Terrible Swift Sword (41 page)

 

SINCE LEE'S ARMY HAD left Amelia Court House, the Rebels had been harried and attacked, receiving little rest or sustenance. Saturday, April 8, a warm, springlike day, was their first respite. For once, the ragged men in gray had both ample rations—thanks to the shipment at Farmville—and relative peace and quiet.

While these unexpected gifts improved the Rebels' morale, the mass desertions and straggling continued. Moreover, Sailor's Creek had severely eroded their staunch belief that the Army of Northern Virginia would somehow survive. Defeatism had begun spreading through the army, even infecting Lee's lieutenants.

Brigadier General William Pendleton, Lee's artillery chief, West Point contemporary, and good friend, was nominated by a group of high-ranking Confederate officers to urge surrender. As Lee rested under a pine tree, Pendleton stated his case; Lee rejected the proposition. Instead, he consolidated his battered, depleted army. Richard Anderson, George Pickett, and Bushrod Johnson were relieved of their commands, which no longer existed. Lee told them they were free to go home if they wished.

The remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia marched on, keeping the Appomattox River between them and the Yankees. Lee's path to Appomattox Station was longer than Sheridan's southerly route. From Farmville, Lee's men would have to travel thirty-nine miles, but Sheridan, just thirty.
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SHERIDAN AND HIS STAFF rode up to a home where a middle-aged Southern gentleman, dressed in a swallowtail coat, vest, pantaloons, and morocco slippers, was seated in a chair on the piazza. Sheridan dismounted, sat on a step, lit a fresh cigar, and asked the man if Lee's troops had passed by. The man replied with a little speech about why his loyalty to the Confederacy prohibited him from answering.

Sheridan whistled softly, unrolled a map, and asked the uncooperative citizen how far away Buffalo Creek was. The man said he did not know. Sheridan replied exasperatedly, “The devil you don't!” He asked the Rebel how long he had lived there. All his life, the man said.

“Very well, sir, it's time you did know,” Sheridan said. He summoned a captain. “Put this gentleman in charge of a guard, and when we move, walk him down to
Buffalo Creek and show it to him.” The man shot Sheridan “a savage glare” as he began the five-mile hike to Buffalo Creek in his slippers.
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SHERIDAN LISTENED TO HIS scout's report with satisfaction. The Confederate telegram that his men had intercepted three days earlier, ordering 300,000 rations—and which Sheridan's scouts had transmitted—had borne fruit. Supply trains were rolling from Lynchburg toward Appomattox Station, five miles southwest of Appomattox Court House. Sheridan instructed Custer's division to tear up the tracks west of Appomattox Station after the trains passed so that they could not make a dash back to Lynchburg when they discovered that Yankees, not Rebels, were at the depot.
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One of Major Young's scouts in Confederate gray met the trains—there were four of them—and led the engineers to a place east of the station. Custer's men seized the trains and the depot, while other troopers tore up the tracks behind the trains. Union locomotive engineers took charge of the four trains, whose freight cars bulged with supplies carefully selected by Lynchburg quartermasters to succor Lee's army.

Troops set fire to one of the trains, while the other three became the playthings of the engineers. Sheridan irritably observed that they “amused themselves by running the trains to and fro, creating much confusion, and keeping up such an unearthly screeching with the whistles that I was on the point of ordering the cars burned.” When an advance unit of Lee's army arrived to claim the supplies, the engineers drove the trains eastward, beyond the Rebels' reach.
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The arriving Confederate infantry and cavalry immediately pitched into Custer's cavalrymen, and they fought a chaotic battle in the woods that continued for the rest of the day. At one point, Custer's men nearly captured the Rebel artillery chief, Pendleton, who hours earlier had urged Lee to surrender. Devin's cavalry division helped Custer's men finally drive away the Rebels about 9 p.m.
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In a note to Major General John Gibbon of XXIV Corps of the Army of the James, Sheridan reported the capture of 1,000 prisoners, as well as thirty guns and 150 to 200 wagons that were evidently to have been sent back to Lynchburg on the trains bringing the supplies. Sheridan pointedly added, “If it is possible to push on your troops we may have handsome results in the morning.”
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Sheridan's goal since Five Forks now lay within his grasp: the Cavalry Corps was poised to close off Lee's final escape route to Lynchburg. The Army of Northern Virginia had reached the end of its tether.
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THE NIGHT OF APRIL 8 was an anxious one for both armies, which were camped just a few miles from one another near Appomattox Court House. Saturday
evening's lurid red sunset seemed to portend a climactic battle on Palm Sunday morning.

