Grant
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Even though Sheridan’s camp lay ten miles off, Grant had to traverse hazardous countryside and skirt rebel lines, logging more than thirty miles on horseback: “I remember being challenged by pickets, and sometimes I had great difficulty in getting through the lines. I remember picking my way through the sleeping soldiers, bivouacked in the open field.”51 Around 10 p.m., Grant reached Sheridan’s small frame headquarters in Jetersville where he found aides toiling by candlelight while Sheridan dozed in an elevated loft. When Grant entered, Sheridan climbed down a ladder “with no clothing but a shirt, pants, and boots,” said an observer.52 After supplying his weary guests with beef, chicken, and coffee, Sheridan again implored Grant to make the supreme push for victory. An intense debate had divided Sheridan and Meade, with Meade wanting to guard Richmond to the east, while Sheridan feared this would facilitate Lee’s escape to the west. Sheridan wished to clobber Lee’s army now. With his inimitable gusto, he pored over maps and sketched diagrams, showing the positions of Lee’s columns and how he could capture his entire army. “Lee is in a bad fix,” confessed Grant, who tried to tamp down expectations, resisting premature euphoria. “It will be difficult for him to get away.” “Damn him,” Sheridan spluttered, “he can’t get away,” then he let fly a volley of profanities.53 These words rattled around in Grant’s mind. He knew Sheridan would stalk Lee with his usual febrile intensity. “My judgment coincided with Sheridan’s,” Grant recalled. “I felt we ought to find Lee, wherever he was, and strike him. The question was not the occupation of Richmond, but the destruction of the army.”54
Accompanied by Sheridan, Grant consulted with an ailing, dyspeptic Meade, arguing the time had come to scrap prudence and stake everything on victory. Reiterating his wartime credo, Grant insisted he did not want to take Richmond, which was “only a collection of houses,” but grab Robert E. Lee’s army, “an active force injuring the country.”55 Among other things, Grant hoped to throw his army between Lee and Johnston’s army in the Carolinas, isolating both and ruling out any cooperation. “I explained to Meade that we did not want to follow the enemy; we wanted to get ahead of him, and that his orders would allow the enemy to escape.”56 It was now too late for Grant to pretend that Meade made the major decisions for the Army of the Potomac. On the spot, he took out a pencil and handed Meade orders for his entire infantry to move on Amelia Court House early the next morning.57
That night, Lee abandoned his position there and raced to stay ahead of the Union army, his abject soldiers reduced to pleading for food from spectators lining the route. At the battle of Sayler’s Creek (sometimes spelled Sailor’s Creek) the next day, Sheridan isolated a corps of Confederate infantry under General Richard S. Ewell, shattering a solid quarter of Lee’s army. “The enemy, seeing little chance of escape, fought like a tiger at bay,” Sheridan wrote.58 After furious fighting, Sheridan collared six rebel generals and six thousand prisoners. George Armstrong Custer helped to capture and burn hundreds of Confederate wagons. Like disoriented sleepwalkers, Lee’s gallant but now spent soldiers could scarcely function any longer, one correspondent telling how “hundreds of men dropped from exhaustion, and thousands let fall their muskets from inability to carry them any further.”59 These dazed retreating figures had the extra handicap of having to stop and turn to fire, making them ready targets for Union marksmen. With his army eroded, Lee understood the terrible meaning of the defeat, destined to be the last major engagement between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia. As he sat astride Traveller, watching in horror as his noble band of soldiers broke down into a chaotic rabble, he let forth a poignant lament: “My God! Has the army been dissolved?”60
Even before receiving news from Sayler’s Creek, Lincoln had narrowly monitored developments. At noon on April 6, he summoned Mary and others into a drawing room of the River Queen to regale them with the flow of uplifting bulletins from Grant. Once again Lincoln seemed to possess limitless energy, shucking off the war’s oppressive weight. “His whole appearance, pose, and bearing had marvelously changed,” noted Senator James Harlan. “That indescribable sadness . . . had suddenly changed for an equally indescribable expression of serene joy, as if conscious that the great purpose of his life had been attained.”61 When Sheridan rushed off a message to Grant—“If the thing is pressed I think that Lee will surrender”—Lincoln endorsed this audacious declaration: “Let the thing be pressed. A. Lincoln.”62
The latest victory effected a critical transformation in Grant’s outlook. Quite unlike Sheridan, he hadn’t expected to capture Lee’s army in its entirety. Now he had to revise his thinking. Upon reaching Sayler’s Creek, he observed prisoners “coming in by shoals, I saw there was no more fighting left in that army.”63 He reflected on a conversation he had with a Virginia doctor named Smith, who relayed a startling pronouncement made by Richard Ewell, now in captivity. Ewell regarded the Confederate cause as so helpless that he thought “that for every man that was killed after this in the war somebody is responsible, and it would be but very little better than murder.”64 Spending the night at Burkeville, Grant decided the time had come to propose to Lee the surrender of his army.
