A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy Read online

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1990

  Copyright © 1953 by Bruce Catton

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday in 1953. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Catton, Bruce,

  A stillness at Appomattox / Bruce Catton.

  —1st Anchor Books ed.

  p. cm.

  Reprint. Originally published: Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962.

  (The Army of the Potomac: v. 3)

  1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Regimental histories. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns. 3. Appomattox Campaign, 1865. 4. United States. Army of the Potomac. I. Title. II. Series: Catton, Bruce, 1899–.

  Army of the Potomac; v. 3.

  E470.2.C39 1990 90-454

  973.7′41—dc20

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77372-2

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  To my sister Barbara

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ONE

  Glory Is Out of Date 1. A Boy Named Martin

  2. Turkey at a Shooting Match

  3. From a Mountain Top

  TWO

  Roads Leading South 1. Where the Dogwood Blossomed

  2. Shadow in the Night

  3. All Their Yesterdays

  4. Surpassing All Former Experiences

  THREE

  One More River to Cross 1. The Cripples Who Could Not Run

  2. Judgment Trump of the Almighty

  3. Secondhand Clothes

  4. Lie Down, You Damn Fools

  FOUR

  White Iron on the Anvil 1. Changing the Guard

  2. I Know Star-Rise

  3. Like the Noise of Great Thunders

  FIVE

  Away, You Rolling River 1. Special Train for Monocacy Junction

  2. To Peel This Land

  3. On the Upgrade

  4. No More Doubt

  SIX

  Endless Road Ahead 1. Except by the Sword

  2. Great Light in the Sky

  3. The Soldiers Saw Daylight

  4. The Enormous Silence

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOTES

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  Glory Is Out of Date

  1. A Boy Named Martin

  EVERYBODY agreed that the Washington’s Birthday ball was the most brilliant event of the winter. Unlike most social functions in this army camp by the Rapidan, it was not held in a tent. There was a special, weatherproof ballroom—a big box of a building more than a hundred feet long, whose construction had kept scores of enlisted men busy. Some of these had been sent into the woods to fell trees. Others had taken over and operated an abandoned sawmill, to reduce the trees to boards. Still others, carpenters in some former incarnation, had taken these boards and built the building itself, and it was pleasantly odorous of new-cut pine, decorated with all of the headquarters and regimental flags which the II Army Corps possessed. The flags may have been worth seeing. It was the boast of this corps that although it had suffered nearly 19,000 battle casualties it had never yet lost a flag to the enemy.

  At one end of the ballroom there was a raised platform on which, to dazzle the guests, there was an idyllic representation of what the ladies from Washington might imagine to be a typical army bivouac—spotless shelter tents pulled tight to eliminate wrinkles, piles of drums and bugles, tripods of stacked muskets, mimic campfire with cooking kettles hung over it, and as a final touch two brass Napoleons, polished and shining until their own gun crews would hardly know them, reflecting the light of Chinese lanterns, as brightly festive as any instruments of pain and death one could hope to see.

  Some of the guests—the wives of officers who had enough rank or influence to be attended by their womenfolk while in winter quarters—were more or less permanent residents of this highly impermanent camp. Others, who had come down from the capital by train just for this occasion, were quartered in wall tents, and since a woman in a hoop-skirted party gown could neither ride horseback nor walk on the muddy footways of an army camp, their escorts called for them in white-topped army ambulances.

  The escorts were of course officers, both of staff and of line. They wore their dress uniforms, and they had their swords neatly hooked up at their belts, and even though they were to spend the evening dancing many of them wore spurs. It was remarked that both escorts and guests seemed to make a particular effort to be gay, as if perhaps the music and the laughter and the stylized embrace of the dance might help everybody to put out of mind the knowledge that in the campaign which would begin in the spring a considerable percentage of these officers would unquestionably be killed.

  That knowledge was not easy to avoid. The war was just finishing its third year, the end of it was nowhere in sight, and what lay ahead was almost certain to be worse than what had gone before. Neither the officers who wore spurs and swords to the dance floor, nor the women who swirled their voluminous skirts to the music without regard for these encumbrances, retained any romantic illusions about this war. Yet they still had the ability—perhaps there was a necessity about it—to create illusions for the moment; and this evening there seems to have been a conscious effort to enter into the Byronic mood, an eagerness to see a parallel between this ball and the fabulous ball given in Brussels by the Duchess of Richmond on the eve of Waterloo. The dancers tried to act the parts which the romantic tradition called for, and while the music lasted—the brave music of a military band, playing the swinging little tunes that would keep reality at bay—they could maintain their chosen attitudes, changing tragedy into a dreamy unobtrusive melancholy that would do no more than highlight the evening’s gaiety. It was at one of these dances that a young woman found herself chatting with a general officer whose only son had recently been killed in some outpost skirmish up the river. She offered her sympathy. The general bowed: “Yes, madame, very sad! Very sad! He was the last of his race. Do you waltz?” 1

  The dance lasted until the small hours, and at last the ambulances went off through the sleeping camp, and there was a final tinkle of chatter and laughter and so-glad-you-could-come under the frosty stars as the guests went to their tents. And the next afternoon everybody reassembled in and around a reviewing stand in an open field for a grand review of the II Corps, with the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac taking the salute as the long ranks of veterans went past.

