The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

  Part of this intermittent sadness no doubt came from realization that he was approaching the end of the only real vacation he had taken in the past four years. All day Saturday preparations went forward for departure of the Queen that night, including a thorough check on the records of her crew, ordered by Porter in reaction to the belated fright he felt at the risk he had run in taking the President to and through the rebel capital, all but unescorted. That evening a military band came on board for a farewell concert. After several numbers, Lincoln requested the “Marseillaise,” which he liked so well that he had it repeated. “You must, however, come over to America to hear it,” he said wryly to the young marquis, knowing the Emperor had banned the piece in France. Then he called for “Dixie,” much to the surprise of his guests and the musicians, as well as to listeners in the outer darkness on the docks and blufftop. “That tune is now Federal property,” he told Chambrun. An hour before midnight, the Queen cast off and began to steam down the winding moonlit river, escorted by the Bat. Reaching Hampton Roads before dawn, she stopped long enough to board a pilot at Fort Monroe and was off again by sunrise, up Chesapeake Bay toward the mouth of the Potomac.

  It was April 9; Palm Sunday. Eastward the sky was a glory of red, but the rising sun was presently dimmed by clouds rolling in from the sea with a promise of rain. The President and his guests rose early, and after breakfast went on deck to watch the gliding tableau of the Coreline. Soon after they entered the Potomac, paddle wheels churning against the current, they passed Stratford Hall, the birthplace of Robert Lee — presumably still in flight for his life, a hundred-odd miles to the southwest — and within the hour, on that same bank, saw the birth-sites too of Washington and James Monroe. Almost in view of the capital, as they steamed past Mount Vernon just at sundown, someone remarked that Springfield would someday be equally honored. Lincoln, who had been musing at the rail, came out of himself on hearing his home town mentioned. “Springfield!” he exclaimed. He smiled and said he would be happy to return there, “four years hence,” and live in peace and tranquillity. Mainly though, according to Chambrun, “the conversation dwelt upon literary subjects.” Lincoln read to the assembled group from what Sumner called “a beautiful quarto Shakespeare,” mainly from Macbeth, perhaps his favorite, with emphasis on the scenes that followed the king’s assassination.

  “Duncan is in his grave;

  After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well;

  Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,

  Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing

  Can touch him further.”

  He paused, then read the lines again, something in them responding to something in himself. After the reading he was again withdrawn, although presently when his wife spoke of Jefferson Davis—saying, as the staff officer had said five days ago in Richmond, “He must be hanged”—he replied, as he had then: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Contradiction was risky in that direction, inviting “malice domestic” as it did, but he ventured to repeat it when they came within sight of the roofs of Washington and he heard her tell Chambrun, “That city is filled with our enemies.” Lincoln made a gesture of impatience. “Enemies,” he said, as if with the taste of something bitter on his tongue. “We must never speak of that.”

  Rain was coming down hard in the twilight by the time the steamer reached the wharf at the foot of Sixth Street. The President’s carriage was waiting to take him to the White House, but he let Tad and Mrs Lincoln off there and went on alone to Seward’s house, nearby on Franklin Square, where the Secretary lay recovering from the injuries he had suffered. They were extensive, the right shoulder badly dislocated, the jaw broken on both sides; the pain had been so great that he had been in delirium for three of the four days since his fall. Indeed, he was scarcely recognizable when his friend entered the upstairs bedroom to find him stretched along the far edge of the bed, his arm projected over the side to avoid pressure on the bruised socket, his face swathed in bandages, swollen and discolored, his jaw clamped in an iron frame for healing. “You are back from Richmond?” he said in a hoarse whisper, barely able to speak because of the damage and the pain. “Yes, and I think we are near the end at last,” Lincoln told him. First he sat gingerly on the bed, then sprawled across it, resting on an elbow, his face close to Seward’s while he described much that had happened down near City Point in the course of the past two weeks. He stayed half an hour, by which time the New Yorker had fallen into a feverish sleep. Then he came out, gesturing for silence in the hall, and tiptoed down the stairs to the front door, where his carriage was waiting to take him back to the White House.

  Later that evening, undressing for sleep, he felt the familiar weariness all men feel on their first night home from a vacation. Then there came a knock, and he opened the bedroom door to find a War Department messenger in the hall with a telegram that made Lincoln forget that weariness had anything to do with living. It was from Grant and had been sent from a place called Appomattox Courthouse.

  April 9, 1865 — 4.30 p.m.

  Hon. E. M. Stanton,

  Secretary of War:

  General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this afternoon upon terms proposed by myself. The accompanying additional correspondence will show the conditions fully.

  U. S. GRANT

  Lieutenant General.

  4

  What had begun as a retreat the previous Sunday night, when Lee abandoned Petersburg and Richmond with the intention of marching southwest beyond the Roanoke, developed all too soon into a race against Grant and starvation, which in turn became a harassed flight that narrowed the dwindling army’s fate to slow or sudden death. For six days this continued, ever westward. Then on the seventh — April 9, Palm Sunday — Lee made his choice. The agony ended, as his opponent said in the bedtime telegram to Lincoln, “upon terms proposed by myself.”

  Few at the start, in the column he accompanied, apparently thought it would turn out so: least of all Lee himself, who told a companion when they took up the march on Monday morning: “I have got my army safely out of its breastworks, and in order to follow me, the enemy must abandon his lines and can derive no further benefit from his railroads or James River.” Others felt a similar elation at their successful withdrawal across the Appomattox, unpursued, and the exchange of their cramped trenches for the spread-out landscape, where sunlight glittered on greening fields and new-fledged trees along the roadside. Whatever the odds, this was Chancellorsville weather, with its reminders of their old skill at maneuver. “A sense of relief seemed to pervade the ranks at their release from the lines where they had watched and worked for more than nine weary months,” a staff brigadier would recall. “Once more in the open field, they were invigorated with hope, and felt better able to cope with their powerful adversary.”

  But that applied only to the central column, the 13,000 infantry under Longstreet and Gordon, Pendleton’s 3000 cannoneers, and Mahone’s 4000-man division on its way from Bermuda Hundred via Chesterfield Courthouse. Most of these 20,000 effectives had stood fast the day before, had conducted the nighttime withdrawal in good order, and had sustained their group identity in the process. It was different for the 6000 coming down from beyond the James with Ewell. Less than a third were veterans under Kershaw, while the rest — combined extemporaneously under Custis Lee, who had lately been promoted to major general though he had never led troops in action outside the capital defenses — were reservists, naval personnel, and heavy artillerymen, so unaccustomed to marching that the road in their rear was already littered with stragglers, footsore and blown from a single night on the go. Nor was their outlook improved by the view they had had, back over their shoulders the night before, of Richmond in flames on the far side of the river. Even so, they were in considerably better shape than the 3500 men with Anderson beyond the Appomattox, rattled fragments of the four divisions of Pickett, Johnson, Heth, and Wilcox, working their way west in the wake of Fitz Lee’s 3500 jaded troopers on wors
e-than-jaded horses. Badly trounced at Five Forks, two days back, and scattered by yesterday’s breakthrough on the right — which had now become the left — they had been whipped, and knew it. “There was an attempt to organize the various commands,” a South Carolina captain later said of this smallest and worst-off of the three infantry columns; “to no avail. The Confederacy was considered as ‘gone up,’ and every man felt it his duty, as well as his privilege, to save himself. I do not mean to say there was any insubordination whatever, but the whole left of the army was so crushed by the defeats of the past few days that it straggled along without strength and almost without thought. So we moved on in disorder, keeping no regular column, no regular pace. When a soldier became weary he fell out, ate his scanty rations — if, indeed, he had any to eat — rested, rose, and resumed the march when his inclination dictated. There were not many words spoken. An indescribable sadness weighed upon us. The men were very gentle toward each other, very liberal in bestowing the little of food that remained to them.”

