CHAPTER IV

White Iron on the Anvil

1. Changing the Guard

The trenches ran south from the Appomattox for five miles, following the tops of the low ridges, and for all anyone could see the armies might stay there forever. There had been no rain for two weeks (nobody knew it, but another month would pass before there was as much as a light shower) and the dust was inches deep: a fine, powdery dust, like soiled flour, so light that every footstep sent up a cloud of it, and half a dozen men walking together along a trench or on open ground in the rear moved, invisible, in a choking mist of their own creation.

Sometimes the dust seemed to be the chief enemy. A Connecticut man wrote that taking a stroll was like walking in an ash heap, and he said that after a short time "one's mouth will be so full of dust that you do not want your teeth to touch each other." A gunner said that whenever a grasshopper hopped it raised so much dust that Rebel lookouts reported the Yankee army on the move, a New Yorker found the combination of 110-degree heat and 4-inch dust "is killing more men than the Johnnies," and a private from Michigan—remembering the cool pines and clear streams of his homeland —wrote despondently: "I think of the hottest days, in harvest time, away north in Michigan, and oh! how cool, compared with these." Every day men toppled over with sunstroke and were carried to the rear. Uniforms, faces, trees, shrubs, and grass were all a dull, ugly yellow gray. The air was heavy with the odor of unburied bodies, and the sun beat down day after day on men who cowered in deep slits in the earth.¹

General Grant had said that they would use the spade, and they did. Each regiment in the line would dig a broad trench, and on the side facing the enemy there would be a solid wall of logs, with dirt banked up beyond it. Several yards in front of this there would be a ditch, six feet deep by ten feet wide, with the earth that came out of it added to the pile in front of the logs until the embankment was six or eight feet high and a dozen feet thick. Sandbags or logs would be arranged on top of the embankment, with slits or loopholes for men to stick their rifles through, and just behind the log wall there would be a fire step—a low ledge of packed earth, built so that a man who stood on it could put his musket through the loopholes. At intervals, leading to the rear, there would be covered ways, which were deep trenches zig-zagged to take advantage of the ground, built so that men could walk to the firing line from the rear without being exposed.

Out in front of the trenches, fifty or one hundred yards nearer to the enemy, there was an abatis. Much of the ground had been timbered, and the trees were felled with their bushy tops pointing toward the foe. The butts were embedded in shallow trenches to hold them in place, and the branches were sharpened and bound together so that it was almost impossible to get through them. In places there were several rows of these entanglements, with narrow lanes cut here and there so that pickets could go out to their stations. This abatis was supplemented very often by what were called chevaux-de-frise: heavy logs laid end to end and bound together with chains, bristling with six-foot stakes sharpened to a point and projecting in such a way that a man who tried to scramble over was certain to find his person or his clothing jagged and held fast.

On every hill or knoll there was a fort, a square enclosure of earth and logs with openings for the guns. These were ar° ranged so that there was no place in front of the trenches that could not be reached by artillery fire. Farther to the rear there were pits like unroofed cellars where coehorn mortars were mounted. In these forts and pits, and adjoining all of the trenches, there were bombproofs—square holes in the earth roofed with logs and dirt, in which the men could hide when the enemy fired shells.²

That was the front. It was five miles long and the Rebel line was exactly like the Union line, and there was not the remotest chance that any part of either line could be taken by storm so long as a handful of defenders remained on duty and stayed awake. The dust and the sickening air and the killing sunlight lay on everything, and the sharpshooters and the gunners were always alert, and by day and by night there was intermittent heavy firing. A good many men were killed and wounded every day, to no particular end except to warn the survivors that they had better dig deeper and stronger trenches and hide in them every moment of their lives.⁸

On most of the line the trenches were not far apart, and In front of Burnside's corps there were hardly 150 yards between them, and the firing there was almost continuous. On each side sharpshooters with long-range rifles found vantage points a little behind the lines and kept their weapons trained on the firing slits in the opposing trenches, so that a man who looked out to see what he could see was quite likely to get a bullet in the face.

