Terrible Swift Sword (40 page)

Longstreet's I Corps, which had absorbed the late A. P. Hill's III Corps, was in the lead, followed by Richard Anderson's IV Corps, containing the remnants of George Pickett's and Bushrod Johnson's divisions. Then came Ewell's Reserve Corps, made up of the Richmond defense forces, the marines, and the reserves. It was followed by the wagon train. John Gordon's II Corps formed the rearguard.

The Rebel column stretched for many miles down the dark, muddy road, clogged with horses, mules, and wagons. The bone-weary, gaunt troops were forced to travel at an agonizing “inchworm pace,” taking a few steps and then standing and waiting; they often covered no more than a mile in one hour. Straggling and desertions reached epidemic proportions. The shrinking Army of Northern Virginia dwindled further.
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As they pursued Lee to Farmville, Joshua Chamberlain's two brigades of New Englanders and Pennsylvanians came upon a stretch of low ground where the mud was axle deep. The area was strewn with abandoned wagons “stuck fast in the mire—the trembling mules still harnessed to the wrecks; horses starved and over-tasked, but still saddled and packed, turned loose by their masters.” Chamberlain also saw a place where some of Sheridan's cavalrymen had “burst across the flying column and left a black and withered track behind [them] like the lightning's path” of burned wagons and supplies.
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THE “BLACK DAY OF the Army of Northern Virginia,” as it became known in the South, began with Meade's infantrymen reaching Amelia Court House in a morning drizzle on April 6. As Sheridan had tried to tell Meade, Lee was gone. “I did not permit my cavalry to participate in Meade's useless advance,” Sheridan wrote, a touch smugly.

The Cavalry Corps was riding directly west from Jetersville, parallel to Lee's army. Sheridan ordered his commanders to launch flank attacks to slow the Confederates so that Meade's infantry could overtake them. Grant's army, Sheridan believed, must stop the Rebels from reaching Lynchburg, fifty miles beyond Farmville.
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Grant moved VI Corps from the army's right side to its left—so that it could operate with Sheridan's cavalry, “with which they had formerly served so harmoniously and so efficiently in the valley of Virginia.” Sheridan once more commanded Wright's crack corps, whose stand at Cedar Creek had presaged a spectacular victory. Grant's extraordinary action—unprecedented amid a hot pursuit of the enemy—signified his unbounded faith in Sheridan's judgment and abilities.
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That morning, Major General Edward O. C. Ord, commander of the Army of the James, had sent a small brigade of six hundred infantry and cavalry to burn a railroad bridge, known as High Bridge, over the Appomattox River before Lee's army could get there. If Colonel Theodore Read's brigade succeeded, part of Lee's army might be pinned on the south bank and destroyed before it could cross on the smaller bridges nearby.

But the task force reached the bridge just as Longstreet's corps appeared. Believing that the Yankees were the vanguard of a much larger column, the Rebels dug in.

Read valiantly drew up his little brigade in a line, made an inspirational speech, and led it in repeated, albeit futile, attacks on the Rebels—against odds of twenty to one or more.

Most of Read's men were killed or wounded. Read perished in a dramatic pistol duel with a Confederate cavalry commander, Brigadier General James Dearing, who died two weeks later of wounds inflicted by Read. The Yankee survivors surrendered. Grant wrote of this seemingly minor action, “This gallant band of six hundred” delayed Lee's column and “no doubt saved to us the trains following.”
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SHERIDAN'S TROOPERS SHADOWED LEE'S column to Sailor's Creek, a picturesque stream in the Virginia Piedmont country between Amelia Court House and Farmville. The wooded hills, fields, farms, and creeks were charmingly bucolic, but Sailor's Creek would become a byword for disaster for the exhausted Rebels.

