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

  “On no battlefield of the war have I felt a juster pride in the conduct of my command,” Joe Kershaw was to say, and Custis Lee was equally proud of what remained of his scratch division, though both saw clearly now that further resistance was useless. So did Ewell, who afterwards reported that “shells and even bullets were crossing each other from front and rear over my troops, and my right was completely enveloped. I surrendered myself and staff to a cavalry officer who came in by the same road General Anderson had gone out on.” Some 200 of Kershaw’s Georgians and Mississippians managed to escape in the confusion, but they were about all that got away. The rest were taken, along with their commanders at all levels. These 2800, combined with those lost earlier by Anderson, brought the total to 4300 graybacks snared in the fork of Sayler’s Creek that afternoon. No wonder, then, that a Federal colonel visiting Sheridan’s headquarters that evening found Richard Ewell “sitting on the ground hugging his knees, with his face bent down between his arms.” Old Bald Head now bore little resemblance to the self he had been when he was Stonewall Jackson’s mainstay, two years ago in the Shenandoah Valley. “Our cause is lost. Lee should surrender before more lives are wasted,” he was reported to have told his captors. Watching him, the colonel remarked that “if anything could add force to his words, the utter despondency of his air would do it.”

  Sheridan provided a study in contrast. Elated, he got off a sundown message to Grant reporting the capture of one lieutenant general, two major generals, and three brigadiers, together with thousands of lesser prisoners, fourteen pieces of artillery, and an uncounted number of wagons. “I am still pressing on with both cavalry and infantry,” he informed his chief, and added the flourish that would catch Lincoln’s eye next morning: “If the thing is pressed I think Lee will surrender.”

  That might be, but Lee by then was in a better frame of mind than Sheridan supposed. Mahone, who was beside him on the western ridge when he exclaimed, in shock at what he saw in the valley down below, “My God! Has the army been dissolved?” replied stoutly, in reference to his division coming up behind: “No, General. Here are troops ready to do their duty.” Lee at once recovered his composure, and turned his thoughts to preventing the enlargement of the disaster by the bluecoats in pursuit of the remnant of Anderson’s corps streaming toward him up the hillside. “Yes, General,” he said; “there are some true men left. Will you please keep those people back?”

  Leaving Mahone to prepare a line of defense against “those people,” he rode forward to meet and comfort his own. From somewhere, perhaps from the hand of a passing color bearer, or else from the ground where another had dropped it in flight, he secured a Confederate battle flag; with the result that Anderson’s panicked fugitives, toiling uphill, saw him waiting astride Traveller near the crest, a gray general on a gray horse, over whose head the red folds of the star-crossed bunting caught the rays of the sun declining beyond the ridge. Some kept going, overcome by fear, while others stopped to cheer and cluster round him, though with more than a touch of delirium in their voices. “It’s General Lee!” they cried. “Where’s the man who won’t follow Uncle Robert?” As at Gettysburg when they came limping back across the mile-wide valley from the carnage on Cemetery Hill, they found solace in his words and manner. Mahone’s troops would cover their withdrawal, he said; they must go to the rear and form again. They did as he asked, most of them at any rate, and presently Mahone came forward to relieve him of the flag and escort him within the lines his veterans had drawn in case the Federals launched a follow-up assault.

  No such attack ensued. Despite Sheridan’s message assuring Grant that he was “pressing on,” Custer had all he could handle in rounding up captives in the brush, as did Crook and Devin, a mile to the north; Wright went into bivouac, and Humphreys’ clash with Gordon was still in progress near the Appomattox. Mahone remained in position till after dark, as Lee directed, then marched for High Bridge, four miles northeast, under instructions to cross and set it and an adjacent wagon span afire as soon as Gordon passed over with what remained of the three-corps train. Lee meantime had rejoined Longstreet at Rice for a night march to Farmville, where he too would cross the river and burn the bridges in his rear. A dispatch from Gordon, received soon after sundown, informed his chief that he was “fighting heavily” with Humphreys. “My loss is considerable,” he reported, “and I am still closely pressed.” By the time he was able to break contact, after nightfall, he had left some 1700 men behind as prisoners, together with a good part of the train. This brought the total to 6000 Confederates made captive today, with perhaps another 2000 killed, wounded, or otherwise knocked loose from their commands. Ewell’s corps had been abolished, all but a couple of hundred survivors who made it through the lines that night. (“What regiment is that?” someone asked an officer at the head of the arriving column. “Kershaw’s division,” he replied.) Anderson’s corps had been reduced by half, its units shattered except for one brigade, and Gordon’s three divisions were cut to skeleton proportions, as Lee would see for himself when they came up next morning. “That half of our army is destroyed,” he said of the troops engaged along Sayler’s Creek this black Thursday.

  Still, even though it was done at a cost of 8000 casualties — not half, but in any case a solid third of all that remained with the colors —he had accomplished what he set out to do when he left Amelia the day before. Old Peter’s corps was intact, having had little trouble holding off Ord’s advance up the Southside Railroad. Moreover, rations in plenty were waiting ahead at Farmville, and once there, with the bridges burned behind him, he could put the swollen Appomattox between him and his pursuers, feed and rest his weary men, and perhaps, by moving westward on the north side of the river, get enough of a new head start to try again for a turn south to combine with Johnston in North Carolina. Or, failing that, he might press on to gain the fastness of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he once had said he could hold out “for years.”

  The night was cold, with flurries of snow reported in nearby Burkeville next morning. Lee went ahead of Longstreet’s men, who trudged on a poor cross-country road, and got a few hours’ rest in a house at Farmville. When he rose at dawn, April 7, the First Corps troops were filing through the town, their step quickened by the promise of rations awaiting issue in boxcars parked on the northside tracks. Anxious for some first-hand word of the Sayler’s Creek survivors, who were crossing downriver, with instructions to follow the railroad to the vicinity of Farmville, he again doubled Old Peter’s column and proceeded eastward, beyond the Appomattox, until he encountered the first of his missing veterans in the person of Henry Wise, who had shared with him the rigors of his first campaign, out in western Virginia in the fall of ’61. Arriving on foot at the head of his brigade — the only one to survive, as a unit more or less intact, Anderson’s debacle of the day before — the former governor presented an outlandish picture of a soldier. He had lost not only his horse and baggage in yesterday’s fight, but also much else in the hurried withdrawal, including his headgear and overcoat, which he had replaced with a jaunty Tyrolean hat, acquired en route, and a coarse gray blanket held together in front by a wire pin. His face, moreover, was streaked with red from having washed it in a puddle. This gave him, as he later said, the appearance of an aged Comanche brave. Lee thought so, too, and recovered a measure of his accustomed good humor at the sight. “I perceive that you, at any rate, have not given up the contest,” he told his fellow Virginian, “as you are in your warpaint this morning.” Wise drew himself up, shoulders back; he and Lee were of an age, just under two years short of sixty. “Ready for dress parade,” he responded proudly to a question about the condition of his command.

  Other good news he had as well. Mahone was over the river, too, in position to cover the downstream bridges; Gordon had crossed with all that remained of the train, preceded by a number of Anderson’s stragglers, and Mahone was waiting for still others to get over before he gave the engineers word to fire both spans; that i
s, unless the Yankees came in sight beforehand, which they had not done by the time Wise left at sunup. Encouraged, Lee rode back to where his staff had set up headquarters opposite Farmville. Here he was visited presently by the Secretary of War, who had come on horseback by a different route from Richmond and was off again for Danville as soon as he had conferred with the general-in-chief. In a wire sent to the President next day, while moving roundabout to join him, Breckinridge reported that Lee had been “forced across the Appomattox” to find “temporary relief” from the heavy columns of Federals in pursuit, but that he would “still try to move around [them] toward North Carolina,” once he resumed his westward march up the left bank of the river shielding his flank. So he had said at any rate. A military man himself, however, the Kentuckian added his own appraisal of Lee’s chances as he saw them: “The straggling has been great, and the situation is not favorable.”

