A Stillness at Appomattox (167 page)

Meade
got
back
from
City
Point
just
as
the
fighting
died down,
and
he
reasoned
that
Lee
must
have
weakened
his forces
elsewhere
to
make
this
attack.
He
ordered
the
II

Corps
and
the
VI
Corps,
accordingly,
to
attack
the
entrenched Rebel
picket
lines
in
their
front.
They
did
so,
seizing
the lines,
taking
hundreds
of
prisoners,
and
gaining
excellent positions
from
which
to
assault
the
main
Southern
defenses if
that
should
ever
seem
advisable.
⁵

The
grimy
Federals
who
cleared
the
recaptured
trenches, sent
wounded
men
and
prisoners
to
the
rear,
and
put
the burial
squads
to
work
had
had
a
bigger
day
than
they
could realize.
They
had
beaten
off
the
last
great
offensive
thrust of
the
Army
of
Northern
Virginia.

That
army
had
struck
at
its
Yankee
antagonists
many times—at
Gaines's
Mill
and
at
Bull
Run,
at
Chancellorsville and
at
Gettysburg,
and
on
many
other
fields,
and
always
it struck
with
terrible
power,
tough
soldiers
running
forward under
the
shrill
yip-yip
of
the
Rebel
yell,
red
battle
flags sparkling
above
flashing
muskets,
cold
fury
of
battle
lighting
the
eyes
of
the
gray
warrior
who
directed
the
blows.
It would
never
happen
again.
It
was
a
new
war
now,
and
the end
was
coming.

In
the
afternoon
there
were
visitors
on
the
battlefield-Abraham
Lincoln
and
U.
S.
Grant,
coming
up
by
rattletrap military
train
from
City
Point,
Meade
and
his
staff
officers going
to
meet
them.
Lincoln
walked
over
the
field,
saw wounded
men
not
yet
removed
to
hospital,
and
dead
men for
whom
graves
were
not
yet
ready.
Grant
had
seen
this many
times
and
on
many
dreadful
fields
and
Lincoln
had never
seen
it
at
all
except
for
a
little
at
Fort
Stevens;
and these
two
men
who
were
so
very
different
were
much
alike in
that
neither
one
was
ever
able
to
forget
the
human
cost of
glorious
victories,
or
his
own
responsibility
for
that
cost. An
army
surgeon
told
how
Lincoln
once
visited
a
hospital
in Washington
and
afterward
stopped
to
chat
with
the
doctors. One
of
these
was
telling
about
a
difficult
operation
just
performed,
in
which
a
wounded
soldier's
arm
had
been
removed at
the
shoulder
joint,
and
he
went
into
much
technical
detail, the
other
doctors
listening
intently.
At
last,
as
he
finished, and
the
others
were
asking
this
and
that
about
the
operation,
Lincoln
burst
out
with
the
one
question
that
interested him,
the
one
question
which
no
doctor
had
thought
to
asks "But
how
about
the
soldier?"
⁸
Neither
Lincoln
nor
Grant, who
remorselessly
held
the
country
up
to
month
after
month of
wholesale
killing,
ever
got
far
away
from
that
question.

Back
to
City
Point
went
Lincoln
and
Grant,
to
talk
by headquarters
campfires,
their
shadows
falling
longer
and darker
over
the
dwindling
borders
of
a
fading
Confederacy. Presently
there
came
to
join
them
another
man
who
also
cast a
long
and
portentous
shadow,
a
lean
and
wiry
man
with unruly
red
hair
and
a
short
stubble
of
a
close-cropped
beard, dancing
lights
in
the
alert
eyes
that
peered
out
of
a
hard face—William
Tecumseh
Sherman,
who
had
made
his
name terrible
to
the
South,
here
now
for
a
last
conference
before returning
to
the
tough,
devil-may-care
army
which
he
had
left in
the
pine
hills
of
North
Carolina.

In
a
sense,
Sherman
was
responsible
for
the
attack
on
Fort Stedman.
What
remained
of
the
Southern
Confederacy
was the
ground
that
lay
between
his
army
and
Grant's,
and
its doom
was
absolutely
certain
if
he
continued
his
relentless advance
until
the
two
armies
made
contact.
If
Lee
could break
away,
get
south
fast,
pick
up
the
inadequate
army
with which
Joe
Johnston
was
opposing
Sherman,
beat
Sherman by
a
quick,
hard
blow,
and
then
turn
to
deal
with
Grant—if all
of
that
could
be
done,
then
the
Confederacy
might
survive. The
blow
at
Fort
Stedman
had
been
an
attempt
to
knock
the Army
of
the
Potomac
back
on
its
heels
and
cripple
it
just long
enough
to
give
Lee
the
start
he
would
need
on
a
move to
the
south.

The
odds
against
the
success
of
any
such
program
were fantastically
long,
and
both
Lee
and
Grant
knew
it.
But
they also
knew
one
other
fact—that
the
people
of
the
North
were weary
of
the
war
with
a
deep,
numb,
instinctive
weariness, so
that
one
more
major
disappointment
might
be
too
much for
them.
Whether
or
not
he
could
beat
Sherman,
Lee
might at
least
prolong
the
war
for
six
months
if
he
could
get
away from
Grant,
and
if
he
could
do
that
there
was
a
fair
chance that
the
North
would
give
up
the
struggle.