A Stillness at Appomattox (163 page)

That
was
his
last
act.
The
admiral
on
this
expedition
was tough
David
Porter,
who
had
been
on
intimate
terms
with Grant
ever
since
the
Vicksburg
campaign,
and
Porter
told Grant
the
fort
could
be
had
any
time
they
sent
a
competent general
to
take
it.
The
presidential
election
was
over
and
the war
was
on
the
downhill
slope,
and
it
was
suddenly
realized that
Butler
no
longer
need
be
handled
with
tongs.
So
Grant relieved
him
of
his
command
and
sent
him
back
to
Massachusetts,
and
Lincoln
sustained
Grant,
and
the
one
man
who ever
bluffed
those
two
citizens
had
lost
all
of
his
terrors.

Another
expedition
went
out,
Fort
Fisher
was
captured, and
the
Confederacy
was
sealed
away
from
the
outside world.
Sherman
was
beginning
to
come
north
from
Savannah, and
for
the
Army
of
the
Potomac
it
was
a
winter
of
rising confidence.
"There
was
hope
in
the
air,"
wrote
a
veteran
in the
VI
Corps.
"All
were
beginning
to
feel
that
the
next
campaign
would
be
the
last."
¹⁰
Much
of
this
was
due
to
the realization
that
the
men
in
the
opposing
trenches,
the
indomitable
veterans
of
Lee's
magnificent
army,
were
themselves
beginning
to
lose
hope.

The
Confederacy
was
visibly
failing—in
manpower,
in
rations,
in
equipment.
A
Union
man
in
Fort
Hell,
peering through
the
wintry
air,
saw
a
stooped
and
ragged
Confederate
detail
marching
out
to
relieve
the
picket
line
and
wrote that
"I
could
not
help
comparing
them
with
so
many
women with
cloaks,
shawls,
double-bustles
and
hoops,
as
they
had thrown
over
their
shoulders
blankets
and
tents
which
flapped in
the
wind."
An
officer
of
the
day
on
the
VI
Corps
front
recorded
that
forty
deserters
had
come
into
his
lines
in
forty-eight
hours,
and
he
said
that
this
was
about
average;
"if
we stay
here,
the
Johnnies
will
all
come
over
before
the
4th
of July."
To
another
Union
officer,
the
"starved
and
wan
appearance"
of
the
deserters
proved
that
"the
Confederacy
was on
its
last
legs."
²⁰

In
the
lines
facing
Richmond,
Union
pickets
one
night heard
a
great
hallooing
and
cursing
from
a
swamp
out
in front,
and
they
crept
out
and
rescued
an
indignant
Rebel conscript
who
had
got
stuck
in
the
mud
while
trying
to
desert.
They
took
him
to
their
campfire
and
found
that
he
was fat
and
sixty,
a
man
who
ordinarily
wore
a
wig,
spectacles, and
false
teeth,
but
who
had
lost
all
three
while
floundering in
the
swamp.
They
dried
him
off
and
gave
him
coffee;
he drank,
looked
about
the
circle,
and
then
began
to
curse the
Confederacy:

"He
cursed
it
individually,
from
Jeff.
Davis
and
his
cabinet
down
through
its
Congress
and
public
men
to
the
lowest pothouse
politician
who
advocated
its
cause;
he
cursed
its army,
from
General
Lee
down
to
an
army
mule;
he
cursed that
army
in
its
downsittings
and
uprisings,
in
all
its
movements,
marches,
battles
and
sieges;
he
cursed
all
its
paraphernalia,
its
artillery
and
its
muskets,
its
banners,
bugles and
drums;
he
cursed
the
institution
of
slavery,
which
had brought
about
the
war,
and
he
invoked
the
direst
calamity, woe
and
disaster
upon
the
Southern
cause
and
all
that
it
represented;
while
the
earnestness,
force
and
sincerity
with which
it
was
delivered
made
it
one
of
the
most
effective speeches
I
ever
heard,
and
this
together
with
his
comical appearance
and
the
circumstance
of
his
capture
made
the men
roar
with
laughter."

The
Union
man
who
told
about
all
of
this
added,
perhaps unnecessarily,
that
"the
best
element
in
the
Southern
army" did
not
desert.
²¹

A
New
England
private
said
that
each
evening
the
men fin
his
company
would
speculate
about
the
number
of
de
serters
who
would
come
in
that
night:
"The
boys
talk
about the
Johnnies
as
at
home
we
talk
about
suckers
and
eels.
The boys
will
look
around
in
the
evening
and
guess
that
there will
be
a
good
run
of
Johnnies."
Heavy
firing
on
the
picket lines
was
always
taken
to
mean
that
the
enemy
was
trying to
keep
deserters
from
getting
away.
Many
deserters
were willing
to
enlist
in
the
Union
army,
and
before
1864
ended it
was
ordered
that
all
such
should
be
sent
w
est
to
fight
the Indians—it
would
go
very
hard
with
them
if
the
army
from which
they
had
deserted
should
recapture
them.
When
these men
talked
about
the
Southern
cause,
it
was
said,
they
would remark
that
it
was
a
rich
man's
war
and
a
poor
man's
fight.
²²