The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (124 page)

Richmond and Petersburg, semi-beleaguered at opposite ends of the line, were barely twenty crow-flight miles apart, but the intrenchments covering and connecting them had stretched by now to nearly
twice that length. From White Oak Swamp on the far left, due east of the capital, these outer works (as distinguished from the ‘inner’ works, two miles in their rear) ran nine miles south, in a shielding curve, to Chaffin’s Bluff on the James; there they crossed and continued for four gun-studded miles along the river’s dominant right bank to a westward loop where the Howlett Line — Beauregard’s cork in Butler’s bottle — began its five-mile run across Bermuda Neck to the Appomattox, then jogged another four miles south, up the left bank of that stream, to connect with the trenches covering Petersburg at such close range that its citizens had grown adept at dodging Yankee shells. The first four miles of these trans-Appomattox installations — disfigured about midway by the red yawn of the Crater — defined the limits of the original blue assault as far south as the Jerusalem Plank Road, where both sides had thrown up imposing and opposing fortifications. Officially dubbed Forts Sedgwick and Mahone, but known respectively by their occupants as Fort Hell and Fort Damnation, these were designed to serve as south-flank anchors, back in June, for the two systems winding northward out of sight. Since that time, however, as a result of Grant’s four all-out pendulum strikes (staged one a month, July through October, and costing him some 25,000 casualties, all told, as compared to Lee’s 10,000) the gray line had been extended nine miles to the west and southwest, covering the Boydton Plank Road down to Hatcher’s Run. All these segments brought the Confederate total to thirty-five miles of earthworks, not including cavalry extensions reaching up to the Chickahominy on the left and down past Burgess Mill to Gravelly Run on the right. Lee’s basic problem, with only about half as many troops as he opposed, was that his line was not only longer, it was also more continuous than Grant’s, who, having no national capital or indispensable railroad junction close in his rear, had less to fear from a breakthrough at any given point.

Another problem was food; or rather the lack of it. Badly as Lee needed men — and the need was so stringent he could not give his Jewish soldiers a day out of the trenches for Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur — he saw no way of feeding substantial reinforcements even if they had been available, which they were not. As it was, he barely managed to sustain the troops on hand by reducing their daily ration to a pint of cornmeal, baked into pones when there was time, and an ounce or two of bacon. Moreover, with the Shenandoah Valley put to the torch and only two rail lines open to Georgia and the Carolinas — the Southside out of Petersburg, the Danville out of Richmond — there was little hope that the fare could be improved, despite the fact that the trench-bound men were losing weight and strength at an alarming rate. They looked fit enough, to a casual eye, but would “pant and grow faint” at the slightest exertion, a staffer noted. “General, I’m hongry,” some would reply when Lee rode out and asked them how they were. All through this grim time, a veteran would say, “I thanked God I had a backbone for my stomach to lean up against.”

Others remarked that the quality of such food as they received was even lower than its quantity; which was low indeed. The meal was unbolted, generally with much of the cob ground in, and alive with weevils. But the bacon remained longest in their memories and nightmares. Nassau bacon, it was called, though one memorialist was to testify that “Nausea with a capital would have been better. It came through the blockade, and we believed it was made from the hog of the tropics and cured in the brine of the ocean. More likely it was discarded ship’s pork, or ‘salt junk.’… It was a peculiarly scaly color, spotted like a half-well case of smallpox, full of rancid odor, and utterly devoid of grease. When hung up it would double its length. It could not be eaten raw, and imparted a stinking smell when boiled. It had one redeeming quality: elasticity. You could put a piece in your mouth and chew it for a long time, and the longer you chewed it the bigger it got. Then, by a desperate effort, you would gulp it down. Out of sight, out of mind.”

