A Place Called Appomattox

7. The Flight

7 THE FLIGHT Having wrung every white citizen from the South who could be attracted, persuaded, cajoled, shamed, or forced into the army, the Confederate Congress finally authorized the unthinkable: the government that had been established in protection of the right to enslave black people turned, in the final extremity, to those very black people for its salvation. On March 17, 1865, two Richmond slaves who had been scheduled to hang that day for burglarizing a home offered themselves as the first recruits for a black Confederate battalion, thus winning executive clemency. George and Oliver—they had no other names—were taken to an empty building on the corner of Cary and Twenty-first Streets, where they shouldered broom handles to begin learning the fundamentals of close-order drill. Within ten days nearly three dozen other slaves had joined them, earning their own freedom in return for the promise of helping to preserve slavery. By the final week of March the opposing trenches stretched some forty miles, from above Richmond down to the James, across Bermuda Hundred, over the Appomattox River, below Petersburg, and out to Burgess’s Mill, on Hatcher’s Run. On paper, the Army of Northern Virginia had enough men that if they stood with their arms outstretched and their fingertips touching they would just about reach from one end of their fortified line to the other. On the opposite side, Ulysses Grant could field two men to Lee’s one. The situation would only worsen, for the long blue line kept jumping a couple of miles to the west every few weeks, and eventually it would have to cut the Southside Railroad, which served as Petersburg’s last direct connection to the rest of the South. Up north, journalists had only to look at a map to understand this, and the New York Herald predicted that Lee’s army would soon evacuate Richmond. Immediately inside the siege lines, though, editors perhaps lacked enough perspective, and a Richmond counterpart laughed at the idea.1 Soldiers suffered from no such delusions. Robert E. Lee knew something had to be done, and soon. He took the initiative early on the morning of March 25, sending John B. Gordon into the predawn darkness east of Petersburg with the remnants of Stonewall Jackson’s old corps. Gordon burst into Fort Stedman, grabbed 500 prisoners, and ripped a thousandyard gap in the Union perimeter. As the sky began to lighten, however, they saw ahead of them a second line of works nearly as strong as the first, and it soon became clear that Gordon’s corps would be annihilated if he tried to carry those entrenchments now that the Yankees were alerted. By the time Lee authorized Gordon to pull back, Union artillery and infantry up and down the line had trained a crossfire over the line of retreat, and those who attacked Fort Stedman at dawn sought safety in it by breakfast. A division of new Pennsylvania regiments—each one as big as a Confederate brigade—slammed into Gordon’s weary infantrymen and drove most of them back toward Petersburg; hundreds of Southerners surrendered inside and around Stedman, further weakening an army that could little afford their loss. Lee’s last offensive had not lasted four hours.2 The Richmond Examiner boasted of the 500 Federals who marched into the city under guard that Saturday evening, but the word on the street told the real story: Lee was thinking about breaking out and leaving both the capital and Petersburg to the enemy, but he was too weak even to do that, let alone defeat his besiegers in the field. Any sane man could tell that it would only be a matter of weeks before the last rail lines fell, and the army would have to run away, starve altogether, or surrender. The limp Confederate dollar reflected the clarity of the calamity as the price of gold skyrocketed : it closed downtown at $151.50 an ounce that Monday, sending government notes into their final inflationary plunge.3 As he had been doing since the previous May, Ulysses Grant began the spring campaign by sliding several of his divisions to his left, trying to crumble or slip around Lee’s right flank. Now he sent two corps of infantry toward Hatcher’s Run, partly to make another attempt on that flank and partly to cover a raid by Sheridan’s cavalry on the Southside tracks...