End at Appomattox

“I think,” Lee said, “that General Grant has managed his affairs remarkably well up to the present time.”

A. P. Hill, one of Lee’s corps commanders, spoke up. “General Lee,” he said, “let them continue to attack our breastworks. We can stand that very well.”

Lee, as always, insisted on the offensive, saying, “We must attack those people. .  .  . This army cannot stand a siege. We must end this business on the battlefield, not in

a fortified place.”

So the two armies continued to maneuver for position and to fight when they were not on the move. The bloodiest and most futile of these fights came in early June, at Cold Harbor, where Grant’s army took some 7,000 casualties in 20 minutes. If it was a Confederate victory, it was not the kind that Lee desired or needed.

Shortly before the battle, he had said to Jubal Early, another of his generals, “We must destroy this army of Grant’s before he gets to the James River. If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.”

General Grant wanted what Lee dreaded. If he could put his army between Lee and Richmond and force him to fight in the open, or if he could pin Lee’s back to the Confederate capital, then his superiority in numbers, firepower, logistics—everything, it seemed, except will where the forces were equal—would lead to a conclusive victory and the end of the war. He had said that he intended “to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer,” and no one doubted his word. But he never said that he preferred this course.

Shortly after the disaster at Cold Harbor, Grant began working on a plan to leave his earthworks and move his entire army across the James River, below Richmond, to take the rail hub at Petersburg, then lay siege to the city. It was the sort of thing that Lee had done, almost routinely, and it involved substantial risk. It meant dividing his forces in the presence of the enemy, and it required movement that was both secret and speedy. Lee and Stonewall Jackson had become almost mythic for this sort of thing. The Army of the Potomac, on the other hand, had built a reputation for caution and for ponderousness, especially on the march. President Lincoln had remarked of one of its previous commanders, George McClellan, that he had “the slows.”

McClellan had failed, dismally, on some of the same ground over which Grant hoped to speedily and stealthily march his army. That had been two years earlier in the Seven Days battles, Lee’s first campaign as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. McClellan had superior numbers but was indecisive and cautious to the point of cowardice, and had been chased out of Virginia by superior generalship and harder marching.

Grant’s reputation was for direct action. He was thought to disdain maneuver warfare and had been quoted as saying, “I never maneuver.” But he was selling himself short (his victorious Vicksburg campaign was the proof). Still, here he was, back in the low country east of Richmond where the place names conjured up dark memories for the Army of the Potomac: Gaines’s Mill, White Oak Swamp, the Chickahominy River. This was the country through which Grant proposed to move his army, leaving the earthworks around Cold Harbor that were foul with the stink of the dead.

As he explained in a letter to his nominal superior in Washington, Chief of Staff Henry Halleck, “My idea from the start has been to beat Lee’s army, if possible, north of Richmond.” However, Grant admitted, “without a greater sacrifice of human life than I am willing to make, all cannot be accomplished that I had designed.”

McClellan could never have written those words. When he had been frustrated by Lee in this same country, he said it was because he had been betrayed by people in Washington.

Grant went on to explain his intention to cross the James and come at Lee from the south, cutting off his supplies through the vital rail hub of Petersburg. Lee would be trapped with his back to Richmond and slowly be starved out or, more likely, come out into open country and fight. Grant was confident he would win that fight and the war.

Halleck didn’t like the plan. He imagined Lee marching rapidly for the Potomac, for Washington, while Grant was moving his army across the James. Lee had, after all, done it before, twice, and both times it had been, in Wellington’s phrase, “a near-run thing,” ending first at Antietam and then at Gettysburg. Halleck wanted Grant to keep his army between Lee and Washington.

“We can defend Washington best,” Grant wrote back, “by keeping Lee so occupied that he cannot detach enough troops to capture it. I shall prepare at once to move across James River.”

If “audacious” was the single word that best captured the essence of Lee, the word for Grant would be “decisive.”

