Let The Thing Be Pressed

The Appomattox Campaign

After shattering a large part of Lee's army at Sailor's Creek, Phil Sheridan telegraphed U.S. Grant:

I have the honor to report that the enemy made a stand at the intersection of Burke's Station road with the road upon which they were retreating.  I attacked them with two divisions of the Sixth Army Corps and routed them handsomely, making a connection with the cavalry.  I am still pressing on with both cavalry and infantry.  Up to the present time we have captured Generals Ewell, Kershaw, Baron, Corse, De Foe [Du Bose], and Custis Lee, several thousand prisoners, 14 pieces of artillery, with caissons and a large number of wagons.  If the thing is pressed I think that Lee will surrender.

The next morning, as he prepared to leave City Point to return to Washington, President Lincoln saw Sheridan's message and telegraphed Grant:

General Sheridan says: "If the thing is pressed I think that Lee will surrender".  Let the thing be pressed.

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The night of April 6-7 had been the second consecutive night march for Lee's shrinking and weary army.  In his essential memoir, Fighting For The Confederacy, Longstreet's artillery chief General Edward Porter Alexander wrote of that march:

. . . this night was actively wretched.  I was 8 hours in riding the 6 miles to Farmville.  The road was one sea of mud through which men, horses, ambulances, artillery, & cavalry splashed & foundered & stopped in the darkness & splashed & floundered & stopped again.  And if it was that to me on horseback what must it have been to the poor fellows on foot loaded with  muskets, blankets, & ammunition & worn with continuous marching & digging & lack of food.

April 7 was another day of drama at High Bridge but on this day it was the retreating Confederates who were trying to burn the bridge in order to thwart the Federal pursuit rather than the Federals trying to burn it to cut off the Confederate retreat as happened on the previous day.  The rebels were only partly successful burning the railroad bridge but unable to destroy the lower wagon bridge before it was captured by Union troops ending Lee's hopes of being able to break contact with the pursuing Grant.

It was on that day that Alexander noted the Confederate soldiers were "beginning to foresee the inevitable end" and heard his cannoneers shouting to him "Don't surrender no ammunition!" and "Let us shoot up this ammunition first if we got to surrender!".

That afternoon U.S. Grant decided to open communications with Lee writing him at 5pm:

General:  The events of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia, in this struggle.  I feel that it is so, & regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood by asking of you the surrender of the Confederate States Army known  as the Army of Northern Virginia.

Grant's message reached Lee sometime after 9pm when he was with General Longstreet.  He showed it to Longstreet who replied "not yet".  Lee responded (Grant received it the next morning):

General:  I have received your note of this date.  Though not entertaining the opinion you express on the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia, I reciprocate your desire to avoid useless effusion of blood, & therefore, before considering your proposition, ask the terms you will offer on condition of its surrender.

Lee knew he was in a trap.  Alexander summarized the situation:

We were now in a sort of jug shaped peninsula between the James River & the Appomattox, & there was but one outlet, the neck of the jug at Appomattox C.H. [Court House], and to that Grant had the shortest road! [See Map on April 3 post]

The only way out for Lee was to beat the Union army to the railroad (and rations) at Appomattox Station, three miles to the west of the Court House.  He ordered yet another night march.

Washburn's Last Charge

The Appomattox Campaign

Today sees the worst fighting since the storming of the Petersburg entrenchments on April 2.

At Sailor's Creek the Confederate army suffers a catastrophe when several divisions are cut off and forced to surrender after heavy combat.  Almost 8,000 rebel soldiers are killed, wounded or (mostly) captured (a quarter of the entire army), including seven generals, among them Richard Ewell, one of Lee's three corps commanders.
(from Civil War.org)

Many soldiers were grievously injured during the desperate struggle, among them Private Samuel E Eddy of the 37th Massachusetts.  Samuel Eddy was forty years old and living in the Berkshire hill town of Chesterfield when he volunteered for the army in 1862.  On April 6 his regiment was involved in fierce combat with Confederate forces under the command of General Custis Lee (Robert E Lee's son), who began surrendering.  The National Park Service campaign website describes what happened next:

The Colonel next in command (of Lee's forces) was in the act of handing his sword to adjutant (John S.) Bradley, when, seeing how small was the command (300 men) opposed to him, he drew back his sword, and attacked the adjutant with his pistol. Bradley grappled with his foe though wounded by his pistol shot (passing near his shoulder blade)—and they rolled into a hollow, where surrounded by rebels, Bradley was shot through the thigh, when Samuel E. Eddy private Co. D. shot the rebel Colonel as he was about to shoot Bradley through the head with his pistol. A rebel who saw the man who killed his Colonel—put his bayonet through private Eddy's body, the bayonet passing through the lung and coming out near his spine. Eddy dropped his gun, and tore the bayonet out from his body, then in a hand to hand struggle with his foe temporarily disabled him and crawled to his gun, and with it killed his antagonist.

