A Stillness At Appomattox – Bruce Catton, 1953 ★★★½

A Somber Last Waltz

The third and final volume of Bruce Catton’s “Army Of The Potomac” series winds up the story of Abraham Lincoln’s greatest fighting force as it struggled to its ultimate victory. Like nearly all such grand culminations, it can’t help but be at least a little disappointing.

Part of that is due to the natural deflation of finding oneself at the end of a long journey, wondering if all the toil and pain was worth it. Part of it is because the last year of the American Civil War, at least in Northern Virginia, was as dull as it was deadly, mired in an early form of trench warfare which put an end to dashing assaults and quick successes.

The author is also at fault. Catton, for all his factual command, his poetic turns of phrase, and his masterful word portraits, comes across somewhat more the way critics have painted him, moralizing and windy. The book is still good, very good in places, but a modest comedown from the fantastic first two volumes.

At the center of A Stillness At Appomattox is the general who would reverse the Army of the Potomac’s string of falling short against Confederate commander Robert E. Lee. Catton introduces him in terms of respect, mixed with some wonder at his humble origins:

Ulysses S. Grant was a natural – an unmistakable rural Middle Westerner, bearing somehow the air of the little farm and the empty dusty road and the small-town harness shop, plunked down here in an army predominantly officered by polished Easterners.

Not everyone underestimated him. Catton quotes an old friend of Grant’s, Confederate General James Longstreet: “That man will fight us every day and every hour till the end of the war.”

Truer words were never spoken, as Grant’s own troops would learn.

Ulysses S. Grant in command. Catton notes Grant had to convince subordinates that Robert E. Lee could be beaten, saying: “Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault and land in our rear and on both our flanks at the same time.” He quickly took the war to the South.
Image from https://www.britannica.com/story/what-was-ulysses-s-grants-relationship-with-the-lakota-indians

The book begins at a sumptuous party held by the Army in a makeshift ballroom near the front, an oddly festive affair given the hard fighting so many attendees had faced and would face again soon:

It was remarked that both escorts and guests seemed to make a particular effort to be gay, as if perhaps the music and the laughter and the stylized embrace of the dance might help everybody to put out of mind the knowledge that in the campaign which would begin in the spring a considerable percentage of these officers would unquestionably be killed.

Some would be dying very soon, on a simultaneously launched cavalry raid aimed at Richmond, the enemy capital in Virginia. Catton describes the confusion of what became known as “Dahlgren’s Raid,” the wanton killing of a Black man who tried to help the raiders find a place to ford a river, and the repercussions when the slain leader of the raid was discovered carrying papers marking Southern leaders for death. As with Mr. Lincoln’s Army, Catton delivers an off-center opening awash with novelistic detail and characterization. It’s riveting stuff.

Was retribution really the goal of the raid? Catton suggests not, blaming it on a cabinet officer in a way that doesn’t convince. His admiration for the leaders of the Army of the Potomac becomes a pill this time out.

Dahlgren's raiders, a detachment of another cavalry force led by Judson Kilpatrick, got as far as Richmond's outskirts. Dahlgren's corpse was later exhibited in the city. Gawkers were much amused by his wooden leg.
Image from https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-dahlgren-affair-kilpatrick-dahlgren-raid-on-richmond/

Nowhere is this clearer than Catton’s handling of one figure, Philip Sheridan, the cavalry commander whose vigor for combat was quite the contrast from the Yankee brass around him. We are told how invigorating an example Little Phil set, pushing his men to accomplish more when hungry and half-asleep than they did after months of rest.

He also destroyed the career of another Northern general, Gouverneur Warren, in a wanton act of spite. In the last major battle of the war, Five Forks, Warren found a third of his command had wandered off. He rounded them up and personally led them into the enemy rear, sealing Sheridan’s victory. Sheridan then used Warren’s absence from his part of the front as an excuse to strip Warren of his command.

Catton plays this off as just the thing the Army needed:

Sheridan had been cruel and unjust – and if that cruel and unjust insistence on driving, aggressive promptness had been the rule in this army from the beginning, the war probably would have been won two years earlier…

Sheridan gets the most love in Catton’s telling, a superhero whom we are told inspired everyone who saw him ride into battle: “…the way he moved and rode and gestured somehow made going back into battle with him seem light and gay and exciting, even to men who had been in many battles.”

Whatever his faults as a person, Philip Sheridan's bravery was undisputed. Catton describes him as heedless of danger in the thick of battle. Above, at Cedar Creek in 1864, Sheridan rallies his troops to push the Confederates from the Shenandoah Valley.
Painting by Thulstrup de Thures from https://www.thisiswhywestand.net/single-post/2019/10/28/ride-into-legend-philip-sheridan-at-the-battle-of-cedar-creek

Catton’s less overt admiration with Grant is similarly hard to take. Grant’s willingness to sacrifice troops and trade disproportionate losses with Lee’s dwindling command proved right in the end. But while grinding down his foe, Grant left too much of the detail work in the hands of subordinates whom he knew lacked resolve or vision.

