A Stillness at Appomattox (45 page)

Now
John
Sedgwick
was
dead,
and
the
great
wagon
trains were
lumbering
down
to
Fredericksburg,
every
day
and
every night,
and
the
white
ash
and
charred
twigs
of
the
Wilderness
were
dropping
on
disfigured
bodies
which
no
one
would ever
name,
while
long
columns
of
weary
men
went
blindly into
new
fights
that
would
be
worse
than
what
they
had
just come
away
from;
and
Lincoln
sat
late
at
night
with
a
volume of
Shakespeare's
tragedies,
and
to
a
friend
he
read
the
lines of
Macbeth's
despair;
¹⁷

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.

This
was
in
the
White
House.
The
young
men
of
the
Army of
the
Potomac
had
had
many
yesterdays
to
light
their
dusty way,
but
they
did
not
talk
about
them.
They
simply
lived
by the
remembered
light
those
days
had
given
them,
and
the days
were
various,
and
nobody
can
say
just
where
all
of
the light
came
from
or
what
it
finally
meant.
(Take
a
morning
in Ohio,
for
example.
The
land
is
flat,
and
when
dawn
begins there
is
a
thin
mist
everywhere,
and
it
glows
with
the
first light
so
that
the
green
trees
begin
to
come
out
black
in
the distance,
and
the
earth
rolls
gently
off
to
meet
them,
and
the truth
about
many
things
lies
not
quite
veiled
in
the
hollow places
where
the
mist
lies
the
longest;
and
a
man
who
sees it
knows
something,
but
what
sort
of
light
is
that
for
a soldier?)

One
of
the
things
these
men
had
got
out
of
their
long yesterdays
was
a
toughness
and
a
jaunty
humor.
On
the morning
after
the
Laurel
Hill
fight,
Grant
came
riding
past the
littered
slopes
to
a
new
place
that
had
been
picked
for his
headquarters.
A
fife
and
drum
corps
was
somewhere about,
and
when
the
musicians
saw
the
general
they
suddenly,
on
inspiration,
struck
up
a
rollicking
little
tune.

Many
soldiers
were
near,
and
when
they
heard
the
tune they
looked
about
them
and
saw
Grant,
and
then
they
all
began
to
cheer
and
laugh.
Grant
noticed
it,
and
he
was
quite unable
to
tell
one
tune
from
another—he
had
a
feeble
jest,
to the
effect
that
he
knew
just
two
tunes:
one
was
Yankee Doodle,
and
the
other
wasn't—and
he
asked
an
aide
what
the band
was
playing
to
cause
all
of
this
commotion.
The
aide explained
that
it
was
playing
a
popular
camp-meeting
ditty which
the
whole
army
was
familiar
with:
a
little
number
entitled,
"Ain't
I
glad
to
get
out
of
the
wilderness!"

4. Surpass
ing All
Former Experiences

There
were
many
young
men
in
the
army
and
one
of
them was
a
colonel
named
Emory
Upton.
He
was
thin,
wiry, freckled,
with
unruly
hair
and
a
trim
goatee
and
mustache; an
intense,
passionate
man,
a
Regular
Army
officer
who
was impatient
with
the
army's
way
of
doing
things
and
especially with
the
ways
of
its
higher
officers.
None
of
these,
he
said contemptuously,
knew
how
to
lead
men.
They
commanded the
best
soldiers
in
the
world
but
they
did
not
know
what to
do
with
them.

Like
John
Sedgwick,
in
whose
corps
he
served,
Upton poured
out
his
thoughts
in
long
letters
to
his
sister.
To
her he
spoke
his
mind
about
generals:

"I
have
never
heard
our
generals
utter
a
word
of
encouragement,
either
before
or
after
entering
a
battle.
I
have
never seen
them
ride
along
the
lines
and
tell
each
regiment
that
it held
an
important
position
and
that
it
was
expected
to
hold it
to
the
last,
I
have
never
heard
them
appeal
to
the
love every
soldier
has
for
his
colors,
or
to
his
patriotism.
Neither have
I
ever
seen
a
general
thank
his
troops
after
the
action for
the
gallantry
they
have
displayed."

Having
written
this,
young
Colonel
Upton
added
that when
he
meditated
on
all
of
the
incompetence
in
starred shoulder
straps,
and
then
considered
his
own
qualifications, "there
is
no
grade
in
the
army
to
which
I
do
not
aspire."

Upton
was
the
son
of
a
New
York
farmer.
He
had
spent
a couple
of
his
teen-age
years
at
Oberlin,
in
Ohio,
just
in
time to
absorb
the
fervid
religious
and
abolitionist
sentiments
that yeasty
place
was
germinating
then.
He
was
a
sober
youngster, worrying
about
his
soul,
about
the
Union,
about
slavery, about
his
own
health—at
one
stage
he
refused
to
sleep
on
a pillow
for
fear
it
would
make
him
round-shouldered—and he
entered
West
Point
in
1856
and
was
graduated
shortly before
the
war
began,
number
eight
in
his
class.
He
could have
gone
into
the
engineers,
the
army's
corps d'elite,
but