He ordered troops put to work creating a second set of earthworks behind those the army occupied. These were to be strong enough that they could be held by a thin, stay-behind force if Lee were to learn that the rest of Grant’s army was on the move and go on the attack. Then, he sent out two officers from his staff, both engineers, to reconnoiter the route of the army’s march and to select a site for the construction of what would be the longest pontoon bridge in military history, which his engineers would throw across the James.

The scouts returned to report they had found a suitable place for the crossing. One of them, who had been with Grant for a long time, later wrote that the general “showed the only nervousness he ever manifested in my presence. .  .  . We could hardly get the words out of our mouths fast enough to suit him. .  .  . At the close of the interview, he informed us he would begin the movement that night.”

That movement was one of immense complexity and would have been difficult enough even in peacetime, with no requirement for stealth. Five corps of almost 100,000 men would be involved. Almost all of them would leave the positions they occupied without tipping off the enemy. Some of them would cross the Chickahominy, and that would call for the construction of bridges. When these elements reached the James, some would be ferried across the river while others waited on completion of the pontoon bridge. Another element would remain on that bank and move upriver to screen the crossing. Meanwhile, other troops that had marched for the York River on leaving their entrenchments would have boarded ships for transport down that river and then up the James to take their place in the coming attack on the thin ranks of Confederates holding a line in front of Petersburg. If all went well, that line would be broken before Lee had time to react.

It went well. Indeed, it was a masterpiece of military movement.

The withdrawal from the Cold Harbor line began in darkness on June 12. Until the order to move, almost none of the Union troops knew it was about to happen. In three years of war, the army had become wise in many things. Not least, security. “It was not now the custom,” in the words of one veteran, “to inform the rank and file, and the newspapers, and the enemy, of intended movements.”

When the main force reached the point designated for the crossing, the transports were there and the engineers were already at work on the pontoon bridges. Some of the men doubtless remembered how in the days of late 1862 General Burnside had waited for days for the arrival of the pontoons that would be laid across the Rappahannock. By the time they arrived, Lee’s men had made the high ground so strong that “even a chicken could not live” under their fire, as one of his officers put it.

Its ponderous movements before the Battle of Fredericksburg had led to one of the Army of the Potomac’s most dismal defeats, which Lee had watched from a spot of high ground, observing famously, “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.”

Now facing Grant on a river further south, Lee was informed that the Union army had left its entrenched positions around Cold Harbor in the night. But while he knew that much, he still did not know enough to act. He suspected Grant might be moving to cross the James, but he could not be sure. And until he was, he was unwilling to cross with his forces and leave Richmond open to attack from the river’s north side.

Grant had bought some time and, with it, a glittering opportunity. When he arrived on the banks of the James, he wired Halleck, “The enemy show no signs yet of having brought troops to the south side of Richmond. I will have Petersburg secured, if possible, before they get there in much force. Our movement from Cold Harbor to the James River has been made with great celerity and so far without loss or accident.”

The response, when it came, was not from Halleck:

There were some Confederate forces in front of Peters-burg under the command of General P. G.T. Beauregard. They amounted to fewer than 5,000 men, and they had been holding off a larger Union force under the command of General Benjamin Butler, who had a manpower advantage of around two to one. But he was one of those political generals who had handicapped the Union effort throughout the war. He was far more skillful as a politician than as a general. Grant had sent him moving up from the south against Beauregard and Petersburg as part of his overall plan for breaking the South—a plan that included sending General Sigel up the Shenandoah, General Banks against Mobile, General Sherman against Atlanta, and General Meade, with whom he would march, against Lee. The main effort was to be made by Sherman and Meade. The others were secondary, and if Grant did not expect much of them, they did not disappoint. All had failed so far, including Butler.

He had gone on the attack against Beauregard shortly before the crossing by Grant’s army and had been turned back, at one point by forces that included people who had come out of hospitals and jail (the battle of “patients and penitents”). Butler remained a presence in the Petersburg campaign and a burden on Grant until he was, finally, able to send him and his army off to the North Carolina coast where he was ordered to take Fort Fisher. Butler failed, predictably, to do this and Grant relieved him.

