Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain - Appomattox: Paper Read Before the New York Commandery Loyal Legion of the United States; October Seventh, 1903 (Classic Reprint)

APPOMATTOX

Paper Read before the New York Commandery Loyal Legion of the United States

October Seventh, 1903

By General Joshua L. Chamberlain

APPOMATTOX

By Brevet Major-General Joshua L. Chamberlain, U.S. Volunteers

I AM to speak of what came under my observation in the action at Appomattox Courthouse and the circumstances attending the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, April 9, 1865.

You will understand that I am not attempting to present matters upon a uniform scale or to mark the relative merits of participants. This is only the story of what I saw and felt and thought, in fact, my personal experience, including something of the emotions awakened and the reflections suggested by that momentous consummation.

In order that you may understand the pressure of conditions and the temper of our spirits in this last action, permit me to recur briefly to the situation of affairs. The great blow had been struck, the long hold loosened. Lee's communications had been cut; his intrenched lines broken and overrun; his right rolled up; Richmond and Petersburg evacuated by the Confederate forces and officials, and in our possession; his broken army in full retreat, or rather, desperately endeavoring to get off, either to Danville, to effect a junction with Johnston in North Carolina, or to Lynchburg, where they might rally for one more forlorn but possibly long resistance. Meade with two corps of the Army of the Potomac the Second and Sixth was pressing Lee's rear; while Sheridan with his cavalry three divisions and our Fifth Corps of infantry under Griffin was making a flying march to circumvent Lee's path and plans; our combined forces all the while seeking to draw him to final battle, or compel him to surrender.

The 8th of April found the Fifth Corps at Prospect

Station, on the South Side Railroad, nearly abreast of the head of Lee's retreating column, while Meade was with his two corps close upon Lee's rear at New Store, ten miles north of us, across the Appomattox. At noon of this day General Ord, of the Army of the James, joined us with two divisions of the Twenty-fourth Corps under General Gibbon, and Bimey's division of the Twenty-fifth Corps, colored troops; Ord, by virtue of seniority, becoming commanding officer of the whole. He was a stranger to us all, but his simple and cordial manner towards Sheridan and Griffin, and even to us subordinates, made him welcome. We pushed on, the cavalry ahead.

The Fifth Corps had a very hard march that day, made more so in the afternoon and night by the lumbering obstructions of the rear of Ord's tired column, by courtesy given the road before us, the incessant check fretting our men almost to mutiny. We had been rushed all day to keep up with the cavalry, but this constant checking was worse. We did not know that Grant had sent orders for the Fifth Corps to march all night without halting; but it was not necessary for us to know it. After twenty-nine miles of this kind of marching, at the blackest hour of night, human nature called a halt. Dropping by the roadside, right and left, wet or dry, down went the men as in a swoon. Officers slid out of saddle, loosened the girth, slipped an arm through a loop of bridle-rein, and sunk to sleep. Horses stood with drooping heads just above their masters' faces. All dreaming, one knows not what, of past or coming, possible or fated.

Scarcely is the first broken dream begun when a cavalry man comes splashing down the road, and vigorously dismounts, pulling from his jacket front a crumpled note. The sentinel standing watch by his commander, worn in body but alert in every sense, touches your shoulder. "Orders, sir, I think!" You rise on elbow, strike a match, and with smarting, streaming eyes read the brief, thrilling note, from Sheridan like this, as I remember: "I have cut across the enemy at Appomattox Station, and captured

three of his trains. If you can possibly push your infantry up here to-night, we will have great results in the morning." Ah, sleep no more! The startling bugle notes ring out "The General""To the march!" Word is sent for the men to take a bite of such as they had for food: the promised rations would not be up till noon, and by that time we should be where? Few try to eat, no matter what. Meanwhile, almost with one foot in the stirrup you take from the hands of the black boy a tin plate of nondescript food and a dipper of miscalled coffee, all equally black, like the night around. You eat and drink at a swallow; mount, and away to get to the head of the column before you sound the "Forward." They are there the men: shivering to their senses as if risen out of the earth, but something in them not of it! Now sounds the " Forward," for the last time in our long-drawn strife; and they move these men sleepless, supperless, breakfastless, sore-footed, stiff-jointed, sense-benumbed, but with flushed faces pressing for the front.

By sunrise we have reached Appomattox Station, where Sheridan has left the captured trains. A staff-officer is here to turn us square to the right, to the Appomattox River, cutting across Lee's retreat. Already we hear the sharp ring of the horse-artillery, answered ever and anon by heavier field guns; and drawing nearer, the crack of cavalry carbines; and unmistakeably, too, the graver roll of musketry of infantry. There is no mistake. Sheridan is square across the enemy's front, and with that glorious cavalry alone is holding at bay all that is left of the proudest army of the Confederacy. It has come at last, the supreme hour! No thought of human wants or weakness now: all for the front; all for the flag, for the final stroke to make its meaning real. These men of the Potomac and the James, side by side, at the double in time and column, now one and now the other in the road or the fields beside. One striking feature I can never forget, Bimey's black men abreast with us, pressing forward to save the white man's country.

I had two brigades, my own and Gregory's, about midway of our hurrying column. Upon our intense procession comes dashing out of a woods road on the right a cavalry staff-officer. With sharp salutation he exclaims: " General Sheridan wishes you to break off from this column and come to his support. The rebel infantry is pressing him hard. Our men are falling back. Don't wait for orders through the regular channels, but act on this at once!"

Sharp work now! Guided by the staff-officer, at cavalry speed we break out from the column and push through the woods, right upon Sheridan's battle-flag gleaming amidst the smoke of his batteries in the edge of the open field. Weird-looking flag it was: fork-tailed, red and white, the two bands that composed it each charged with a star of the contrasting color; two eyes sternly glaring through the cannon-cloud. Beneath it, that storm-centre spirit, that form of condensed energies, mounted on the grim charger, Rienzi, that turned the battle of the Shenandoah, both, rider and steed, of an unearthly shade of darkness, terrible to look upon, as if masking some unknown powers.

Right before us, our cavalry, Devins's division, gallantly stemming the surges of the old Stonewall brigade, desperate to beat its way through. I ride straight to Sheridan. A dark smile and impetuous gesture are my only orders. Forward into double lines of battle, past Sheridan, his guns, his cavalry, and on for the quivering crest! For a moment it is a glorious sight: every arm of the service in full play, cavalry, artillery, infantry; then a sudden shifting scene as the cavalry, disengaged by successive squadrons, rally under their bugle-calls with beautiful precision and promptitude, and sweep like a storm-cloud beyond our right to close in on the enemy's left and complete the fateful envelopment.