Catton discusses the most dramatic of these failures, the Battle of the Crater – where a good idea of building a mine deep under Southern entrenchments literally blew up in the Army’s face because no one took responsibility for what would happen after the explosives went off – as a failure of middle ranks. Grant’s role is curiously left unexamined.

Instead Catton waxes poetic about the long stalemate as a condition beyond any one person’s control:

The final grapple had begun, and the war had become a war of using up – using up men and emotions and the wild impossible dreams that had called the armies into being in the first place – and everything that Americans would ever do thereafter would be affected in one way or another by what remained after the using up was completed.

While not as famous as the burning of Atlanta, the destruction of Richmond by war's end was nearly as absolute. Catton writes: "The war would end only when one side or the other had been pounded into helplessness, for men had passed beyond the point where they could negotiate or compromise."
Image from https://cptv.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/civil-war-battles-richmond-ken-burns-civil-war/civil-war-battles-richmond-ken-burns-civil-war/ 

The stakes were always high in the Civil War, but Catton depicts a greater awareness of this fact in its last full year, from the spring of 1864 through early 1865. The final outcome was still up in the air; an election in November would decide whether President Lincoln would be around to see an end to slavery and the Union’s restoration, or if another man would step in to offer more generous terms to the Rebels.

Lincoln makes a few cameo appearances, most memorably watching a battle fought just outside Washington in 1864. Catton describes the horror of one Union officer who saw the President poking his famous head over the parapet to see the battle, uncaring of the fact he was exposing himself to enemy fire.

Most had seen enough of war by then. This was a problem for the North, as the three-year enlistments under which many of its soldiers were recruited was about to expire. Catton quotes a letter from a soldier in the 25^th Massachusetts reluctant to re-up: “I have no desire to monopolize all the patriotism there is, but am willing to give others a chance.”

The 1864 presidential election pitted Lincoln against Democrat George McClellan (center). It wasn't clear exactly what McClellan would do if he won, but even a hint of compromise was seen by some as too much. Catton quotes Grant on Lincoln: “I consider it as important to the cause that he should be elected as that the army should be successful in the field.”
Image from https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/election-1864 

The war had always been an ugly thing, but now there was no disguising it. If it wasn’t the slow butchery of trench warfare, it was the more wantonly sadistic guerrilla campaign fought by Confederate irregulars which the Union countered with regular hangings.

At the Battle of the Wilderness, Grant’s first major action as commander, troops were hemmed in by trees which often caught fire and burned the wounded to death:

There was no more war in the grand style, with things in it to hearten a man even as they killed him. This was all cramped and close and ugly, like a duel fought with knives in a cellar far underground.

Catton’s account has a ring of authenticity about it, using soldiers’s letters and diaries to bring the strategy and tactics to life. Still, in this book more than the first two “Army Of The Potomac” volumes, it is harder to ignore Catton’s willingness to print the legend when it tells a better tale.

The fall of Petersburg ended Robert E. Lee's defense of Richmond. By this time, taking the Confederate capital mattered less than destroying the troops surrounding it. Catton recounts: "And the whole corps looked up and down the Petersburg lines – broken forever, now – and took in what had been done, and caught its breath, and sent up a wild shout which, the Connecticut man said, it was worth dying just to listen to."
Image from https://pixels.com/featured/the-battle-of-petersburg-the-fall-everett.html 

In Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, a Confederate breadbasket which Sheridan’s troops burned and pillaged, we are told of a wagon carrying 18 small Black children, driven by a “bandannaed mammy.”

“Aunty, are these all your children?” a surgeon from a New York regiment called out:

She looked at him in mild surprise and protested: “They’s only eighteen of ‘em.”

I guess it was a cute anecdote back when Catton wrote it, but it doesn’t hold up, and I am not talking about racism. Clearly someone was exaggerating here, either the woman or Catton’s eyewitness, but Catton doesn’t bother to try and sort it out. Instead, he settles on relating the official story and letting the soldiers’ stories speak for themselves.

The overall success of this approach is hard to dispute. Especially in the 1950s, when the Confederate side was too often depicted having all the brains and bravery on their side, Catton did a lot to balance the scales. Today his version can be taken to task for its failure to elevate the cause of Black Americans, or his criticisms of Radical Republicans and their desire to inflict a Carthaginian peace on the Rebel states. Now as then, the issue often lies in the eyes of the beholder.

While disappointing in some particulars, A Stillness At Appomattox closes a powerful military trilogy with appropriate somberness, the bullet-riddled remnant of a victorious army marching down a long road to an uncertain end. Does Catton means in it a metaphor for the American experiment, both then and now? Perhaps, but it’s also an effective way to wind up this gripping and poignant saga.