A gap had opened between Longstreet's corps and Anderson's corps to its rear. Behind Anderson marched Ewell's corps, followed by the wagon train and then Gordon's corps. Unaware that it had become separated from the rest of the army, Longstreet's corps marched on, and the gap widened. Anderson neglected to inform Longstreet of the breach.
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Earlier, Sheridan had messaged Grant: “I think that now is the time to attack them with all your infantry.” The Rebels had marched all night and were in bad shape, he wrote. “They are reported to have begged provisions of the people of the
country all along the road as they passed.” Grant assured Sheridan that “the Sixth Corps will go in with a vim any place you may dictate.”
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Sheridan's Cavalry Corps struck where the interval between Longstreet's corps and Anderson's was greatest. Throwing itself across the road, Crook's cavalry division, supported on the right by Thomas Devin's and Custer's troopers, attacked Anderson's infantrymen. Sheridan sent a message to Horatio Wright to bring VI Corps into action as fast as his men could run.
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Ewell reacted to the looming disaster by alertly sending the vulnerable supply train on a side road to the northwest. But he failed to tell Gordon, whose corps was behind the wagons, to remain with Ewell and not to march after the train. And so Gordon followed the wagons as they veered off the main road, with Major General Andrew Humphrey's II Corps on his heels. Anderson's and Ewell's communication lapses had broken Lee's army into three segments, setting the stage for its ruin.
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AS THE CAVALRY CORPS poured into the gap, Anderson's divisions, led by Major Generals Joseph Kershaw and George W. Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee's oldest son, threw up fence-rail breastworks and fought back.
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Behind Anderson, Ewell was just discovering that Gordon was gone and that his scratch corps was now the rearguard. Ewell placed his men on a ridge paralleling Sailor's Creek and faced northeast. Within minutes, the hill on the creek's other side teemed with bluecoats; two divisions from VI Corps had arrived.
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Exactly how many Rebels remained in the Army of Northern Virginia after its all-night march cannot be known with certainty, but an educated guess would be no more than 30,000. Possibly 15,000 of them were now under attack by three Union corps whose numbers exceeded 45,000. While Gordon fought a running battle with Humphrey's II Corps, Anderson and Ewell were trapped between Sheridan's three cavalry divisions and Wright's two infantry divisions.

VI Corps's lead regiments splashed across Sailor's Creek and charged the ridge where Ewell's infantrymen lay in the grass to present smaller targets for Wright's fulminating batteries. As one, the Rebels rose to discharge volleys of musket fire into the oncoming Yankees, driving them back across the creek. “The water in the creek was dancing over the dropping bullets,” wrote Sheridan aide Frederick Newhall. “A good many men were falling.”

VI Corps charged again, in greater numbers. And then, to everyone's amazement, a small Richmond brigade of Confederate marines and Georgia artillerymen, clad in scarlet-trimmed uniforms made for the parade ground, furiously counterattacked. They forced the Union infantrymen back over the creek—“with an élan which has never been surpassed,” wrote the awed Newhall—and defiantly planted the Stars and Bars at the water's edge. “I was never more astonished,” wrote Wright,
the commander of VI Corps. The valorous display ended when the gallant marines and cannoneers were smashed to pieces by Yankee musket and artillery fire.
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Custer's and Devin's cavalry divisions squeezed Anderson's beleaguered corps front and rear, while Crook battered its midsection. Some of the most intensive fighting of the war took place here. “The enemy fought with desperation to escape capture, and we, bent on his destruction, were no less eager and determined,” wrote Sheridan.
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“Never mind your flanks!” Sheridan shouted when he saw troopers dismounting. “Go through them! They're demoralized as hell!”
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Anderson's divisions broke, but there was nowhere to go. Somehow, Anderson escaped with two brigades. Then, the Cavalry Corps struck Ewell's infantry from behind as VI Corps swarmed up the ridge in his front. With the tigerish ferocity of men who have lost all hope, the Confederates fought with clubbed muskets, bayonets, and fists until their dead lay in dense windrows, but they had no chance against the thousands of bluecoats all around them. Ewell surrendered.
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It was a tour de force by Sheridan, who had brilliantly coordinated the operations of large cavalry and infantry forces in a running fight over unfamiliar terrain to trap and destroy two Confederate corps. His months-long apprenticeship in combined operations in the Shenandoah Valley had prepared him for this apotheosis of tactical mastery. No other Union general could have accomplished what Sheridan had done.

