WHEN ULYSSES S. GRANT issued marching orders to
the Army of the Potomac for March 29, 1865, and the
armies lurched into motion, every man involved realized
that this campaign would end the war. For the Federal army, it was a
classic maneuver, carried out with a good degree of precision, and
indeed, the events that led to Appomattox constitute one of the great
examples of maneuver and pursuit. Fortunately for the Federals, and
sadly for their foes, it was a maneuver carried out against second- or
even third-class opposition, for the army commanded by Robert E. Lee
was a pale, hollow ghost of what it had been in its glory days. But
that, after all, was the nature of war; it was not a sporting contest, both
sides equally matched and playing a good game to a satisfactory conclusion;
it was a grim, deadly contest in which hundreds of thousands
had already suffered, and no man who had watched his friends die in
the Wilderness could now lament the sad state of the Confederacy. The
sooner it was over, the better, for winner and loser alike.
Such was certainly Grant's belief on the matter, and he was determined
to press every advantage. In Philip Sheridan, just returned from
the Shenandoah, he possessed a like-minded subordinate, and as Grant
moved, he gave the little fighter command of what was basically his
maneuver arm. As the campaign developed, this shunted George Meade
off to the sidelines, and there was a degree of dissatisfaction among the
commanders and their staffs over this. Meade, however, remained both
a gentleman and a loyal subordinate, and what might have made for
real difficulties in the chain of command was glossed over by the pace
of events, the general good sense of the participants, and above all the
knowledge that at last they were winning. There was one unfortunate
casualty of this arrangement, but the important thing was getting the
war over and done with.
Grant now outnumbered his opponent by about two and a half to
one, about 125,000 to 57,000. His command organization was complicated
and his troops spread in a long arc from north of the James
River all the way around to the southwest of Petersburg. Three corps,
XXV under Weitzel, IX under Parke, and VI under Wright, were on
the northern and eastern end of this line; then came the Army of the
James, now commanded by Edward O. C. Ord, successor to Ben Butler,
basically another corps-sized formation, and then extending southwestward
were II Corps under Humphreys and V Corps under Warren.
Officially, Sheridan commanded only the Cavalry Corps, but Grant
soon enlarged his responsibility. As the Federal army moved out into
the open, Sheridan took tactical control of the infantry moving along
with his troopers. He would have preferred Wright to Warren as an
associated infantry commander—both Grant and Sheridan seemed to
find Warren a bit too punctilious for their taste—but Warren was
there, and it did not seem worthwhile trying to shuffle the corps about
for a personality preference.
So, on the 27th and 28th of March Ord put his Army of the James
into the line west of the Weldon Railroad, and that freed Humphreys
and Warren for a strike. On the 29th the two corps moved out to the
south and west, feeling their way along, Humphreys's men making a
little loop across Hatcher's Run, Warren's people doing a larger leapfrog
out past the Boydton Plank Road toward a little dirt track, the
White Oak Road. While the foot soldiers marched carefully along
through the wet and rainy weather, the cavalry swung wider yet, covering
their flank to the south, where there was no anticipated danger
anyway, and heading out even farther. For two days they all moved
cautiously, and little happened. On the afternoon of the 31st, a couple
of A. P. Hill's brigades put in a small counterattack against Warren's
advance, but both sides stopped for the night without much accomplished.
Sheridan's troopers, meanwhile, had swung up and moved
toward Five Forks, where they bumped into Confederate infantry of
Pickett's division. The horsemen were armed with Spencer repeating
carbines, which could outfire an infantry rifle by about three or four
rounds to one, but even so, infantry were generally much harder to
displace than cavalry—hence the contempt with which the former had
treated the latter for most of the war—and Sheridan's men made little
progress. They bivouacked that night four miles south of Warren's lead
troops, around Dinwiddie Court House. The next morning they saddled
up and started northwest again, toward Five Forks. Sheridan ordered
Warren to come to his support; Warren, already in contact with the enemy,
a fact ofwhich Sheridan was ignorant, began to disengage and obey
his orders, though it did not seem to him the right thing to do.
On the other side, Lee was trying to organize his army to get it away
from Petersburg and Richmond. After the failure of his attempt on
Fort Stedman, he knew there was little chance of, and indeed little
good to be gained by, retaining his position. His only hope now was
to get out, take his army south into North Carolina, and link up with
Joe Johnston; this would mean giving up the Confederate capital, but
there was no help for it; indeed, he would have to be both skillful and
lucky to manage as much as he now intended.
The crucial line for him was the Southside Railroad; it ran more or
less west to Lynchburg, and about halfway there it crossed the Danville
Railroad, at Burke's Station, running southwest from Richmond to
Danville. Lee needed these, especially the Southside, to get the government,
his trains, and ultimately his army out of the trap that was
now developing. And to keep these lines open, he had to hold Grant
at arm's length off the rail line. So by April 1, the vital question was,
Could he do it?
That was in the minds of all the commanders as Sheridan's troopers
moved once again toward Five Forks. The blue horsemen had three full
cavalry divisions, plus a couple of independent brigades that joined in,
13,000 troopers in all, and Warren got his three infantry divisions into
contact with them by dint of hard marching, stumbling about on the
unfamiliar roads, and a great deal of cursing by noncoms and company
officers. George Pickett, with two infantry divisions and the small cavalry
corps of Fitzhugh Lee, all told about 19,000 men, wisely fell back
on Five Forks and began taking up a defensive position, an L-shaped
line in front of the junction with its left flank bent back. Pickett went
off to get something to eat, and he and Fitzhugh Lee found a fellow
general enjoying some baked shad. They settled down in anticipation
of a good meal, the first in some time.
As Sheridan developed the position, he came up with a simple
plan: his cavalry would keep the Rebels pinned to their front, while
Warren's infantry massed on their left flank and rolled them up. It
almost worked, except that the Confederates were not just where the
Federals thought they were, and the bad terrain made it very difficult
for the infantry to get in position. When Warren's people did advance,
they hit open country beyond Pickett's left. Of Warren's three
divisions, only that on his left flank came into immediate contact,
and while he was on his own right flank getting his men realigned,
Sheridan galloped up, took over the left-flank division, and successfully
drove the Confederates. Pickett, who had given up his meal and
run a gauntlet of fire to get back to his troops, tried to shift units
from one end of his line to the other, but the Federal pressure was
too strong front, flank, and now rear, and the line finally caved in
and collapsed. Those who could drew off, but the Confederates lost
more than 5,000 men, a number of guns and standards, and, of
course, their hold on the Southside Railroad. The whole was thus a
major blow to Lee's slim remaining hopes. Sheridan celebrated his
victory by unceremoniously, ungraciously, and quite unjustly relieving
Warren of his command.
As soon as the news of this success reached Grant, he realized the
time was ripe for bigger things, and ordered a general assault on the
Petersburg lines for the next day. As Grant was issuing his orders, Lee
was pulling troops out of the works to send off to help Pickett rebuild.
He also sent a message to Richmond, to inform President Davis that
he could no longer hold his position, and that both Petersburg and the
capital would have to be abandoned.
It was April 2, Sunday morning, when this message reached the
president. By that time, there was little of official Richmond left anyway;
most of the government had left earlier, and Davis had sent his
family off three days ago, giving his wife a small pistol and instructing
her how to use it. He, and his cabinet, and his aides, were about all
that was left. Davis was in St. Paul's Church when the sexton came
down the aisle and gave him a message, just received from Lee. He
read it impassively, then stood and quietly left the church. For the
remainder of the service, cabinet members were summoned and left
one by one, the saddest and undoubtedly the most dramatic service
ever held in Richmond. Soon the churches were empty all over town,
as men and women wandered anxiously and aimlessly back and forth,
asking each other for news. Clerks in the War Department were burning
papers, and the smell of disaster was in the air.
