Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  At dawn it came, with more élan and power than the Army of the Potomac had shown for a long time. And the Army of Northern Virginia—weary, hungry, shorn of more than one-fifth of its strength by the fighting on March 25 and April 1—could no longer hold the Yankees off. Sheridan got astride the last railroad into Petersburg, and the blue infantry punched through Confederate lines at several places southwest of the city. The rebels fought desperately as they fell back, but it was only to hold on to the inner defenses until dark in order to get away.

  For Lee knew that he must pull out. As Jefferson Davis worshipped at St. Paul's Church in Richmond this balmy Sunday, a messenger tiptoed down the aisle and gave him a telegram. It was from Lee: Richmond must be given up. Turning pale, the president left the church without a word. But parishioners read the message on his face, and the news spread quickly through the city. Everyone who could beg, borrow, or steal a conveyance left town. Government officials crowded aboard ramshackle trains headed for Danville with the Treasury's remaining gold and as much of the archives as they could carry, the rest being put to the torch. So was everything of military and industrial value in Richmond. As night came and the army departed, mobs took over and the flames spread. Southerners burned more of their own capital than the enemy had burned of Atlanta or Columbia. When the Yankees arrived next morning, their first tasks were to restore order and put out the flames. Among the troops who marched into Richmond as firemen and policemen were units from the all-black 25th Corps.

  Following the northern soldiers into Richmond came a civilian—the number one civilian, in fact, Abraham Lincoln. The president had taken a short vacation from Washington to visit the Army of the Potomac, arriving just before it broke up the Confederate attack on Fort Stedman. Wanting to be there for the end, which now seemed imminent, Lincoln had stayed on as Grant's guest. Commander in chief and general in chief entered Petersburg on April 3 only hours after the Army of Northern Virginia had left. Grant soon rode west on the chase to head off Lee. Lincoln returned to the Union base on the James River and told Admiral David D. Porter: "Thank God I have lived to see this. 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."32 Porter took Lincoln upriver to the enemy capital where the President of the United States sat down in the study of the President of the Confederate States forty hours after Davis had left it.

  Lincoln's visit to Richmond produced the most unforgettable scenes of this unforgettable war. With an escort of only ten sailors, the president walked the streets while Porter peered nervously at every window for would-be assassins. But the Emancipator was soon surrounded by an impenetrable cordon of black people shouting "Glory to God! Glory!

  32. Foote, Civil War, III, 896.

  Glory! Glory!" "Bless the Lord! The great Messiah! I knowed him as soon as I seed him. He's been in my heart four long years. Come to free his children from bondage. Glory, Hallelujah!" Several freed slaves touched Lincoln to make sure he was real. "I know I am free," shouted an old woman, "for I have seen Father Abraham and felt him." Overwhelmed by rare emotions, Lincoln said to one black man who fell on his knees in front of him: "Don't kneel to me. That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will enjoy hereafter."33 Among the reporters from northern newspapers who described these events was one whose presence was a potent symbol of the revolution. He was T. Morris Chester, who sat at a desk in the Confederate Capitol drafting his dispatch to the Philadelphia Press. "Richmond has never before presented such a spectacle of jubilee," he wrote. "What a wonderful change has come over the spirit of Southern dreams."34 Chester was a black man.

  For Robert E. Lee and his army the dreams had turned into a nightmare. Reduced to 35,000 men, the scattered divisions from Petersburg and Richmond rendezvoused at Amelia Courthouse thirty-five miles to the west, where the starving men expected to find a trainload of rations. Because of a mixup they found ammunition instead, the last thing they needed since the worn-out horses could scarcely pull the ordnance the army was carrying. A delay to forage the countryside for food proved fatal. Lee had intended to follow the railroad down to Danville, where he could link up with Johnston and where Jefferson Davis on April 4 issued a rallying cry to his people: "Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities . . . with our army free to move from point to point . . . and where the foe will be far removed from his own base . . . nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain, but . . . our own unquenchable resolve."35 But the foe was closer to Danville than Lee's army was. Racing alongside the retreating rebels a few miles to the south were Sheridan's cavalry and three infantry corps. On April 5 they cut the Danville railroad, forcing Lee to change direction toward Lynch-burg and the Blue Ridge passes beyond.

  But this goal too was frustrated by the weariness of Lee's despondent

  33. Burke Davis, To Appomattox: Nine April Days, 1865 (New York, 1959), 184; Foote, Civil War, III, 897; Charles Carleton Coffin, The Boys of '61 (Boston, 1896), 538–42.