Toward the southern end of the line, however, where the V Corps was stationed, the works diverged. Here the Rebel trenches curved over toward the west and the Federal trenches continued in a southerly direction, and the rival lines were half a mile apart, and so there was much less shooting. Along here the pickets had made their usual arrangements with each other, and between the lines there was a little stream to which men from both armies came, in full light of day, to fill their canteens. When an officer came down the enemies would warn each other, because most officers had strong ideas about the need for keeping up a constant fire, and the general feeling was that officers were interlopers who ought to stay farther in the rear. One day the Union General Crawford came out to the picket line and stood up on a parapet and began examining the Rebel line through field glasses. A Reb scribbled something on a sheet of paper, wrapped the paper around a stone, and tossed it over into a Union rifle pit. The Federal soldier who picked it up found that the Southerner had written: "Tell the fellow with the spy glass to clear out or we shall have to shoot him."

When they were left to themselves the men in this particular sector faithfully observed the rules of their informal truce. There was a day when some recently conscripted Southerner was assigned to duty down here, and being full of the ideas his officers had drummed into him he leveled his musket and fired at the first Yankee he saw. The other Federals jumped into their holes and prepared to shoot back, but the Confederates called out: "Don't shoot—you'll see how we fix him." Thereafter, for the rest of the day, the ardent Southern recruit was seen pacing back and forth along the firing line ignominiously shouldering a fence rail, and the supposed enemies lounged on the grass, went for water, exchanged gossip, and kept a wary eye open for officers.⁴

But this was the exception. Along most of the line the two armies were playing for keeps, and it was considered certain death to expose oneself for more than a moment. Men cooked, ate, and slept in the earth, and when mortars were fired they ran for the bombproofs, although they soon discovered that most of these did not offer much protection against a direct hit by a shell of large caliber. On one part of the line certain Pennsylvania soldiers—time-expired members of the famous Bucktails, mostly, who had re-enlisted in another regiment when the Bucktails were paid off—found that it was higlily amusing to fire ramrods at the enemy, because of the peculiar whirring noise and erratic flight of these iron arrows. Many men had been killed in this sector and there were discarded rifles all over the place, so the supply of surplus ramrods was large and some of the Pennsylvanians got so they could actually hit people with them. The fun was mostly in the noise, however, for the ramrods would go "whirling end over end, and every way, whipping out of the air a multitude of sharp screeches and cutting sounds." ⁵

In some regiments men were under orders to fire a certain number of rounds per day, regardless. The more conscientious would try to find a good target before firing, but many of the men simply thrust their weapons over the parapet and fired at random.⁶

There did not seem to be any especial reason why this could not go on forever. Not even the major generals supposed any longer that Petersburg could be taken by assault, and it had become equally obvious that whatever else an army under Grant might do, it was not going to retreat. The strategy by which Grant had hoped to apply pressure elsewhere so as to compel Lee to retreat had fizzled out, so there was nothing for the Army of the Potomac to do but stay where it was, stand the hammering, and hope for the best.

Sheridan and his cavalry had got nowhere with the plan to team up with Hunter's forces at Charlottesville. Wade Hampton had gone in hot pursuit with Confederate cavalry, and he and Sheridan collided near Trevilian Station on the Virginia Central Railroad and had a desperate fight. Each general said afterward that he had beaten the other, but Sheridan had gone no farther west. He said this was because he had learned that Hunter was nowhere near Charlottesville and never would be, so that it was useless to go on. However that might have been, Sheridan rode north and east in a wide circle and got back into the Union lines.

Hunter had tried to go to Lynchburg instead of to Charlottesville, and he had bumped into a strong Confederate force led by the redoubtable Jubal Early. Hunter conceived that he did not have enough ammunition to carry him through a serious battle; conceived also, it may be, that Early and his men were pretty tough; conceived finally that he had best retreat, and did so, fleeing across the mountains into West Virginia, taking his command entirely out of the war for several weeks and nullifying this particular part of Grant's strategy as neatly as Lee himself could have wished. His departure left the Shenandoah Valley wide open, and Early promptly began to march down the valley toward the Potomac, taking a leaf from the Stonewall Jackson book of two years earlier.⁷

