It was less clear-cut who was winning on the subject of Reconstruction. Lincoln was prepared to push forward with his 10 percent plan for Reconstruction in Louisiana, but the Radicals remained reluctant to endorse any template that did not clearly overturn the old racial and economic order of the agrarian South. Lincoln was far from blind to the faults of his plan. But he was eager to first bring as many of the former rebel states into Reconstruction as fast as they could be gotten there, and then worry about opening the ears of Southerners to his hints to include emancipation and black civil rights as part of their new constitutions.
Lincoln’s admirers, then and now, have been inclined to ascribe this to Lincoln’s generosity and desire to end the war on a note of forgiveness. That certainly seemed to be the message Lincoln had for the country when he stood on the Capitol steps on a blustery March 4 to take his second oath of office as president. In the brief address he gave before taking the oath, Lincoln reviewed the fundamental causes of the war—slavery, … the demand for slavery’s extension westward into the territories, and … the idea that the Constitution permitted secession from the Union when those demands were not met. But he also took the opportunity of this review to set these immediate causes of war in the context of a larger metaphysical, almost theological question. Lincoln looked beyond the material causes of the war and urged Northerners and Southerners alike to think of it (as John Brown had prophesied before his execution in 1859) as a judgment by God on a crime that the whole nation, not just one section, had been guilty of.
Perhaps, Lincoln speculated, the war ultimately was not about secession or slavery but about the mysteries of divine providence and moral judgment. In this life, the Bible told him that offenses are unavoidable, and slavery had certainly been an offense. Slavery had grown up from the first in America without anyone’s particular bidding, and in spite of the best intentions of the Founders. But like sinners in the hands of an angry God, not even those who had merely inherited such offenses have the right to plead inability and innocence. “If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came,” Lincoln asked, “shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to him?”15
But if the time had now come, at whatever the cost, to rip up slavery by the roots, then human beings could only bow their heads to that cost as the price of a national life in which “offences must needs come.” Perhaps it would be only justice, Lincoln said, that “all the wealth piled up by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,” and “every drop of blood drawn with the lash” shall now “be paid by another drawn with the sword.” These words were bound to surprise and enrage those who thought of themselves as the righteous, who had suffered innocently from the depravity of the “slave power.” But they could protest all they liked; their argument would not be with Lincoln. “As it was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’” Americans must not waste their energies now in judgment—that belonged to the inscrutable God who moved all things in such mysterious ways—but in the one exercise that still was within their grasp, that of mercy.
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
Eloquent as these words were as religious philosophy, they were also read as a promise of a speedy and painless Reconstruction. Certainly speed was part of Lincoln’s Reconstruction agenda. After four years of war, Congress had passed the Thirteenth Amendment by the slimmest of margins, and efforts by the Radicals to promote a Reconstruction bill in Congress guaranteeing the freed slaves the right to vote had died on the floor. Allowing Reconstruction to proceed under the single eye of the executive branch might get better, faster, less ambiguous results than with all the cooks in Congress stirring the pot. A month after the inaugural, Lincoln once again called on Louisianans (whose state was furthest along the road to Reconstruction) to open “the elective franchise” to the “very intelligent” among African Americans and “those who serve our cause as soldiers.” His appointment of Salmon Chase as Taney’s successor on the Supreme Court was also a direct way of dealing with the threat of postwar legal appeals from the war’s military results. “Judge Chase would only be sustaining himself … as regarded the emancipation policy of the government,” Lincoln remarked to a newspaper correspondent, and added to George Boutwell, “We want a man who will sustain the Legal Tender Act and the Proclamation of Emancipation.”16
Keeping the cards securely in his own hands was uppermost in his mind when at the end of March 1865 Lincoln came down to the James River to confer with Grant and with Sherman, who had come up from the Carolina coast by steamer for the meeting. There, Lincoln talked to his premier generals about the kind of terms he wanted given to the South and its armies if and when they surrendered. He advised them to offer whatever they thought would induce surrender of the Confederate armies as a whole, since it would be better to let them give up their arms as organized groups rather than pressing the Confederates so hard that they broke up into innumerable guerilla bands. He expressed the hope that Jefferson Davis could be allowed to escape the country, rather than running the risk of a sensational treason trial, and Sherman remembered Lincoln suggesting that the generals might even offer to recognize the existing rebel state governments, especially in North Carolina, as an inducement to surrender “till Congress could provide others.” And since Congress had now adjourned (and with the new Congress elected in November not scheduled to assemble until December 1865), Lincoln had a free hand to end the war, resuscitate the Southern state governments, and move them toward black civil rights without Congress encumbering or endangering the process.17