 

ON A NEARBY HILL, Lee sat astride his horse Traveller with the rearguard of Longstreet's corps and surveyed the wreckage of nearly half his army: 8,000 men from Ewell's and Anderson's corps had been made prisoners. Gordon had largely eluded the clutches of II Corps but had lost three hundred wagons, four guns, and another 1,700 men to captivity.

“My God! Has the army been dissolved?” Lee reportedly exclaimed as dazed survivors streamed up the hill toward him. Not dissolved, but a third of it was gone.

Among the nearly 10,000 prisoners were half a dozen generals, including Ewell, Kershaw, and Custis Lee. That night, Union officers shared their fire with the captive Rebel officers. Ewell, sitting on the ground, silently hugged his knees in “utter despondency.”
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Sheridan informed Grant that the Cavalry Corps and VI Corps had “routed them handsomely” and continued to pursue Lee. “If the thing is pressed I think that Lee will surrender,” he wrote.
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When Grant passed Sheridan's message to Lincoln at City Point, the president telegraphed Grant, “Let the thing be pressed.”
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LEE'S ARMY WAS RAPIDLY disintegrating under the Union army's hammer blows. A broad swath of discarded Confederate ammunition and weapons, and dead and
dying horses, marked the dying Rebel army's passage. After stopping to examine a dead Rebel soldier in the road, Lieutenant Edward Tobie noted that he had “every appearance of having died from hunger and exhaustion.”
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“Horses and mules dead or dying in the mud,” wrote a Confederate artilleryman. “The constant marching and fighting without sleep or food are rapidly thinning the ranks of this grand old army.”
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While Crook's division kept Lee under observation, Sheridan swung southwest of Farmville with Custer's and Devin's divisions. The Cavalry Corps traveled at the “long slinging walk” acquired during the corps's many campaigns. Lieutenant Colonel Newhall marveled that 10,000 cavalrymen, who a year earlier had alternated between straggling and galloping on their marches, could now travel from daybreak to dark without a single regiment altering its gait.

On April 7, Sheridan and his two cavalry divisions reached the hamlet of Prince Edward Court House, which lay ten miles from Farmville. If Lee suddenly pivoted and marched south, hoping to reach Danville, Sheridan's cavalry could block the Confederates' path.
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AFTER DISPOSING OF READ'S brigade, Longstreet's I Corps crossed the Appomattox River, intent on reaching the 80,000 rations awaiting them at Farmville. The Rebels set fire to the Appomattox bridges, but Crook's cavalry division, snapping at their heels, managed to save one of them. The Yankee troopers got over the river and overtook the Rebels.

Like a cornered wolf, Longstreet's infantry counterattacked Crook's mounted troops, forcing Colonel J. Irvin Gregg's brigade back across the Appomattox and capturing Gregg. At Farmville, the Confederates collected their two days' rations, but they could not rest with the Yankees pressing them.
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When the report of Crook's fight reached Sheridan, he knew that Lee's destination was Lynchburg, not Danville, and he made a new plan. Much like at Sailor's Creek, Sheridan intended to pin Longstreet's and Gordon's corps between his cavalrymen and infantrymen. He would “throw [his] cavalry again across his [Lee's] path, and hold him till the infantry could overtake him.”

Late on April 7, Sheridan ordered Crook to bring his division to Prospect Station to join the rest of the Cavalry Corps. Together they would ride to Appomattox Station in the hope of getting in front of Lee.
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THAT NIGHT, GRANT CALLED upon Lee to surrender. “The result of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance,” Grant wrote. The message reached Lee northwest of Farmville, where the weary Rebels had halted after a daylong slog over muddy roads, harassed by Crook's cavalry. Without comment, Lee handed the note to Longstreet, who returned it, saying only, “Not yet.”

Lee wrote to Grant that he disagreed with Grant's analysis of his army's plight, but he asked what terms Grant was offering. Grant replied that Lee's men must lay down their arms until exchanged. To Sheridan, Grant expressed optimism early on April 8 that “Lee will surrender today. . . . . We will push him until terms are agreed upon.”

As Grant was writing those words during the predawn hours of April 8, Lee tried to steal a march on the Yankees to Appomattox Station. There he hoped to obtain the rations that he had requested from Lynchburg. Sheridan and Lee were racing for the same destination.
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