The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (180 page)

In response to the summons, Grant undertook a cross-country ride over unfamiliar ground, with no more escort than a quartet of staff officers and a squad of cavalry, but arrived too late to overrule Meade, if in fact that was what he had had in mind when he set out. In any case, next morning’s dawn proved Little Phil’s concern well founded; Lee was gone. He had swung westward on a night march, scouts reported, apparently headed for Farmville, eighteen miles away on the upper Appomattox and the Southside Railroad, down which he could draw supplies from Lynchburg, then continue his getaway toward the fastness of the Blue Ridge, or turn back south in a renewal of his effort to combine with Johnston. Such disappointment as Grant felt at this loss of contact, this postponement of the showdown that was to have been his reward for winning the race to Burkeville, was more than offset by another consideration, stated later: “We now had no other objective than the Confederate armies, and I was anxious to close the thing up at once.” In other words, the race was now a chase — “a matter of legs,” as the saying went — and he had confidence in the outcome, not only because he had had a chance to compare the legs of the two armies, these past three days on the march from Petersburg, but also because he understood the temper of his soldiers and the motive that impelled
them. “They began to see the end of what they had been fighting four years for. Nothing seemed to fatigue them. They were ready to move without rations and travel without rest until the end. Straggling had entirely ceased, and every man was now a rival for the front.”

Pursuit began without delay, and even before contact was reëstablished — first by Sheridan, whose horsemen lapped the rebel flank, probing for a gap, and then by Humphreys, whose lead division overtook the tail of the slow-grinding butternut column within a couple of hours of setting out — all the indications were that the course would not be long. Abandoned rifles and blanket rolls, cluttering the roadsides west of Amelia, testified to the weariness of the marchers who had carried them this far, while the roads themselves were clogged from point to point by broken-down or mud-stalled wagons, as well as by the creatures who had hauled them. “Dropped in the very middle of the road from utter exhaustion,” one pursuer would recall, “old horses, literally skin and bones, [were] so weak as scarcely to be able to lift their heads when some soldier would touch them with his foot to see if they really had life.” But the best, or worst, evidence in this regard was the condition of the stragglers encountered in increasing numbers as the chase wore on. Collapsed in ditches or staggering through the woods and sodden fields, near delirium from hunger and fatigue, they not only offered little resistance to being gathered up; they seemed to welcome capture as a comfort. For them at least the war was over, won or lost, and winning or losing made less difference than they had thought before they reached the end of their endurance. Not that all of them, even now, had abandoned the last vestige of that cackling sense of the ridiculous they had flaunted from the start, four years ago. A squad of well-clad, well-fed bluecoats, for example, descended on a tattered, barefoot North Carolina private who had wandered off, lone and famished, in search of food. “Surrender, surrender! We’ve got you!” they cried as they closed in with leveled weapons. “Yes, you’ve got me,” the Tarheel scarecrow replied, dropping his rifle to raise his hands, “and a hell of a git you got.”

Any army in this condition, more or less from top to bottom, was likely to stumble into some error that would cost it dearly, and that was what happened this April 6, known thereafter as the Black Thursday of the Confederacy. Longstreet, still in the lead, was under orders to march hard for Rice, a Southside station three miles short of the Appomattox, lest Ord’s corps, reported to be on its way up the track from Burkeville, get there first and cut the hungry graybacks off from the rations St John had waiting for them at Farmville. Behind the First Corps train came Anderson, then Ewell, followed by the guns and wagons of the other three corps — so called, though none was larger than a division had been in the old days — including Gordon’s, which had been fighting a rear-guard action against Humphreys since 8.30 that morning,
west of the Flat Creek crossing where the march had been delayed. By then Old Peter had reached Rice at the head of his lead division, not only in advance of Ord but also in time to send Rosser’s horsemen in pursuit of a flying column of 600 Federals who had just passed through on their way north to burn the bridges the army would need if it was to cross the river. This too was successful. Overtaken and surrounded, outnumbered two to one, the raiders — two regiments of infantry, sent forward by Ord with a squadron of cavalry — were killed or captured, to a man, before they reached their objective. The bridges were saved, along with the rations still awaiting the arrival of the half-starved troops approaching from the south and, presumably, the east.