This did not mean, however, that Lincoln was willing to grant the Confederates any kind of blank check. Lincoln had been willing, as early as mid-1863, to allow friends and intercessors to open up secret negotiations with Richmond, but only on terms Jefferson Davis at once rejected. As late as February 1865 Lincoln himself came down to Hampton Roads to meet with a Confederate peace commission headed by his old friend Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president. Lincoln offered to swap $400 million in United States bonds if the Confederate states would rejoin the Union and adopt the Thirteenth Amendment prospectively, with the understanding that it would be gradually phased in over a period of—as Stephens later claimed Lincoln said—five years. But the negotiations foundered on Lincoln’s insistence that the Confederate states abandon all claim to treat with the United States as a separate government, and the Hampton Roads conference in particular turned up empty after Jefferson Davis dismissed any form of surrender.18
Lincoln even went so far, after his meeting with Grant and Sherman, as to authorize members of the Virginia legislature to assemble as a Union government—but only if they understood that there would be “no receding by the Executive of the United States on the slavery question.” And then, after reflecting on the inadequacies of this proposal, Lincoln cancelled it a week later. He wanted peace, and he wanted it done quickly enough that he could supervise it. But he would brook Southern foot-dragging on Reconstruction no more than he would welcome Radical meddling.19
Sherman, and possibly Grant as well, mistook Lincoln’s desire for the fastest Union solution to peace as a desire for any solution so long as it was fast, and as a result, both Grant and Sherman came away from their meeting with the president in possession of a certainty about Lincoln’s easygoing i
ntentions that Lincoln himself did not entirely share. Neither Grant nor Sherman could have realized how quickly they were going to have to deal in hard terms with that uncertainty, since almost all of their generals believed that at least one more major battle in Virginia would probably have to be fought. “The great fight may yet be fought out in this vicinity,” George Meade warned in March. That apprehension was not necessarily misplaced, either, since Lee staged a breakout attempt from the Petersburg lines on March 25, lunging toward Fort Stedman, on the far right of Grant’s lines.20
But the attack was beaten back, and with it, the last of the Army of Northern Virginia’s fabled aggressiveness faded. On March 27 Grant once again began sliding the Army of the Potomac around to his left, looking to cut Lee’s last supply line into Petersburg, the Southside railroad. On April 1 Philip Sheridan’s 12,000 cavalrymen, supported by the infantry of the 5th Corps of the Army of the Potomac, overran the last Confederate outpost on the extreme end of Lee’s lines at Five Forks, effectively shutting off the Southside. At four the next morning the entire left of the Federal line went over the top against Lee’s trenches, and only the stubborn resistance of two small Confederate forts kept the entire Army of Northern Virginia from collapsing into Federal hands that night.21
That one night, however, was enough for Lee. He had been anticipating the necessity of “abandoning our position on the James River” since February, when he sketched out a what-if strategy for James Longstreet. After informing Jefferson Davis that the Petersburg lines could no longer be held, Lee skillfully pulled his army out of the Richmond fortifications and crossed what was left in the Petersburg trenches over onto the north side of the Appomattox River. There, he turned west, designating Amelia Court House as the rendezvous point for the whole army. He planned to meet the last supply trains out of Richmond at Amelia Court House and, afterward, pick up a spur line of the Richmond & Danville railroad that would take the Army of Northern Virginia south to join Johnston in the Carolinas. Davis, with a small escort and the official papers and records of the Confederate government, also headed west, staying ahead of Lee and the army and ultimately turning and escaping to the south. Richmond was abandoned, left to its mayor to be surrendered to Grant on April 3, 1865. Fires set by the Confederate provost marshal to destroy the arsenal and magazines roared out of hand and rioters and looters took to the streets until at last Federal soldiers, their bands savagely blaring “Dixie,” marched into the humiliated capital and raised the Stars and Stripes over the old Capitol building.22
Lee, meanwhile, struggled westward to Amelia Court House. He was dogged by two major problems, one of which was the geographical position of his army. Except for the troops Grant detached to occupy Richmond, Grant and the Army of the Potomac were on the south side of the Appomattox River, and as soon as Lee bolted westward, so did Grant, pacing Lee step for step on his side of the Appomattox, keeping between Lee and the never-never land to the south, never letting Lee get far enough ahead to curl around the head of the Federal columns and break for the Carolinas. Lee’s other problem surfaced as soon as he concentrated his men at Amelia Court House on April 5. In the last hours in Richmond, the orders that were to have sent supply trains to meet Lee’s men in Amelia Court House were never received, or perhaps were never given in the first place. Either way, Lee found only limited supplies of food waiting for him there. He also found that the last troops out of Richmond, mostly the men of Richard Ewell’s corps, were still on their way to Amelia Court House.23