If Beauregard and his ad hoc force had been able to turn back Ben Butler, the Army of the Potomac was another thing. Not long after Grant received that message from Lincoln, nearly 20,000 Union troops were across the James and ready to attack the Confederate defenses of Petersburg. When they did attack, they took ground and captured guns and prisoners, so easily that it seemed to their commander that he “held the key to Petersburg.”

Beauregard, recalling the battle later, agreed. “Petersburg was clearly at the mercy of the Federal commander, who had all but captured it.”

But as with so many of the big actions in this war, things came down to “not quite enough” and “just in time.” The frictions of war intervened and that great opportunity was missed. In one instance, the largest corps in the Army of the Potomac was slow to reach a position from which it might have overwhelmed the meager Confederate defenses. First, it was ordered to halt its march and wait on the delivery of some 60,000 rations that it did not need. The order had come at dawn but by 10:30 in the morning, the rations still had not arrived. The men moved out without them, nearly half a day wasted. The unit marched off in one direction and then another, losing more time because, as the commander, General Hancock, put it in his report, “I spent the best hours of the day marching by an incorrect map in search of a designated position which, as described, was not in existence.”

The first attacks had succeeded in pushing the Confederates back, but only enough to shorten their lines. Still, by June 17 there were 80,000 Union troops across the James and bearing down on Beauregard, who had, even with reinforcements, a total of fewer than 15,000 men. Grant seemed strangely indifferent to the loss of momentum, saying at one point, “I think it is pretty well, to get across a great river and come up here and attack Lee in the rear before he is ready for us.”

But if Lee had been beaten to the march and mystified as to Grant’s intentions and the location of the Army of the Potomac, once he learned, for sure, that it was across the James, he acted and did so decisively. He reinforced Beauregard and eventually took command himself of the defense of Petersburg.

The Army of the Potomac had by then recovered from the confusions and lackluster operations of the previous days. It was ready to attack the Confederate positions and take them, as orders specified, “at all costs.”

The attack went forward and took more abandoned trenches. Went forward again and ran into heavy resistance from elements of the Army of Northern Virginia that had come down by train overnight and dug in that morning. The Union troops were ordered to attack, but this looked to them like Cold Harbor all over again. They knew, by now, that such frontal assaults were suicidal. Those orders to attack were, at best, carried out without much conviction and, in some cases, flatly ignored by men who, as one put it, “knew that we had outmarched Lee’s veterans and that our reward was at hand” and were now demoralized.

Still, later that day, another attack was ordered and organized, and a regiment from Maine went forward against the entrenched Confederate troops, taking the heaviest casualties of any Union regiment in any single action of the entire war. Of 850 men, 632 were killed or wounded.

The attack failed, and the great opportunity that had been seized by the night march and the crossing of the James was lost. Grant said he was satisfied and that it was now time to “rest the men and use the spade for their protection until a new vein can be struck.”

His army had suffered another 11,000 casualties since pulling out of the Cold Harbor lines. From the beginning of the campaign, which had opened with the Battle of the Wilderness, the Army of the Potomac had taken over 66,000 casualties, and it was now twice as far from Richmond as it had been when it left its lines around Cold Harbor. As it was digging in again and preparing for a long fight, a visitor from Washington arrived.

The president had taken a boat down the Potomac and then up the James. The visit was unannounced and its purpose was unclear. He may have just wanted to get out of Washington. He made no criticisms, and when Grant said, “You will never hear of me farther from Richmond than now, till I have taken it,” Lincoln seemed reassured. “I cannot pretend to advise,” he said, “but I do sincerely hope that all may be accomplished with as little bloodshed as possible.”

There would be more bloodshed and more fighting. That would not change until the end, which was still some 300 days off. But there was a change in the nature of the fighting. When the war began, soldiers fought out in the open in the old way, and it was thought that the bayonet was a decisive weapon. Modern rifles and artillery had forced men to go to ground and then to dig into it and get as much earth between them and the enemy as possible. By Cold Harbor, troops had learned to dig deep trenches and to reinforce them with timbers. Combat in what came to be thought of as the “siege of Petersburg” anticipated the war in Europe 50 years later. Trench lines were extended and strengthened with timbers. Elaborate dugouts were excavated to provide shelter for the troops. Strongpoints were created and given names such as Fort Hell and Fort Damnation.