  Like the dance, the review was an occasion: a quiet reminder, if anybody needed one, that dances and bright officers and everything else rested finally on the men in the ranks, who went to no parties and who could be turned out to parade their strength for the admiration of the officers’ ladies. It was noted that the major general commanding, George Gordon Meade, was in rare good humor. He was lean and grizzled, with a great hawk nose and a furious temper, and his staff had learned to read omens in his behavior. When the army was about to do something he gave off sparks, and those around him did well to step quietly and rapidly, but toda
y the omens were good. He was light-hearted, making small jokes and telling stories, enjoying the review and the company of the guests, and acting the part of a major general who had nothing in particular on his mind. Staff observed and took heart; some weeks of quiet must lie ahead of the army.2

  In this judgment the staff officers were wrong. There was a movement afoot, and General Meade did not wholly approve of it. He was at ease, perhaps, merely because the imminent movement would involve only a fragment of the army, and because it did not seem likely to have any great importance one way or the other. Visible sign that something was in the wind was the presence at this infantry review of the 3rd Cavalry Division of the Army of the Potomac, led by Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick.

  Kilpatrick was in his mid-twenties, young for a brigadier, a wiry, restless, undersized man with blank eyes, a lantern jaw, and an imposing growth of sand-colored sideburns; a man about whom there were two opinions. A member of Meade’s staff wrote in his diary that it was hard to look at Kilpatrick without laughing, and the common nickname for him around army headquarters was “Kail Cavalry.” His division fought well and paraded well—at this review it put on a noble mock charge, a thundering yelling gallop across the dead grass of the plain, troopers rising in their stirrups with gleaming sabers extended, all very stimulating for the visiting ladies—but its camp was usually poorly policed and in bad order, its horses were overworked and badly groomed, the clothing and equipments of the men had a used-up look, and its carbines were mostly rather dirty.

  Yet the man had a quality, somehow. In combat he was valiant, and he was afraid of nothing—except, possibly, of the final ounce of the weight of personal responsibility—and he was slightly unusual among the officers of this army in that he neither drank nor played cards. At West Point he had been noted as a gamecock, anxious to use his spurs. Born in New Jersey, he was ardent for the Union and against slavery, and he had had many fist fights with other gamecock cadets from the South. William Tecumseh Sherman, with his genius for brutal overstatement, may have summed him up when, a bit later in the war, he asked to have Kilpatrick assigned to him for the march to the sea, explaining: “I know that Kilpatrick is a hell of a damned fool, but I want just that sort of man to command my cavalry on this expedition.”

  Kilpatrick had ambitions. It was his belief that if he survived the war he would become, first, governor of New Jersey, and then President of the United States. At the moment, however, he was more concerned with the thought that he would presently become a major general, and various events hung upon this conviction.3

  While the officers of the II Corps were having their ball, Kilpatrick had been having a party of his own—a lavish affair, held in a big frame house near Brandy Station, where Kilpatrick had his headquarters. The guests included a number of important senators—the Senate had to confirm the promotions of all general officers—and if the general did not drink he saw to it that any guests who did were taken care of. The party appears to have been loud, merry, and successful. One guest recalled that Kilpatrick had been “as active as a flea, and almost as ubiquitous.” When the review was held on the following day Kilpatrick, who had arranged to have his cavalry take part, saw to it that his guests had places in the reviewing stand.4

  But the senators were only part of it. In his reflections on the road to promotion Kilpatrick that winter had thought of two other points. One was the anxiety of Abraham Lincoln to extend friendship and amnesty to any citizens of the Confederacy who would return to their old allegiance to the Federal government. Mr. Lincoln had recently issued a proclamation offering such amnesty, and he greatly wanted copies of it distributed in the South. The other point was the relatively defenseless condition of Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, where there were confined many thousands of Union prisoners of war.

  Putting these two points together, Kilpatrick had evolved a plan. A well-appointed cavalry expedition, he believed, under the proper officer (who might well be Judson Kilpatrick) could slip through General Lee’s defenses, get down to Richmond before the Army of Northern Virginia could send reinforcements, free all of the Union prisoners, and in its spare time distribute thousands of copies of the President’s proclamation. Having thought of this plan Kilpatrick managed to get word of it to Washington, and in the middle of February he had been formally summoned to the White House to explain the scheme to Mr. Lincoln and to the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton.

