Federal army bands had played in Capitol Square every day, but though there were newspaper notices of the concerts and the bluecoats made every effort to attract crowds, the conquered people of Richmond did not appear.
Phoebe Pember noted it:
“When the appointed hour arrived, except for Federal officers, musicians and soldiers, not a white face was to be seen. The Negroes crowded every bench and path.”
Later newspapers announced that Negroes would not be admitted to the concerts. The next day there were only the bands and Federal troops. Phoebe said, “The absence of everything and anything feminine was appalling.”
The ingenious Federals then advertised that Negro nurses would be admitted, if they brought white children as their charges. The Square was packed with them the next day, each white child surrounded by a dozen or more well-dressed Negro women.
In two or three days, however, the music was abandoned, Phoebe wrote, “the entertainers feeling at last the ingratitude of the subjugated people.”
Phoebe found the Federal troops courteous, and was pleased to see that they made “no advance toward paternalism.” Many bluecoats spoke warmly of their Southern sympathies, but the hospital matron saw that they did not understand the feelings of defeated Virginians. She wrote:
Bravely-dressed Federal officers met their old classmates and enquired after relatives to whose homes they had been welcomed in days of yore, expressing the desire to call and see them, while the vacant chairs, rendered vacant by Federal bullets, stood by the hearth of the widow and the bereaved mother. They could not be made to understand that their presence was painful.
There were few men in the city at this time, but the women of the South still fought their battle for them, fought it resentfully, calmly, but silently. Clad in their mourning garments, overcome but hardly subdued, they sat within their desolate homes, and when compelled to leave, went with veiled faces and swift steps. By no sign or act did the possessors of the fair city know they were even conscious of their presence. If they looked in their faces they saw them not; they might have supposed themselves a phantom army.
It was not easy for the new shopkeepers in the atmosphere of gloom. Small shops were set up in rows along the main streets, with circus booths and other entertainments among them. Miss Pember complained:
“The small speculators must have supposed that there were no means of cooking left in the city from the quantity of canned edibles they offered for sale. They inundated Richmond with pictorial canisters at exorbitant prices, which no one had money to buy.”
The new shopkeepers would trade only in greenbacks, and since these were scarce, many of the stores soon closed.
Phoebe made a last defiance of Federal authority on Chimborazo Hill during the day. She was ordered to transfer her Confederate patients to Camp Jackson, some distance away, leaving the vast wards of Chimborazo for Federal soldiers.
Miss Pember insisted that the men were in no condition to be moved and the officers retreated, leaving her to care for the last of her wounded; she was alone now, without a surgeon or a servant to help. She worked with the remaining Confederates in a ward crowded by sick Federal soldiers.
The diarist T. C. DeLeon was fascinated by the sutlers, peddlers, and hucksters who arrived on every river steamer—like locusts, he thought. He walked among their crowded stores on Broad Street, where he saw “every known thing that could be put up in tin.”
These tradesmen were strangely Southern in sympathy, he found.
“The war was a damned shame,” one of them said. All of them curried favor with Richmond’s people, but their customers were only Negroes who could somehow obtain greenbacks, or the “stamps” issued by Federal authorities. DeLeon wrote of these merchants:
“They had calculated on a rich harvest, but they reckoned without their hosts. There was no money in Richmond to spend with them, and after a profitless sojourn, they took up their tin cans, and one by one returned north—certainly wiser, and, possibly, better men.”
Showers fell during the morning, but John Beauchamp Jones, the enterprising war clerk, was in the streets. He talked with Federal officers about the future, but found them unable or unwilling to predict Richmond’s fate. “Reticent,” Jones thought.
Most of the town had assumed a philosophical attitude, prepared to accept the new order.
But Jones knew some women who would not surrender, and some of these seemed hysterical to him. All he could hear from these friends was an insistent chatter that they would leave Richmond this very day, and set out on foot for “The Confederacy,” a fast dwindling land.
Charles Francis Adams, the Massachusetts soldier-historian, had been just outside the city for three days on picket duty with his Negro cavalry regiment. He found the place as “quiet and orderly” as any Northern cities, with none of the incidents usually reported from fallen cities in foreign wars.
In the afternoon he was surprised by an order to take his troops to Petersburg. He called in his pickets and “made a moonlight flitting.” It was midnight when he left camp on the march through Richmond’s streets, and Adams found “that conquered city quiet and silent as a graveyard. I believe I saw but one living being in the streets—a single sentry on his beat—and I did not hear a sound.”
General John B. Gordon, the lean Georgian, herded the Confederate rear guard west from Amelia, looking often behind him. The view was not reassuring, he said:
“On and on, hour after hour, from hilltop to hilltop, retreating, making one almost continuous shifting battle.”
A scout brought Gordon two prisoners, both in gray uniform. The scout, a veteran named George, insisted that these were spies.
“General, they say they belong to Fitz Lee, but I say they’re Yankees. I want you to examine them.”
Gordon questioned the men at length, but found no reason to suspect them; they were obviously at ease, as if amused by this comic error. They called off names of Fitz Lee’s commanders, down to the companies, and gave the names of those in their own mess.
“They seem all right to me, George,” Gordon said.
“They’re not, General. I saw them in the dark counting your files.”
“Yes,” one of the boys said. “We were trying to get an idea of our force. We’ve been on sick leave, and wondered if we had an army left.”
Gordon’s suspicions were aroused by this and he had them taken to a fire so that he could read their furlough papers. As they entered the bright light of a roadside blaze, George shouted, “They’re Yankees, General! They’re the two who caught me two months ago, at Grant’s headquarters.”
The prisoners laughed and pointed to the papers, whose signatures seemed genuine.
“They’re forged,” George said. “That’s an easy trick—or maybe they captured them. Make them get down, General, and I’ll search them.”
The scout found nothing in the clothing of the prisoners until he pulled off their boots, cut open the lining and saw a folded dispatch—an order from General Grant to General Ord which bore an ominous dateline:
Jetersville, April 5, 1865—10:10 P.M.
The order directed Ord to move at 8 A.M. to guard roads between Burkeville and Farmville to the west. It was clear that the Union strength was at hand, for Ord’s Army of the James had come by the longest march, from east of Richmond, its arrival unsuspected by the Confederates. The dispatch ended:
I am strongly of the opinion that Lee will leave Amelia tonight to go South. He will be pursued at 6 A.M. from here if he leaves. Otherwise an advance will be made upon him where he is.
Gordon turned to the prisoners: “Well, you know your fate. I’ll shoot you at sunrise.”
The oldest of the two boys was about nineteen. “We knew what we were doing, General. You have the right to shoot us, but it would do you no good. The war can’t last much longer.”
Gordon sent them away and hurried the captured dispatch to Lee, who was to the northwest at a crossing of Flat Creek. The engineer, Colonel T. M. R. Talcott, was there, just after 3 A.M., when Gordon’s message arrived.
“The county road bridge over the stream had given away, so that neither artillery nor wagons could cross it. General Lee … considered the situation critical enough to require his personal attention … and did not leave until he was assured that material for a new bridge was close at hand.”
Lee sat to write instructions to Gordon, three long pages in pencil, outlining the infantry and wagon routes, telling Gordon to burn bridges behind him. He added, “You must, of course, keep everything ahead of you, wagons, stragglers, etc. I will try to get the head of the column on and to get provisions at Rice’s Station or Farmville.”