A fellow soldier reported:

I saw him (Eddy) after the battle sitting on the ground. I says to him are you wounded? He said they have run a bayonet through me. I looked and saw where it entered his body and came out on his back. He said it did not hurt so very much when it went through, but the man twisted it when withdrawing it but the man never bayoneted another soldier, for Mr. Eddy was so indignant, that he shot him then and there.

Amazingly, Eddy survived his wound.  Taken to a field hospital at City Point he was treated for a bayonet wound passing between his third and fourth ribs and exiting through his back near the spine.  Discharged on June 9 he returned to Chesterfield.  In 1897 he received the Medal of Honor for his actions that day.  His citation reads:

Saved the life of the adjutant of his regiment by voluntarily going beyond the line and there killing one of the enemy then in the act of firing upon the wounded officer. Was assailed by several of the enemy, run through the body with a bayonet, and pinned to the ground, but while so situated he shot and killed his assailant.

Mr Eddy lived to the age of 86, passing away in 1909.
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The same afternoon a related engagement occurred several miles northwest of Sailor's Creek.  It seemed clear to the Union generals that Lee intended to get his army to the north side of the Appomattox River near Farmville.  General Ord, commanding the Army of the James, was ordered to destroy any bridge that the Confederates could retreat across.  The most obvious crossing point was High Bridge with its span of almost a half mile looming 125 feet above the river.
(High Bridge from usacivilwar. com)

On the morning of the 6th, Ord sent a raiding party to scout the area and, if possible, burn the bridge.  The party, under the command of General Theodore Read, consisted of two elements; about eighty 4th Massachusetts cavalry led by Colonel Francis Washburn and eight hundred infantry commanded by Lieutanent Colonel Horace Kellogg.  Washburn was 26 years old, a Harvard student who volunteered in 1861 and veteran of fighting in Virginia, South Carolina and Florida.

After Read left on his mission, Ord received information that Lee's infantry was approaching the bridge on a path that would place them in the rear of the raiding force.  Ord sent Read an order to retreat on a roundabout way to the north to avoid capture but the messenger was captured by the rebels leaving Read unaware of his danger.

Nearing the river, Read sent Washburn's troopers to scout the bridge and they drove off the Confederates defending it and were preparing to fire it when they heard firing to their rear; it was rebel cavalry and infantry attacking Read's infantry in overwhelming numbers.  Riding to the sound of fire, the 80 Massachusetts cavalry, accompanied by General Read, rode round the federal infantry and charged an estimated 2,000 Southern troops, engaging them in hand to hand fighting.  Read was shot and killed, likely by the Confederate commander General Dearing who, in turn, was killed as he discharged his pistol.  Washburn was shot in the mouth, fell from his horse and was cut across the skull by a saber while on the ground.   Of the eleven Union cavalry officers, four were killed or mortally wounded, four wounded and the remaining three captured and the entire command met the same fate.

(From Calkins, The Appomattox Campaign)

Michael Sorenson in his online biography of Washburn provides additional detail and anecdote (though he inaccurately implies that Washburn, not Read, commanded the entire raiding force).  He writes that after after the war Confederate General Rosser, also part of the action that day, upon meeting a Union veteran took his hand and exclaimed  "You belonged to the 4th Massachusetts Cavalry?  Give me your hand!  I have been many a day in hot fights.  I never saw anything approaching that at High Bridge.  While your Colonel kept his saddle, everything went down before him!"

General Ord wrote of the engagement (from the Sorenson biography which includes other official reports on Washburn's charge):

Charge after charge was made by the handful of cavalry, led by the chivalrous Washburn, who captured more rebels than he had men; but Read fell mortally wounded, then Washburn, and at last not an officer of the cavalry party remained alive or unwounded to lead the men, and not until then did they surrender.  But, as I learned afterward, this stubborn fight in his front led General Lee to believe that a heavy force had struck the head of his column; he halted his whole army, began entrenching, issued what was called a stampeding order, so that not longer afterward Sheridan's cavalry and the Sixth Corps did overtake and strike him [at Sailor's Creek], and swept his lines for some two miles.

