A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton

The soil was poor, and there were hardly any farms or clearings, and the land under the trees was like a choppy sea, broken by ridges and hillocks and irregular knolls.
    There were dark little streams that never saw the sun, and these had cut shallow ravines, some of which had very steep banks. These water courses wandered and twisted and turned on themselves, soaking the low ground into bush-covered swamps, and the thickets covered their banks. Once in a great while there would be a house—paintless, sometimes made of hewn logs, looking gaunt and forsaken like the forest itself, with a hopeless corn patch and weedy pasture around it—and there were a few aimless lanes, hardly more than tracks in the jungle, which did not seem to go anywhere in particular.
    It was the last place on earth for armies to fight, and the entire Army of the Potomac was marching straight into it.
    Actually, the high command had little intention of fighting here. The two armies had been facing each other, with the Rapidan between them, a number of miles upstream from the Wilderness, and when Grant made his plans he had two choices. He could move by his right flank, sliding along the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad in the general direction of Gordonsville, swinging past Lee to the west, and forcing him to fight in open country; or he could go by his left, slipping quickly through the Wilderness, heading for a position behind Lee's right—where, as in the other case, there could be fighting in the open.
    He had taken the second choice, for reasons which seemed good to him. Chief reason was the matter of supply. Counting everybody, he would be taking some 116,000 men with him, and more than 50,000 horses, and it seemed improbable that the single-tracked railway line could supply all of them adequately. Furthermore, the railroad led through country infested with guerillas—John S. Mosby's famous irregulars, mostly, who attacked Yankee supply lines and outposts so viciously and effectively that the region between Brandy Station and Alexandria was commonly known as "Mosby s Confederacy." If the Federal army dangled at the end of a hundred miles of railroad, these men would have a field day, and so would Jeb Stuart's far-ranging cavalry, and half of the army would have to be left behind to cope with them. So the army was going to the left, where if it made progress there would be seacoast bases, with a short roadway for the enormous wagon train.
    There might have been a third choice: McClellan's old smite of 1862, putting the army on boats and going down by water to the tip of the Virginia peninsula, with a landing at Fortress Monroe and a quick march toward Richmond between York and James rivers. That way, the army could get up within shooting distance of Richmond without trouble, and the long overland hike with exposed supply lines and hard fighting at every crossroads would be avoided. Before he got to Brandy Station Grant felt that that was the way to go, and soldiers as good as John Sedgwick agreed. Why fight one's way to Richmond when the army could travel most of the way by water and come up to the doors of the Rebel capital fresh and unbloodied?
    The trouble was that it was not that kind of war any more. Meade's soldiers had noticed many changes this spring, but what they had not seen was the fact that the role of the Army of the Potomac itself had changed. The goal now was not to capture Richmond but to fight the Army of Northern Virginia—to begin to fight it as soon as possible and to keep on fighting it until one side or the other could fight no more.
    Whatever happened, Lee must never again be allowed to take the initiative. It might or it might not be possible to beat him, but it was all-important to keep him busy. It must be made impossible for him to detach troops to oppose Sherman, who was breaking his way into Georgia with the contemptuous remark that when you pierced the shell of the Confederacy you found hollowness within.