  This summons Kilpatrick had obeyed gladly, amid mutterings on the part of his chief, Major General Alfred Pleasonton, who commanded the cavalry corps and who had a low opinion both of Kilpatrick’s plan and of Kilpatrick’s action in dealing direct with the White House. Pleasonton remarked tartly that the last big cavalry raid—Stoneman’s luckless expedition, during the Chancellorsville campaign—had accomplished nothing of any consequence and had cost the army 7,000 horses. He added that if the President wanted his amnesty proclamation circulated in Richmond that could be done by regular espionage agents without taking a single cavalryman away from the army.5

  But Pleasonton was not listened to and Kilpatrick was. He may have owed a good deal to Secretary Stanton, who had a weakness for fantastic schemes. He probably owed more to Mr. Lincoln himself, who was forever hoping that the seceding states could be brought back into the Union before they were beaten to death, and who, from long dealings with officers of the Army of the Potomac, had come to look with a kindly eye on those who were willing to display a little initiative. In any case the project had been approved at the very top, and orders came down from Washington to give Kilpatrick 4,000 troopers and let him see what he could do. Simultaneously, whole bales of pamphlets reprinting the amnesty proclamation arrived at Brandy Station.

  The enthusiasm aroused by all of this at army headquarters was tepid. Army intelligence was well aware that Richmond was lightly held this winter. There were strong fortifications about the city, but hardly any troops occupied them, the chief reliance being on militia—and on the presence just below the Rapidan, far from Richmond but close to the Army of the Potomac, of the indomitable soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia.

  In theory, Richmond was open to a sudden grab. But headquarters could not help remembering that a plan not unlike Kilpatrick’s had been cooked up a month earlier by the imaginative but incompetent Ben Butler, who commanded Federal troops around Fortress Monroe. Butler had proposed that the Army of the Potomac make a pretense of an offensive, to keep Lee busy, while Butler’s own troops marched up the peninsula and seized Richmond, and after a good deal of correspondence back and forth the thing had been tried. The Army of the Potomac had done its part, getting into a smart little fight at Morton’s Ford and suffering two or three hundred casualties, and with Confederate attention thus engaged the way had been open for Butler to do what he proposed to do. But somehow nothing much happened. Butler’s troops advanced, encountered a broken bridge several miles below Richmond, paused to contemplate it for a while, and at last retreated, and everything was as it had been before except that Lee had been alerted and now held the Rapidan crossings in greater strength.

  Major General John Sedgwick, unassuming and wholly capable, who commanded the army just then in the temporary absence of General Meade, commented indignantly on the business in his dispatches to Washington, but he succeeded only in ruining his own standing at the War Department.6 The administration still believed that Richmond could be taken by a bold stroke, and an officer who disagreed was likely to be considered fainthearted and politically unsound. Also, there were all of those pamphlets to be distributed.

  Orders were orders, in other words, and Meade dutifully set about obeying them. His part was to enable the cavalry to get through the Rebel lines along the Rapidan, and he devised a little stratagem: the army would make an ostentatious lunge toward the right, as if it meant mischief somewhere down the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, and while the Confederates were looking in that direction Kilpatrick’s men could go slicing off to the left. If the tric
k worked, so that the expedition once got past Lee’s army, the whole project might very well succeed.

  It was all top secret, of course, for everything depended on taking Lee by surprise. As far as headquarters knew there had been no leaks. And then one day, just about the time the ladies were gathering for the Washington’s Birthday ball, there came limping across the railway platform at Brandy Station a youthful colonel of cavalry whose mere presence here was proof that the story was all over Washington.

  This officer was Ulric Dahlgren. In addition to a colonel’s commission, he possessed, at twenty-one, much glamor, a wooden leg, and some extremely important connections. His father was Rear Admiral John A. D. Dahlgren, a world authority on ordnance and one of the Navy’s hard-case shellbacks to boot. Inventor of the heavy bottle-shaped Dahlgren gun which the Navy favored so much, he was also a good friend of Abraham Lincoln. Currently, the admiral was in charge of the fleet which was vainly trying to batter its way into Charleston Harbor. A square-jawed, bony, tenacious Scandinavian, lean and sharp-cornered, he rode in the front line of action in a hot ill-ventilated monitor instead of taking his ease in his admiral’s suite on the flagship, and he was deeply proud of the son who freakishly had forsaken the Navy and sought fame in the hard-riding, headline-happy squadrons of the cavalry corps.

  Young Dahlgren was tall and slim and graceful, with a thin tawny beard and much charm of manner. He was alleged to be the youngest colonel in the Army, and an admiring Confederate wrote of him that he had “manners as soft as a cat’s.” Born in Pennsylvania, he had grown up in the Washington Navy Yard, and when the war began he was studying civil engineering. Early in 1862 he decided that it was time for him to fight—he had just passed his nineteenth birthday—and he was forthwith given an Army captaincy by Secretary Stanton himself. A bit later he found himself on the staff of General Joe Hooker.