Unfortunately, the Union infantry did not fight with the spirit of the cavalry and surrendered as a group after Washburn's charge.  The wounded Washburn was also captured, being released upon the surrender on April 9.  Taken to his brother's home in Worcester, Massachusetts he died of his wounds on April 22.  Washburn received a posthumous brevet promotion to Brigadier General for his actions at High Bridge.
                                          (Francis Washburn)

Our Army Is Ruined

The Appomattox Campaign

Failing to find the expected rations at Amelia Court House on April 3, Robert E Lee issued an appeal for supplies to the local populace and spent the next day at Amelia surveying the disappointing response.  With much of his command remaining stationary during the day he'd lost his critical one day marching lead on the Federal army.

On the 5th the rebel columns resumed their trek amid scattered fighting taking place all through the day.  Tired, underfed and with the end clearly approaching morale was plummeting in the Confederate ranks.  And worse was to come.  Lee's intended line of march was southwest into North Carolina but he found himself blocked by a strong Union force at Jetersville (undoubtedly named in anticipation of the later fame of the Yankee baseball player) forcing him to change his route and send his weary troops straight west hoping to find another place where he could get ahead of the Union army and resume his southwest heading.

Late in the day, one of Sheridan's scouts sent him a captured letter, written earlier in the day, by a Southern soldier:

Dear Mama,

Our army is ruined, I fear.  We are all safe as yet.  Shyron left us sick.  John Taylor is well; saw him yesterday.  We are in line of battle this evening.  General Robert Lee is in the field near us.  My trust is still in the justice of our cause and that of God.  General [A.P.] Hill is killed.  I saw Murray a few moment since.  Bernard Terry [he] said was taken prisoner, but may get out.  I send this by a negro I see passing up railroad to Mecklenburg.  Love to all.

Your devoted son,
WM. B. Taylor
Colonel

(Sketch of Confederate soldiers drawing water from well while on retreat from Richmond; from nps. gov)

(Capture of Confederate supply train by Union cavalry; from nps. gov)


That night Grant meets with Sheridan and Meade and stresses "it is not the aim only to follow the enemy, but to get ahead of him".

Let 'Em Up Easy

(Moc.org)

The Appomattox Campaign

Abraham Lincoln had been at General Grant's headquarters at City Point near Petersburg since March 24 when the news came of the fall of Richmond on April 3 and he could not resist the temptation to see the rebel capital which the armies under his command had sought to capture for four often frustrating and always bloody years.

The next morning Lincoln, accompanied by his son Tad, traveled by ship and barge up the James River.  Landing two miles from the city he proceeded ahead with an armed escort from the U.S. navy eventually linking up with Federal cavalry which took him to the Confederate Executive Mansion where the President sat in Jefferson Davis' chair.

After leaving the mansion, the American President set out on a tour of the city accompanied by General Godfrey Weitzel whose troops were the first to enter Richmond the prior day.  Large crowds turned out to watch, the whites mostly silent, the blacks often cheering and reaching out to grab the President's hand.  Not all the blacks were slaves; there were more than 2,500 freed blacks in the city and even more in nearby Petersburg where 1/3 (3,614) of the black population was free according to the 1860 census, the largest such population in the Confederacy.
(Cleveland Civil War Roundtable)

At one point Weitzel asked the President for advice on how he should treat the citizens of the captured city.  Lincoln replied that he did not want to give orders on that topic but "If I were in your place,  I'd let 'em up easy, let 'em up easy."(1)

On April 7, President Lincoln returned to Washington.
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Forty miles away at Amelia Court House, Lee's scattered troops were beginning to assemble as ordered.  The hungry soldiers expected to find 350,000 rations sent from Richmond on April 2 at the Richmond & Danville Railroad Station in the town but due to a mix-up in orders they found nothing awaiting them.  The crushing disappointment was yet another blow to Lee's getaway plans and further incentive for more disillusioned soldiers to quietly leave the ranks and go home.

 

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(1) " Let 'em up easy" was Lincoln's general instinct at the moment of triumph, a sentiment echoed in his Second Inaugural Address, and in discussions with his cabinet where he indicated he would be just fine with Confederate officials escaping to Europe.  With the president's assassination a week later, we are left with the great "what-if?" of American history - would Reconstruction have turned out differently with Lincoln at the helm for the first three years rather than Andrew Johnson?  And, if so, would Lincoln have stayed with his "let 'em up easy" policy in the face of the violent white Southern violence directly at newly freed blacks and the implementation of the Black Codes by late 1865 and early 1866, or would the president have changed course?

General Barringer's Ride

The Appomattox Campaign

Lee and Grant's strategies for the next week were simple.  For Lee, it was to keep his army ahead of the Federals and to move west quickly towards Danville and then south to united with General Johnston in North Carolina.  For Grant it was to keep his army on the south side of Lee's march to prevent the linkup with Johnston and to eventually get ahead of the Confederates and block their route to the west.

