A Stillness at Appomattox (189 page)

The
Confederates
had
scattered
the
cavalry,
and
most
of the
troopers
fled
south,
across
the
shallow
valley
that
ran parallel
with
the
Lynchburg
Road.
As
the
last
of
them
left the
field
the
way
seemed
to
be
open,
and
the
Confederates who
had
driven
them
away
raised
a
final
shout
of
triumph —and
then
over
the
hill
came
the
first
lines
of
blue
infantry, rifles
tilted
forward,
and
here
was
the
end
of
everything:
the Yankees
had
won
the
race
and
the
way
was
closed
forever and
there
was
no
going
on
any
farther.

The
blue
lines
grew
longer
and
longer,
and
rank
upon rank
came
into
view,
as
if
there
was
no
end
to
them.
A
Fed
eral
officer
remembered
afterward
that
when
he
looked across
at
the
Rebel
lines
it
almost
seemed
as
if
there
were more
battle
flags
than
soldiers.
So
small
were
the
Southern regiments
that
the
flags
were
all
clustered
together,
and
he got
the
strange
feeling
that
the
ground
where
the
Army
of

Northern Virginia had been brought to bay had somehow blossomed out with a great row of poppies and roses.22

So the two armies faced each other at long range, and the firing slackened and almost ceased.

Many times in the past these armies had paused to look at each other across empty fields, taking a final size-up before getting into the grapple. Now they were taking their last look, the Stars and Bars were about to go down forever and leave nothing behind but the stars and the memories, and it might have been a time for deep solemn thoughts. But the men who looked across the battlefield at each other were very tired and very hungry, and they did not have much room in their heads for anything except the thought of that weariness and that hunger, and the simple hope that they might live through the next half hour. One Union soldier wrote that he and his comrades reflected bitterly that they would not be here, waiting for the shooting to begin, if they had not innocently believed that tale about getting breakfast at Appomattox Station; and, he said, "we were angry with ourselves to think that for the hope of drawing rations we had been foolish enough to keep up and, by doing so, get in such a scrape." They did not mind the desultory artillery fire very much, he said, but "we dreaded the moment when the infantry should open on us." 23

Off toward the south Sheridan had all of his cavalry in line again, mounted now with pennons and guidons fluttering. The Federal infantry was advancing from the west and Sheridan was where he could hit the flank of the Rebels who were drawn up to oppose that infantry, and he spurred over to get some foot soldiers to stiffen his own attack. General Griffin told Chamberlain to take his brigade and use it as Sheridan might direct. Men who saw Sheridan pointing out to Chamberlain the place where his brigade should attack remembered his final passionate injunction: "Now smash 'em, I tell you, smash 'em!"

Chamberlain got his men where Sheridan wanted them, and all of Ord's and Griffin's men were in line now, coming up on higher ground where they could see the whole field.

They could see the Confederate line drawing back from in front of them, crowned with its red battle flags, and all along the open country to the right they could see the whole cavalry corps of the Army of the Potomac trotting over to take position beyond Chamberlain's brigade. The sunlight gleamed brightly off the metal and the flags, and once again, for a last haunting moment, the way men make war looked grand and caught at the throat, as if some str
ange value beyond values were
comprehensively mixed up in it all.

Then Sheridan's bugles sounded, the clear notes slanting all across the field, and all of his brigades wheeled and swung into line, every saber raised high, every rider tense; and in another minute infantry and cavalry would drive in on the slim Confederate lines and crumble them and destroy them in a last savage burst of firing and cutting and clubbing.

Out from the Rebel lines came a lone rider, a young officer in a gray uniform, galloping madly, a staff in his hand with a white flag fluttering from the end of it. He rode up to Chamberlain's lines and someone there took him off to see Sheridan, and the firing stopped, and the watching Federals saw the Southerners wheeling their guns back and stacking their muskets as if they expected to fight no more.

All up and down the lines the men blinked at one another, unable to realize that the hour they had waited for so long was actually at hand. There was a truce, they could see that, and presently the word was passed that Grant and Lee were going to meet in the little village that lay now between the two lines, and no one could doubt that Lee was going to surrender. It was Palm Sunday, and they would all live to see Easter, and with the guns quieted it might be easier to comprehend the mystery and the promise of that day. Yet the fact of peace and no more killing and an open road home seems to have been too big to grasp, right at the moment, and in the enormous silence that lay upon the field men remembered that they had marched far and were very tired, and they wondered when the wagon trains would come up with rations.

One of Ord's soldiers wrote that the army should have

gone wild with joy, then and there; and yet, he said, somehow they did not. Later there would be frenzied cheering and crying and rejoicing, but now . . . now, for some reason, the men sat on the ground and looked across at the Confederate army and found themselves feeling as they had never dreamed that the moment
of victory would make them feel.