At first light on that day the Federal troops, 60,000 strong, came
surging up out of their trenches and began a general assault on the
Petersburg lines. There were less than 20,000 Confederates left to try
to stop them, and though the defenses were still formidable, the men
left to man them were just too few to hold. Right in front of the city,
Parke's IX Corps troops were stopped for a while, but to their west,
Wright's people broke the long trench line, turned left, and began
rolling the Confederates up. Then Ord's and Humphreys's troops took
it up, and with the western end of the line thoroughly smashed, the
Union troops about-faced and began moving back toward the city. By
mid-afternoon the Confederates were completely done; by then so were
the Union men, exhausted from hours of marching, righting, and
storming. The time it took to carry two last bravely defended forts
brought the day to an end, and the battle burned down. The Federals
had lost nearly 4,000 men, and no one bothered to count the number
of Confederates killed, wounded, or, in greater numbers, taken prisoner.
Sadly, the dead included A. P. Hill, come back sick for his last
fight, and shot through the heart. Lee wept when the news was brought
to him. In the darkness, the wounded Confederate army took up its
march to the westward.
With Petersburg virtually in his grasp, Grant ordered a further attack
upon it, and on Richmond as well, for the next morning. These
proved unnecessary. Davis and the last of his government left the capital
on the afternoon of the 2nd. That night in Richmond was one of
horror, as the city mobs broke into warehouses, arsenals, and liquor
stores, got drunk, set fires, and looted what little was left to steal. By
the next morning, the good citizens were eagerly awaiting the arrival
of their captors, almost their rescuers now, and Federal troops, including
some proud black regiments, marched into the city, raised the flag
of the United States, and began patrolling the streets to restore order.
All this was now virtually a sideshow, unimportant except that this
was the Confederate capital, for Grant was after the real prize now,
Robert E. Lee's army, and with it Confederate ability to continue the
war. Five Forks had drastically lengthened the odds against Lee getting
away, for the Federal victory there levered him off the Southside Railroad
as a line of retreat. He must now take his troops due west to
Amelia Court House, Farmville, and ultimately Lynchburg. By the
fifth, he had most of his army at Amelia Court House, thirty miles
west of Petersburg. Davis and his government-in-flight had managed
to reach Danville, to the south, but the line was cut behind them,
when Union troops reached Burke's Station at the same time that Lee
got to Amelia Court House.
The hunt was up now. On the morning of the 6th, Lee's weary men
shouldered their rifles and headed west, the long tired columns strung
across the rolling hills, men hungry, animals breaking down, wagons
gradually being abandoned, a tatterdemalion wreck of a great army.
To the south and around the rear hung Union cavalry, snapping at
their heels, picking up stragglers. And behind them came the Federal
infantry, those long-suffering faithful regiments of the old Army of the
Potomac, lengthening their stride now, hastily grabbing rations in the
morning, a quick cup of coffee and a couple of biscuits, and On to the
day! Gonna catch Bobby Lee at last!
What Grant and Sheridan and Meade and all wanted was to get
across the Confederate line of retreat, and to cut them off from the
south and west. By mid-day of the 6th, the Confederates were strung
out around Sayler's Creek, just east of Farmville, their long wagon train
holding up the rear guard of Anderson's III Corps and Dick Ewell's
grab bag of about 3,000 troops from the Richmond garrison. The two
Confederate commanders halted their men and took up a position,
giving the trains time to close up to the advance. But then they got
cut off, Federal cavalry hitting their southern flank and infantry closing
up from the east on their position. Nothing daunted, the Confederates
launched counterattacks—first by garrison troops, later by the last men
of the Confederate naval battalion—that temporarily halted the bluecoats.
But the pressure kept on mounting, with George Custer's cavalry
and their repeating carbines banging away and heavy infantry massing
against them, and finally the Confederates broke. Surrounded and harassed
from all sides, Ewell ended up surrendering nearly a third of
Lee's army.
They were getting close to the end now. An exultant Sheridan wired,
"If the thing is pressed I think Lee will surrender," and Lincoln himself
wired back, "Let the thing be pressed!" On the other side, one of Lee's
aides asked where they should stop for the night, and Lee ruefully
remarked, Somewhere over the North Carolina line.
They reached Farmville on the 7th, and actually got some rations.
Lee then crossed to the north side of the Appomattox River, burning
most of the bridges behind him. Humphreys's troops got across at High
Bridge, however, and he and Wright kept up the pressure, forcing Lee
to deploy to hold them off. Meanwhile, Sheridan, with Ord and Griffin,
Warren's successor, in tow, marched more directly west and got across
the Confederate line of retreat near Appomattox Station, where they
captured some trains. Lee came up against this on the late afternoon
of the 8th, and ordered Gordon's division of infantry and Fitzhugh
Lee's cavalry to clear a way through the next morning, the 9th.