  All that day, well into darkness, Anderson’s fugitive survivors kept up their march northwest along the south bank of the Appomattox. Around midnight, when a halt was called at last, the weary captain watched as his men “fell about and slept heavily, or else wandered like persons in a dream. I remember, it all seemed to me like a troubled vision. I was consumed by fever, and when I attempted to walk I staggered about like a drunken man.” A night’s sleep helped, and Tuesday morning when they encountered Longstreet’s veterans, crossing the river with Lee himself at the head of the central column, they were comforted to find that the rest of the army was by no means as badly off as they were. Small bodies of blue cavalry, attempting to probe their flank and interrupt the march, were driven off and kept at a respectful distance. “We revived rapidly from our forlorn and desolate feeling,” the captain would recall.

  Hunger was still a problem, to put it mildly, but there was also comfort for that; at any rate the comfort of anticipation. Amelia Courthouse lay just ahead on the Richmond & Danville, five miles west of the river, and Lee had arranged for meat and bread to be sent there from the 350,000 rations amassed in the capital in the course of the past two months. Or so he thought until he arrived, shortly before noon, to find a generous shipment of ordnance equipment — 96 loaded caissons, 200 crates of ammunition for his guns, and 164 boxes of artillery harness — waiting aboard a string of cars pulled onto a siding; but no food. His requisition had not been received, the commissary general afterwards explained, until “all railroad transportation had been taken up.”

  If Lee’s face, as a cavalry staffer noted, took on “an anxious and haggard expression” at the news, it was no wonder. At the close of a march of nearly forty miles in about as many hours, with nothing to eat but what they happened to have with them at the outset or could scrounge along the way, he had 33,000 soldiers — the number to which his army, including reservists, had been reduced in the past ten days by its losses at Fort Stedman and Five Forks and during the Sunday breakthrough, each of which had cost him just under or over 5000 men — converging on a lonely trackside village where not a single ration could be drawn. His only recourse was to call a halt while commissary details scoured the countryside for such food as they could find. This they soon began to do, armed with an appeal “To the Citizens of Amelia County,” signed R. E. Lee and calling on them “to supply as far as each one is able the wants of the brave soldiers who have battled for your liberty for four years.”

  In point of fact, there would have been a delay in any case, since nothing had yet been heard from Ewell, and the rest of the army could not push on down the railroad until this laggard column was on hand. Meantime, Lee got off a telegram to Danville, directing the immediate rail shipment of rations from the stores St John had waiting for him there, though whether the requisition would get through was doubtful, the wires having been cut near Jetersville, a hamlet six miles down the track and twelve miles short of Burkeville. After supper, a message came from Ewell announcing that he had been delayed by flooded bridges; he expected to cross the Appomattox tonight and would arrive next morning. Lee could do nothing but wait for him and the commissary wagons, hopefully loaded with whatever food had been volunteered or impressed. Even so, he was aware that he had lost a good part of the head start he had gained when he slipped away from Grant two nights ago, and knowledge of this, together with the anguish he felt for the hungry troops still hobbling in, was reflected in his bearing. “His face was still calm, as it always was,” an artillery sergeant major later wrote, “but his carriage was no longer erect, as his soldiers had been used to see it. The troubles of these last days had already plowed great furrows in his forehead. His eyes were red as if with weeping, his cheeks sunken and haggard, his face colorless. No one who looked upon him, as he stood there in full view of the disastrous end, can ever forget the intense agony written upon his features.”

