by Ron Chernow
On April 1, 1865, at Five Forks came the swift blow from which Robert E. Lee never recovered, the encounter one southern officer eulogized as the Confederacy’s Waterloo. Late in the afternoon, an impatient Sheridan sent his dismounted cavalry crashing into Confederate lines, aided by Gouverneur Warren’s corps on his flank. Sheridan was as energetic as a storybook soldier, riding Rienzi up and down the line, shaking his fist at the enemy and inspiring his men with pungent oaths. “The cowardly scoundrels can’t fight such brave men as mine,” he roared, or “Kill that infernal skulker.”17 Porter recorded a horrifying moment when a Union soldier was struck by a bullet in his neck, which spouted blood. “I’m killed!” the man exclaimed, slumping to the ground. “You’re not hurt a bit!” Sheridan expostulated. “Pick up your gun, man, and move right on to the front.” So commanding were Sheridan’s words that the stricken man hoisted his musket and stumbled forward a dozen paces before keeling over and dropping dead.18 In another extraordinary moment, Sheridan vaulted on horseback over a Confederate barrier only to drop down in the middle of astounded enemy soldiers.19
Pickett’s army didn’t simply reel under the bluecoats’ onslaught but disintegrated, allowing Sheridan to capture thousands of prisoners, almost half the rebel soldiers, while the other half fled in fright. When Porter rode into Grant’s camp with the glad tidings, he found the officers grouped around “a blazing campfire,” with Grant “wrapped in a long blue overcoat and smoking his usual cigar.”20 Not waiting to dismount, Porter shouted the news from horseback to electrifying effect: all the officers except Grant leapt to their feet, shook hands, spun their hats in the air, and engaged in backslapping. Typically, Grant reacted in businesslike fashion. Eager to exploit enemy weakness and knowing Lee would now have to abandon Petersburg and Richmond, he disappeared into his tent and scratched out orders to batter the entire Petersburg front at 4:45 the next morning. As ever, he reasoned that because Lee had shored up forces on his left, he must have weakened his center. It represented a huge military gamble, but Grant was eager to move in for the kill.
Despite the moment’s high drama, he slumbered peacefully on his camp bed that night. As dawn broke and hundreds of Union guns boomed simultaneously, the attack was launched while Grant waited at headquarters. A vast flying wedge of soldiers descended on all points of the Confederate lines. After the grinding misery of a four-year war, the tempo speeded up in an almost unimaginable manner. Union troops under Generals Ord, Andrew Humphreys, and Horatio Wright stormed Petersburg, slashing openings and taking the outer ring of defenses.
As soon as Grant heard of this triumph, he mounted his horse “to join the troops who were inside the works. When I arrived there I rode my horse over the parapet just as Wright’s three thousand prisoners were coming out.”21 When Grant encountered Wright’s men, they burst into cheers unlike anything he had ever heard. Once inside Petersburg’s fortifications, he dismounted and gazed at the sophisticated ramparts with something akin to awe. “They are exceedingly strong,” he told Julia, “and I wonder at the success of our troops carrying them by storm.”22 By his own estimate, he had captured twelve thousand prisoners and fifty pieces of artillery from a southern army once deemed unbeatable. The scene unfolding on the rebel side was a mirror image of such elation. Submitting to the inevitable, Lee ordered his crippled, depleted army to retreat from Petersburg; to save the remnant of this force, he needed to evacuate Richmond as well. As he informed Secretary of War Breckinridge: “I see no prospect of doing more than holding our position here till night. I am not certain that I can do that; if I can I shall withdraw tonight north of the Appomattox.”23
Late that afternoon, Grant transmitted to Lincoln news of his victory, inviting him to tour the captured Petersburg works the next day. Julia was at City Point with Lincoln when he received the message and noted his “radiant” expression.24 “Allow me to tender to you and all with you the nation’s grateful thanks for this additional & magnificent success,” Lincoln replied to Grant. “At your Kind suggestion I think I will meet you tomorrow.”25 Some officers urged Grant to pierce Petersburg’s inner lines that afternoon, but Grant argued that Lee would evacuate the city that night, sparing them any need for further bloodshed. Sheridan had choked off the last railroad into Petersburg, making Confederate survival there impossible. True to Grant’s prediction, the Confederate army stole westward at nightfall and Grant issued orders to overrun the town at dawn the next day.