"... I remember how we sat there and pitied and sympathized with these courageous Southern men who had fought for four long and dreary years all so stubbornly, so bravely and so well, and now, whipped, beaten, completely used up, were fully at our mercy—it was pitiful, sad, hard, and seemed to us altogether too bad." A Pennsylvanian in the V Corps dodged past the skirmish line and strolled into the lines of the nearest Confederate regiment, and half a century after the war he recalled it with a glow: "... as soon as I got among these boys I felt and was treated as well as if I had been among our own boys, and a person would of thought we were of the same Army and had been Fighting under the Same Flag."

Down by the roadside near Appomattox Court House, Sheridan and Ord and other officers sat and waited while a brown-bearded little man in mud-spattered uniform rode up. They all saluted him, and there was a quiet interchange of greetings, and then General Grant tilted his head toward the village and asked: "Is General Lee up there?"

Sheridan replied that he was, and Grant said: "Very well. Let's go up."

The little cavalcade went trotting along the road to the village, and all around them the two armies waited in silence. As the generals neared the end of their ride, a Yankee band in a field near the town struck up "Auld Lang Syne."

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It
would be harder to write this kind of book, and the final result would be poorer, if one did not get so much help from so many kindly people. In listing the sources from which material was drawn the writer must express his abiding gratitude for a great deal of generous assistance.

Of particular value has been the opportunity to study various collections of unpublished letters written by Federal soldiers. These letters not only provide useful source material; they leave one feeling that he somehow had personal friends in the Union army—and, now and then, give him the odd illusion that he actually served in that army himself.

The following manuscript collections were made available:

Letters of Edwin Wentworth, of the 37th Massachusetts Infantry, loaned by Miss Edith Adams, of Auburn, Maine. These letters provide a singularly appealing glimpse at the experiences and emotions of a typical New England soldier, and one feels a sense of personal loss upon discovering that the last letter in the collection is a note to next of kin announcing Private Wentworth's death at the Bloody Angle.

Letters of Lewis Bissell, of the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery, loaned by Mr. Carl H. Bissell, of Syracuse, New York. Extremely valuable as an unrevised, day-to-day account of the experiences of a VI Corps veteran, these letters also provide a useful check on the formal regimental history of this Connecticut regiment, whose author is frequently mentioned in Private Bissell's letters.

Letters of Henry Clay Heisler, of the 48th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers, loaned by Mr. Donald M. Hobart, of Philadelphia. Written by a soldier in the regiment which dug the famous Petersburg mine, these letters shed a revealing light on that operation and on the reaction of Burnside's soldiers to Burnside's last battle. (Interestingly enough, this
r
egiment apparently blamed the fiasco on Burnside's subordinates rather than on Burnside himself.)

Letters of Sebastian Muller, of the 67th New York Infantry: in the manuscript collection of the Library of Congress. Quaint and stilted in their formal, old-world phraseology, these letters show how the war looked to an immigrant who supposed he had enlisted to fight "the rebels of South America."

Manuscript diary of Corporal S. O. Bryant, of the 20th Michigan Infantry, loaned by Mr. Donald C. Allen, of Washington. In this diary another of Burnside's soldiers expresses himself about the war, and in a complaint about Spotsylvania foreshadows the disaster at the crater.

Letter of Sergeant George S. Hampton, of the 91st Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers, loaned by Mr. J. Frank Nicholson, of Manassas, Virginia. Written some years after the war, this letter contains a priceless glimpse of men of the two armies at the moment of the cease-fire at Appomattox Court House.

The writer's especial thanks are due to Mr. Ralph Happel, historian, the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County National Military Park, for the loan of his excellent manuscript studies of the Wilderness-Spotsylvania battles, and for guidance in study of the terrain.

Dr. James Rabun, of the Department of History, Emory University, kindly forwarded a reprint of his article, "Alexander Stephens and Jefferson Davis," in the
American
His
torical Review.

Major General U. S. Grant, III, was most helpful in recalling anecdotes and family recollections about his distinguished grandfather.

Colonel Charles G. Stevenson, state judge advocate, New York National Guard, provided interesting material on the history of the famous "14th Brooklyn" Regiment, and traced that regiment's lineal descent to the 955th Field Artillery Battalion recently active in Korea.

Finally, a substantial debt of gratitude for many acts of helpfulness is owed to various librarians—specifically, to Dr.
David Mearns and Dr. Percy Powell of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; to Colonel Willard Webb of the Stack and Reader Division and to Mr. Legare Obear of the Loan Division in that library; to Mr. Paul Howard, librarian of the Department of the Interior, and to Miss Georgia Cowan of the History Division of the Public Library of the District of Columbia.