By the afternoon of April 7, riding in light rain, applauded by soldiers as he passed—he lifted his hat and nodded in response—Grant arrived at Farmville and heard the clock ticking down toward the end of the war. “Every moment now is important to us,” he warned Meade.65 Galvanized by the fast-moving situation, Grant traveled without baggage, his clothes soiled from squalid roads. Separated from his headquarters wagons, he didn’t even transport a dress sword, making it pure happenstance that he was not grandly appareled for his rendezvous with Lee two days later. In the town hotel, an ample brick building with a wide porch, he set up temporary headquarters. However fine in better days, the dowdy hostelry now appeared “almost destitute of furniture,” Grant wrote.66 That morning, Lee had passed through Farmville, where he tried to resuscitate his faltering army with waiting rations. Having abandoned plans to escape south toward Danville and the North Carolina border, he planned to drive west to Appomattox Station, where the next batch of supplies, he prayed, would await him in railway cars. If all went according to plan, he would reach Lynchburg and still more abundant supplies and maybe vanish into the vast hinterland of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sheridan intended to make sure Lee never reached Appomattox Station and wrote Grant with that pledge.
At five in the afternoon, Grant conferred on the hotel verandah with Generals Ord and John Gibbon. Before they hurried off to assist Sheridan, Grant said in a disarmingly soft-spoken voice, “I have a great mind to summon Lee, to surrender.”67 Taking up his dispatch book, he wrote on its thin yellow pages, interleaved with carbon sheets. In his usual concise style, he began his letter to Lee: “GENERAL, The result of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Va. in this struggle. I feel that it is so and regard it as my duty to shift from myself, the responsibility of any further effusion of blood by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the C. S. [Confederate States] Army known as the Army of Northern Va. Very respectfully your obt. svt U. S. Grant Lt. Gn.”68 Riding under a flag of truce, Brigadier General Seth Williams and an orderly disappeared down darkening country lanes to deliver this momentous message to Lee.
Awaiting the reply, Grant eased into a chair on the verandah, which afforded him a front-row seat as emboldened soldiers from Wright’s Sixth Corps moved by with a crisp, elastic step. It developed into one of the war’s more theatrical scenes. The soldiers, who had learned to love Grant, spotted him on the porch and saluted him with exultant cheers as they swung by, crooning “John Brown’s Body.” When Grant rose and stood by the banister, puffing his cigar, the ovation swelled in volume. As night fell, a starry sky stood revealed, washed clean by the day’s rainfall. The soldiers tramped by in bright moonshine, their movements thrown into silhouette by the powerful glow of bonfires bordering the r
oute. They grabbed sticks, thrust them into the blaze, then strode on with flaming torches, as if participating in a candlelight election parade. “The night march had become a grand review,” noted Horace Porter, “with Grant as the reviewing officer.”69
Grant’s message reached Lee around 10 p.m. at a little cottage where he was bedding down for the night. He perused it with a blank face that would have done credit to Grant at his most inscrutable, then handed the sheet to his most reliable deputy, James Longstreet, who instantly vetoed surrender with the admonition, “Not yet.”70 Now a study in contradiction, Lee was convinced the war was hopeless, yet was reluctant to fall on his sword. “I have never believed we could, against the gigantic combination for our subjugation, make good in the long run our independence unless foreign powers should, directly or indirectly assist us,” he mused aloud to General William Pendleton. A devout believer in the Confederate cause, Lee had braced himself to fight until the last moment: “We had, I was satisfied, sacred principles to maintain and rights to defend, for which we were in duty bound to do our best, even if we perished in the endeavor.”71 The comment belies the notion that Lee fought simply from loyalty to his home state of Virginia and betokens a more militant attachment to Confederate ideology.