Nor was the outer man, in his butternut rags, any better served than the inner. Shoes, for example, had always been a scarce requisition item, and now that the once bounteous yield of well-shod Union corpses had diminished as a dividend of battle, the shortage was acute. Even so, and with cold weather coming on, many soldiers preferred going barefoot to wearing the “pitiable specimens” of footgear issued by the government as a substitute for shoes. “Generally made of green, or at best half-cured leather,” one who suffered from them later wrote, “they soon took to roaming. After a week’s wear, the heel would be on one side, at an angle to the foot, and the vamp in turn would try to do duty as a sole.… While hot and dry, they would shrink like parchment, and when wet they just slopped all over your feet.”

Crippling as this was, other shortages cramped the army’s style still more. Chief among these, despite the sacrifice of most of the South’s stills, was the scarcity of copper, indispensable in the manufacture of percussion caps, without which not a shot could be fired. Riflemen in the critical outer pits were limited to eighteen caps a day, while their Federal counterparts across the way complained of bruised shoulders from being required to expend no less than a hundred rounds in the same span. Other metals not only were less rare, they also could be salvaged from incoming projectiles, much as boots and overcoats had been scavenged from incoming infantry, back in the days of mobile warfare. “As an inducement to collecting scrap iron for our cannon foundries,” a line officer would recall, “furloughs were offered, a day for so many pounds collected. Thus, gathering fragments of shells became an active industry among the troops. So keen was their quest that sometimes they would start toward the point where a mortar shell fell, even before it exploded.” Similarly, the loose dirt of the parapets was periodically sifted for spent lead, but only under cover of darkness, when snipers were inactive. Twice each day, an hour before dawn and half an hour before dusk, every regiment mounted the fire step along its portion of the trenches and remained there, on the alert, until full daylight spread or night came down. Between times, round the clock, half the men kept watch, while the other half slept or rested on their arms, ready to assist in repelling an attack whenever their on-duty comrades sounded the alarm.

Outnumbered and outgunned, ill-clad, ill-shod, and invariably hungry, running after fragments of shell as they once had run after rabbits — except that now they were not in direct pursuit of food, for there was none at the scene of the chase, but rather of the chance to win a day out of the trenches, on the roam where a few mouthfuls could be scrounged from roadside gardens (“They stole more from us than the Yankees did; poor things,” a farmwife was to say long afterwards) — Lee’s veterans fought less by now for a cause than they did for a tradition. And if, in the past six months, this had become a tradition not so much of victory as of undefeat, it had nonetheless been strengthened by the recent overland campaign and now was being sustained by the current stalemate, which was all that Grant’s hundred thousand casualties had earned him in this latest On-to-Richmond effort, launched in May. Mainly, though, Lee’s veterans fought for Lee, or at any rate for the pride they felt when they watched him ride among them. He had “a fearless look of self-possession, without a trace of arrogance,” a Tarheel captain noted, and though a fellow Virginian observed that “he had aged somewhat in appearance,” it was also evident that he “had rather gained than lost in physical vigor, from the severe life he had led. His hair had grown gray, but his face had the ruddy hue of health and his eyes were as clear and bright as ever.”

Partly this appearance of well-being derived from the extended spell of golden weather, which continued through November into December; Lee had always been responsive to climatic fluctuations, good and bad, even before the onset of what doctors called his rheumatism. A staff cavalryman, however, looking back on this hale, autumnal time — when the general, as he said, “seldom, if ever, exhibited the least trace of anxiety, but was firm, hopeful, and encouraged those around him in the belief that he was still confident of success” — believed he saw deeper into the matter. “It must have been the sense of having done his whole duty, and expended upon the cause every energy of his being, which enabled him to meet the approaching catastrophe with a calmness which seemed to those around him almost sublime.”