  34. Philadelphia Press, April 11, 12, 1865.

  35. Rowland, Davis, VI, 529–31.

  men and the speed of Union pursuers who sniffed victory and the end of the war. Stabbing attacks by blue cavalry garnered scores of prisoners, while hundreds of other southerners collapsed in exhaustion by the roadside and waited for the Yankees to pick them up. Along an obscure stream named Sayler's Creek on April 6, three Union corps cut off a quarter of Lee's army, captured 6,000 of them, and destroyed much of their wagon train. "My God!" exclaimed Lee when he learned of this action. "Has the army been dissolved?"36

  Not yet, but it soon would be. As the remaining rebels trudged westward on April 7, Grant sent Lee a note under flag of truce calling on him to surrender. Lee responded with a feeler about Grant's terms. The northern commander offered the same terms as at Vicksburg: parole until exchanged. Since Lee's surrender would virtually end the war, the part about exchange was a mere formality. As the tension mounted on April 8—Grant had a splitting headache and Meade suffered from nausea—Lee parried with a vague proposal to discuss a general "restoration of peace," a political matter on which Grant had no authority to negotiate. Grant shook his aching head and commented: "It looks as if Lee meant to fight."37

  Lee did have that notion, intending to try a breakout attack against Sheridan's troopers blocking the road near Appomattox Courthouse on the morning of April 9. For the last time rebel yells shattered the Palm Sunday stillness as the gray scarecrows drove back Union horsemen—only to reveal two Yankee infantry corps coming into line behind them. Two other Union corps were closing in on Lee's rear. Almost surrounded, outnumbered by five or six to one in effective troops, Lee faced up to the inevitable. One of his subordinates suggested an alternative to surrender: the men could take to the woods and become guerrillas. No, said Lee, who did not want all of Virginia devastated as the Shenandoah Valley had been; the 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." With a heavy heart Lee decided that "there is nothing left for me to do but go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths."38

  36. Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography, 4 vols. (New York, 1934–35), IV, 84.

  37. Catton, Grant Takes Command, 460.

  38. Freeman, Lee, IV, 120–23.

  Lee sent a note through the lines offering to surrender. Grant's headache and Meade's illness vanished. The bleeding and dying were over; they had won. To the home of Wilmer McLean went Lee and Grant for the surrender formalities. In 1861, McLean had lived near Manas-sas, where his house was a Confederate headquarters and a Yankee shell had crashed into his dining room. He moved to this remote village in southside Virginia to escape the contending armies only to find the final drama of the war played out in his living room. The vanquished commander, six feet tall and e
rect in bearing, arrived in full-dress uniform with sash and jeweled sword; the victor, five feet eight with stooped shoulders, appeared in his usual private's blouse with mud-spattered trousers tucked into muddy boots—because his headquarters wagon had fallen behind in the race to cut off the enemy. There in McLean's parlor the son of an Ohio tanner dictated surrender terms to the scion of a First Family of Virginia.

  The terms were generous: officers and men could go 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." This clause had great significance. Serving as a model for the subsequent surrender of other Confederate armies, it guaranteed southern soldiers immunity from prosecution for treason. Lee asked another favor. In the Confederate army, he explained, enlisted men in the cavalry and artillery owned their horses; could they keep them? Yes, said Grant; privates as well as officers who claimed to own horses could take them home "to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter." "This will have the best possible effect upon the men," said Lee, and "will do much toward conciliating our people." After signing the papers, Grant introduced Lee to his staff. As he shook hands with Grant's military secretary Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian, Lee stared a moment at Parker's dark features and said, "I am glad to see one real American here." Parker responded, "We are all Americans."39

  The surrender completed, the two generals saluted somberly and parted. "This will live in history," said one of Grant's aides. But the Union commander seemed distracted. Having given birth to a reunited nation, he experienced a post-partum melancholy. "I felt . . . sad and depressed," Grant wrote, "at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long

  39. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 46, pt. 1, pp. 57–58; Horace Porter, "The Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse," Battles and Leaders, IV, 739–40; Davis, To Appomattox, 386.

  and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought." As news of the surrender spread through Union camps, batteries began firing joyful salutes until Grant ordered them stopped. "The war is over," he said; "the rebels are our countrymen again, and the best sign of rejoicing after the victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations."40 To help bring those former rebels back into the Union, Grant sent three days' rations for 25,000 men across the lines. This perhaps did something to ease the psychological as well as physical pain of Lee's soldiers.

  So did an important symbolic gesture at a formal ceremony three days later when Confederate troops marched up to stack arms and surrender their flags. As they came, many among them shared the sentiments of one officer: "Was this to be the end of all our marching and fighting for the past four years? I could not keep back the tears." The Union officer in charge of the surrender ceremony was Joshua L. Chamberlain, the fighting professor from Bowdoin who won a medal of honor for Little Round Top, had been twice wounded since then, and was now a major general. Leading the southerners as they marched toward two of Chamberlain's brigades standing at attention was John B. Gordon, one of Lee's hardest fighters who now commanded Stonewall Jackson's old corps. First in line of march behind him was the Stonewall Brigade, five regiments containing 210 ragged survivors of four years of war. As Gordon approached at the head of these men with "his chin drooped to his breast, downhearted and dejected in appearance," Chamberlain gave a brief order, and a bugle call rang out. Instantly the Union soldiers shifted from order arms to carry arms, the salute of honor. Hearing the sound General Gordon looked up in surprise, and with sudden realization turned smartly to Chamberlain, dipped his sword in salute, and ordered his own men to carry arms. These enemies in many a bloody battle ended the war not with shame on one side and exultation on the other but with a soldier's "mutual salutation and farewell."41

  The news of Lee's surrender traveled through a North barely recovered from boisterous celebrations of Richmond's capture. The fall of the rebel capital had merited a nine-hundred gun salute in Washington;

  40. Davis, To Appomattox, 387; Personal Memoirs of Grant, II, 489; Porter, "The Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse," 743.

  41. Davis, To Appomattox, 362; Joshua L. Chamberlain, "The Last Salute of the Army of Northern Virginia," in Southern Historical Society Papers, 32 (1904), 362.

  the surrender of Lee produced another five hundred. "From one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other," wrote a reporter, "the air seemed to burn with the bright hues of the flag. . . . Almost by magic the streets were crowded with hosts of people, talking, laughing, hurrahing and shouting in the fullness of their joy. Men embraced one another, 'treated' one another, made up old quarrels, renewed old friendships, marched arm-in-arm singing." The scene was the same on Wall Street in New York, where "men embraced and hugged each other, kissed each other, retreated into doorways to dry their eyes and came out again to flourish their hats and hurrah," according to an eyewitness. "They sang 'Old Hundred,' the Doxology, 'John Brown,' and 'The Star-Spangled Banner' . . . over and over, with a massive roar from the crowd and a unanimous wave of hats at the end of each repetition." "My only experience of a people stirred up to like intensity of feeling," wrote a diarist, "was the great Union meeting at Union Square in April 1861." But this time the feeling was even more intense because "founded on memories of years of failure, all but hopeless, and the consciousness that national victory was at last secured."42

  Lincoln shared this joyous release of pent-up tension, but he was already thinking more of the future than of the past. While in Richmond he had met with John A. Campbell, one of the Confederate commissioners at the earlier Hampton Roads conference. Campbell was now ready to return to the Union on Lincoln's terms. He suggested an apparent way to undermine what was left of the southern war effort: allow the Virginia legislature to meet so it could withdraw the state's troops from the Confederacy. The president thought this a good idea and on April 6 gave the necessary permission. But Campbell misconstrued Lincoln's position to be one that recognized the legislature as the legitimate government of the state. Lincoln had no such purpose. He had authorized a meeting of "the gentlemen who had acted as the Legislature of Virginia . . . having power de facto to do a specific thing," but did not intend to recognize them as "the rightful Legislature." Lee's surrender which included nearly all of Virginia's soldiers made the whole matter academic, so Lincoln revoked his permission for the legislature to meet. And on April 11 he delivered from a White House balcony a carefully prepared speech on peace and reconstruction to a crowd celebrating Union victory. "There is no authorized organ for us to treat with," he said—thereby disposing of state governments as well as Jefferson

  42. Foote, Civil War, III, 900; Strong, Diary, 574–75.

  Davis's fugitive government. "We must simply begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements." This he had done in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Defending the government of Louisiana, Lincoln conceded that he would prefer it to have enfranchised literate Negroes and black veterans. He hoped that it would soon do so; as for the unreconstructed states, Lincoln promised an announcement soon of a new policy for their restoration to the Union.43

  At least one listener interpreted this speech as moving Lincoln closer to the radical Republicans. "That means nigger citizenship," snarled John Wilkes Booth to a companion. "Now, by God, I'll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make."44

  43. CWL, VIII, 406–7, 399–405.

  44. William Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (Urbana, Ill., 1983), 37.

  Epilogue To the Shoals of Victory

  The weeks after Booth fulfilled his vow on Good Friday passed in a dizzying sequence of events. Jarring images dissolved and reformed in kaleidoscopic patterns that left the senses traumatized or elated: Lincoln lying in state at the White House on April 19 as General Grant wept unabashedly at his catafalque; Confederate armies surrendering one after another as Jefferson Davis fled southward hoping to re-establish his government in Texas and carry on the war to victor
y; Booth killed in a burning barn in Virginia; seven million somber men, women, and children lining the tracks to view Lincoln's funeral train on its way back home to Springfield; the steamboat Sultana returning northward on the Mississippi with liberated Union prisoners of war blowing up on April 27 with a loss of life equal to that of the Titanic a half-century later; Jefferson Davis captured in Georgia on May 10, accused (falsely) of complicity in Lincoln's assassination, imprisoned and temporarily shackled at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, where he remained for two years until released without trial to live on until his eighty-first year and become part of the ex-Confederate literary corps who wrote weighty tomes to justify their Cause; the Army of the Potomac and Sherman's Army of Georgia marching 200,000 strong in a Grand Review down Pennsylvania Avenue on May 23–24 in a pageantry of power and catharsis before being demobilized from more than one million soldiers to fewer than 80,000 a year later and an eventual peacetime total of 27,000; weary, ragged Confederate soldiers straggling homeward begging or stealing food from dispirited civilians who often did not know where their own next meal was coming from; joyous black people celebrating the jubilee of a freedom whose boundaries they did not yet discern; gangs of southern deserters, guerrillas, and outlaws ravaging a region that would not know real peace for many years to come.