There were “battles” within the greater battle as Grant (mostly) would attack and attempt to break the Confederate line, flank it, or extend it until it broke. Lee would launch counterattacks, to shore up his lines or to catch the attacking formations in their flanks. The battles had names—Jerusalem Plank Road, First Deep Bottom, Hatcher’s Run, and others—and they succeeded or failed to varying degrees. But none could be called in any way decisive, though they did increase the bloodshed that Lincoln had wanted to avoid. The bleeding and dying went on, in fact, even when there was no attack by either side. Artillery exchanges were a routine part of life on the line. Large trench mortars were employed to provide “plunging fire.” And snipers, using scoped rifles that were accurate to ranges of 300 yards, would take out men who carelessly exposed themselves.

The life of men in the trenches was one of perpetual mud, filth, danger, and boredom. One Confederate officer described the trenches as places where “vermin abounded” and “digestive organs became impaired by the rations issued and the manner in which they were prepared. Diarrhea and dysentery were universal.”

The Union troops had the better of it. They were supplied through a massive depot created at the junction of the James and Appomattox rivers. They were well fed, and they could count on shoes and uniforms to replace those that were worn out. Many Confederates went barefoot and wore rags. And as the weeks and months went on, they grew hungrier and hungrier. Lee’s troops had always been lean, but in the trenches around Petersburg they became emaciated and almost cadaverous, sustaining themselves on cornmeal and rancid bacon and whatever else the strained logistical apparatus of the Confederacy could supply. One of Lee’s veterans said, “I thanked God I had a backbone for my stomach to lean up against.”

His commander, in frustration, appealed to Richmond, again and again. But the Confederacy itself was slowly being starved into submission. And the machinery of its government, which had never been particularly efficient, was breaking down.

From the beginning, Lee’s army was never actually trapped, so there was no true “siege” of Petersburg. Lee might have attempted a breakout at any time, but doing so would have led to the capture not only of Petersburg and the vital rail lines but also of Richmond. And at first, there was a strategic case to be made for holding the line and forcing Grant’s attempts to break it.

The North was war weary, and Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 was by no means certain. Late that summer, in conversation, he’d said, “You think I don’t know I am going to be beaten, but I do, and unless some great change takes place, beaten badly.” The war dragged on. Sherman’s march proceeded, but slowly. Jubal Early had marched up the Shenandoah all the way to Washington and beyond, forcing Grant to send men from in front of Petersburg off to defend the capital. And Grant, with the Union’s signature force, was bogged down around Petersburg, launching attacks that inevitably failed. Futility, it seemed, was everywhere, and nowhere more acute than in the action known as the Battle of the Crater.

It came early in the long ordeal, when the form of the stalemate was becoming clear. The Army of the Potomac needed to break the Confederate line and, once that had been accomplished, capture Petersburg, cut the rail lines, take Richmond, and end the war.

It was not possible to break the lines by frontal assault. The lesson of Cold Harbor had been validated often since then. The line might be turned, but so far attempts to do this had merely extended it. An officer from a Pennsylvania unit had a suggestion. Why not dig a tunnel under the ground between the lines, then dig a chamber under

the enemy’s position, fill it with explosives, and blow a hole in the line so troops could move through to the enemy’s vulnerable rear and, also, roll up the exposed flanks on either side of the breach?

Grant was not enthusiastic when the proposal was presented to him. But the project went ahead, and in time, the tunnel had been dug—more than 500 feet of it—and the chamber at the end had been packed with some four tons of powder. The tunnel was in the section of the line occupied by the IX Corps of the Army of the Potomac, Ambrose E. Burnside in command.