Sheridan's corps had stopped between Appomattox Station and Appomattox Court House. Lee's army camped east of the village; Major General Thomas Rosser stayed in town at the home of a friend, Wilmer McLean. Meade's II and VI Corps were bivouacked to the east of Lee's troops. Another 35,000 Union infantrymen were marching through the night from the south and southwest to join Sheridan at Appomattox Station.

It was a night for making plans: Sheridan, for preventing Lee from reaching Lynchburg; Lee, for breaking through. “I did not sleep at all, nor did anybody else, the entire command being up all night long,” wrote Sheridan, who stayed in a small frame house just south of Appomattox Station. A member of his staff wrote that “everybody was jubilant” and too excited to sleep because of rumors that Lee was going to surrender.
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Sheridan's great concern was that Gibbon's XXIV Corps—which was doggedly following the Cavalry Corps along with a brigade of black troops from XXV Corps and with V Corps right behind it—would not arrive before Lee's tatterdemalion army tried to break through to Lynchburg. Sheridan knew that without infantry support, the Cavalry Corps alone could not stop the Confederates. As he worriedly paced the floor, Sheridan might have felt that he was reliving the tortuous hours before Five Forks, when he awaited V Corps's arrival.

Unable to compel Gibbon's men to move any faster than they were—indeed, they were marching all night to reach him, after having traveled farther and faster from Petersburg than any other Union army unit—Sheridan fired off messages. To Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain at V Corps, which had collapsed alongside the road to Appomattox Station early on April 9, Sheridan wrote, “If you can possibly push your infantry up here tonight, we will have great results in the morning.” The note resulted in a flurry of bugle calls that put V Corps back on its feet.

Sheridan also shared his anxiety with Grant in a dispatch at 4:20 a.m. “If General Gibbon and the Fifth Corps can get up to-night we will perhaps finish the job in the morning. I do not think Lee means to surrender until compelled to do so.” When Sheridan wrote the dispatch, the Cavalry Corps had been in ranks and under arms since 4 a.m., facing east toward Appomattox Court House.
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A pounding migraine had forced Grant to stop for the night at a farmhouse sixteen miles east of Appomattox Court House. While Grant bathed his feet in hot water and mustard and applied mustard plasters to the back of his neck and his wrists, his staff officers played a piano downstairs and sang. The music was just noise to the tone-deaf Grant, and it only aggravated his headache. He asked them to stop. When morning came, Grant's “sick headache” persisted despite his home treatments.
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Major General Edward O.S. Ord, the Army of the James's commander, reached Sheridan's headquarters just before sunup with excellent news: XXIV Corps and V Corps were just a couple of miles behind him. Sheridan's worries vanished.

As firing began in front of Sheridan's dismounted cavalrymen, the generals agreed that when the infantry arrived, it would take positions behind the cavalry. Until then, Sheridan's men would fight a delaying action, falling back when the pressure became too great.
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SHERIDAN WAS CORRECT IN believing that Lee would not surrender until there was absolutely no other option. While Sheridan was sleeplessly waiting for the Union infantry to reach his lines, Lee was discussing a last, desperate plan with his two remaining corps commanders, James Longstreet and John Gordon, and his nephew and cavalry chief, Fitzhugh Lee.

