The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (183 page)

Old Peter cleared his camps well before midnight, but presently, in accordance with instructions to assume the more rigorous task of guarding the rear, halted to let Gordon take the lead on the westward march up the left bank of the Appomattox. The army thus had a head and a tail, but no middle now that the other two corps had been “dissolved” in battle and by Lee; Wise’s still sizeable brigade — practically all that remained of Johnson’s division — was assigned to Gordon, in partial compensation for his losses at Sayler’s Creek, while skeletal fragments of the other three divisions, under Pickett, Heth, and Wilcox, were attached to Longstreet, thereby rejoining comrades they had not seen since the Petersburg breakthrough sundered them, six days back. That left Richard Anderson and Bushrod Johnson troopless, and George Pickett not much better off with only sixty armed survivors; Lee solved the problem by formally relieving all three of duty, with authorization to return to their homes before reporting to the War Department. Anderson and Johnson left that afternoon, but Pickett’s orders apparently went astray. In any case he was still around, that day and the next, still nursing grievances over rejection of a report in which he had sought to fix the blame on others for his Gettysburg repulse. Lee may or may not have known about the Five Forks shad bake, a week ago today, but subsequently, when he saw his fellow Virginian ride by headquarters, ringlets jouncing, air of command intact, he reacted with dark surprise. “I thought that man was no longer with the army,” he remarked.

Otherwise, aside from continuing hunger and fatigue, there was much that was pleasant about this sixth day’s march, especially by contrast with the five that had gone before. Not only had the weather improved, the plodding graybacks noted when the sun came up this Saturday morning, but so had the terrain, barely touched by war till now. It was a day, one pursuing Federal wrote, “of uneventful marching; hardly a human being was encountered along the way. The country was enchanting, the peach orchards were blossoming in the southern spring, the fields had been peacefully plowed for the coming crops, the buds were beginning to swell, and a touch of verdure was perceptible on the trees and along the hillsides. The atmosphere was balmy and odorous; the hamlets were unburnt, the farms all tilled.” Best of all, no roar of guns disturbed what a South Carolinian called “the soft airs,
at once warm and invigorating, which blew to us along the high ridges we traversed.” Fitz Lee, whose horsemen trailed the column at a distance of two miles, reported the enemy infantry no closer to him than he was to his own, while the blue cavalry seemed equally disinclined to press the issue. Still, there was a driving urgency about the march, an apprehension unrelieved by the lack of direct pressure, and the need for it was evident from even a brief study of the map. On the left, the dwindling Appomattox soon would cease to be a barrier to whatever Union forces were in motion on the other side. A dozen miles beyond that critical point, westward across a watershed traversed by the Southside Railroad, the James River flowed northeast to reënter the tactical picture as a new barrier — one that was likely to be controlled by whichever army rounded the headwaters of the Appomattox first. If it was Lee’s, he could feed his men from the supply trains he had ordered sent to Appomattox Station, then press on next day to take shelter behind the James. If on the other hand the Federals got there in time to seize his provisions and in strength enough to block his path across the twelve-mile watershed, the campaign would be over. Alexander, the First Corps artillerist, saw this clearly. Examining on the map the “jug-shaped peninsula between the James and the Appomattox,” he noted that “there was but one outlet, the neck of the jug at Appomattox Station.” Both armies were headed there now, north and south of the river that had its source nearby — and “Grant had the shortest road.”

What was likely to come of this was plain enough to a number of high-ranking officers who had conferred informally about it the previous evening while waiting to set out on what they judged might well be their last march. Concluding that surrender would soon be unavoidable, they requested William Pendleton, the senior of the group, to communicate their view to Lee and thus, as Alexander put it, “allow the odium of making the first proposition to be placed upon them,” rather than on him. Neither Longstreet nor Gordon took part in the discussion, and when Pendleton told them of it next morning, seeking their endorsement, both declined. Old Peter, in fact — saying nothing of the message from Grant, which he had read the night before — was quick to point out that the Articles of War provided the death penalty for officers who urged capitulation on their commanders. As for himself, he said angrily, “If General Lee doesn’t know when to surrender until I tell him, he will never know.”