Lee was forced to waste an entire day foraging and waiting for Ewell to catch up, and by the time he was ready to move on, he found that Sheridan’s cavalry had cut the rail line eight miles below Amelia Court House. With Grant’s infantry now breathing down his neck, Lee had no choice but to strike westward again, this time toward Lynchburg, where there were Confederate reinforcements and more supplies to be had. The problem was getting there. “Hundreds of men dropped from exhaustion; thousands threw away their arms; the demoralization appeared at last to involve the officers; they did nothing to prevent straggling; and many of them seemed to shut their eyes on the hourly reduction of their commands, and rode in advance of their brigades in dogged indifference.”24
By now, Grant was rapidly closing in on the fleeing Confederates. On April 6, Sheridan’s cavalry caught up with Lee’s rear guard as it was crossing a little tributary of the Appomattox River called Sayler’s Creek, and sliced off 7,000 prisoners with hardly any effort. In a desperate effort to keep Grant from getting any closer, Lee had the bridges over the Appomattox burned, but on the morning of April 7 one Federal corps discovered a neglected wagon bridge over the river and crossed over in hot pursuit. Lee now had one hope, and only one: if he could reach Appomattox Station before the Federal cavalry, he could be supplied there from Lynchburg, and perhaps make a stand that would force Grant to back off and give him maneuvering room. (It might have worked: Grant admitted to John Russell Young that his own logistical tether was so attenuated that “he could not have kept up his pursuit a half day longer.”) But it turned out to be impossible. Sheridan’s cavalry got to Appomattox Station on the evening of April 8, while Lee was still several miles back up the road. When Lee shook out a battle line to back them away the next morning, the early morning fog burned off to reveal two infantry divisions of the 24th Corps and two brigades of the 25th Corps coming up to relieve the federal cavalry, with the 5th Corps of the Army of the Potomac coming up behind them.25
Stopped in front by Sheridan’s horsemen, and pressed from behind by Grant’s infantry, Lee knew that at last the end had come. It was what he had feared from the beginning: “It will all be over—ended—just as I have expected it would end from the first,” Lee lamented. He had gambled on disheartening the North by invading Maryland in 1862 and Pennsylvania in 1863; he had gambled on the siege of Petersburg dragging on long enough to turn Northern voters against Lincoln. None of it had worked, and now his army was trapped. Grant had sent several notes to Lee by courier on April 7 and 8 concerning a possible meeting of the generals, and so Lee sent flags of truce through the lines and asked to see Grant personally. “In ten minutes more,” wrote Union brigadier general Thomas C. Devin about that morning,
the charge would have been ordered for the whole line and we would have been on and over them like a whirlwind. Our men were terribly vexed at the truce. It was laughable to see the old troopers come up to the edge of the hill [overlooking the Confederate positions], look down at the position of the Rebs and go back growling and damning the flag of truce.26
For the dwindling band of Confederates, however, the surrender could not have come more quickly. “Within range of my eye,” wrote a Confederate surgeon, “there were a great number of muskets stuck in the ground by the bayonet, whose owners, heart-sick and fainting of hunger and fatigue, had thrown them away, and gone, none knew whither.” The remainder were living on “corn, stolen from the horses’ feed, and parched and munched as they marched.”27
Grant, who had been pounding along at the head of his army, leaving bag and baggage days behind in the dust, was at that moment in the throes of a migraine, “but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.” Lee selected as a meeting place the home of Wilmer McLean in the little crossroads village of Appomattox Court House, about four miles above Appomattox Station. Grant arrived with his staff later that morning, painfully conscious of the contrast between Lee, immaculate in a full general’s uniform and dress sword, and himself, clad in the only things he owned in the absence of his baggage, a pair of muddy boots and a standard-issue frock coat with his lieutenant general’s shoulder straps sewn on. The meeting was formal, and after some polite chitchat between Grant and Lee about old Mexican War times, they got down to business. Grant’s terms, bearing in mind his discussions with Lincoln, were surprisingly mild. There was no more talk of unconditional surrender: all Confederate soldiers would surrender their arms and promptly be paroled (no ghastly death march to a prison camp, no impri
sonment of Confederate officers pending treason trials), all officers could retain their swords and other sidearms, and paroled soldiers could claim any captured horses and mules they wished to take home with them. “This done,” Grant specified, “each officer and man will be allowed to return to his home, not to be disturbed by U.S. authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside.”28
The terms were written out and acknowledged, and then the negotiation was over. Lee walked out onto the porch of the McLean house and (as one of Grant’s staff wrote) “signaled to his orderly to bring up his horse … and gazed sadly in the direction of the valley beyond, where his army lay …”
He thrice smote the palm of his left hand slowly with his right fist in an absent sort of way, seemed not to see the group of Union officers in the yard, who rose respectfully at his approach, and appeared unaware of everything about him. All appreciated the sadness that overwhelmed him, and he had the personal sympathy of every one who beheld him at this supreme moment of trial. The approach of his horse seemed to recall him from his reverie, and he at once mounted. General Grant now stepped down from the porch, moving toward him, and saluted him by raising his hat. He was followed in this act of courtesy by all our officers present.29
Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Page 66