A Stillness at Appomattox

A Stillness at Appomattox

“All up and down the lines the men blinked at one another, unable to realize that the hour they had waited for so long was actually at hand. There was a truce…” Bruce Catton’s Pulitzer prize winning book A Stillness at Appomattox chronicles the final year of the American Civil War. This book taught me a lot more about the Civil War than I ever learned through the public school system. Bruce Catton brought to life the real day to day life of the soldiers and the generals who led them into battle.

The day to day life for the regular soldier was not glorious. Many times the regiments were low on supplies such as food and clothing. They lived in the elements. Medical conditions were grotesque because of the lack of advanced equipment and anesthesia. “Discipline was enforced with brutality” as if all the other conditions were not bad enough.

The author is graphic in his detail of the people and the places of importance during this time in history. The book is written more from a Northern point of view and so I didn’t get quite the same perspective of the Southern side but still learned more than I knew before.

A few chapters into the book the war year of 1864 begins with a changing of the guard again with President Lincoln appointing Ulysses Grant to lead the Army of the Potomac.

Grant has an illustrious past. People talked about his being a drunkard but Catton says “He was simply a man infinitely more complex then most people could realize.” Grant, even though he was a West Point graduate, never wanted to be a soldier or to have a life in the military. He wanted to be a teacher. What Grant did bring to the Army of the Potomac was his ability to relate to the soldiers and made them his army. He completely retrained and re-organized the armies, and re-enlisted troops that were going to go home. They all realized that under Grant the Army of the Potomac changed which meant now that the entire war would change.

The Battle of the Wilderness was a very unusual battle because it was fought in the woods. The terrain and the trees wouldn’t allow for the smoke to clear and it was dark anyway because of the trees. The men described it as eerie. Both sides fired blindly because of the smoke. Artillery was abandoned because they could not transport it through the woods. So those soldiers became...

... middle of paper ...

... or ending the war, because it was the only rail junction connecting Richmond to the rest of the Confederacy. Faced with the need to defend a line running continuously from north of Richmond to Petersburg, the Confederates were stretched thinner and thinner. Eventually their line broke. Within a little over a week it was over. The final year of the Civil War was something new in the history of warfare - never before had two large armies remained locked in continuous combat for such a long period of time. In the past the armies would fight, retreat, regroup, and usually meet at some later date and place but in 1864-65 even though they moved around some it was almost one continuous fight to the end.

On the final day the Union soldiers were told that “if they hurried this was the day they could finish everything” although that inspired them, they were also promised that once they reached Appomattox Station rations would be handed out. Many of the men later admitted they did so “because they figured it was the quickest way to get breakfast.” After a small skirmish near Appomattox Station Lee decided to surrender his army right before the Union carried out their attack.