It was the railroads that made Petersburg important, and about the time the two armies settled down to unbroken trench warfare, Wilson was told to take his division of cavalry and ride far south to destroy the line that led to North Carolina. His men tore up much track, burned stations and freight cars, and wrecked bridges and culverts, but Sheridan's retreat from Trevilian had left Lee with a temporary surplus of cavalry and these rode hard and fast, overtaking Wilson, boxing him in, and coming close to destroying his entire command. He got back within the Union lines at last, minus his artillery and his wagons and a good many of his men, and his expedition looked like a flat failure. Actually, it had accomplished more than the Federal command quite realized. The break which it made in the vital Southern railway line was a bad one and it was not fully repaired for weeks, and while it lasted the Confederates were burdened with one of their worst supply problems of the war.⁸

There had been one other failure, and in some ways it was the worst of the lot. When Beauregard pulled his troops out of the Bermuda Hundred lines in order to save Petersburg, Butler's inactive army was released. For twenty-four hours the way was open for it to move forward, cut the railroad and highway from Petersburg to Richmond, and sever all communications between Beauregard and Lee. Butler's front-line commanders saw the chance and tried to do something about it, and Grant saw it and sent Wright and two divisions of the VI Corps over to help, but Butler flubbed the shot completely. He hesitated and considered and then launched a spate of orders which looked good on paper but which served only to confuse the generals who had to do the fighting, and before he could get himself rounded up Lee sent Pickett's division in, shoved the irresolute Federals back, and closed the gap for good.

Somewhere, in the tangled mesh of politics that lay between Washington and the fighting fronts, Butler possessed influence that even the commander of the armies could not break. Grant tried to have him removed, and failed. Then he worked out a scheme by which Butler would retain his command but would do all of his work down at Fortress Monroe, where there was administrative routine to be handled, leaving all military operations to Baldy Smith, his second-in-command. That could not be done, either. Butler held his job and he held it on his own terms, although Grant warned Halleck that relations between Butler and Smith were so bad that if Butler stayed Smith probably would have to go.

In the end, Smith did go; and in the end, when he went, it was Grant who sent him away. While he fought his losing fight to get rid of Butler, Grant seems to have done a good deal of thinking about Smith's performance on June 15, when he captured the Confederate forts and then sent his soldiers to bed instead of into Petersburg. In the end Grant concluded that Smith was a man he could do without, Butler or no Butler, and when he came to this conclusion he acted on it. Smith was quietly removed and sent up to New York—indignant, protesting bitterly, writing long afterward that the real trouble was that Butler had got Grant drunk and then had used his knowledge of the fact as blackmail to make Grant do as Butler wished.⁹

The tale can be taken or left alone, at anyone's choice. The chief trouble is that it is too simple, explaining too much with too little. There is of course no reason to suppose that Butler would have been above blackmailing Grant or anyone else if it would have served his purposes, but something much more intricate than a threat to let one small cat out of a bag was unquestionably involved in the fact that Butler could not be fired. His political power had been moving mountains long before he had any opportunity to lay Grant under threat of exposure.

Everything about Butler was fantastic, beginning with his personal appearance: lumpy oversized body, arms and legs that looked as if they had been attached as an afterthought, eyes that refused to mesh. As a Democratic politician, he had in 1860 been an ardent supporter of the extreme Southern viewpoint; two years later the Southerners were announcing that Ben Butler was the one Yankee who, if captured by Confederate forces, would be shot without trial. Abolitionists made a hero of him and considered him a great friend of the Negro, although at the beginning of the war he had said that he would not interfere with slavery in a slave state, and when the idea of enlisting Negroes as soldiers was first suggested to him in New Orleans he turned it down flatly. A private in the 25th Massachusetts wrote that "as a military governor he is a none-such . , . but as a commander of troops in the field he is not just such a man as I should pick out." ¹⁰