Gordon’s aide passed a verbal request to Lee as he took the dispatch from the commander:
“What should General Gordon do with the spies? They admit everything. They’re in Confederate uniform, and subject to execution. Should they be shot?”
Lee hesitated. “Tell the General that the lives of so many of our men are at stake that all my thoughts now must be given to disposing of them. Let him keep the prisoners until he hears further from me.”
Lee rode ahead to the resort hotel at Amelia Springs where Fitz Lee’s cavalry had camped, and was now stirring. The bridge over Flat Creek was built under Talcott’s direction, and guns and wagons were soon crossing. At sunrise a Federal artillery battery came into sight and opened fire, but by then only engineers and a Negro work gang were within range.
Lee met his Commissary General, I. M. St. John, at Amelia Springs and got a report on the confusion which had cost the army its rations yesterday—blocked railroad lines, the swift Federal advance on Richmond, and, finally, the capture of supply wagons at the Clementown Bridge of the Appomattox. There was one hope:
“I have eighty thousand rations for you at Farmville, General. Do you want them left there, or brought up the tracks nearer the army?”
“I can’t say,” Lee said. “The enemy cavalry is along all these roads, no longer in the rear. They might strike the railroad at any point.”
At daylight Longstreet’s infantry was well on the way toward Farmville, by way of Rice’s Station. Behind him were the commands of Anderson and Ewell, with Gordon in the rear. Fitz Lee’s troopers went toward Rice’s Station, outdistancing the column and its wagon trains. Ewell reached Amelia Springs at 8 A.M.
The nineteen miles of road from Amelia Springs to Farmville lay reasonably straight until it joined the old Genito Road at the village of Deatonsville, some three miles away. It then ran on westward, making a series of loops to avoid streams which fed the Appomattox, over and around hills at the marshy heads of creeks, past tilting fields, through ravines, between thickets of wild plum and azalea, now in bloom. The ruts were deep from weeks of rain, and a heavy shower at sunrise sent red torrents foaming under the wheels and feet of the army.
West of Deatonsville two roads spraddled over the valley of Sayler’s Creek, a narrow lowland with shouldering bluffs, its walls cut by twin branches of the stream. The valley was 600 to 800 yards wide, with the main bed of the creek to the west, a shallow, inconspicuous stream lined with willow and alder, its miry banks overgrown with sedges.
The main road crossed the southern end of this valley by a flimsy pole bridge, passing the plantation house of the Hillsman family; the second road looped northward some two miles away. Thick growths of pine and sassafras screened the hillsides, above the mouths of gulches known as The Devil’s Tavern. Rice’s Station was just to the south and west of this landscape, perhaps four miles along a road lined with drifts of dogwood.
At 9 A.M. John Gordon climbed the hill west of Amelia Springs with the rear guard, able to look into the distant valley of Sayler’s Creek—and to see on the flanks of the marching army lines of blue cavalry. The enemy struck him in the first of the day’s crackling skirmishes.
Colonel Walter Taylor, the bridegroom of Lee’s staff, had ridden ahead with the commander, leaving headquarters wagons behind. He gave precise orders to the drivers about papers they carried, especially those in a chest with rope handles—the archives of the Army of Northern Virginia, orderbooks, letter-books and other valuable documents: “If the Yankees crowd you, take this chest with you and leave the wagon. They must not have these papers.”
But when the blue cavalry pounded from a side road into the path of the wagons, excited clerks took the chest from the wagon and burned the papers. A few minutes later the enemy was driven off and the wagon was saved.
The Georgia private, Willie Graham, was roused at 3 A.M. by the voice of his commander, Major James Milligan, “Come, Bullies, get up! Rise, Bullies!” They marched by the ruins of two miles of wagons, burned by enemy cavalry the night before, some 400 wagons and ambulances. Graham said:
“After marching ten or fifteen miles we struck the lines of battle. The Yankees had massed their troops and disputed our passage. The prisoners were marched by the right flank at a double quick almost; through fields, swamps, over gullies, fences, briers—nothing seemed to be in the way. We carried them in this style several miles until the danger was passed. But the poor signalmen who were nearly dead before, were now fagged out.… I walked wearily on alone amongst thousands and soon came to the Appomattox River which here is a small stream. The bridge was worn out and they were trying to ford. The passage of the stream was so slow that the wagons had accumulated by the hundred waiting their turn. About this time there was a cry of ‘Yankees!’ Such a stampede I never witnessed. The teamsters cut loose their teams and here they came by the hundred. The whole bottom is soon covered by them seeking a crossing! Presently I hear a cry, ‘Come back! False alarm! Being sick and lame I thought it best to hasten away as best I could. So I plunged into the stream and forded it—the water being about three feet deep.”
Captain McHenry Howard of Custis Lee’s division breakfasted just before dawn: “I first parched a handful of corn in a frying pan, borrowed with some difficulty, and was then preparing for a nap, when the drum beat the assembly and we took the road once more.”
They were separated from a part of the command, and began squeezing past the wagon train:
“By this time the command was fearfully reduced in numbers, and men were falling out continually. They were allowed to shoot from their places in the ranks pigs, chickens, or whatever of the sort came in their way, commanding officers looking on without rebuke.”
W. L. Timberlake, of Company D, was one of the few survivors of the 2nd Virginia Reserve Battalion with the strength to perform special duty. The men had slept for an hour just before dawn, but their commander, Lieutenant Colonel R. T. W. Duke, roused them at a drum roll and they shambled ahead, worn, hungry, all but exhausted.
They had marched about two miles within sound of enemy cavalry attacks when Duke sent Timberlake ahead with a companion to search for food. They caught three sheep, slaughtered and skinned them, and were dividing them when enemy cavalry came, shouting and firing.
Timberlake lost part of his sheep to Colonel Duke, who wrote of this attack:
“We at once fell into ranks, moved on, and in the excitement of the moment forgot our mutton, except that I pulled off a kidney and put it in my haversack.”
Soon afterward, during a pause, Colonel Duke broiled the delicacy over a bed of coals.
About 2 P.M. these troops neared Sayler’s Creek as part of the army’s swarm. Unknown to them a gap had opened in the gray column between the tail of Longstreet’s corps, which was Mahone’s division, and the head of Anderson’s corps, made up of Pickett’s survivors. Enemy cavalry was slashing at this spot.
The 2nd Virginia Reserve Battalion passed over Sayler’s Creek on a few fence rails. Duke saw an important party:
“I came to a group of mounted officers, consisting of Generals Ewell, Custis Lee, Barton and others. In a few moments the artillery of the enemy opened on us. I felt somewhat excited, but General Ewell remarked in his ordinary tones, ‘Tomatoes are very good. I wish I had some.’”
Duke was calmed by the absurdly irrelevant remark, and had to restrain his laughter. Duke dismounted and gave his horse to an orderly, and after a walk of half a mile his men were halted just below the crest of a hill, with a higher ridge opposite them, across Sayler’s Creek. Duke lay on the left of the corps line, with a battalion of Naval cadets under Commodore John R. Tucker and some infantry under Colonel Stapleton Crutchfield on either side. Duke’s own men now numbered only ninety.