Once Lee decided to retreat from Petersburg, he wired Jefferson Davis and advised him to leave Richmond at once. The messenger who bore this telegram crept down the aisle of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond and handed it to Davis, who turned deathly pale, bolted from his pew, and left. As alarmed whispers spread through the church, government officials fled and soon the whole congregation poured into the street, where pandemonium broke loose. People scurried about frantically, desperate to desert the town. At the train station, officials scrambled to load treasury gold and government archives onto trains bound for Danville. The cabinet rode off by two in the afternoon. People clambered onto roofs of overloaded trains or clung feverishly to their sides. Determined to deny the Yankees anything of value, residents set ablaze cotton and tobacco, and flames enfolded the town by nightfall.26 In the early morning of April 3, retreating Confederate troops exploded ordnance depots, causing thousands of shells to burst until “a vast column of dense black smoke shot into the air . . . several bright jets of flame . . . augured the breaking forth of that terrible conflagration which subsequently swept across the heart of the city,” wrote a British correspondent.27 Shattered glass spilled across sidewalks. By the time Yankee troops under Godfrey Weitzel arrived at 8:15 the next morning, their first order of business was to douse towering sheets of flame that had burned hundreds of buildings in what came to be known as the Burnt District. In South Carolina, Mary Chesnut penned an epitaph for the Confederacy: “Everything is lost in Richmond, even our archives. Blue-black is our horizon.”28
Grant was hardly surprised that Lee had abandoned Richmond; his only surprise was that he had held it for so long at such dear cost. In later years, he expounded on Lee’s error in holding on to Richmond: “After I crossed the James, the holding of Richmond was a mistake . . . Lee sacrificed his judgment as a soldier to his duty as a citizen and the leader of the South. I think Lee deserves honor for that, for if he had left Richmond when Sherman invaded Georgia, it would have given us another year of war.”29
As word of the Petersburg and Richmond surrenders spread to northern cities, the joy was as profound as the pent-up misery of the war had been deep. In Washington crowds filled the streets with raucous people laughing and bellowing hurrahs. Philadelphia residents broke out flags and flapped them deliriously. Even in the sober precincts of Wall Street, George Templeton Strong found a euphoria that transformed pure strangers into instant comrades: “I walked about on the outskirts of the crowd, shaking hands with everybody, congratulating and being congratulated by scores of men I hardly know even by sight.”30
On the morning of April 3, Grant entered Petersburg and, with bullets still ricocheting off walls, took shelter with Meade in a deserted brick house at 21 Market Street that offered cover from enemy fire. Members of the town council—“old men, in homespun, butternut clothing . . . bearing an improvised flag of truce that looked suspiciously like a dirty linen table cloth,” said one journalist—surrendered to the new authorities.31 In the distance, Grant discerned the Confederate army escaping across a bridge over the Appomattox River. He deliberately refrained from bringing up artillery to mow it down. “At all events I had not the heart to turn the artillery upon such a mass of defeated and fleeing men,” he explained, “and I hoped to capture them soon.”32 Instead of trailing Lee’s army, Grant preferred to let them withdraw and then race ahead of them, obstructing their access to remaining food supplies in western Virginia and blocking their access to Johnston in North Carolina. Few white residents poked
their heads out of doors, while small knots of blacks rejoiced at their Union liberators. As Grant sat on the porch of the house, curious white pedestrians studied the man who had been their constant nemesis and now suddenly turned up in their midst.
