The Year of Decision

A STILLNESS AT APPOMATTOX (438 pp.) --Bruce Callon--Doubleday ($5).

Bruce Catton is a journalist (the Nation) who has spent three years making the Civil War sound as fresh and exciting as if it had been fought yesterday. In A Stillness at Appomattox, he ends the story of the Army of the Potomac that he began with Mr. Lincoln's Army and continued with Glory Road. Once again, without stinting the strategies of the generals, he digs into regimental histories and private diaries to create a lively sense of the common soldier performing his uncommon chore of fighting and dying.

It was the privates who dubbed the Army of the Potomac "Grant's army" after the day in March 1864 when the man with the bristly red beard and black sugarloaf hat came to visit the army's nominal commander, Meade. Grant was something of a mystery to this army. His breakfast was a cucumber sliced in vinegar and a cup of coffee; if he ate meat, it had to be cooked black, and he never started the daily round without two dozen cigars stowed in his pockets.

Hard-Bitten Veterans. The Army of the Potomac was less of a mystery to Grant. He knew that a handful of bumbling leaders--from McDowell to Hooker --had given it a galloping inferiority complex about Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. By 1864, not only morale but men were ebbing away as their enlistments came to an end. Yet Grant pinned his faith on hard-bitten veterans like the soldier who said: "They use a man here just the same as they do a turkey at a shooting match, fire at it all day and if they don't kill it raffle it off in the evening; so with us, if they can't kill you in three years they want you for three more--but I will stay."

Once in overall command, Grant fleshed out this backbone of veterans with raw recruits, revamped whole regiments, brigades and corps, and then shoved the Army of the Potomac across the Rapidan toward Richmond. With Lee blocking it, the road to Richmond was a series of bloody detours. Never out of contact for more than a few hours in eleven months, Grant's men and Lee's men took bloody swipes at each other in the Wilderness, at Bloody Angle, Spotsylvania Court House, Cold Harbor and the Crater. On the Union side, each of these actions was well conceived but rawly executed.

One of the North's best chances was lost at the battle of the Crater, outside Petersburg, the last defense post for Richmond. A bright young colonel on General Burnside's staff thought up the idea of digging a 500-ft. tunnel under the Confederates key redoubt, blowing it up and running a ground attack through the breach. The tunnel was dug, 320 kegs of powder were planted, and after a misfiring fuse was relit, the earth flew up, as one soldier wrote, like "a waterspout as seen at sea." A gap 500 yards wide opened in the Confederate line. The attackers rushed forward--only to bog, company after company, in the wide crater. The Confederates began lobbing mortar shells, and within a short time, close to one-third of the attackers were wiped out.

Palm Sunday. Though Grant winced at the human cost, he was dogged enough to go on paying it month after month. But what the Union was losing in blood, the Confederacy was losing in ground and hope. Sherman took Atlanta, Sheridan wheeled through the Shenandoah and sent 60 miles of that fertile valley up in smoke. By the spring of 1865 Richmond fell easily, and Lee and the remnants of his army were boxed in near Appomattox Court House.

Fifty years later, a Pennsylvania veteran remembered fraternizing with Confederate soldiers on the Palm Sunday that Lee surrendered to Grant: "As soon as I got among these boys I felt and was treated as well as if I had been among our own boys, and a person would of thought we were of the same Army and had been Fighting under the Same Flag."

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