A Stillness at Appomattox (121 page)

In
the
captured
trenches
there
was
a
dreadful
crush
of men.
An
officer
wrote
afterward
that
people
were
packed
so tightly
that
he
literally
could
not
raise
his
arms
from
his
side. The
Confederates
had
followed
close,
and
they
poked
rifles over
the
edge
of
the
trench
and
fired
into
the
huddle
at
three-foot
range.
Some
of
them
jumped
down
in
with
bayonets, and
men
began
to
surrender,
and
the
soldiers
remembered hearing
the
Confederates
crying:
"Take
the
white
man—kill the
nigger!"
There
was
a
blind
flurry
of
bitter
fighting
in
the maze
of
trenches
and
rifle
pits
and
dugouts,
and
eventually the
whole
section
of
captured
trench
was
lost
and
the
Union survivors
got
into
the
crater
and
prepared
to
hang
on
as
long as
they
could.
²⁶

It
was
all
over
now,
except
for
the
killing.
Grant
had
recognized
failure
and
had
told
Meade
to
get
the
men
back
and call
the
whole
operation
off,
and
Meade
had
passed
the
word on
to
Burnside,
but
Burnside
still
thought
that
the
attack somehow
could
be
reorganized
and
made
successful,
and
no recall
was
sounded.
Hundreds
of
Union
soldiers
were jammed
into
the
crater,
most
of
them
down
at
the
bottom where
they
could
do
no
fighting
whatever.
Men
up
along the
rim
were
standing
on
a
slope
so
steep
that
after
a
man fired
his
rifle
he
had
to
turn
around,
dig
in
with
his
heels, and
brace
his
shoulders
against
the
dirt
in
order
to
reload.
²⁷

Confederate
mortars
had
the
range
and
they
were
dropping
shell
into
the
crater
on
a
helpless
target
that
they
could not
miss;
men
who
got
out
alive
remembered
a
horrible
debris
of
severed
limbs
and
heads
flying
through
the
air
after each
shell
exploded.
The
sun
was
high
in
the
sky
now
and it
beat
down
with
unrelenting
heat,
terribly
magnified
in
this steaming
pit,
and
thirst
seemed
to
be
a
worse
foe
than
Confederate
infantry.
A
Rebel
countercharge
came
to
the
very edge
of
the
crater,
and
Negroes
lined
the
rim
and
fired
and drove
the
attackers
back,
and
the
noise
and
the
heat
and
the exploding
shell
beat
on
men's
brains
and
dazed
them
so
that nothing
was
remembered
very
clearly
afterward.

Here
and
there,
officers
were
able
to
organize
details
to search
among
the
dead
and
wounded
for
cartridges.
Some men
were
ordered
to
run
back
to
the
Union
line
with
a
cluster
of
canteens
to
get
water,
and
a
few
of
them
managed
to make
the
round
trip
without
being
killed.
More
than
200 men
dropped
unconscious
from
sheer
heat
and
exhaustion, and
a
captain
in
the
45th
Pennsylvania
wrote:
"The
loss
of life
was
terrible.
There
was
death
below
as
well
as
above ground
in
the
crater.
It
seemed
impossible
to
maintain
life from
the
intense
heat
of
the
sun."
He
noted
that
his
regiment lost
67
of
the
110
men
who
had
gone
in.
²⁸

Somehow,
finally—long
after
noon—it
ended.
The
men
who could
do
so
went
back
to
the
Union
lines;
the
others
stayed where
they
were
and
either
died
or
went
off
to
Confederate prison
camps.
Burnside
continued
to
insist
to
Meade
that
the attack
could
still
succeed,
but
Ord
bluntly
told
Meade
that
it was
nonsense,
and
defeat
at
last
was
accepted.
Through
it all,
Colonel
Pleasants
had
been
standing
on
the
parapet
of the
fourteen-gun
battery
where
he
could
watch
the
proceedings,
and
he
stormed
and
swore
in
unregimented
fury,
telling
Burnside
that
he
had
"nothing
but
a
damned
set
of
cowards
in
his
brigade
commanders";
and
one
of
the
men
in
the 48th
Pennsylvania
recorded
that
"Pleasants
was
awful
mad when
he
saw
how
things
were
going
on."
²⁹

Mad
Colonel
Pleasants
might
well
have
been.
Never
before
had
the
army
met
so
completely
ignominious
a
defeat. Grant
summed
it
up
by
telling
Halleck
that
it
was
"the
saddest
affair
I
have
witnessed
in
the
war,"
and
he
added:
"Such an
opportunity
for
carrying
fortifications
I
have
never
seen and
do
not
expect
again
to
have."
A
man
in
the
36th
Massachusetts
wrote
that
this
day
had
been
"the
saddest
in
the history
of
the
IX
Corps,"
and
a
boy
in
the
48th
Pennsylvania wrote
to
his
sister: