Free A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton Page A

from Chancellorsville the preceding spring, had remarked that "we do not build largely on the Eastern army," and continued; "When we hear, therefore, that the Eastern army is going to fight, we make our minds up that it is going to be defeated, and when the result is announced we feel sad enough but not disappointed." Westerners believed that the Army of the Potomac had never been made to fight all out and that when all was said and done there was something mysteriously wrong with it. The Westerners had had no Antietam or Gettysburg, but they had had a Shiloh and a Stone's River, and they felt that they had seen the Confederates at their toughest. When the IX Corps was sent to Tennessee in the fall of 1863, Western troops greeted the boys with the jeering question: "All quiet along the Potomac?" and announced caustically: "Well show you how to fight." 11
    So there were mutual d oubts, and the effect was unfor tunate. The officers of this army not only viewed Grant's advent with strong skepticism; in many cases this skepticism verged on outright hostility, so that it was ready to burst out with a bitter, triumphant "I told you so!" if the new general should run into trouble. Grant's presence here was an implied criticism of the army's prior leadership and strategy. Through him, the administration was striking its final blow at the whole complex of emotions and relationships which had come down from McClellan—and McClellan remained, next to Lee, the man in whom most of the veteran officers still had implicit confidence.
    Among the private soldiers there was mostly a great curiosity. It was noticed that of a sudden the enlisted man had become a student of newspapers and magazines, reading everything he could find about the new general in chief. Men made themselves familiar with Grant's campaigns, and it was not uncommon to see campfire groups drawing maps in the dirt with sticks to demonstrate how Vicksburg and Chattanooga had gone. At the worst, there was resigned acquiescence. One man summed up his company's opinion by saying: "He cannot be weaker or more inefficient than the generals who have wasted the lives of our comrades during the past three years." He concluded that "if he is a fighter he can find all the fighting he wants." 12
    Ohio and Pennsylvania soldiers, huddling together on a picket post, talked it over:
    'Who's this Grant that's made a lieutenant general?"
    "He's the hero of Vicksburg."
    "Well, Vicksburg wasn't much of a fight. The Rebels were out of rations and they had to surrender or starve. They had nothing but dead mules and dogs to eat, as I understand."
    The men nodded, and one said that Grant could never have penned up any of Lee's generals that way. Longstreet or Jeb Stuart "would have broken out some way and foraged around for supplies." 13
    An impressionable newspaper correspondent might describe Grant as "all-absorbed, all-observant, silent, inscrutable," a man who "controls and moves armies as he does his horse," but the enlisted man wanted more evidence. He liked the fact that Grant went about without fuss and ceremony, and he was ready to admit that "a more hopeful spirit prevailed," but for the most part he went along with the company officer who said that only time would tell whether this new general's first name was really Ulysses or Useless. 14
    Yet there was a change, and before long the men felt it. There was a perceptible tightening up, as if someone who meant business had his hands on the reins now. Orders went forth to corps and division commanders to make a radical cut in the number of men who were borne on the returns as "on special, extra, or daily duty," and attention was called to the discrepancies between the numbers reported "present for duty" and those listed as "present for duty, equipped." In brigades and divisions the inspectors general became busy, and where equipment had been lacking it suddenly materialized. Long trains of freight cars came clanking in at Brandy Station, to