Taking up Grant’s offer, Lincoln, with Tad in tow, slowly made his way on horseback to Petersburg, garbed in a black suit, a silk hat, and trousers that inched up his legs as he rode. Despite anguished concerns about his personal safety, he reassured Stanton, “I will take care of myself.”33 He traversed battlefields covered with mutilated, bloated bodies, and William Crook noted that the president looked upon “one man with a bullet-hole through his forehead, and another with both arms shot away.” As Lincoln mused on these dreadful visions, his “face settled into its old lines of sadness.”34
On the fringes of Petersburg, Robert Lincoln met his father with horses and a cavalry escort, and the retinue proceeded through eerily deserted streets, passing dozens of skeletal houses with gaping holes blown through their walls. When they reached the brick house where Grant awaited them, the general in chief descended the stairs to greet the president. A beaming Lincoln bounded forward, grasping Grant’s hand robustly, his joy gushing to the surface. With a droll smile he declared, “Do you know, General, I have had a sort of sneaking idea for some days that you intended to do something like this.”35 As they conversed on the porch, neither Lincoln nor Grant knew of Richmond’s downfall. In an expansive frame of mind, Lincoln expatiated on his ideas for southern Reconstruction. Grant felt he could be open with Lincoln about upcoming battle plans. He expressed pleasure that the eastern army was defeating Lee. Otherwise western congressmen might have lorded it over their eastern counterparts after the war. Lincoln confessed he had never given the matter much thought “because his anxiety was so great that he did not care where the aid came from, so the work was done.”36 It is interesting to note that the astute Lincoln never weighed this question while the supposedly apolitical Grant volunteered this insight. As the two men chatted, the little yard before them filled with former slaves emancipated by the triumphant troops in blue. Lincoln and these freed people stared at one another in silent wonder. It would have been hard to say which was more surprising: the sudden freedom of the slaves or the fact that the president who brought forth the Emancipation Proclamation was there to greet them personally in their first hours of freedom.
Lincoln and Grant talked for ninety minutes, hoping to hear the momentous news of Richmond’s fall, which didn’t arrive. When the two parted, Lincoln pumped Grant’s hand, wishing him “God-speed and every success.”37 Grant rode off to join Sheridan, Ord, and Meade in hot pursuit of Lee. The last great chase of the Civil War was on. As Grant sped west, he surveyed the wreckage deposited by Lee’s fleeing army: discarded artillery, ammunition, clothing, burned wagons, and ambulances. Union forces had taken twelve thousand Confederate prisoners, with large numbers of stragglers rounded up everywhere. Grant spent the night at Sutherland Station, where he received word that Richmond had fallen into Weitzel’s hands. The surrounding generals reacted with jubilation, one soldier emitting a cry of joy: “Stack your muskets and go home.”38 True to his nature, Grant showed no emotion, merely saying: “I am sorry I did not get this information before we left the President. However, I suppose he has heard it by this time.”39
The riven portions of Lee’s army, pared down to thirty-five thousand men and separated on opposite sides of the Appomattox River were set to converge at Amelia Court House, thirty-five miles west of Petersburg. The fond hope of these famished men was to find stores of rations awaiting them there; instead, due to a bureaucratic snafu in Richmond, they came upon ammunition of little value without rested horses to carry it. The day Lee sacrificed in waiting for supplies proved costly. He had planned to move along the railroad tracks toward Danville and merge with the northward-moving army of Joseph Johnston, defeating Sherman before Grant intervened. Once Grant got wind of this, he ordered Sheridan to move west on the railroad with all possible speed, and Meade traced the same route the next morning.
By the time Lincoln returned to City Point, he had learned of Richmond’s capture, erasing four years of inexpressible heartache. “Thank God I have lived to see this,” he told Admiral Porter. “It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone. I want to see Richmond.”40 Grant had prevailed upon Lincoln to extend his City Point stay, promising that he would soon be able to tour the liberated Confederate capital.