Lee sat down and formulated his thoughts to Grant: “GENERAL:—I have received your note of this date. Though not entertaining the opinion you express of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of N. Va. I reciprocate your desire to avoid useless effusion of blood & therefore before Considering your proposition ask the terms you will offer on condition of its surrender.”72 A courier galloped off into the night. Grant was resting in his room, well after midnight, when he was given Lee’s response. He wisely chose to sleep on his response. The next morning, he sent Lee a delicately worded note that dropped the defiant tone that had earned him the nickname “Unconditional Surrender Grant”:
GENERAL, Your note of last evening, in reply to mine of same date, asking the conditions on which I will accept the surrender of the Army of N. Va. is just received. In reply I would say that peace being my great desire there is but one condition I insist upon, namely: that the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified for taking up arms again, against the Government of the United States, until properly exchanged.
I will meet you or will designate Officers to meet any officers you may name for the same purpose, at any point agreeable to you, for the purpose of arranging definitely the terms upon which the surrender of the Army of N. Va. will be received.
Very respectfully your obt. svt. U. S. GRANT Lt. Gn73
By April 8, Grant felt confident enough about the outcome that he assured Stanton he expected to compel Lee’s surrender the next day. Far from being exhausted, Sheridan’s men operated on the spare reserves of energy armies muster in the last spurts of winning wars. Many of Lee’s soldiers, by contrast, who came from the surrounding region, began to dissolve back into the countryside from whence they came. As northern politicians tingled with expectation, future president Rutherford B. Hayes noted that “the glorious news is coming so fast that I hardly know how to think and feel about it. It is so just that Grant, who is by all odds our man of greatest merit, should get this victory.”74 Still, Grant grappled with tremendous anxiety at this pivotal juncture. Lee was approaching supplies sent by railroad at Appomattox Station while his own supply base receded uncomfortably in the rear. He figured that he had, at most, a day to close the contest before he would need to retreat and feed his own army. Lee, in turn, knew that if his army could survive another day, he might penetrate farther west to Lynchburg and find a haven in the Virginia and Tennessee mountains.
Grant’s morning letter reached Lee after dark when he read it in a roadway by the uncertain glare of a candle held aloft by an aide. He pondered the message with an impassive face before passing it to the aide. “How would you answer that?” he inquired. The young man, with southern pride, responded, “I would answer no such letter.” Lee knew such intransigence would no longer suffice.75 Under the surface, he had been gripped by turbulent feelings all day, striding about in a black mood. Always in tight control of his emotions, Lee sat down by the road and composed his reply to Grant as he clung to his last shred of dignity.