Firing broke out and bluecoats came into the valley. The action at this spot was not severe, and within half an hour Duke saw the enemy retiring. He watched anxiously, however, as another blue column, at least a brigade strong, marched around to his left.
Captain Fred Colston, who rode with the reserve ordnance toward this valley, lost his personal belongings today. Federal cavalry came down on the wagons, and his Negro driver, Tom Peters, drove a wagon into a tree in his excitement, refusing to pull from it clothing or the records of the command. Colston and his friend Bob Burwell drove a wagon beside the smashed vehicle, threw Colston’s belongings into it, and lurched away after the scattered wagon train. Colston came to the ridge overlooking Sayler’s Creek and halted behind a snarl of wagons at the bridge.
General Ewell was there, shouting curses:
“Double up them teams! If they don’t get on, we’ll get caught right here.”
Colston dived into his wagon to rescue his good uniform coat and emerged into a hail of fire from the enemy:
“One man next to me was struck, the bullet making a loud whack. We crowded on the bridge and had to take it at a slow pace under the heavy fire.… When I got across I looked back and saw the enemy setting fire to our wagons. Thus I lost all of my treasures of the war, for which I had risked my life only a few hours before.”
Colston rode up the hill beyond the fighting in the creek valley, and came upon Robert Lee:
“He was reclining on the ground and holding Traveller’s bridle. He was entirely alone and looked worn. I was then ‘dead beat’ in mind and body. I had been more than forty consecutive hours from Amelia Courthouse in the saddle, practically without food or sleep.”
Colston rode on; the firing behind him grew louder.
Dick Ewell, still strapped to the lean gray Rifle, led his troops into the valley blindly, following General Anderson. Men in his ranks were chewing raw fresh meat as they marched. Ewell wrote of this hour:
“On crossing a little stream known as Sayler’s Creek, I met General Fitz Lee, who informed me that a large force of cavalry held the road just in front of General Anderson, and were so strongly posted that he had halted a short distance ahead. The trains were turned into a road nearer the river, while I hurried to General Anderson’s aid. General Gordon’s corps turned off after the trains.”
At that moment, however, no one seemed to know that Gordon’s rear guard had left the main route of the infantry; the enemy pressed from almost every direction, and confusion grew.
Ewell consulted Anderson.
“At least two divisions of cavalry up in front,” Anderson said. “We can get out two ways. Unite our forces and break through, or turn to the right through the woods and strike a road running to Farmville.”
“I say go to the woods,” Ewell said, “but you know the ground and I don’t.”
Before Anderson put troops into motion a Federal infantry column appeared behind Ewell.
“I’ll charge in front,” Anderson said. “You hold them off here.”
Ewell drew his men into line across a ravine, with General Kershaw on the right, Commodore Tucker’s Naval battalion in the center, and Custis Lee on the left. The Federal artillery pounded away at the waiting men from a field across the creek. Ewell had no guns to challenge them, and the enemy came closer with their batteries. The cannon fired for half an hour before the blue infantry moved in.
Ewell rode to the front just as the enemy wave came forward:
“General Anderson made his assault, which was repulsed in five minutes.… General Anderson rode rapidly toward his command. I returned to mine to see if it were yet too late to try the other plan of escape.
“On riding toward my left I came suddenly upon a strong line of the enemy’s skirmishers. This closed the only avenue of escape, as shells and even bullets were crossing each other from front and rear over my troops. My right was completely enveloped.
“I surrendered myself and staff to a cavalry officer. At my request, he sent a messenger to General G. W. C. [Custis] Lee, with a note from me telling him he was surrounded, General Andersons’s attack had failed, I had surrendered, and he had better do so, too, to prevent useless loss of life.”
Custis Lee had been captured before the note reached him.
General Joseph B. Kershaw’s men were literally driven to the battlefield. They had pushed back two Federal cavalry attacks when Gordon’s rear guard appeared, also under fire. He did not see Gordon’s column take the right-hand fork of the road. Kershaw said:
“I was not informed that Gordon would follow the wagon train as he did, and was therefore surprised on arriving at Sayler’s Creek to find that my rear was menaced.”
He dismounted General Gary’s cavalry, added a little infantry brigade, and sent them to hold off the enemy while his column crossed the creek. His entire command was fewer than 2000 men.
Charles Stevens Dwight, the South Carolina captain on Kershaw’s staff, had been sent to the rear to save the headquarters wagons. Dwight found the train halted, with teamsters refusing to cross an open space where enemy shells were bursting. He stationed guards from the train along the road with orders to shoot any driver who hesitated. Dwight wrote:
“They moved! A shell burst harmlessly over the first team. The next shell burst under the wheel horses of the second wagon, blowing them to pieces, badly wounding the teamster and upsetting the wagon. A panic resulted, of course, but the choice between Yankee shells at long range or Confederate miniés at short range kept the wagons moving, at least as long as I could stay there. That was my last sight of Confederate Army wagons.”
This train was burned by the enemy after Dwight had returned to General Kershaw.
The captain found the general watering his horse in Sayler’s Creek, talking with Ewell and Custis Lee; troops were already under fire in their line on the ridge. Colonel Stapleton Crutch-field, the gunner who had served with Stonewall Jackson, reported to the generals.
“I haven’t even one battery left,” he said. “We barely got through the attacks with the men, and the guns that got past the cavalry stuck in the roads, or had to be left when the horses gave out.”
The officers came under fire.
“Gentlemen,” Kershaw said, “they’ve noticed this group. We’ll have to scatter now.”
A shell struck Crutchfield in the right thigh, passed through his horse and his left leg, and exploded shortly beyond. Horse and rider fell into a heap. Captain Dwight and another staff officer knelt by Crutchfield, who could barely speak.
“Take my watch and letters for my wife,” the gunner said. “Tell her how I died, at the front.” He was dead.
Dwight and his friend removed Crutchfield’s body from the horse and left him lying in the open by the creek. The enemy infantry was coming.
Dwight ran to Kershaw’s forming line, which was only one man deep, with the soldiers many feet apart. Downhill, nearing the creek, the Federal infantry was massed elbow-to-elbow, two men deep, and firing rapidly. Over the heads of these men enemy cannon dropped shells from the ridge. Dwight sketched the action on this front:
“General Kershaw gave strict orders to hold fire until the enemy was within 50 yards, and to aim low. The lines neared, and there was a flash and a roar. The big column hesitated and then with a Rebel Yell the thin line charged them. The Yankees broke and fled, closely pressed. A supporting column came up in good order and drove us slowly back. The first enemy line, broken but now repaired, came in a second attack. It was like the first.”
Captain Dwight saw Custis Lee walking calmly along the line, a sheathed saber lying flat on his left arm, “in perfect dignity and composure” which seemed natural in the son of the Commander-in-Chief.
Dwight saw the big Federal flanking column and knew that the end had come. Kershaw ordered the line straightened at all costs, but it was too late. Dwight grabbed a flag from the color-bearer of a Georgia regiment. “Tell the men to follow me,” he yelled.
The color-bearer snatched back the staff. “No, Captain,” he said. “You can’t have this flag. Show me where you want it put and I will put it there, but I must do it.”
Dwight lost sight of the man. The right flank had been driven in, and blue cavalry galloped behind the Confederate line. General Kershaw and Custis Lee and several brigadiers were quickly rounded up.
Dwight was riding along the hill when a bluecoat cavalryman locked knees with him, holding him fast.
“Halt!”
“Who’re you?”
“Oh, I’m a Yankee soldier and you’re my prisoner.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Dwight said. He looked around for a chance of escape.
“You needn’t look. We’ve got you tight.”
A Confederate private ran past them and did not halt when the enemy horseman called to him. The Federal dropped him with his carbine, not twenty yards away.
“That’s how I’d have done you,” he said to Dwight, “if you had run. I guess you’ll surrender.”
“You’re a private, aren’t you?
“Yes.”
“I’m damned if I’ll surrender to you.”
“The hell you won’t. I’ll have to shoot you.”
“Shoot and be damned. I’ll not give up to a private. Bring an officer and I’ll surrender to him.”
“Well, you’re a hell of a fellow.”
The trooper hailed a passing Federal officer. “Major, here’s a Rebel officer says he’ll be damned if he’ll surrender to a private.”
The major halted. “He’s perfectly right,” he said. “Captain, I see you’re a staff officer. Whose staff are you on?”
“If you want to know, find out. I don’t give information to the enemy.”
“You’re right again, Captain. I should not have asked. You see the situation here. It’s hopeless. Will you give me your parole not to escape?”
“I will. There’s no other way.”
“Well, just ride aside. Dismount if you like, and await events.”
Dwight dismounted and leaned against a tree. His horse shied and tore away from him, disappearing on the hillside. Dwight broke down:
“I wept as never before or since. I had one pervading, overwhelming regret that I had survived the division, the Army of Northern Virginia, and the Confederate States. Why could I not have fallen like so many war-long veterans?”
After a time Dwight fell asleep under the tree above Sayler’s Creek.
Not far from Kershaw’s sector of the front, Major Robert Stiles, the gunner, settled his battalion on the hill. Next to him, to his amusement, Commodore Tucker shouted orders to his Naval battalion. The old seaman called to the sailors, “To the starboard, march! Grand moral combination!” There were choruses of “Aye, aye, sir!” as the men went into position.
A staff officer rode to Tucker.
“May I help put your command in position, sir?”
“Thank you, young man,” the commodore said. “I understand how to talk to my people.”
The enemy was already shelling the ridge, and one of the bursts struck among the artillerymen. Major Stiles wrote:
“My men were lying down and ordered not to expose themselves. I was walking backward and forward just back of the line, talking to them whenever that was practicable.… A twenty-pounder Parrott shell struck immediately in my front, on the line, nearly severing a man in twain, and hurling him bodily over my head, his arms hanging down and his hands almost slapping me in the face as they passed.”
Stiles recognized the victim as young Blount, who had been so tearful at the reading of the Soldier’s Psalm on Sunday night that now seemed so long ago.
Federal fire was so accurate that Stiles thought his men might bolt: “They did not appear to be hopelessly demoralized, but they did look blanched and haggard and awe-struck.”
Federal infantry came up the hill at a walk and Stiles called to his men, “When I say ready, rise on the right knee. Aim at their knees. Fire together when I call. Obey every order instantly.”
In the last yards of the Federal approach the field was “still as the grave,” Stiles thought. Some of the enemy officers had white handkerchiefs in their hands, and waved to Stiles, telling him to surrender. The major gave the order to fire, with results which surprised him:
“The earth appeared to have swallowed up the first line of the Federal force in our front.… The second line wavered and broke.
“The revulsion was too sudden. On the instant every man in my battalion sprang to his feet and, without orders, they rushed, bare-headed and with unloaded muskets, down the slope after the retreating Federals. I tried to stop them, but in vain, although I actually got ahead of a good many of them. They simply bore me on with the flood.”
Stiles caught up with his color-bearer, whom he yanked backward with a tug at his rolled blanket.
“What do you mean, advancing the colors without orders?”
An artillery shell knocked down the flag-bearer, and when Stiles reached for the colors, the dead man’s brother grabbed for them. “They belong to me now, Major!” he yelled. The second man was shot through the head almost as he took the staff.
Another of the color guard jumped up. “Give ’em to me, Major!” This man also fell. Stiles said:
“There were at least five men dead and wounded lying close about me, and I did not see why I should continue to make a target of myself. I therefore jammed the color staff down through a thick bush, which supported it in an upright position, and turned my attention to my battalion.”
Stiles saw that his men could not remain in the open, and led them through a ravine to their old position; many were missing when they were once more in place. He saw the bloody end of it:
“Quicker than I can tell it the battle degenerated into a butchery and a confused melee of brutal personal conflicts. I saw numbers of men kill each other with bayonets and the butts of muskets, and even bite each other’s throats and ears and noses, rolling on the ground like wild beasts. I saw one of my officers and a Federal officer fighting with swords over the battalion colors, which we had brought back with us, each man having his left hand upon the staff. I could not get to them, but my man was a very athletic, powerful seaman, and soon I saw the Federal officer fall.”
Stiles had warned his men against wearing the captured blue enemy overcoats in battle, but today many had them on. Stiles saw one of his men blow open the head of his most intimate friend, failing to recognize him in the blue coat he wore. This moment impressed Stiles:
“I was wedged in between fighting men, only my right arm free. I tried to strike the musket barrel up, but alas, my sword had broken in the clash and I could not reach it. I well remember the yell of demoniac triumph with which that simple country lad clubbed his musket and whirled savagely upon another victim.”
The fury around Stiles ceased suddenly and he ran. Within a few yards he met a Federal force and was captured. He said, “I was not sorry to end it thus, in red-hot battle.”
Private Timberlake, watching from a few yards away, saw:
“Near the end the 37th Massachusetts had the fiercest literally savage encounter of the war with the remnant of Stiles’ battalion and the Marines. I was next to those Marines and saw them fight. They clubbed muskets, fired pistols into each other’s faces and used bayonets savagely.”
Commodore Tucker, who fought stoutly in his first land battle, did not give up until the blue lines had overrun his band from every side. He was astonished: “I never before got into a fight like this. I thought everything was going on well.”
Timberlake was soon captured. He fired at a Federal who came up with a flag of truce before he understood his purpose, but missed him.
“You’re surrounded,” the bluecoat said. “We have lines all around you. Give it up.”
As the 2nd Virginia Reserve Battalion’s survivors surrendered, Timberlake threw down a musket so hot that it burned his hands. He wrote:
“I went to the rear, thirsty, but the water was bloody in a ditch I tried. Custer’s cavalry was gathering prisoners. I jumped from the ditch and scared a Yank’s cavalry horse. He cursed me. The next one came along at a gallop.”
“You hungry, Johnny?” the trooper said.
“That’s a pretty question to ask a Rebel.”
“Never mind. You got a knife?”
“Yes.”
The bluecoat turned the horse and Timberlake saw a ham strapped to the saddle.
“Cut you a piece, Johnny.”
Timberlake took a thick slice and the Federal gave him a piece of hardtack.
“God bless that Yankee,” Timberlake said. “He saved my life.”
Captain Thomas Blake, of Company E of the artillery battalion on the hillside, also found the enemy abruptly friendly when he had surrendered:
“The infantry which we had so recently repulsed came up with smiling faces. They showed no resentment, but opened their haversacks and offered to share their hard tack with us, saying, ‘You Johnnies sure put up a good fight.’… It was only when we fell into the hands of the provost guard that any harshness was shown.”
General Henry Wise, the one-time Governor of Virginia, led a small brigade from Anderson’s corps into the outer edge of the melee at Sayler’s Creek. The enemy fired from behind a plantation house and outbuildings and the stone wall of a graveyard, but Wise drove the bluecoats from this cover, chased them about two miles, and, he said, “broke them thoroughly.” He got no support from Pickett’s men, who were nearby. There was an order to retreat. Wise said:
“We had hardly formed and begun to move in his rear before Pickett’s whole command stampeded, leaving their artillery in the enemy’s hands, and they were exploding caissons in a lane in our front.”
Wise led his men over the west fork of Sayler’s Creek and found himself surrounded. A neighboring brigade broke, but the former governor gave not a thought to surrender: “We pressed up a hill in our front, halted behind a worm fence on the crest, fired three volleys to the rear … poured three volleys obliquely to the left and front, broke the enemy and got out.”
The well-drilled veterans of Colonel William K. Perrin’s 26th Virginia saved Wise. They rallied and formed ranks in sight of the Federal column, and Wise formed his entire brigade about it. A strange scene followed. When Wise’s men fired into adjoining woods, a white flag emerged, and the South Carolina brigade of General William Wallace came out of hiding. Wise put these men in front of him and hurried them rearward, toward Farmville.
Colonel R. T. W. Duke was sent into the creek valley by General Barton during a lull in the firing, to meet a Federal flag of truce. The enemy officer was Colonel Oliver Edwards.
“Generals Ewell and Custis Lee and several others have surrendered,” he said. “Lots of men and officers are dead. We want you to give up and stop this useless bloodshed.”
“We can’t do that,” Duke said. “We’ve had no orders. We’ll fight on.” He went back up the hill to report to Barton, but had hardly arrived when a bluecoat cavalry squadron surrounded them. Duke gave up his dress sword with reluctance; his great-grandfather had carried it in the Revolution. Duke carefully took down the name and address of the officer who relieved him of the weapon.
The Federals carried General Ewell to the headquarters of General Horatio Wright, commander of the 6th Corps. Ewell freely answered questions about the strength of the two divisions he had lost: some 6,000 men had left Richmond with him, but the figures of 2800 prisoners and 150 killed or wounded at Sayler’s Creek were as accurate as he could make them. Thousands, he said, had straggled away during the march.
At his request the Federals found Major Robert Stiles among the prisoners and brought him to Ewell. Stiles wrote:
“In the presence of half a dozen generals [Ewell] said that he had summoned me to say, in the hearing of these officers, that the conduct of my battalion had been reported to him, and that he desired to congratulate me and them upon the record they had made.”
Survivors of the afternoon’s fighting began to scatter, and many did not follow the trail of the main army west toward Farmville.
Private W. S. White and a few companions of the 3rd Company, Richmond Howitzers, waited until dark and buried the few cannon left to them. Then, around a campfire, they discussed the future:
“It was now apparent to all that we could hold out but a few hours—men and horses were utterly worn down by fatigue, loss of sleep and hunger. Thousands were leaving their commands and wandering about the devastated country in quest of food, and they had no muskets.”
Private John L. G. Woods, the drummerboy of the 53rd Georgia, had beat the long roll for his regiment in the morning and then, as a noncombatant, gone to a hospital wagon as his companions went into line of battle.
In the lull before the wounded came back, Woods wandered, visiting farmhouses in search of food. He was trading for provisions when a civilian shouted to him:
“The Yanks have surrounded Longstreet’s corps, and their cavalry is on the road just behind you and will soon cut off the bridge.”
Woods was incredulous, but the man insisted that he had seen the enemy troops, and the drummer hurried for the bridge. He was none too soon, for he reached the far bank as bluecoats appeared. He walked among disorganized stragglers in the road. After dark these men were thrown into a panic by a mounted officer or courier who galloped among them yelling, “Halt! Yanks in front!” The column halted and many left the road, but the report was soon found to be false, and the soldiers concluded they had been misled by a Yankee scout.
Woods went on into Farmville, and spent the night under a tree.
Corporal M. W. Venable and the 1st Engineers were a bit to the west of Sayler’s Creek when the battle came on; they had driven off cavalry and were retreating when they met General Eppa Hunton’s brigade of Pickett’s division, lying along the road awaiting orders. As the engineers passed, shells dropped near this infantry, and Hunton soon ordered them up and into battle.
An hour or more later Venable met a man hobbling back in a stream of wounded. “I’m the last of Hunton’s men,” the cripple said. “They got all the rest, dead, wounded or captured. They got General Hunton, and Ewell and Custis Lee and lots of others.”
The engineers marched toward Farmville by way of the chief crossing of the Appomattox east of the town—High Bridge. They had orders to destroy both the lofty railroad bridge and the lower wagon bridge beneath it, but only after the infantry had passed. By 8 P.M. the engineers had reached the bridge and Company G was detailed to stand by until ordered to burn it. The bridge was built of a dozen wooden trusses atop towering brick pillars, and the dry pine frames would burn like giant torches. Troops poured over the bridge.
Major Henry Kyd Douglas, the young survivor of Stonewall Jackson’s staff, brought the remnants of The Light Brigade to High Bridge, only 500 of them in the ranks. Douglas had narrowly escaped during the day.
His brigade was caught in the rear of Gordon’s fight near Sayler’s Creek, and held a hill until artillery and wagons had crossed the stream. Lieutenant Colonel Wilfred Cutshaw, who had left Petersburg with six batteries in his artillery battalion, reported to Douglas with a handful of men, armed with muskets. Their cannon were gone.
In the fighting Cutshaw’s leg was torn off by a shell, and Douglas was knocked from the saddle by a spent musket ball which struck a button on his chest.
Near High Bridge there was an even closer call for the major. He was asleep when the enemy came near, and staggered groggily after his men had shaken him. He was fully awake only when a shell burst overhead, tearing his shoulder with a painful wound from a fragment. A doctor halted the bleeding, gave Douglas a stout drink of brandy, and put him back into his saddle. He retreated with his arm in a sling.
Robert Lee rode up from Rice’s Station in the afternoon, apprehensive at the sound of firing, aware that the broken valley of Sayler’s Creek held dangers for the column. He learned that Gordon had been attacked, but that he evidently was not marching with the main body. A Virginia captain approached Lee as he studied the valley with binoculars, holding Traveller’s reins with one hand.
“Are those sheep or not?” Lee asked.
“No, General,” the soldier said, “they are Yankee wagons.”
“You’re right,” Lee said slowly. “But what are they doing there?”
There was only one answer: The enemy wagons were following Grant’s infantry, which must have overtaken the rear segment of the Confederate column. Lee soon met General William Mahone, and was riding with the tiny Virginian when Colonel Charles Venable, Lee’s aide, came up swiftly.
“Did you get my message, sir?”
“No,” Lee said. “What message?”
“The enemy’s taken the wagon train. At Sayler’s Creek.”
“Where is Anderson?” Lee said. “Where is Ewell? It is strange that I can’t hear from them.”
The commander turned to Mahone. “I have no other troops. Will you take your division to Sayler’s Creek?”
Mahone soon had the men on the way, and went with Lee to a knoll overlooking the site of defeat. Mahone wrote:
“The scene beggars description—hurrying teamsters with their teams and dangling traces, retreating infantry without guns, many without hats, a harmless mob, with the massive column of the enemy moving orderly on.
“At this spectacle General Lee straightened himself in the saddle and, looking more the soldier than ever, exclaimed, as if talking to himself:
“‘My God! Has the army been dissolved?’”
Mahone was ready. “No, General. Here are troops ready to do their duty.”
“Yes,” Lee said. “There are some true men left. Will you please keep those people back?”
Men of the retreating brigades swarmed around Lee, who held a battle flag in one hand. Mahone took the flag from him.
The commander agreed, at Mahone’s suggestion, to send Longstreet by the river road into Farmville during the night, and allow Mahone, Gordon and other survivors to march north to the river and cross at High Bridge. Once over the bridge, Mahone was to use his own judgment as to a course.
“What shall I do with the bridge when I’ve crossed?”
“Set fire to it,” Lee said.
Mahone asked him to send Colonel T. M. R. Talcott of the engineers to direct the burning.
Lee put a few of Mahone’s men into line within sight of the approaching enemy and rode Traveller about in the dusk as if impatient for action. The writer, John Esten Cooke, watched admiringly:
“An artist ought to have seen the old cavalier at this moment, sweeping on upon his large iron-gray, whose mane and tail floated in the wind; carrying his field glass half-raised in his right hand; with head erect, gestures animated, and in the whole face and form the expression of the hunter close upon his game. He rode in the twilight among the disordered groups, and the sight of him aroused a tumult.
“Fierce cries resounded on all sides, and, with hands clenched violently and raised aloft, the men called on him to lead them against the enemy. ‘It’s General Lee! Uncle Robert! Where’s the man who won’t follow Uncle Robert?’ I heard this on all sides—the swarthy faces full of dirt and courage, lit up every instant by the glare of burning wagons.”
Lee told an officer, after he had looked at the scene of the rout of Ewell, Pickett and Custis Lee, that “half of the army has been destroyed.”
At dark there was a dispatch from John B. Gordon:
I have been fighting heavily all day. My loss is considerable and I am still closely pressed. I fear that a portion of the train will be lost as my force is quite reduced & insufficient for its protection. So far I have been able to protect them, but without assistance can scarcely hope to do so much longer. The enemy’s loss has been very heavy.
Gordon, at least, was safe. Lee could not know that the fierce Georgian lost about 1500 men as prisoners when the enemy broke his line at dusk—or that Confederate losses for the day were near 8000, excluding the stragglers who would be seen no more.
Lee rode at nightfall to Rice’s Station, and in a field beside the railroad tracks, with only an orderly or two and a staff officer, made headquarters as the army moved toward Farmville in retreat. He handled many dispatches during the night; in the early hours Longstreet’s men were forced to fend off enemy attacks, but the situation was not serious, and fighting died away.
Young John Wise, who had been stalking the enemy in his locomotive, forced his engineer into Burkeville in the early morning hours and came upon hundreds of Federal soldiers working on the rails by firelight, widening the tracks to accommodate Grant’s big trains.
There was hardly time to surmise the obvious fact that the enemy held Burkeville, for blue cavalrymen charged the lightless locomotive which had so startled them.
“Reverse the engine!” Wise yelled. His engineer seemed to be paralyzed.
“It’s no use, Lieutenant,” the man said. “They’d kill us before we got underway.”
Wise put his pistol behind the engineer’s head. “Reverse or you’re a dead man,” he said. The engineer pulled a lever and the engine slowly backed away. Federal riders opened fire. Wise and the engineer lay down and let the locomotive go. She gathered speed and rocked away so swiftly that Wise feared she would jump the rotten track.
When they were safe, the engineer turned to Wise:
“Lieutenant, would you have blowed my brains out, sure enough?”
“I would that.”
“Well,” the engineer said. “I don’t want to travel with you no more.”
Wise left him at Meherrin Station, not far down the tracks, and with the aid of his pass from Jefferson Davis, took a fine mare from a cavalryman on furlough and rode on in search of General Lee and the army. He heard the fighting at Sayler’s Creek, outran a couple of enemy cavalry parties and was almost ambushed by Confederate scouts. He rode through Farmville, having gone far out of his way, then southeast toward Rice’s Station.
Wise found Lee in the field, standing by a fire. Colonel Charles Marshall was in a headquarters wagon, writing dispatches on a lap desk as Lee dictated.
The boy gave Lee his message, telling him of President Davis’s request for information.
“I hardly think it is necessary to prepare written dispatches,” Lee said. “They may be captured. You may say to Mr. Davis that, as he knows, my original purpose was to adhere to the line of the Danville road. I have been unable to do so, and am now trying to hold the Southside road as I retire toward Lynchburg.”
“Have you chosen a place to make a stand?”
Young Wise long retained his memory of Lee’s reply: “No, I’ll have to wait for developments. A few more Sayler’s Creeks and it will be all over—ended—just as I have expected it would end from the first.”
Lee sent the boy toward Farmville, where he might join his father for a night’s rest.
Between Sayler’s Creek and Farmville, not far from High Bridge, Fitz Lee’s cavalry ran into the enemy. It was near noon, before the opening of battle at the creek.
Trooper E. M. Boykin missed the action, but saw the prisoners, about 900 fresh Yankee infantrymen just come to the front, gobbled up by Fitz Lee’s regiments. Boykin saw them going to the rear:
“Their coats were so new and blue and buttons so bright, and shirts so clean, that it was a wonder to look upon them by our rusty lot.”
These prisoners were the harvest of a sharp skirmish in the Confederate rear. General Longstreet had discovered enemy infantry marching toward High Bridge and guessed that its mission was to destroy the bridge before Lee’s army could cross. He sent Tom Rosser after it with a division of horsemen; he soon reinforced him with Tom Munford, leading Fitz Lee’s men.
Rosser found the bluecoats about 1 P.M. and charged as they lay behind a fence at the fringe of a woodland. Munford’s men joined, and it seemed that the Federals would be quickly overrun, until bluecoat cavalry slashed in upon the flank of the attack. The columns met at great speed, and there was close work with sabers and pistols.
One of Rosser’s commanders was young General James Dearing, of the Laurel Brigade, who led troopers upon the enemy at the fence and ran into a saber duel with the Federal commander, General Theodore Read, of Ord’s staff. Dearing dropped Read from the saddle with a fatal body wound, but, as he turned, the Federal’s orderly shot Dearing, who fell to the ground.
The charge was pressed home by Colonel Elijah White of the 35th Virginia Battalion, and the enemy was driven. White’s Comanches herded prisoners back toward the army, but the colonel did not leave the scene—Watson’s Farm—until he had visited the mortally wounded Dearing.
The boy general had been carried into a farmhouse. When White entered, Tom Rosser sat by the bed, nursing a fresh wound of his own. Dearing was failing rapidly. He pointed to the new stars of a brigadier on his collar and whispered weakly to Rosser, “These belong on his collar.” He nodded toward White in one of the final gestures of his life.
There were other casualties among Confederate officers. Major James Thomson, the fearless chief of horse artillery, had been shot through the neck in the charge and had died instantly. The 5th Virginia had lost its colonel, Reuben Boston. The Federals had lost both General Read and Colonel Francis Washburn, a cavalryman who had been at West Point with Dearing.
William Owen of the New Orleans artillery was sitting near High Bridge when the cavalry came in with the prisoners. A familiar voice called, “Where would I find General Longstreet, friend?”
Owen was surprised to see Tom Rosser, whom he had not seen in months. The horseman was full of news. “Oh, we captured these people who were going to burn the bridge, and took them all in. But we lost Jim Dearing. He cut General Read from his horse, but was shot down. It was a gallant fight.”
Rosser had some trophies.
“This is Read’s horse, and this is his saber. Both beauties, aren’t they? But I must see Longstreet.”
Owen joined Rosser after he had reported to Old Pete, and they rode toward Farmville. Owen wrote: “It was 10 P.M. when we took the road again. It was axle-deep in mud. It was a fearfully trying night.”
Trooper E. M. Boykin rode with his command toward Farmville, living on the country. Broken-down commissary wagons were the best supply, but some riders stopped at farmhouses and were given food. They rode through Farmville and camped in a grove outside the town.
They built a big campfire, for the night was cold. When the flames died down “there was a general awakening and a building up” of the fire. In one of these late stirrings Boykin and Colonel Haskell were surprised to find two strangers bedded down between them, a colonel and a lieutenant from Pickett’s command who did not know what had become of their regiment, or even the division. For the first time Boykin realized that the famous fighting unit had been destroyed.
PURSUIT
General Meade was off on a false scent at 6 A.M., following his three massed corps of infantry on Amelia Court House. Meade still rode in his ambulance, but Colonel Lyman wrote:
“We are pelting after Old Lee as hard as the poor doughboys’ legs can go.”
Grant was not misled: “It turned out that the retreat began the evening of the 5th and continued all night. Satisfied that this would be the case, I did not permit the cavalry to participate in Meade’s useless advance.”
Grant put the troopers on a road leading west, from Deatonsville to Rice’s Station, with Crook and Merritt leading. They soon struck Rebel wagons and the squadrons raced in; smoke rose over the roadway, but the bluecoats were driven off by infantry. Grant moved as calmly as if he were playing checkers:
“So, leaving Stagg’s brigade and Miller’s battery about three miles southwest of Deatonsville—where the road forks, with a branch leading north to the Appomattox—to harass the retreating column and find a vulnerable point, I again shifted the rest of the cavalry toward the left, across-country, but still keeping parallel to the enemy’s line of march.”
The leading Federal cavalry had crossed Sayler’s Creek when Merritt and Crook saw their chance. They went into the road to Rice’s Station, cut the Confederate train, burned several wagons, took hundreds of prisoners and sixteen guns. Longstreet’s corps had marched on ahead of this break, but Ewell and Custis Lee were behind. The little force Grant had posted near Deatonsville had pushed John Gordon out of the main road, and was striking Ewell’s rear. The Confederate line of march was snarled.
Colonel Lyman watched the start of it from Jetersville when Meade had returned from his early-morning march. Lyman could see the fighting four miles away:
“At that point was a bare ridge, a little above Deatonsville, and there, with my good glass, I could see a single man very well. It was just like a play of marionettes.… At first I saw only the Rebel train, moving along the ridge toward Deatonsville, in all haste; there now goes a pygmy ambulance drawn by mouse-like horses, at a trot. Here come more ambulances and many wagons from the woods, and disappear in a continuous procession, over the ridge. Suddenly—boom! boom! and the distant smoke of Humphreys’ batteries curls above the pine trees. At this stimulus the Lilliputian procession redoubles its speed.… Ah, here come the infantry. Now for a fight! Yes, a line of battle in retreat, and covering the rear. There are mounted officers; they gallop about, waving their tiny swords.”
At 8:30 A.M., when he discovered at last that the Rebels were streaming westward, Meade turned the infantry in their path, and Humphreys, Wright and Griffin pushed the men hard.
It was the 26th Michigan which first sighted the Rebels—a glimpse over the valley of Flat Creek, near Amelia Springs. It was ten thirty, and the troops they saw made up the rear of John Gordon’s column. Griffin’s men were swung wide, north of the enemy’s route. Humphreys hurried the 2nd Corps after Gordon. Humphreys wrote:
“A sharp, running fight … continued over a distance of fourteen miles, during which several partially entrenched positions were carried. The country was broken, wooded with dense undergrowth and swamps, alternating with open fields … for miles the road being strewn with tents, camp equipage, baggage, battery forges, limbers and wagons.”
By noon, with the massed infantry closing in and Sheridan hurrying along the flank into the Confederate path, the cavalryman sent to Grant a dispatch on the plight of the enemy:
The trains and the army were moving all last night and are very short of provisions and are very tired indeed. I think now is the time to attack them with all your infantry. They are reported to have begged provisions from people of the country all up and down the road as they passed. I am working around farther to the left.
Until 2 P.M. Sheridan’s rear force under Stagg and Miller worried the Confederates. By then General Wright’s 6th Corps marched into sight, and at three thirty these men looked down from a ridge to see Ewell’s troops turning in confusion. Morris Schaff, the Federal reporter, sketched the scene from the hill above Sayler’s Creek:
“The Confederates could see the regiments pouring into the fields at double quick, the battle lines blooming with colors, growing longer and deeper at every moment, and batteries at a gallop coming into action in the front. They all knew what it meant.… Batteries right and left of the Hillsman house opened on Ewell’s line, a rapid and destructive fire.”
Sheridan watched the opening of the fight from beside a barn on a hillside, shading himself from the hot sun.
Colonel Oliver Edwards, of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Division, reported to him. Sheridan pointed across the creek, to the steep hillside.
“The enemy are there,” he said. “I want you to form your brigade in one line, cross the creek and carry the heights.” He indicated the left of the enemy line held by Custis Lee.
“Can my flanks be covered?”
Sheridan roared, “Never mind your flanks! Go through them. They’re as demoralized as hell!”
The attack moved slowly, the men wading the creek without drawing Rebel fire—some of them went to their armpits in the water. A volley broke the line and hand-to-hand fighting covered the slope.
The 37th Massachusetts, of the same 3rd Brigade, was late in arriving. Like most units today, it had marched twenty miles at a fast pace, but when word came that the Rebels were at bay, the sweating men checked the magazines of their Spencer repeating rifles, began flinging aside knapsacks, blankets, canteens and heavy clothing, and for the last three miles went at a run. They came to the hillside where the Confederates were fighting for their lives, and the men of the 37th, most of them from the Berkshire hills, crashed through the undergrowth to meet the remnant of Stiles’ battalion and the Confederate Marines.
Schaff said: “They clubbed their muskets, fired pistols in each other’s faces and used the bayonet savagely. One Berkshire man was stabbed in the chest by a bayonet and pinned to the ground as it came out near his spine. He reloaded his gun and killed the Confederate, who fell across him. The Massachusetts man threw him off, pulled out the bayonet, and despite the awful wound, walked to the rear.”