Grant had already written to Lee, and over the last two days they
had had a carefully courteous exchange of notes. On the 7th Grant had
asked Lee to surrender, and Lee had written back asking what terms
might be offered. The next day Grant had replied that his only condition
would be that officers and men upon surrendering should agree
not to fight again until properly exchanged, which both knew was a
euphemism for "never." To this Lee had replied that he did not believe
his situation as difficult as Grant seemed to think it was, and was
therefore not yet prepared to give up. By then it was the morning of
the 9th, and Gordon's troops were marching toward Appomattox Station.
It was only when they took up the march that they found there were
Federal troops in front of them, but there was no help for it; they had
to have supplies. So one last time the shrunken regiments deployed,
most of them so small now a whole regiment barely made a company
front, and on they came with the morning sun catching the glorious
old battle flags. They hit Sheridan's cavalry, and the carbines and rifles
broke into a rattle. But then the cavalry gave way, wheeling right and
left, and there ahead of them were masses of blue infantry, and there
was only one meaning to that: it was all but over now.
With Sheridan, and infantry, in front, and Meade pressing from
behind, the Army of Northern Virginia was finished; it could either
surrender or be killed where it stood. After some hesitation and discussion
among the commanders, they raised a white flag—actually a
towel—and reopened communications. It took a while to find Grant,
who was in the process of moving forward to join Sheridan, but eventually
notes were exchanged, and Grant went to meet Lee at the house
of Wilbur McLean, the man who had moved from Bull Run, at Appomattox
Court House.
Lee, as always, was impeccably dressed, suffering terribly but armored
in the self-possession that never deserted him. Grant, travelworn
and just getting over a headache, was almost theatrically shabby.
The two men shook hands and began reminiscing about their service
in the Mexican War, in the old army. Finally, after a good deal of
diffidence on both sides, they got down to business, and Grant wrote
out his terms, a simple surrender and officers allowed to retain side
arms, men to keep horses and baggage, and that was it. Lee thought
the offer generous, and said so, and wrote out an acceptance, and then,
with some embarrassment, asked for rations for his men. After some
hesitant small talk, Lee left and Grant telegraphed the great news to
Washington.
The actual surrender of most of the troops did not come until the
12th, when Joshua Chamberlain, the hero of Little Round Top, was
detailed to receive the arms and colors of the various units of the Army
of Northern Virginia. One by one the shrunken formations marched
past the solid ranks of Federal infantry to lay down their arms. Chamberlain
had already decided on his own how to handle this, and as each
unit came in, he ordered the Carry Arms, the marching salute. The
downhearted Southerners, most with tears in their eyes, responded
gratefully to a gesture of honor from men who had endured and suffered
as much as they had themselves. Many a regimental color was surrendered
as merely a bare pole, as the men had cut the flags up into little
pieces to be taken home and cherished for years, until they had rotted
away and, like the army that carried them, become but a memory. All
day the surrender went on, regiments, divisions, men who had fought
through Gettysburg, and Fredericksburg, and Antietam, men who had
stood together in the hour of danger and would now stand no more.
When it was all over, the blue soldiers and the gray sat down and
shared rations while the bands played "Auld Lang Syne."
Appomattox Court House and the surrender of Robert E. Lee's army
was the most dramatic of the several surrenders at the close of the war,
but it was not the last; in fact, it was the first. There were still operations
in progress all across the South, and these gradually came to an
end, either as they reached a logical military conclusion, or as the news
of the Confederacy's collapse reached the respective commanders. Unfortunately,
some of these surrenders were more confused, and more
colored by the evolving political scene, than Lee's surrender.