Burnside was the quintessential political general, a man of obvious gifts, few of them martial. He had been in command of the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg, and one of his subordinates had been General George Meade. Those roles were now reversed, and relations between the two generals were strained. At best.

Burnside presented a plan of attack around the pending explosion of the mine and the rupture it would create in the Confederate line. Meade overruled an essential element of the plan. Burnside wanted to send a unit composed of African Americans in first to exploit the breach, and he had trained and rehearsed the men in their mission. Meade worried that the unit might take heavy casualties, something his political enemies in Washington would use against him. With time running very short, orders were changed. A new lead unit was selected by the unmilitary method of drawing straws.

Before dawn on June 30, the fuse was lit. The explosion, however, did not occur as planned. Time passed and, finally, a couple of very brave men went down into the tunnel to find out what had gone wrong. There was a break in the fuse. They repaired it.

At 4:44 a.m., the mine exploded and tore a gap in the Confederate line. Burnside’s men moved into it. They did not, however, do what the African-American troops had been trained to do: fan out, expand the breach, and then go for the high ground 500 yards in the Confederate rear. Taking that ground would threaten the entire Confederate line and lead, almost certainly, to the fall of Petersburg.

The troops who moved forward did not know quite what to do, and their commander was not there to lead them. He remained in the rear, with a bottle of rum. His inadequately prepared and led troops entered the crater that had been created by the explosion and were trapped there by the steepness of the banks, the crowding of so many men, and the increasingly heavy fire from the Confederates, who, having recovered from the initial shock of the exploding mine, were now counterattacking.

The unit of black troops went in and made progress toward that high ground that they knew, from their rehearsals, was the objective. But by now, the resistance had become too heavy for them to take it unsupported. They retreated, back toward the breech, the crater, and slaughter. Black troops who tried to surrender were killed on the spot, and a Confederate officer reported, “there was, without doubt, a great deal of unnecessary killing of them.”

Grant called off the attack and later said, in a wire to Halleck, “It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in war. Such opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have.”

Grant relieved Burnside, in whom he had never had much confidence. Grant, on the other hand, continued to enjoy that of President Lincoln, who endorsed a decision not to release troops in Virginia for other action, saying in a wire, “I have seen your dispatch expressing your unwillingness to break your hold where you are. Neither am I willing. Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible.”

Then, even as the stalemate around Petersburg and Richmond continued, the North’s fortunes suddenly improved elsewhere, especially in Georgia. Atlanta fell in early September, and Sherman sent his famous telegram to Lincoln: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”

Then Early lost conclusively to Sheridan in the Battle of Cedar Creek less than a month before the election. The Shenandoah was no longer a source of supply or an avenue of invasion for the Confederacy. Sherman and Sheridan had, between them, sealed Lincoln’s reelection. Then, in December, down in Tennessee, General Hood suffered the single worst defeat by any Confederate army in the entire war at the Battle of Franklin.

The New Year, 1865, would be the end, surely.

Lee and his army still held out. But he was stretched thin, and his men were starving and deserting. Still, he continued shifting troops as needed and launching counter-attacks where possible. He was also warning Jefferson Davis that the end was near for Richmond and that to save his army he would be obliged to abandon the city. He hoped to leave his lines around Petersburg and move south to join with the small force commanded by Joseph E. Johnston and resisting, feebly, Sherman’s advance through North Carolina.

If Lee could make his escape and accomplish this link-up .  .  . It was a long gamble. Lee had taken long gambles before, but the war had gone on for a long time, and he had lost so many of his best leaders and soldiers, and there was less and less of a nation behind him. He and his army were, increasingly, on their own.

The end came in a cascade of defeats and death. On April 1, at a battle known as Five Forks, the division under command of George Pickett was defeated, with 2,950 of his men killed or wounded and perhaps as many as 4,000 taken prisoner. General Pickett was not at the scene of the debacle. He was off eating shad at a picnic with some other officers.

On April 2, Lee began moving his units out of the lines they had held around Petersburg and Richmond for almost 300 days. In the confusion of movement, attack, and counterattack, General A. P. Hill, who had saved the day for Lee at Antietam, was killed. When informed of this, Lee said, “He is at rest now, and we who are left are the ones to suffer.”