Perceptive as this was by hindsight, there were other, more evident causes for the confidence he displayed. One was the return of Longstreet in mid-October, on the day of Early’s defeat at Cedar Creek. His right arm partly paralyzed by the effects of his Wilderness wound, Old Peter had learned to write with his left hand, and he gladly accepted full responsibility for the defense of that part of the line above the James, where he soon demonstrated that he had lost none of his cool, hard-handed skill in conducting a battle. Lee’s wisdom in leaving the fighting there to his “old war horse” was confirmed within eight days of the Georgian’s return to duty; no northside drive on Richmond was ever so easily shattered, at such low cost to the defenders, as the one that made up part of Grant’s fourth and final pendulum strike, October 27. What was more, the confidence this inspired was enlarged by Hill’s and Hampton’s canny resistance along Hatcher’s Run, where three Federal corps were turned back in confusion the following day, after suffering even heavier losses than had been inflicted on the other two corps, at the far end of the line.

Small wonder, then, that Lee gave an impression of vigor and well-being as he rode north or south, through the flare and haze of Indian Summer, to inspect his nearly forty miles of unbroken line from the Chickahominy down past Burgess Mill. Even Grant, who was slow to learn negative lessons, had apparently been convinced by this latest failure that he would never take the Confederate capital by storm, and this estimate was strengthened in mid-November by the recall of Kershaw’s division from Early to join Longstreet, whose reunited First Corps now occupied all the defenses north of the Appomattox, including those across Bermuda Neck. A. P. Hill’s Third Corps held the Petersburg intrenchments, supported by Hampton’s cavalry on the right, and a new Fourth Corps was improvised by combining the divisions of Hoke and Bushrod Johnson (but only on paper; Hoke remained north and Johnson south of the James) to provide a command for Richard Anderson, commensurate with his rank, after Old Peter’s return. With Dick Ewell in charge of the reserves in Richmond, on call
for manning the city’s inner works, Lee felt that his army was not only back under his immediate control — aside, that is, from Early’s three Second Corps divisions, still licking their wounds out on the near rim of the Shenandoah Valley — but also, in the light of its performance against four all-out assaults in as many months by twice its numbers, that it had recovered a considerable measure of the responsive, agile quality that made it like a rapier in his hand.

Still, for all its delicate balance and true temper, the rapier had become an exclusively defensive weapon, swift in parry and effective in occasional riposte, but not employed for months now to deliver a bold, original thrust or slash, as in the days when Lee’s aggressive use of it, whether to pink or maim, had dazzled admirers all over the world. Moreover, he knew that in time, without proper care or refurbishment, the fine-honed instrument would wear out (or the fencer would, which came to the same thing) under the constant hammering of the Union broadsword, any one of whose strokes would end the duel if his arm wearied and let it past. “Without some increase of strength,” he had warned Seddon more than two months ago, “I cannot see how we can escape the natural military consequences of the enemy’s numerical superiority.” Nothing much had come of this, nor of a follow-up protest to Bragg one month later: “I get no additions. The men coming in do not supply the vacancies caused by sickness, desertions, and other casualties.” Now in November he appealed to the President himself. “Grant will get every man he can.… Unless we obtain a reasonable approximation to his force I fear a great calamity will befall us.”

Nothing came of that either; Davis could only reply, as he had done to similar pleas from Hood, “No other resource remains.” And now that Lincoln’s reëlection had dashed Confederate hopes for an early end to the war by negotiation, Lee saw clearly enough that all his skilled resistance had really gained him, north and south of the James, was time — time with which, lacking substantial reinforcements, he could do little except continue to resist; until time ran out, as it finally must, and broke the vicious, tightening circle. His belief that Grant was at last convinced of the folly involved in prolonging a series of bungled attempts to overrun him was encouraged, if not confirmed, when November drew to a close without a major assault having been launched against any part of his works from start to finish, the first such month since the siege began. But he also knew this did not mean there would be a let-up in Grant’s efforts to accomplish by attrition what he had failed to achieve by overwhelming force. Expecting renewed strikes at his overworked supply lines, west and south of Petersburg and Richmond, Lee told Davis in early December: “All we want to resist them is men.”