  In point of fact the situation was considerably less favorable than he had known when the brief conference ended. He had no sooner left, around midmorning, than a courier reached headquarters with news of a development that threatened to undo all Lee’s plans for his next move, if indeed there was to be one. Bluecoats were over the Appomattox in strength at High Bridge, four miles east, and were closing even now upon the famished graybacks filing into the fields across from Farmville to draw their first issue of rations in five days. Mahone, it seemed, had pulled out behind Wise and Gordon without giving the engineers orders to fire the two bridges, and the resultant delay, while an officer spurred after him and returned, brought a heavy enemy column in sight before a match was struck. High Bridge itself, an open-deck affair on sixty-foot trusses of brick and pine, burned furiously at once, dropping four of its dozen spans into the water; but the low wagon bridge alongside, built of hardwood, caught fire so slowly that the whooping Federals arrived in time to stamp out the flames. By 9 o’clock Humphreys had his lead division over the river and a second arriving to reinforce the bridgehead to a strength too great for Mahone to retake it, though he countermarched and tried. As for Lee, when he got word of what had happened he lost his temper entirely. “He spoke of the blunder,” a staffer observed, “with a warmth and impatience which served to show how great a repression he ordinarily exercised over his feelings.”

  His rage at this sudden removal of the advantage of having the swollen river between him and his pursuers — not to mention the loss of the anticipated rest halt, which was to have given his road-worn soldiers time to cook and eat their rations and perhaps even get some badly needed sleep before setting out once more to regain the head start that would enable them to turn south for Danville, across the front of the blue column, or anyhow win the race for Lynchburg, where St John had still more rations waiting just over forty miles away — was subdued by the need for devising corrective defensive measures, lest his approximately 20,000 survivors, effective and noneffective, suffer destruction at the hands of more than 80,000 Federals converging upon them from the east and south, on both sides of the Appomattox. Because of a deep bend in the river above Farmville, the Lynchburg pike ran north for about three miles before it turned west near Cumberland Church, where a road from High Bridge joined it. Lee’s orders were for Mahone, falling back under pressure from Humphreys, to take up a position there and hold the enemy off until Gordon and Longstreet cleared the junction. At the same time, he summoned Brigadier General E. P. Alexander, the First Corps chief of artillery, and gave him the double task of sending a battalion of guns to support Mahone and of destroying the two bridges at Farmville, as soon as Old Peter’s men and wagons finished crossing, to prevent the bluecoats in their rear from joining Humphreys in his attempt to end the campaign, and with it the Army of Northern Virginia, here and now.

  Alexander, a Georgia-born West Pointer, not quite thirty and a veteran of nearly all the army’s major battles, got the guns off promptly to Cumberland Church, where they presently were in action against the Federals arriving from High Bridge, and prepared the railroad and wagon spans for burning as soon as the last of the gray infantry on the march from Rice were safely over. There was time for that, but not for the horsemen covering their rear; Alexander was taking no chances on a repetition of what had happened earlier, four miles downstream. Closely pursued by Crook, whose division had been sent over by Sheridan after a good night’s rest, Fitz Lee was obliged to turn and fight on the outskirts of Farmville in order to give the tail of Longstreet’s column a chance to clear the bridges. By the time he was able to break off the action and retire under fire through the streets of the town, both spans were ablaze from end to end; Fitz had to veer west in a race for an upstream ford, which he hoped would not prove too deep for his bone-tired horses to cross before Crook overtook them and used his guns to bloody the waters at that point. His uncle, watching from the opposite bank, took alarm at the thought of his cavalry being cut off, as well as at the sight of the hard-driving VI Corps, which arrived just then from Sayler’s Creek and appeared on the hills overlooking the river from the south. Displaying the first real agitation he had shown on the retreat, Lee rode to where Longstreet’s earliest arrivers had begun to frizzle bacon and boil cornmeal over newly kindled fires. In response to his urgent orders, and despite Old Peter’s remonstrance that Fitz and his troopers could look out for themselves, the issue of rations was discontinued, amid groans from men still waiting to receive them, and those that had been partly cooked were dumped from skillets and kettles which then were flung over the tailgates of wagons whose drivers were in a panic to be off. In a state of torment from the smell of food they had not gotten to eat, the First Corps veterans fell in for the march beyond Cumberland Church, where Mahone was making his stand.