Lee’s relief at this turn of events, which encouraged hope for a successful getaway, was soon replaced by tension from a new development, one that left him in the dark as to what might have happened to the other half of his army. Anderson, obliged to halt from time to time to fight off mounted attacks on his flank, had lost touch with Longstreet’s rear; so that by noon, with three of the four First Corps divisions deployed near Rice to contest Ord’s advance from the southeast, the gray commander could only guess at what might have occurred or be occurring rearward, beyond the gap Sheridan’s troopers had created by delaying Anderson. There was mean ground in that direction, as Lee knew from just having crossed it: particularly between the forks of Sayler’s Creek, which combined to flow into the Appomattox half a dozen miles below Farmville, athwart the westward march of all four corps. Riding north, then east in an attempt to find out for himself, he approached the point where the boggy little stream ran into the river, and saw beyond it a skirmish in progress between Gordon’s rear-guard elements and heavy columns of blue infantry in pursuit. Not only was this dire in itself; it also deepened the mystery of the disappearance of Anderson and Ewell, supposedly on the march between Gordon and
Longstreet. Lee turned south and rode in search of them, only to encounter a staffer who informed him that enemy horsemen had struck the unprotected train between the two branches of Sayler’s Creek, setting fire to wagons and creating panic among the teamsters. Eastward, guns were booming in earnest now, and Lee still knew nothing as to the fate or whereabouts of his two missing corps. “Where is Anderson? Where is Ewell?” he said testily. “It is strange I can’t hear from them.”

It was worse than strange: far worse, he soon found out. Proceeding eastward with Mahone, whose division he summoned from its position in rear of Longstreet’s other three near Rice, he topped a ridge overlooking the valley of Sayler’s Creek, and there he saw, spread out below him and scrambling up the slope, the answer to his questions about Anderson and Ewell. Union batteries were firing rapidly from a companion ridge across the way, pounding the shattered remnant of both gray corps as the fugitives streamed out of the bottoms where they had met defeat; “a retiring herd,” Mahone would later call them, made up of “hurrying teamsters with their teams and dangling traces, infantry without guns, many without hats — a harmless mob.” Instinctively, Lee straightened himself in the saddle at the sight. “My God!” he cried, staring downhill at the worst Confederate rout he had seen in the thirty-four months since Davis placed him in command amid the confusion of Seven Pines. “Has the army been dissolved?”

That portion of it had at any rate, largely because of errors of omission by the two corps commanders and the redoubled aggressiveness of the blue pursuers, mounted and afoot, once they became aware of the resultant isolation of the graybacks slogging westward into the toils of Sayler’s Creek. Just as Anderson, in failing to notify Longstreet of his need to stop and fight off cavalry attacks upon his flank, had created the gap into which enemy troopers had plunged, so presently had Ewell lost touch with Gordon through a similar oversight. Informed that the rear guard was heavily engaged, he too halted to let part of the intervening train move on, then diverted the rest onto a secondary road that led directly to High Bridge, where the railroad crossed the Appomattox, three miles north of Rice, before looping back to recross it at Farmville, four miles to the west. In resuming his march to overtake Anderson, however, he neglected to tell Gordon of the change: with the result that Gordon, still involved with the bluecoats close in his rear, took the same route as the wagons he had been trailing all along, unaware that he was alone, that his corps had become one of three unequal segments into which Lee’s army had been divided by this double failure on the part of the two generals in charge of the central segment. This was now the most gravely endangered of the three, though neither of the two commanders knew it. Ewell, in fact, did not even know that he had rear-guard duties until he came under fire from guns of the VI Corps, which was coming up fast and massing for an assault
in conjunction with Sheridan’s horsemen, still on Anderson’s flank and cavorting among the burning wagons up ahead.