Federal cavalry hacked away at the gray line in the rear, and the end soon came. Bluecoats began working on a mass grave in the ravine by the creek.
Just to the west, Custer had snapped up an artillery battery of Colonel Frank Huger, his West Point classmate. With the divisions of Crook and Merritt, the Federals cleared away infantry guards, and in the midst of a panic began rounding up prisoners. Generals Corse and Hunton of Pickett’s division were taken. Pickett, Fitz Lee and Dick Anderson escaped on fast horses. General Bushrod Johnson did not wait to see the stout defense of his lieutenant, General Henry Wise, but “fled up the road in the midst of a panicky swarm of soldiers and teamsters toward Rice’s Station.”
As night fell Humphreys’ men were pecking at Gordon’s force, which managed to cross the double bridges of Sayler’s Creek and escape. To the south and west, General Ord’s Army of the James approached Rice’s Station, but it was too late for a full-scale attack on Longstreet’s corps.
Sheridan sent a staff man, Colonel Redwood Price, to Grant with news of the victory. On his way Price stopped at the headquarters of Meade. Meade was astonished when he read the dispatch, for he had known nothing of the scale of victory at Sayler’s Creek. He seemed even more surprised that no infantry general had observed the formality of reporting to him, and that Sheridan had claimed full credit. Colonel Lyman noted in his diary:
“There comes a staff officer with a dispatch. ‘I attacked with two divisions of the 6th Corps. I captured many thousand prisoners, etc. P. H. Sheridan.’
“‘Oh,’ said Meade, ‘so General Wright wasn’t there?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ said the staff officer, as if speaking of some worthy man who had commanded a battalion, ‘Oh, yes, General Wright was there.’ Meade turned on his heel without a word, and Cavalry Sheridan’s dispatch proceeded—to the newspapers!”
Thus the squabbles among the high command raged before Grant learned of his victory. Sheridan wrote of his aide’s halt at Meade’s camp:
“On his way Price stopped at the headquarters of General Meade, where he learned that not the slightest intelligence of the occurrence on my line had been received, for I not being under Meade’s command, he had paid no attention to my movements. Price gave the story of the battle, and General Meade, realizing its importance, sent directions immediately to General Wright to make his report of the engagement to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, assuming that Wright was operating independently of me in the face of Grant’s dispatch of 2 o’clock, which said that Wright was following the cavalry and would ‘go in with a vim’ wherever I dictated. Wright could not do else than comply with Meade’s orders in the case, and I, being then in ignorance of Meade’s reasons for the assumption, could say nothing.”
Meade was soon consoled by getting a report from General Humphreys. Colonel Price rode into the night and found Grant at Burkeville. It was midnight when the commander-in-chief read the stunning lines of Sheridan’s dispatch:
Up to the present time we have captured Generals Ewell, Kershaw, Barton, Corse, Hunton, Dubose and Custis Lee, several thousand prisoners, 14 pieces of artillery and a large number of wagons. If the thing is pressed, I think Lee will surrender.
Grant sent a telegraph message to President Lincoln at City Point and hurried a note to Meade: “Every moment is now important to us.”
He sent the infantry westward by several roads, to cut off Lee around Farmville. The troops were to move early.
Sheridan’s camp was not far from Sayler’s Creek. Colonel Newhall of his staff sketched the cavalry commander:
“He is lying on the broad of his back on a blanket, with his feet to the fire, in a condition of sleepy wakefulness. Clustered about are blue uniforms and gray in equal numbers, and immediately around his campfire are most of the Confederate generals. Ewell is sitting on the ground hugging his knees, his face bent down between his arms.”
Ewell was not talkative, but he made a brief comment to General Horatio Wright, who invited him to share his quarters, “Our cause is gone. Lee should surrender now, before more lives are wasted.”
George Custer was at hand, a boy general of twenty-six, resplendent in a suit of olive corduroy, his long yellow hair on his shoulders, a scarlet neckerchief over his coat. The South Carolina Confederates, General Kershaw and Colonel Huger, were Custer’s guests for the night.
Colonel George Forsythe of Sheridan’s staff came to report that headquarters had been set up in a fine orchard, with tents pitched and a hot supper ready. The officers followed him, and the cavalry command settled for the night. Federal generals shared their blankets with their captives. They slept for no more than an hour before Sheridan was up, busy with plans for the chase.
THE LINCOLNS
Mrs. Lincoln returned to her husband about noon, when her river steamer nudged into the busy harbor at City Point; she had been almost exactly twenty-four hours steaming from Washington down the Potomac, through the Chesapeake and up the James. She had brought a rather exotic party:
One of them, to his lingering surprise, was the young French count, Adolphe de Chambrun, who had known the Lincolns little more than a month, and was in his third month of learning English. The Count had impeccable manners, was an impassioned partisan of the principles of Union, and paid homage to Mary Lincoln with subtle flattery. He had scratched in his diary: “Mrs. Lincoln must have been very pretty when young.”
Others in the party were Lincoln’s old enemy, Senator Charles Sumner; James H. Harlan, new Secretary of the Interior, with his wife, daughter, and an undersecretary. There were also Mrs. Lincoln and her maid, Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who had been seamstress to Mrs. Jefferson Davis in prewar days in Washington.
The party went immediately to the President’s boat, and Lincoln took them, with boyish enthusiasm, into the saloon where he had met with Judge Campbell and the other Confederate commissioners in the futile peace conference of the winter.
Secretary Harlan, an old friend of Lincoln’s, had until lately been a Senator from Iowa, a sturdy schoolmaster of pioneer days who had become in turn a college president. He was amazed at his first glimpse of Lincoln today:
“His whole appearance, pose and bearing had marvellously changed. He was, in fact, transfigured. That indescribable sadness which had previously seemed to be an adamantine element of his very being, had been suddenly changed for an equally indescribable expression of serene joy, as if conscious that the great purpose of his life had been achieved.”
Mary Lincoln was “much disappointed” when she heard that her husband had already visited fallen Richmond, Elizabeth Keckley noticed. Mrs. Lincoln had wanted to go to the Rebel capital herself and announced plans to do so the next day.
Lincoln turned to business. He was drawn by the dilemma of trying to make peace with Campbell and other Virginia leaders while Grant was in chase of Lee; he could not put it from his mind, and now dealt with it more subtly than Admiral Porter suspected. Lincoln telegraphed General Weitzel in Richmond:
It has been intimated to me that the gentlemen who have acted as the legislature of Virginia, in support of the rebellion, may now desire to assemble at Richmond, and take measures to withdraw the Virginia troops, and other support from resistance to the General Government. If they attempt it, give them permission and protection until, if at all, they attempt some hostile action to the United States, in which case you will notify them and give them reasonable time to leave; & at the end of which time, arrest any who may remain. Allow Judge Campbell to see this, but do not make it public.
The President also telegraphed Grant, explaining his effort to entice Virginia from the war; there was little chance that his maneuver would bear fruit, he said, but added, “I have thought best to notify you, so that if you should see signs, you may understand them.”
There was a bit of further news for him to send Grant: Secretary of State Seward had been dangerously injured in a carriage accident, and Lincoln must soon return to Washington.