An attack by me," he added, "would be simply preposterous." Beyond Smith's men, innumerable adjustments had to be made in the positions of Warren's and Burnside's corps, and they were doing a good deal of marching to and fro to get into new positions—being considerably pestered, the while, by intermittent Confederate stabs and thrusts—and it began to seem best to have those two corps act on the defensive and hold their positions while the fight was made at Cold Harbor.

  At last, unable to get the unwieldy machine moving properly, headquarters ordered another postponement and fixed the hour of attack for daybreak on June 3. Darkness came, and there were bursts of rain, turning now and then into hail. All along the disordered lines the men dropped off to sleep, lying face down on the ground in the wet, glad that it was raining because it would lay the dust and cut the heat, dimly conscious that a good many things had been going wrong.17

  Much had gone wrong, and what mattered most was that the attack was going to be twenty-four hours late. An assault at dawn on June 2 might possibly have succeeded, since on that morning the Rebels in front of Cold Harbor had not had time to get set for it. An assault at dawn on June 3 would not have a chance in the world to succeed, and the felony was compounded by the fact that nobody in particular had thought to study the lay of the land and the position of the Confederate defenses.18 The Union army had spent the twenty-four hours of delay chiefly in wearing itself out; the Confederates had used the time with enormous industry and clever engineering skill to build a network of trenches, gun emplacements, and skirmishers' pits like nothing the Army of the Potomac had ever encountered before.

  It was no simple line of breastworks that the army was going to attack in the morning. From the Chickahominy swamps all the way to the Totopotomoy, the Confederate line on the morning of June 3 was cunningly and elaborately designed to take advantage of every ravine, knoll, and hillock, every bog and water course, every clump of trees and patch of brambles, so that unending cross fires could be laid on all possible avenues of approach. A newspaper correspondent wrote of these lines: "They are intricate, zig-zagged lines within lines, lines protecting flanks of lines, lines built to enfilade an opposing line, lines within which lies a battery ... a maze and labyrinth of works within works and works without works, each laid out with some definite design either of defense or offense."19

  The ground was deceptive. The Confederate works lay on an uneven chain of low hills and ridges, none of them high enough to look frightening, all of them just high enough to be ideal for defensive purposes. There was hardly a spot on the front which could not be hit by rifle fire and artillery fire from dead ahead and from both sides. The very pickets and skirmishers were dug in, and to make matters worse the Union front at Cold Harbor bowed out slightly, so that advancing units would follow diverging paths and would expose their flanks to heavy fire.20

  Neither Grant nor Meade had ordered anybody to make a detailed survey of the ground. Apparently they assumed that the corps commanders would do that as a matter of routine. The assumption was wrong, since corps routine in the Army of the Potomac did not extend to such matters, and so nobody knew anything of any consequence about what lay ahead. All that was certain was that 40,000 men in three army corps were to begin marching toward Richmond at dawn. What they were going to run into along the way was something they would have to find out for themselves.

  The rain stopped just before dawn, and as the sky grew lighter it was clear, with a promise of heat. Gunners in the Federal gun emplacements could just see and hear the infantry columns moving forward in the dim light. A moment later they saw orderlies come back, leading riderless horses, by which they knew that the regimental and brigade commanders were going in on foot. The light grew stronger, and half a mile ahead the men could see the main line of Confederate works—an uneven tracing of raw earth across the fields and through the groves, looking empty but somehow ominous. Then couriers came spurring up to battery commanders, and on the II Corps front one cannon was fired as a signal, and along three miles of gun pits the men ran to their places.

  A gigantic crash of artillery broke the morning quiet just as the crackle of skirmishers' fire began. Suddenly the empty-looking Rebel trenches were dotted with black slouch hats and thousands of musket barrels, long sheets of flame ran from end to end of the trench lines, an immense cloud of smoke blotted out the sight of them, and the rocking volume of sound dazed men who had been in the war's worst battles. One of Hancock's gunners wrote, in awe: "It had the fury of the Wilderness musketry with the thunders of the Gettysburg artillery super-added. It was simply terrific." 21

  This was the army's major offensive, the culmination of a month's bloody campaigning, and it was not one fight but many fights: a conglomeration of charges by individual brigades rather than one massed assault. There was no one line of battle, wide and deep, each part supporting all the rest. Instead there were many separate assaults, all going forward at once, each one more or less isolated from the others, so that every unit felt that it was advancing unaided into the very center of the strongest enemy fine it had ever seen.

  Hancock had three divisions of infantry, and he sent two of them in with the third held back for support. The divisions prompdy separated. Barlow took his men in with two brigades in front, and these swept across a sunken road, beating down the Southern skirmishers who held it, and charged on and broke into the main line of Confederate works, capturing several hundred prisoners and three guns and, for an incredible instant, making it look as if they were going to win an amazing success. Yet the ground just behind them was swept by a terrible cross fire from Confederates off to the right and left, and when the support troops tried to come forward they were broken and driven back, and Barlow's two leading brigades were isolated.

  From both sides Rebel gunners were sending shell and solid shot plowing the length of the captured trench with murderous effect, and from the ground ahead of Barlow's men, massed infantry plastered them with an unbearable volume of musket fire. The men stayed there as long as they could, but it was not very long, and in a few minutes they ran back, crouched down behind a low swelling in the ground, and with bayonets and tin cups began frantically to dig in. They had done their best, and instead of retreating to the starting place they were valiantly hanging on within a few rods of the Confederate line, but they had not opened the road to Richmond.

  On their right, Gibbon s division had even worse luck. It set out bravely enough, the veterans knowing full well that they were going into a death trap but setting their teeth and going forward anyway. As the lines moved into range of the Confederate fire the color-bearer of the 19th Massachusetts was shot, and the regimental commander told Corporal Mike Scannell to pick up the flag and carry it. Mike promptly declined, explaining: "Too many corporals have already been killed carrying colors/' The commander blinked at him, and then promised: '111 make you a sergeant on the spot." "That's business," said the corporal. "I’ll carry the colors." So he picked up the flag and the regiment went on.22

  Two hundred yards from the starting point Gibbon's division hit a de
ep swamp whose existence nobody had known about, and the swamp split the line in two, half of the men going to one side and half to the other. The swamp grew wider as the men advanced and the separated halves of the line could not rejoin, and in the swamp there were many snipers who took a heavy toll, and in the end two separated brigades went staggering up to the invulnerable trenches. One of these brigades got onto the Rebel line very briefly —there is memory of a colonel standing on the parapet, swinging his sword and shouting to his men to come on. But the colonel went down, his lifeless body draped across the parapet, and he was hit thereafter by so many stray bullets that when a truce was declared a few days later he could be identified only by the buttons on his sleeve. The other men who got up to the line did not fare much better than he did, and the attack collapsed a few seconds after it had touched the breastworks. The other brigade never reached the line—partly, it was said, because it contained many new troops who went charging in with great dash and much cheering, anxious to prove themselves, and who made such excellent targets of themselves that they were destroyed before they got within fifty yards of their enemies.