While Grant had been so successfully pursuing his Petersburg operations,
Sherman had returned to his own army in the Carolinas. Arriving,
he divided it into essentially three armies, and made ready to
resume his march northward; he had agreed with Grant that he would
begin his advance on April 10. His enemy, Joe Johnston, was to the
northwest, near Raleigh, his entire army less than the 26,000 or 28,000
in any one of Sherman's three. Before the march began, news came in
of the fall of Richmond, and then, soon after the troops moved out, of
Davis's flight and Lee's surrender. Davis, from Danville, had issued a
proclamation calling upon the Confederacy to open a new phase of the
war, essentially guerrilla warfare, but there was little taste for that
among the men who had already fought so long and so well, and Lee's
surrender put any thought of it out of most minds.
On the 13th, as Federal troops entered Raleigh, Johnston wrote to
Sherman asking for terms, and after the usual exchange, they agreed
to meet between Raleigh and Durham's Station on the morning of the
17th. Sherman arrived late; as he was about to board the railroad train
for the meeting, a coded message came in over the telegraph. He waited
for it to be deciphered, and found that President Lincoln had been
assassinated on the 14th, and an attempt had been made on Secretary
of State Seward, and on other members of the government as well.
This had happened on the night of the l4th-15th; the president,
who had returned from a triumphal visit to Richmond, and who was
contemplating the happy and successful conclusion of the war, was shot
in Ford's Theater by John Wilkes Booth, an actor and ardent Confederate
sympathizer. Thinking he was performing an act of patriotic vengeance,
Booth probably did the Confederacy the worst service he could
conceivably have done; his act threw the government of the United
States into the hands of a weak president and a vindictive, Radical
Republican Congress.
The repercussions on Sherman were immediate, as an example of
what would soon happen. He and Johnston met and soon agreed on
wide-ranging terms, some of which transcended the immediate military
situation; Sherman, having recently talked with President Lincoln
and General Grant, believed he knew what was wanted, and the kind
of terms, in a general sense, he thought himself authorized to offer.
His position, after all, was substantially different from that of Grant;
he was virtually in the middle of the Confederacy, and if he did not
make some provision for the continuation of civil authority, the entire
area around him might dissolve into some sort of anarchy. However,
when he sent his dispatch north to Washington, his agreement was
quickly denounced, and Secretary Stanton, riding high in the confused
post-assassination capital, publicly chastised Sherman for exceeding his
authority. The rebuke was open and stinging, and Sherman never forgave
it. Eventually he and Johnston reached an amicable settlement,
on April 26, but here was evidence that the Federal victors might well
have more difficulty with their political masters than their former enemies.
Other surrenders were slow, depending upon the communications
of the country. Substantial cavalry operations were being conducted in
Alabama, and it was the first week of May before a surrender was
arranged there. On the 10th, President Davis and his few immediate
supporters were captured at Irwinville, Georgia. Their makeshift camp
was surprised by Federal cavalry, and there was a good deal of confusion;
Davis sought to escape in the rush, and unfortunately, as he fled
toward the swamp, grabbed the first piece of warm clothing to hand,
which turned out to be a woman's shawl. This subsequently gave rise
to the canard that he had been captured disguised as a woman. He
would spend the next several months in close and unhealthy confinement
while the government tried to decide what to do with him.
It was all falling apart now. The worst of the Confederate irregulars,
William C. Quantrill, was shot in Kentucky on the same day Davis
was captured, the top and bottom of the rebellion going down simultaneously.
Across the Mississippi, there was some talk of keeping on
with the fight; these people were, after all, Texans and the men who
still remembered Bleeding Kansas. It was late June before the last
surrender west of the great river occurred. Some Confederates, unrepentant,
crossed over into Mexico and vowed to continue the fight.
Finally, it was in August that the Confederate cruiser Shenandoah, after
destroying the American whaling fleet in the Bering Sea, heard of the
end of the war.
Thus it was done at last. The Union armies held their great review,
marching through Washington, boots and brass polished, bayonets
twinkling in the sun, bands playing and colors flying, the thin ranks
of the old regiments bringing tears amid the cheers of the viewers.
Then they held their last musters, ate ceremonial dinners, exchanged
gifts and addresses, and struck their tents, heading for home and dear
faces grown unfamiliar through terrible years of war. The Confederates
straggled back by twos and threes, no parades and reviews for them,
to try to find hungry wives and children, and to rebuild shattered lives.
The dream, the nightmare, was over.
World History