Pendleton, who had been at West Point with Lee before leaving the army to enter the ministry, bided his time until midday, when he found his fellow graybeard resting in the shade of a large pine beside the road. Like Longstreet, after hearing him out, Lee said nothing of Grant’s message — or of his own reply, in which, by requesting terms, he had already begun the negotiations Pendleton was recommending
— but rather expressed surprise at the proposal. “I trust it has not come to that,” he said sternly, even coldly. “We certainly have too many brave men to think of laying down our arms.”

Snubbed and embarrassed, convinced, in Alexander’s words, that Lee “preferred himself to take the whole responsibility of surrender, as he had always taken that of his battles,” Pendleton rejoined the troops slogging past on the road beside the river, which narrowed with every westward mile through the long spring afternoon. The going was harder now that this morning’s hunger and exertion had been added to those of the past five days. Tailing the march, Longstreet observed that “many weary soldiers were picked up, and many came to the column from the woodlands, some with, some without, arms — all asking for food.” There were also those who were too far gone for rescue, sitting as Ewell had sat two days ago, his arms on his knees, his head down between them. Others were even worse undone, “lying prone on the ground along the roadside, too much exhausted to march farther, and only waiting for the enemy to come and pick them up as prisoners, while at short intervals there were wagons broken down, their teams of horses and mules lying in the mud, from which they had struggled to extricate themselves until complete exhaustion forced them to wait for death to glaze their wildly staring eyes.” A Virginia trooper saw them thus, but added: “Through all this, a part of the army still trudged on, with their faith still strong, only waiting for General Lee to say whether they were to face about and fight.”

Fortunately, no such turnabout action was required before nightfall ended the march with the head of the column approaching Appomattox Courthouse, some three miles short of Appomattox Station. Part of the train was already parked in the fields around the county seat, and the reserve batteries, which had also gone ahead, were in position over toward the railroad. Lee was just dismounting to make camp beside the pike, about midway between Gordon and Longstreet, when a courier overtook him at last with a sealed message that had come through the lines earlier in the day. By the light of a candle held by an aide, he saw that it was Grant’s reply to last night’s request for his terms of surrender. “Peace being my great desire,” the Union commander wrote, “there is but one condition I would insist upon — namely, that the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified for taking up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged.” Not only was this a far cry from the “unconditional” demand that had won him his nom-de-guerre three years ago at Donelson, but Grant considerately added: “I will meet you, or will designate officers to meet any officers you may name for the same purpose, at any point agreeable to you, for the purpose of arranging definitely the terms upon which the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia will be received.”

Nothing of Lee’s reaction showed in his face. “How would you
answer that?” he asked the aide, who read it and replied: “I would answer no such letter.” Lee mused again, briefly. “Ah, but it must be answered,” he said, and there by the roadside, still by the flickering light of the candle, he proceeded to do so. Parole was infinitely preferable to imprisonment, but he had to weigh his chances of getting away westward, beyond the James, against the advantage of negotiating while surrender remained a matter of choice. Moreover, he still clung to the notion of resuming more general peace discussions that might lead to something less than total capitulation. “In mine of yesterday,” he now told Grant, “I did not intend to propose the surrender of the Army of N. Va., but to ask the terms of your proposition. To be frank, I do not think the emergency has arisen to call for surrender of this Army, but as the restoration of peace should be the sole object of all, I desired to know whether your proposals would lead to that end. I cannot therefore meet you with a view to surrender the Army of N. Va.; but as far as your proposal may affect the C. S. forces under my command, and tend to the restoration of peace, I shall be pleased to meet you at 10 a.m. tomorrow on the old stage road to Richmond, between the picket lines of the two armies.”