  When they got there they found the road still open to the west, but they were unable to take it because Mahone, hard pressed by Humphreys’ flankers, had to be reinforced if he was to continue holding out against bluecoats whose attacks grew harder to withstand as more and more of them arrived from downriver, eager to make the most of the opportunity their rapid, dry-shod crossing had afforded them, first to bring the fleeing rebs to bay — which they had done already — and then to overrun them, while the rest of the blue army effected a crossing in their rear to cut them off and help complete their destruction. Neither of these two last things happened, however. Supported by Gordon and Longstreet when they came up, Mahone not only held firm, he also counterattacked with a fury that went far toward making up for this morning’s lapse at High Bridge, which had brought on the present crisis. Longstreet, informed that the enemy was menacing the left, detached a brigade from Field’s division “with orders to get around the threatening force and break it up. Mahone so directed them through a woodland,” he later wrote, “that they succeeded in over-reaching the threatened march and took in some 300 prisoners, the last of our troubles for the day.”

  The sun by then was going down. When it had set, and the fighting sputtered into a silence broken only by the mewls and groans of the wounded trapped between the lines, Old Peter rode through the twilight to a cottage where Lee had set up headquarters near Cumberland Church. He found him in a much better frame of mind than when he last saw him that morning, agitated by the news of Humphreys’ easy coup, which voided his plans for a rest halt and a shielded march upriver, as well as by the threat of having his cavalry overwhelmed by the superior force of blue troopers in a race for the perhaps unusable ford northwest of the bridges on fire at Farmville. As it happened, though their best pace was no more than a shaky gallop, Fitz Lee’s horsemen not only effected their escape across the Appomattox; they also managed to turn the tables on their pursuers once they reached the other side. Crossing by the ford, hard on the heels of the gray riders, Crook’s lead brigade soon came in sight of Longstreet’s train, grinding northward on a poor road near the river, and sought to repeat its successful foray at Sayler’s Creek the day before. Fitz saw his chance and prepared to take it. Posting his own division to block the attack by receiving it head on,
he sent Rosser against the Union flank, which crumpled when he struck it. Surprised and routed, the former aggressors scurried hard for the ford they had crossed when the pursuit was in the opposite direction, roles reversed.

  Lee’s spirits rose as he watched his nephew’s rousing counterstroke, and lifted again when he learned of Mahone’s success in keeping Humphreys’ flankers off his line of retreat near Cumberland Church. There still was fight in his diminished army, fight in the style that had won it fame, and while he could not react as he once would have done by going over to the offensive against a divided foe, he was much encouraged by what had been achieved in the course of a day that opened with threats of disaster, left and right, and closed with his forces reunited after inflicting heavier casualties than they suffered. Although it was clear that another night march would have to be undertaken — the third in a row, and the fourth since leaving Petersburg and Richmond — by sundown his trains were rolling westward on the Lynchburg turnpike, unmolested, and his still-hungry soldiers were preparing to follow after moonrise. “Keep your command together and in good spirits, General,” he had told his son Rooney that afternoon. “Don’t let them think of surrender. I will get you out of this.”

  * * *

  Surrender. Though the word was spoken in buoyant reaction to his nephew’s savage counterslash at Crook, Lee’s use of it showed that he knew his weary, half-starved troops were thinking of that contingency: as indeed he himself was, if only to counsel rejection. Grant, by contrast, was thinking of it quite purposely by then — in reverse, of course — as a proposal to end the drawn-out agony of his adversary’s retreat, which he perceived was doomed in any case, and as a duty he presently said he felt “to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood.”