  Such distress was general that evening. While the wagon details were out scouring the picked-over region for something the men or animals could eat, the half-starved troops, bedded down in fields around the rural county seat or still limping toward a concentration that should have been completed before nightfall, evidenced a discouragement more profound than any they had known in the darkest days of the siege that now had ended. “Their strength was slowly drained from them,” an officer declared, “and despondency, like a black and poisonous mist, began to invade the hearts before so tough and buoyant.” Some were taken with a restlessness, a sort of wanderlust that outweighed their exhaustion: with the result that there were further subtractions from the army’s ranks. “Many of them wandered off in search of food, with no thought of deserting at all. Many others followed the example of their government, and fled.”

  A hard shock followed next morning, April 5, when the foraging details came rattling back, their wagons all but empty. So thoroughly had Northrop’s and St John’s agents done their work these past ten months, impressing stock and grain to feed the trench-bound men at Petersburg, few of the farmers roundabout had anything left to give, even in response to a personal appeal from Robert Lee. Still, he had no choice except to keep moving. To stay where he was meant starvation, and every hour’s delay was another hour’s reduction of his head-start gain: if, indeed, there was any of it left. All the troops were up by now, and he had done what he could to ease the strain, including a culling of nearly one third of the 200 guns and 1000 wagons — which, fully spread out, covered more than twenty miles of road — to provide replacements for those draft animals exhaustion had subtracted from the teams needed to keep the other two thirds rolling; the culls were to be forwarded, if possible, by rail. A cold rain deepened the army’s gloom when the fall-in sounded for still a third day of marching on empty stomachs. Longstreet took the lead, Gordon the rear-guard duty; Anderson and Ewell slogged between, while Fitz Lee’s troopers ranged well to the front on their gaunt, weak-kneed horses, left and right of the railroad leading down to Danville, a hundred miles to the southwest.

  Five of those miles from Amelia by early afternoon, the outriders came upon bluecoats intrenched in a well-chosen position just short of Jetersville, a dozen miles from Burkeville, where the Southside and the Danville railroads crossed. This was no surprise; enemy cavalry had been active in that direction yesterday. Longstreet shook out skirmishers, preparing to brush these vedettes from his path, but shortly before 2 o’clock, when Lee arrived, reports came back that the force in front amounted to a good deal more than cavalry. One corps of Union infantry was already on hand, in support of Sheridan’s horsemen, and another was rapidly approaching. Lee’s heart sank at the news. His adversary had won the race for the critical Burkeville crossing; he was blocked, and so were the rations he had ordered sent from Danville in hope of intercepting them en route. Regretfully he lowered his glasses from a study of the position, which he knew was too strong for an attack by his frazzled army, heavily outnumbered as it was by the three blue corps, with others doubtle
ss hard on the way to join them. Rejecting the notion, if it crossed his mind, of going out in an Old Guard blaze of glory, he turned his thoughts to another plan of action — another route — still with the intention, or anyhow the hope, of combining with Joe Johnston somewhere to the south.

  He would veer west, across the upper quadrant of the spraddled X described by the two railroads, to the vicinity of Farmville on the upper Appomattox, where rations could be sent to meet him, via the Southside line, from stores collected at Lynchburg by St John. Then, having fed his hungry men and horses, he would move south again, across the western quadrant of the X, bypassing the Burkeville intersection — Grant’s reported point of concentration — to resume his march down the Danville line for a combination with Johnston, beyond the Roanoke, before turning on his pursuers. Admittedly this was a long-odds venture, difficult at best. Farmville was five miles farther away than Burkeville, and he knew little of the roads he would have to travel, except that they were poor. Moreover, he was by no means sure that his half-starved troops and animals could manage a cross-country slog of perhaps twenty roundabout miles without food, especially since they would have to begin it with still another night march if he was to avoid being overtaken and overwhelmed, practically at the start. Here again, however, he had no choice but to attempt it or face the narrowed alternatives of surrender or annihilation. Accordingly, instructions for the westward trek went out; “the most cruel marching order the commanders had ever given the men in four years of fighting,” a later observer was to say. As always, all that time, “Lee’s miserables” responded as best they could when the move began near sundown. “It is now a race for life or death,” one wrote in his diary at the outset.