Killing Lincoln - Bill O'Reilly [11]
AMELIA COURT HOUSE, VIRGINIA
As Booth and Lucy depart Newport long before their supper can be delivered, Robert E. Lee’s soldiers are marching forty long miles to dine on anything they can find, all the while looking over their shoulders, fearful that Grant and the Union army will catch them from behind.
Lee has an eight-hour head start after leaving Petersburg. He figures that if he can make it to Amelia Court House before Grant catches him, he and his men will be amply fed by the waiting 350,000 rations of smoked meat, bacon, biscuits, coffee, sugar, flour, and tea that are stockpiled there. Then, after that brief stop to fill their bellies, they will resume their march to North Carolina.
And march they must. Even though Jefferson Davis and his cabinet have already fled Richmond and traveled to the Carolinas on the very same rail line that is delivering the food to Lee’s forces, there is no chance of the army using the railway as an escape route. There simply isn’t enough time to load and transport all of Lee’s 30,000 men.
The day-and-a-half trudge to Amelia Court House begins optimistically enough, with Lee’s men happy to finally be away from Petersburg and looking forward to their first real meal in months. But forty miles on foot is a long way, and mile by mile the march turns into a death pageant. The line of retreating rebels and supply wagons stretches for twenty miles. The men are in wretched physical condition after months in the trenches. Their feet have lost their calluses and their muscles the firm tone they knew earlier in the war, when the Army of Northern Virginia was constantly on the march. Even worse, each painful step is a reminder that, of the two things vital to an army on the move—food and sleep—they lack one and have no chance of getting the other.
Lee’s army is in total disarray. There is no longer military discipline, or any attempt to enforce it. The men swear under their breaths, grumbling and swearing a thousand other oaths about wanting to go home and quit this crazy war. The loose columns of Confederate soldiers resemble a mob of hollow-eyed zombies instead of a highly skilled fighting force. The men “rumbled like persons in a dream,” one captain will later write. “It all seemed to me like a troubled vision. I was consumed by fever, and when I attempted to walk I staggered like a drunken man.”
The unlucky are barefoot, their leather boots and laces rotted away from the rains and mud of winter. Others wear ankle-high Confederate brogans with holes in the soles and uppers. The only men sporting new boots are those who stripped them off dead Union soldiers. The southerners resent it that everything the Union soldiers wear seems to be newer, better, and in limitless supply. A standing order has been issued for Confederate soldiers not to dress in confiscated woolen Union overcoats, but given a choice between being accidentally shot by a fellow southerner or surviving the bitter nightly chill, the rebels pick warmth every time. A glance up and down the retreat shows the long gray line speckled everywhere with blue.
Bellies rumble. No one sings. No one bawls orders. A Confederate officer later sets the scene: there is “no regular column, no regular pace. When a soldier became weary he fell out, ate his scanty rations—if indeed, he had any to eat—rested, rose, and resumed the march when the inclination dictated. There were not many words spoken. An indescribable sadness weighed upon us.”
It is even harder for the troops evacuating Richmond, on their way to link up with Lee at Amelia Court House. Many are not soldiers at all—they are sailors who burned their ships rather than let them fall into Union hands. Marching is new to them. Mere hours into the journey, many have fallen out of the ranks from blisters and exhaustion.
Making matters worse is the very real fear of Union troops launching a surprise attack. “The nervousness,” a Confederate major will remember, “resulting from this constant strain of starvation, fatigue and lack of sleep was a dangerous thing, sometimes producing