Intent upon capturing Lee’s army, Grant was never tempted to enter Richmond and play the swaggering conquistador, a piece of symbolism as profound as his upcoming mercy at Appomattox. The historian John Lothrop Motley praised this exemplany restraint: “There is something very sublime to my imagination in the fact that Grant has never yet set his foot in Richmond, and perhaps never will.”41 With poetic justice, black soldiers joined the entrance of Union troops into the ravaged capital on April 3. The message wasn’t lost on the townspeople. “The white citizens felt annoyed that the city should be held mostly by negro troops,” wrote the rebel war clerk John Jones.42
The next day, escorted by Admiral Porter and a mere ten sailors equipped with carbines, Abraham Lincoln bravely strode Richmond’s streets, past hundreds of charred, blasted buildings, his steps shadowed by black people who shouted with rapture, as if suddenly beholding the Messiah. One elderly black man exclaimed, “Glory, hallelujah!” and knelt reverently at his feet. Lincoln stood chagrined. “Don’t kneel to me,” he admonished the man tenderly. “That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will hereinafter enjoy. I am but God’s humble instrument.”43 Lincoln traveled to the Confederate White House—his face “pale and haggard,” said one observer, with “a serious, dreamy expression” said another—and occupied the chair so recently warmed by Jefferson Davis.44
During these stirring days, one disaffected spectator was Julia Grant, who felt snubbed by Mary Lincoln and frozen out of her social circle once Ulysses departed. The Lincolns still stayed aboard the River Queen, anchored in the James River, but Julia enjoyed virtually no contact with them, even though she occupied a boat only a hundred yards away. “I saw very little of the presidential party now, as Mrs. Lincoln had a good deal of company and seemed to have forgotten us. I felt this deeply and could not understand it, as my regard for the family was not only that of respect but affection.” Her bitter sense of exclusion sharpened after Petersburg and Richmond fell: “All of these places were visited by the President and party, and I, not a hundred yards from them, was not invited to join them.”45 Accompanied by other ladies, Julia rolled in a carriage through Richmond’s empty streets. Back in her stateroom, she lamented the terrible devastation wrought by the war. “How many homes made desolate! How many hearts broken! How much youth sacrificed!” Suddenly she gave vent to tears and realized that she also mourned the vanished way of life that had bred her in Missouri. “Could it be that my visit reminded me of my dear old home in Missouri?”46
With the war’s end in sight, questions emerged as to whether the Confederate leaders should be treated leniently or harshly. While Lincoln seemed inclined toward leniency, Vice President Andrew Johnson, in a speech celebrating Richmond’s fall, previewed a more vindictive spirit. When his allusion to Jefferson Davis elicited shouts of “Hang him! Hang him!” Johnson appeased the bloodthirsty crowd. “Yes, I say hang him twenty times.” He then extended his retributive wrath to include other ringleaders of the rebellion. “When you ask me what I would do, my reply is—I would arrest them, I would try them, I would convict them, and I would hang them . . . Treason must be made odious.”47
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BY APRIL 4, 1865, Grant had decided to give Lee no respite until he knocked out his army and terminated the war. Nothing mattered any longer except tracking down the enemy army and destroying it. Rawlins applauded his boss’s fighting spirit, his determination to end the protracted str
uggle. “I had feared he might not so decide,” he told his wife, “but all is well now and promising early brightness of the national sky.”48 With Sheridan and his cavalry thundering ahead, straining to overtake the enemy, Grant sorted through intelligence reports to figure out the exact route Lee would take from Amelia Court House. Grant rode through a disorderly landscape swarming with rebel deserters—dazed, exhausted men, often sprawled by the roadside next to wounded brethren. “Houses through the country are nearly all used as hospitals for wounded men,” he informed Stanton.49 At noon, Sheridan reported that Lee’s army, crossing to the north side of the Appomattox River, seemed to be retreating toward Lynchburg in western Virginia.
With the finely honed instinct of a hunter seeking wounded prey, Sheridan wrote to Grant from Jetersville on April 5, saying Lee was at nearby Amelia Court House, had nearly exhausted his rations, and the time had come to trounce the enemy. Lee had ordered rations to be brought up from Danville to the railway junction at Farmville, which now beckoned as his last hope for salvation. He had been reduced to headlong flight to secure food and avert outright starvation. By moving aggressively, Sheridan thought he could foil any move Lee made to Farmville.
That evening, after a wearisome day in the saddle, Grant received a letter from Sheridan that had profound repercussions. It arrived in an unconventional form: a Union scout, tricked out in Confederate garb to dupe the enemy, held a tinfoil pellet in his mouth with a message wrapped inside. Sheridan entreated Grant: “I wish you were here yourself—I feel confident of capturing the Army of Northern Va. if we exert ourselves—I see no escape for Lee.”50 As the great drama hastened to its climax, Grant decided to make his headquarters with his advance troops and, without pausing for supper, set off with Rawlins and a dozen orderlies to join Sheridan.