The tactical execution of these strategies was much more complex.  To move quickly, Lee needed to keep his army moving in columns on different roads.  To have all the army moving on the same route would have slowed them down considerably.  This meant having the bridges across the Appomattox west of Amelia Court House open and for his army to be resupplied with ammunition and rations along the way.

Grant needed to have part of his army push Lee along and for that task he chose the deliberate and careful General Meade.  The other part of his force needed to race along south of Lee and find a place to get ahead of him and cut him off from further movement westward.  For the task he selected the aggressive and irascible General Sheridan.

(To see entire map move it towards the left - Appomattox end)

(From Civil War Album.com)

On April 3 both armies were on the move and with the Confederate head start there was very little combat.  One exception was a cavalry engagement at Namozine Church, halfway between Petersburg and Amelia Court House, and an incident in that fight illustrates the strength of the long-standing relationships among the general officers on both sides as well as the comity that still existed between combatants even after four years of bloodshed.

Commanding the Confederate cavalry that day was General Rufus Barringer.  After his rearguard stand was broken by Union cavalry, Barringer and some of his men tried to escape but were captured by Union soldiers dressed as rebel soldiers.  The general and his officers were taken to that evening to General Sheridan's headquarters at the home of a Mrs Cousins on the Namozine Road.  They had dinner that night with Sheridan, his staff and Mrs Cousins and the next morning were invited to breakfast with Sheridan. 
                                                                                   (Rufus Barringer from ncpedia. org)

After breakfast, Barringer and his men set off eastwards with an escort for the Union headquarters at City Point on the James River.  While on the road they passed enormous columns of Federal troops and supplies moving west and one of Barringer's party recognized General Meade, with whom he had served in the pre-war U.S. Army, riding by, and stopped to introduce Barringer to him.  Meade offered the general some greenbacks to take with him to prison but the general refused but did ask that he be allowed to communicate with friends to supply him while a prisoner.  Then, according to Chris Calkins in The Appomattox Campaign:

Meade noticed that Sheridan had place only a corporal over the Confederate officers and immediately ordered a general officer to take his place, instructing him to tell the provost marshal in City Point that Barringer could reach anybody he wanted.

On April 5 after reaching City Point, Barringer met with the site commander, General Charles    Collis and President Abraham Lincoln who had been there since March 24.  Lincoln reminisced with Barringer about the days he'd served in Congress with his brother and asked him "Do you think I could be of any service to you?"  Lincoln gave the general a card of introduction for his use.  Barringer wrote in his diary of the meeting:

Called to see Mr Lincoln at Gen. Grant's H Qtrs - Pleased with him.  His leadership & manners have been misrepresented [by the] South.  Gave me a card to Mr Staunton [Secretary of War Edward Stanton].

General Barringer was released from prison on July 25, reaching home on July 8.  Barringer, who had opposed secession in 1860, became a Republican after the war and was condemned as a traitor by the Democratic press in North Carolina, before switching parties in 1888 to endorse the Democrat Grover Cleveland for President.  He died in 1895.

I Advise That All Preparations Be Made For Leaving Richmond Tonight

The Appomattox Campaign

Grant's general offensive along the Petersburg siege lines began at 430am on Sunday morning April 2, 1865.  Fierce fighting erupted on the entire front.  Though some Confederate troops fought tenaciously (see, for instance the defense of Fort Gregg, called by some "The Confederate Alamo", the Union forces began to break through.
(Storming Fort Gregg from petersburgsiege.org)

At 1040am Confederate Secretary of War John Breckinridge (a former United States Senator, Vice-President of the United States under President Buchanan (1857-61) and one of three rivals to Abraham Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860) received a telegram from Robert E Lee:
(Breckinridge)

I see no prospect of doing more than holding our position here until night.  I am not certain I can do that.  If I can I shall withdraw to-night north of the Appomattox, and, if possible, it will be better to withdraw the whole line to-night from the James River.  I advise that all preparations be made for leaving Richmond tonight.

President Jefferson Davis received Lee's message while attending Sunday services at St Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond.
 
Late that day, Lee told the War Department "It is absolutely necessary that we abandon our position tonight, or run the risk of being cut off in the morning".

At 8pm, Confederate troops began evacuating Petersburg and Richmond.

By 11pm, Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Cabinet departed Richmond by train from the Richmond & Danville Railroad depot (the same railroad mentioned in The Band's 1969 song The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, "Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train) headed towards Lynchburg and then south hoping to join Johnston's army in North Carolina and continue the fight.