Butler was the archetype of the fixer, the influence man, the person on whom nothing much is ever proved but who is always suspected of everything. Devout Confederates believed that in addition to committing an illegal hanging and insulting Southern womanhood he had in New Orleans personally stolen silver spoons with his own hands. A Northern general who served under him for a time in Virginia reported that Butler had become a dictator who "made laws and administered them, dealt out justice and inflicted punishment, levied fines and collected taxes," and he added that the air about him was thick with rumors and hints of corruption. A good part of Butler's territory in the Norfolk-Hampton Roads area was a queer no man's land in which contraband trade seemed to flourish, with cotton shipped into the Union lines in return for war goods which went to support Lee's army. Nobody was ever quite sure just who got the rake-off, but it seemed obvious that someone must be getting a good deal. A tremendous scandal was always on the edge of breaking, but the break never quite came. There was always something soiled about the man, but he remained uncanny and untouchable.¹¹

There were times when it was all but impossible for a good man to work under him. He could send a subordinate an order phrased so as to constitute the most cruel of insults; then, when the officer protested, Butler would write a smooth letter insisting that no insult was intended and that he had the highest personal and professional regard for the man he had insulted. A brilliant lawyer, he knew how to handle words, and none of the professional soldiers who tangled with him could match phrases with him.

Just at the end of the period when his troops might have broken out of the Bermuda Hundred lines he sent to General Wright a curt order to attack the Rebel troops in his front at once. The situation at the front was not at all as Butler imagined it and Wright wired back that the proposed attack was impossible, suggested an alternative approach, and asked further instructions.

Immediately Butler replied: "At 7:10 this evening I sent an order to you and General Terry to do some fighting. At 10:30 I get no fighting, but an argument. My order went out by direction of the lieutenant general." When Wright, somewhat baffled, protested against what he termed an unmerited reproach, Butler blandly replied: "No reproach is given; a fact is stated," and added loftily that victory could not be won if orders were not obeyed.¹²

In his campaign to keep his job this summer Butler held one prodigious trump card which Grant could not see. This was a presidential election year, and just when Grant was trying to rid himself of this incompetent general the leaders of the Republican party, very much against their will, were in the act of renominating President Lincoln for a second term. It was no time to rock the boat, and Butler was just the man who could rock it to the point of capsizing it.

From the beginning, Lincoln's real problem had been political. He had a war to win and he had to find generals who could win it, but above everything else he had to control the war—not merely the fighting of it, but the currents which would finally determine what it meant and what would come of it all. So far, the war had brought nothing but death: death by wholesale, death in all its forms, death in hospitals, in blazing thickets, on ridges swept by exploding shell, in ravines where dust and battle smoke lay thick and blinding. Unless the whole thing was no better than fever and madness, all of this death must finally be swallowed up in a victory that would justify the cost. The spirit that would infuse this victory must have infinite breadth, because the country was fighting no enemy: it was simply fighting itself. The death of a South Carolinian, brained by a clubbed musket butt in a fort in front of Petersburg, was fully as significant as the death of a Pennsylvanian killed by a Mini6 ball in a swamp at Cold Harbor. If what those men had bought, by dying, was to be principally hatred and smash-'em-up, then both deaths had been wasted and dust and ashes were the final truth.

There were strong men in the North who wanted revenge. The old technique of plowing up the site of a conquered city and sowing the ground with salt had fallen into disuse, since the fall of Carthage, but they would do the best they could with some modern variant. The Ben Wades and the Thad Stevenses and the Zach Chandlers had great capacity for hatred, and the South was not part of the country as they saw it. Lincoln stood in their way, and because they could not budge him they cried that he was soft and irresolute, and they would put one of their own kind in his place if they could. Standing with them were the men whose minds were laudably high but deplorably narrow—the abolitionists, the men who had taken scars in the long fight in the day when the odds were all against them and who now were disposed to judge a man by the iron which he was willing to put into the matter of punishment for the slave-owners.

There was something to be said on their side. They could remember Bully Brooks and his murderous assault on Sumner, and the taunts and jibes of men like Texas's Wigfall, who would have turned the Senate into a place where only an expert duelist could speak freely. If they were grim and implacable, it is at least possible to see how they got that way; and in addition they were that part of the Union cause which would never surrender or stop to haggle over costs. They provided a good part of the nerve and sinew which enabled the North to bounce back from Fredericksburg defeats and Wilderness casualty lists, and neither Lincoln nor any other Republican was likely to win the election if they went actively on the warpath.

What had kept them off the warpath so far was partly the fact that Lincoln did seem to have most of the people with