Sheridan had spotted the opportunity almost as soon as it developed. While Humphreys kept on after Gordon, pressing him back toward the crossing of the creek above the junction of its branches — this was the contest Lee had observed when he rode north from Rice in search of the missing half of his command — Little Phil sent word to Wright, whose corps was next in line, that together they could wipe out that portion of the rebel army stalled by his harassment of its flank and his probe of the resultant gap in front. Just then, about 2 o’clock, Anderson struck at Custer, who had made the penetration, and when Custer recoiled Sheridan threw in Devin to contain the drive. Then, hearing Wright’s guns open against Ewell, a mile to the northeast, he committed Crook’s division against Anderson’s center, locked in position by Custer and Devin, front and rear. “Never mind your flanks,” he shouted to his troopers as they dismounted for the assault. “Go through them! They’re demoralized as hell.”

He was right. Resistance by the jangled, road-worn survivors of the Petersburg breakthrough, four hungry days ago, was as brief and ineffectual as their commander later admitted when he reported that they “seemed wholly broken down and disheartened. After a feeble effort … they gave way in confusion.” Only Wise’s brigade of Virginians retired from the field as a military unit of any size. In all the rest it was more or less every man for himself, including those of highest rank; Anderson escaped on horseback, along with Pickett and Bushrod Johnson, but a solid half of the 3000 troops who had managed to stay with him this far on the retreat were killed or captured as they fled through the tangled brush and clumps of pine. Sheridan, leaving this roundup work to Custer, plunged on north with the other two divisions, intent on dealing with Ewell in much the same fashion. At Five Forks he had delivered the unhinging blow to Lee’s army; now he was out to make Sayler’s Creek the coup de grâce. And in fact that was what it came to, at least for that part of the bedraggled rebel host within his reach.

One-legged Ewell, strapped to the saddle to keep from falling off his horse, had his two undersized divisions facing east along the west side of the creek in an attempt to keep Wright from crossing before Anderson unblocked the road to Rice. Down to 3000 effectives as a result of the straggling by Custis Lee’s reservists, he relied mainly on Kershaw’s veterans in position on his right. Despite heavy shelling from the ridge across the way and mounting pressure from the three blue divisions in his front, he managed to hold his own until Kershaw’s outer flank and rear were suddenly assailed by Sheridan’s rapid-firing troopers, who had just overrun Anderson and came storming northward through the brush. “There’s Phil! There’s Phil!” the VI Corps infantrymen yelled
as they splashed across the creek to join the attack being made by their old Valley comrades.

“On no battlefield of the war have I felt a juster pride in the conduct of my command,” Joe Kershaw was to say, and Custis Lee was equally proud of what remained of his scratch division, though both saw clearly now that further resistance was useless. So did Ewell, who afterwards reported that “shells and even bullets were crossing each other from front and rear over my troops, and my right was completely enveloped. I surrendered myself and staff to a cavalry officer who came in by the same road General Anderson had gone out on.” Some 200 of Kershaw’s Georgians and Mississippians managed to escape in the confusion, but they were about all that got away. The rest were taken, along with their commanders at all levels. These 2800, combined with those lost earlier by Anderson, brought the total to 4300 graybacks snared in the fork of Sayler’s Creek that afternoon. No wonder, then, that a Federal colonel visiting Sheridan’s headquarters that evening found Richard Ewell “sitting on the ground hugging his knees, with his face bent down between his arms.” Old Bald Head now bore little resemblance to the self he had been when he was Stonewall Jackson’s mainstay, two years ago in the Shenandoah Valley. “Our cause is lost. Lee should surrender before more lives are wasted,” he was reported to have told his captors. Watching him, the colonel remarked that “if anything could add force to his words, the utter despondency of his air would do it.”