Soon after the courier set out rearward with this reply, a roar of guns erupted from over near the railroad, three miles off. It swelled and held, then subsided, and after a time — around 9 o’clock — Pendleton arrived from that direction to explain that he had ridden forward, a couple of miles beyond the courthouse village just ahead, to check on the reserve artillery, which had left Farmville with the train the day before. Sixty pieces were in park, awaiting resumption of the march tomorrow; all seemed well, he said, until a sudden attack by Union cavalry exploded out of the twilight woods, full in the faces of the lounging cannoneers. Two batteries were ordered to hold off the blue troopers while the rest pulled back, and there ensued what a participant called “one of the closest artillery fights in the time it lasted that occurred during the war. The guns were fought literally up to the muzzles. It was dark by this time, and at every discharge the cannon were ablaze from touchhole to mouth. There must have been six or eight pieces at work, and the small arms of some three or four hundred men packed in among the guns in a very confined space. It seemed like the very jaws of the infernal regions.” Pendleton by then had left to help withdraw such pieces as might be saved, but narrowly avoided capture himself by enemy horsemen who came swarming up the wagon-crowded road. He feared perhaps half the guns had been lost, he told Lee, including those in the two batteries left behind, which soon fell silent in the darkness, three miles to the southwest.

As it turned out, two dozen of them were taken, there and on the road. But that was by no means the worst of the news, or the worst of its implications. Just beyond the overrun gun park was Appomattox
Station, where the supply trains had been ordered to await the arrival of the army. Most likely they had been captured too. If so, that meant still another rationless march tomorrow: if, indeed, a march could be made at all. No one could even guess at the number of Federals involved in the night attack across the way, and though they appeared to be cavalry, to a man — so far at least as anyone had been able to tell in the darkness and confusion — there was no way of knowing what other forces were at hand, including division after division of blue infantry near the end of their unhindered daylong westward tramp up the opposite bank of the river. One thing was certain in any case. If they were there in any considerable strength, corking the James-Appomattox jug, the way across the twelve-mile watershed was blocked and the campaign was over, all but the formal surrender on whatever terms Grant might require at the 10 o’clock meeting Lee had just requested.

Not even now, with the probable end in sight, did Lee show the mounting tension he had been under since the collapse of his flank at Five Forks, a week ago today. He did react swiftly to Pendleton’s report, however, by summoning his two infantry corps commanders, as well as his nephew Fitz, who was told to alert his troopers for a shift from the tail of the column to its head. Before long, all three joined him at his camp, pitched near a large white oak on the last low ridge overlooking the north branch of the Appomattox, and the council of war began. Longstreet sat on a log, smoking his pipe; Gordon and Fitz shared a blanket spread on the ground for a seat. The new-risen moon, only two nights short of the full, lighted the scene while Lee, who stood by a fire that had been kindled against the chill, explained the tactical situation, so far as he knew it, and read them Grant’s two letters, together with his replies. Then he did something he had not done, at least in this collective way, since the eve of the Seven Days, shortly after he took over as their leader. He asked for their advice. “We knew by our own aching hearts that his was breaking,” Gordon was to say. “Yet he commanded himself, and stood calmly facing and discussing the long-dreaded inevitable.”

So did they, and the decision accordingly reached was that the army would try for a breakout, a getaway westward beyond the glow of enemy campfires rimming the horizon on all sides except the barren north. While Fitz brought his horsemen forward to lead the attack out the Lynchburg pike, Gordon would prepare to move in support of the mounted effort. If successful in unblocking the road, they would then wheel left to hold it open for the passage of the train, which would be reduced to two battalions of artillery and the ammunition wagons, and Longstreet would follow, guarding the rear in case the pursuing Federals tried to interfere from that direction. It was a long-odds gamble at best; moreover, Gordon pointed out, “The utmost that could be hoped for was that we might reach the mountains of Virginia and Tennessee with
a remnant of the army, and ultimately join General Johnston.” Still it was no more, or less, than could be expected of men determined to keep fighting so long as a spark of hope remained. If the bluecoats could not be budged, if more than cavalry had arrived to bar the way, there would be time enough then, as Fitz Lee put it, “to accede to the only alternative left us.”