I received at a late hour your note of today—In mine of yesterday I did not intend to propose the Surrender of the Army of N. Va—but to ask the terms of your proposition. To be frank, I do not think the emergency has arisen to call for the Surrender of this Army, but as the restoration of peace should be the Sole object of all, I desired to know whether your proposals would lead to that end. I cannot therefore meet you with a view to Surrender the Army of N–Va—but as far as your proposal may affect the C. S. [Confederate States] forces under my Command & tend to the restoration of peace, I should be pleased to meet you at 10 A m [sic] tomorrow on the old stage road to Richmond between the picket lines of the two armies—76
As Grant awaited the reply, the bottled-up tension inside him had triggered a pounding migraine headache. Settled in a farmhouse for the night, he turned to his usual sovereign remedies, soaking his feet in hot water mixed with mustard and slapping mustard plasters on his wrists and neck. The tormenting headache would not pass. That staff officers banged out tunes on a parlor piano surely aggravated the misery for the tone-deaf Grant.77
Around midnight, Rawlins brought in Lee’s letter, which Grant read aloud. “It looks as if Lee still means to fight,” he commented, regretting his foe’s obstinacy. “I will reply in the morning.”78 A heated exchange ensued with Rawlins, who, uncompromising as ever, blamed Lee for shifting the negotiating ground from outright surrender to peace talks. “No, sir. No, sir,” he declared hotly. “Why, it is a positive insult—an attempt, in an underhanded way, to change the whole terms of the correspondence.” Grant interpreted Lee’s statement more charitably, not simply from the standpoint of military advantage but from human sympathy for what his chastened opponent must be feeling. “It amounts to the same thing, Rawlins,” Grant explained. “He is only trying to be let down easy.” He had no doubt of prevailing in his upcoming encounter with Lee. “If I meet Lee he will surrender before I leave.”79 Rawlins reminded Grant that Lincoln and Stanton had delegated no power to him to arrange terms of peace. “Your business is to capture or destroy Lee’s army.”80
Perhaps disturbed by this or else tormented by his headache, Grant, usually an excellent sleeper, managed only a few fitful hours of rest. When Horace Porter checked on him at 4 a.m., he discovered an empty room, finding Grant instead “pacing up and down in the yard, holding both hands to his head. Upon inquiring how he felt, he replied that he had had very little sleep, and was still suffering the most excruciating pain.”81 Once again an agonizing headache manifested the extraordinary stress under which Grant labored.
The next morning, Palm Sunday, was unseasonably cold and damp. After downing coffee at Meade’s headquarters, Grant sent Lee a note that spurned his proposed meeting and yielded no concessions. It did, however, exhibit a softer, more personal side.
GENERAL, Your note of yesterday is received. As I have no authority to treat on the subject of peace the meeting proposed for 10 a.m. to-day could lead to no good. I will state however General that I am equally anxious for peace with yourself and the whole North entertains the same feeling. The terms upon which peace can be had are well understood. By the South laying down their Arms they will hasten that most desirable event, save thousands of lives and hundreds of Millions of property not yet destroyed.
Sincerely hoping that all our difficulties may be settled without the loss of another life I subscribe myself very respectfully your obt. svt. U. S. GRANT Lt. Gn82
When this letter reached Lee, he was in the proper frame of mind to receive it. Sheridan’s cavalry had outraced him to the Appomattox depot, capturing four railroad cars, Lee’s last hope for subsistence, while the Union army stood astride the westward route by which he plann
ed to escape. Rebel soldiers were stuck fast in a thicket of Union bayonets. Although they tried one last time to escape the deadly trap, they were badly outnumbered and saw resistance as futile. When one officer suggested to Lee that his army should disband and soldier on as guerrillas, he spiked such dangerous thinking, noting that guerrillas “would become mere bands of marauders, and the enemy’s cavalry would pursue them and overrun many sections they may never [otherwise] have occasion to visit. We would bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from.”83
With his letter sent, Grant mounted Cincinnati and trotted west to Sheridan, who had captured Appomattox Station. Bypassing Lee’s army, Grant took a long, roundabout route along boggy lanes that spattered his already grimy garments. Toward noon, his progress was halted when a high-spirited officer from Meade’s staff galloped toward him, flapping his hat wildly and brandishing a sealed letter, one of the most consequential in American history. Grant broke it open and mutely weighed its meaning. “There was no more expression in Grant’s countenance than in a last year’s bird nest,” observed a journalist. “It was that of a Sphinx.”84 Allowing himself the barest trace of a smile, Grant requested that Rawlins read it aloud. As he complied, his eyes flashed and his voice resonated with solemn emotion:
I sent a communication to you today from the picket line whither I had gone in hopes of meeting you in pursuance of the request contained in my letter of yesterday. Maj Gen Meade informs me that it would probably expedite matters to send a duplicate through some other part of your lines. I therefore request an interview at such time and place as you may designate, to discuss the terms of the surrender of this army in accordance with your offer to have such an interview contained in your letter of yesterday[.]85