The once-powerful Army of Northern Virginia had been whittled down to a scarecrow force of no more than 15,000 infantry and cavalry—the equivalent of a single corps. Arrayed on three sides of the Rebels were more than 80,000 Union troops—the II, V, VI, and XXIV Corps, a brigade from XXV Corps, and the Cavalry Corps.

To Lee and his lieutenants, the road to Lynchburg offered a glimmer of hope. A hard-hitting infantry-cavalry assault might sweep aside Sheridan's cavalrymen if they were all that stood between Appomattox Court House and the Lynchburg road. The Army of Northern Virginia might yet reach the Blue Ridge and eventually join Joseph Johnston's army in North Carolina.

But if Yankee infantrymen reinforced Sheridan's troopers, the game was up. Even as Lee and his lieutenants were making their plan, Gordon thought it was little better than a forlorn hope. Come morning, however, Gordon's II Corps, with Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry and Longstreet's artillery, would spearhead the attack, while the rest of Longstreet's I Corps protected the rear.
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APRIL 9, 1865–APPOMATTOX COURT HOUSE—It was Palm Sunday, but no services were planned in the village; it was a day for fighting, not worship. Above the tree line the sun appeared as an orange disk, tinged by the fog hugging the hills and the dust from thousands of men already in motion.

From the crest of a small hill, Sheridan commanded a good view of the ground west of Appomattox Court House. Before daybreak, he had placed Custer's and Devin's divisions at the forefront, with Crook's and Ranald Mackenzie's divisions to their left.

A heavy line of Gordon's infantrymen and Fitzhugh Lee's cavalrymen emerged from Appomattox village and advanced steadily toward Custer's and Devin's dismounted troopers.

As the gunfire swelled to a sustained roar, Sheridan ordered Custer and Devin to conduct an orderly withdrawal to the right. That left the center open for the infantrymen from XXIV and XXV Corps, who at that moment were forming in the woods to the rear after having run the last two miles. V Corps was also just arriving. Sheridan ordered Mackenzie and Crook to hold their positions on the left as long as possible.

For the last time, the Rebels' high-pitched foxhunter's cry rang out over a contested battlefield. “The last charge of the war was made by the footsore and starving men of my command with a spirit worthy of the best days of Lee's army,” wrote Gordon.

Refusing to sacrifice his men when thousands of reinforcements were so near at hand, Sheridan withdrew Mackenzie and Crook, ordering them to join Devin's and Custer's divisions on the right.
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Gordon's men cheered loudly when they saw the Yankees pull back, briefly entertaining the hope that they might yet break out. They began marching up the Lynchburg road as the Cavalry Corps watched passively.

Then, the cheering stopped. Long lines of bluecoat infantry began emerging from the woods. In minutes, 10,000 troops from the XXIV and XXV Corps were standing shoulder to shoulder, facing the right side of Gordon's line. Ord's Army of the James had accomplished the extraordinary feat of marching 120 miles in just four days over muddy roads, in the rain and the heat, in the daytime and the nighttime.

One of Sheridan's staff officers found Joshua Chamberlain and his two brigades in the long V Corps column that was just arriving. Sheridan wanted Chamberlain to bring his men to the front immediately, the staff officer said. Chamberlain led his brigades into the woods behind Sheridan's cavalry and rode up to Sheridan to receive orders.

He was struck by Sheridan's warlike appearance astride Rienzi, “both, rider and steed, of an unearthly shade of darkness, terrible to look upon.” With “a dark smile and impetuous gesture,” Sheridan urged Chamberlain forward. “Now smash 'em, I tell you, smash 'em!” he cried.

The massed Union infantry divisions behind Sheridan now stretched for three miles and numbered 30,000, ranked three deep. As they faced the newly risen sun, their flags snapping in the breeze, the bluecoats began marching steadily toward Gordon's wraithlike troops. The Cavalry Corps, no longer a bystander, prepared to attack, with Custer in the lead.