Stonewall Jackson, dead. A. P. Hill, dead. The Army of Northern Virginia itself was very close to the end of its life.

For a week, the two armies maneuvered in open country—something they had not done for almost a year, since Grant’s bold march away from Cold Harbor and down to Petersburg, where the armies went to ground. The maneuvers by Lee were meant, now, not to mystify and surprise his enemy but to escape it and, somehow, live to fight another day.

But Lee met the enemy everywhere he went. In one battle, Sailor’s Creek, he lost almost 8,000 men, including eight generals killed, captured, or wounded. Lee had watched the battle from an adjacent piece of high ground, much as he had at Fredericksburg. But on this day he witnessed his once magnificent army routed and said, “My God! Has the army been dissolved?”

With what remained of his army, he resumed the march. The objective was as much to secure food as it was to escape Grant’s forces. On April 7, the army arrived in a town called, hopefully, Farmville. Rations had been left there for the men, but they were so harried by Union cavalry that they had to resume the march before many got anything to eat.

They pushed on, but while at Farmville, Lee received a communication from Grant. It read:

General: The results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army
of Northern Virginia in this struggle.

Lee read the letter asking for his surrender and handed it, wordlessly, to General James Longstreet, a man Lee called affectionately “my old warhorse.” Longstreet read the letter and said, simply, “Not yet.”

Their last, forlorn hope was to reach Appomattox Station ahead of Union troops. What was left of the army would, perhaps, find something to eat there and then move on toward the desired link-up with Johnston. But Grant’s cavalry had taken a shorter route, won the race, and cut him off. Lee ordered one last, desperate attack to make a breakout. He had 8,000 infantrymen under his command.

The attack made some early gains, then faltered. General John B. Gordon sent a message to Lee, telling him that “my command has been fought to a frazzle, and unless Longstreet can unite in the movement, or prevent these forces from coming upon my rear, I cannot go forward.” Coming from Gordon, one of Lee’s most aggressive and able generals, the larger message was plain.

“There is nothing left for me to do,” Lee said, “but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths.”

He listened to a proposal by one of his officers that the army simply disband, the men taking their weapons with them, into the familiar countryside, where they would become guerrilla fighters. Lee rejected it, saying that it would, “bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from.”

The only course, he went on, was for him to “go to General Grant and surrender myself and take the consequences of my acts.”

The formal surrender took place at the home of a man named Wilmer McLean, who had once owned a farm in Manassas. It had been shelled during one of the first great battles of the war, so he had moved here to get away from the fighting.

Lee was dressed in a spotless uniform. Grant’s was muddy. They were, in this and so many ways, a picture in contrasts, but alike, too, in the essential thing: both warriors. Grant, whose generous terms allowed Lee to keep his sword—and his officers to retain their mounts and sidearms—later wrote of Lee that “it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result and was too manly to show it .  .  . [but] my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant .  .  . were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought.”

Three days later, the remaining Confederate infantrymen grounded their arms and colors in a ceremony presided over by Joshua Chamberlain, the hero of Round Top at Gettysburg, where the Union was saved in an epic of “just in time” and “not quite enough.”

Chamberlain had been shot in one of the early battles outside of Petersburg, when it had again been “just in time” and “not quite enough” and Grant’s masterful march had almost finished the war. After he was hit by a bullet that passed through both hips, Chamberlain stuck his sword into the ground and used it as a crutch before he passed out from loss of blood. While he was in the hospital, he was promoted to brigadier general, his superior officer said, in “recognition of his services .  .  . before he dies.”

He lived and returned to duty.

On April 12, 1865, he ordered his men to “carry arms” as a gesture of respect to the Confederates whose “decimated brigades, as they reach our right, respond to the ‘carry.’ All the while on our part not a sound of trumpet or drum, not a cheer, nor a word nor motion of man, but awful stillness as if it were the passing of the dead.”

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.