by Tony Horwitz
This pastoral, unprosperous landscape came as a shock after all the sprawl we’d passed through elsewhere in Virginia. The scenery also formed an appropriately wistful backdrop to the narrative unfolding on our car radio. Marching day and night for a week, Lee’s scarecrow army was stalked as much by hunger as by Union cavalry, and the rebels spent precious hours foraging for food or waiting at railroad junctions for rations that never came.
By the end, Lee’s men quaffed creek water and ate parched corn intended for their horses; 500 of the rebel mounts died of starvation during the army’s last three days in the field. And all the while, Phil Sheridan’s and George Custer’s well-fed cavalry kept closing in, hunting down the Confederates as they would the Plains Indians after the Civil War. But there would be no Little Bighorn here, only a rearguard battle at Sayler’s Creek at which five Southern generals and almost a quarter of Lee’s soldiers surrendered, prompting Lee to exclaim, “My God! Has the army been dissolved?”
One of the tour stops near Sayler’s Creek occupied the parking lot of another general store. Unlike Olgers’s, this shop was still in business and displayed oddly paired signs in the window: “Game Checking Station: Bear—Deer—Turkey” and “Current Jackpot 3 Million.” Inside, we found the store deserted, except for a young black man shooting pool by himself at a ragged, ill-lit table. He wore sunglasses, a Simpsons’ T-shirt and an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. “You all must be doing that reenact thing,” he said, looking up at us with a bemused grin.
Rob sighed and explained for the fiftieth time what the Civil Wargasm was all about. The man listened patiently, put down his pool stick and said, “I been waiting for somebody like you to answer a question about that War.”
“Fire away,” Rob said.
“Let’s roll the clock back. It’s 1861. You two be first cousins, really. You both white, right? One North, one South, but it’s just a mind thing. Why you got to kill six hundred thousand cousins? Can’t you work it out?”
Rob looked at me. I looked back at him. The man walked to the window and pointed down the road. “I grew up down that way, feeding cattle by Sayler’s Creek,” he said. “Six thousand dudes got hurt or killed, three days before the War be finished. For what?”
As the Gasm’s Union representative, I felt obliged to speak up. “At least some Northerners,” I offered, “thought they were fighting to free the slaves.”
The man lowered his sunglasses and looked me straight in the eye. “You shittin’ me, right? I fought in the Gulf War. Nobody be getting their butt shot off for no freedom thing.” Then he rolled the clock back again. Pointing at Rob, he said to me, “Say your mothers sister’s son, he’s got slaves. You gonna say to him, ‘Let’s fight over it’? C’mon now, no way. What you really gonna say is this.” He paused for a moment, then continued in a perfect-pitch parody of redneck dialect: “Hey, Billy Joe, whatever you want to do with those niggers is okay by me. Keep ’em in chains, what the fuck. Your momma is my momma’s sister.”
He returned to his normal voice. “It’s a big lie, this slave war thing. It don’t matter really, except that whites today still like to say, ‘Damn, my ancestors died for those niggers, they should be thankful.’ What I seen in the Gulf War, it made me realize war is useless. The main man, Saddam, he still be there. It was politics and greed. Same as in your war. Seems to me y’all could’a worked it out.” With that, he slapped a dollar on the counter, took a lottery ticket from beside the cash register and stalked out the door, leaving us alone in the deserted shop.
AN HOUR LATER we reached Appomattox Court House, where North and South did finally work it out, in the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s farmhouse. There was a classical symmetry to Lee’s surrender, as there was to so much about the War. The Army of Northern Virginia stacked its arms four years to the day after the South fired the War’s first shot on Fort Sumter. And the surrender was signed in the home of a woebegone farmer who had moved to Appomattox after fleeing his former house at Manassas, site of the War’s first land battle. “I was the alpha and omega of this contest,” McLean told a Northern visitor a few months after the surrender.
At least that’s how the story went. Even Ken Burns highlighted the coincidence in his documentary, which he opened with the tale of farmer McLean, the “aging Virginian” who “had had enough” after the Manassas battle and moved his family to the safety of Appomattox only to have the War follow him there.
The truth, according to park rangers at Appomattox, was a good deal more complicated and less romantic. For one, McLean wasn’t a farmer; he was an entrepreneur who rented his in-laws’ plantation house to the rebels during First Manassas. Nor did he quickly flee Manassas in search of a safe haven for his family. He stuck around for two years, then realized that Southside Virginia was a more convenient headquarters for his main business: war profiteering. Among other things, McLean speculated in sugar, which he acquired through a brother in Cuba and sold at inflated prices to the Confederate government.
After the War, McLean used his brief acquaintance with Grant to secure a job as a tax collector at the port in Alexandria. He was also, at various times in his life, a bankrupt, a deadbeat, and a man so distrusted by his wife (a wealthy widow) that she made him sign a prenuptial agreement. “Vistors always come in here talking about ‘poor Wilmer,’” said Patricia Schuppin, the ranger showing tourists through McLean’s restored home. “I have to break the bad news that he was a pretty unscrupulous fellow.”
After the surrender, McLean’s house had quickly fallen prey to tourists and profiteers, including McLean himself. He sold the furniture from the parlor where Lee and Grant met, and charged soldiers a gold coin to visit the room. Speculators later bought and disassembled the farmhouse in hopes of shipping it to Washington as a tourist attraction. The scheme failed and the ruined house sat for decades, a pile of lumber and mortar that locals often raided for “surrender bricks” to sell the occasional tourist. Appomattox Court House remained a virtual ghost town until the Park Service restored the village after World War II.
The rebuilt McLean parlor, a formal room with heavy curtains, seemed claustrophobic and somehow too small for the momentous history it encompassed. On April 9, 1865, Lee and Grant chatted about their service together in the Mexican War, then wrote out the terms of surrender. One of Grant’s aides, a Seneca Indian named Eli Parker, penned the formal document (and apparently pocketed Grant’s original draft, which he later sold). There were no theatrics or handing over of swords, though one aide was so overcome with emotion that someone else had to take over for him.
The ranger, Patricia Schuppin, said visitors often responded with similar emotion, particularly Southerners. “I had a lady here yesterday who started weeping, and when she found out I was from Mississippi she asked me, ‘How can you work in this terrible place?’ I told her I didn’t think it’s terrible. Reuniting was the only way the South could survive, and we merged back in while keeping our essential culture.”
Schuppin saw another positive result to the conflict. “The War did a lot to launch the women’s rights movement,” she said. Before 1860, women in most parts of the country couldn’t own or run businesses, unless they were widowed or let a man manage their property. “But during the War you had women working as nurses and clerks and factory laborers, and running businesses and plantations. After the War they started to sue for the right to keep doing so.” The War also boosted the suffragette movement, with women like Susan B. Anthony forming political groups to support Lincoln, abolition, and, by extension, the right of women to vote.
I wanted to hear more, but a crowd of tourists arrived and Schuppin apologetically returned to her post. “Someone’s sure to ask about poor Wilmer,” she sighed.
We wandered over to a restored tavern where the Union army had printed passes so Confederates could return to their homes unhindered. Here, talking to another ranger, I learned of one more myth about Appomattox. I’d often heard Southerners speak sentimentally of rebel ancestors who a
rrived home starved and spent after walking all the way from Virginia. While some soldiers may have done so, the parole passes entitled Confederates to travel free on any Union-controlled ship or railroad, and to draw rations from Union troops they met along the way. The South also had hundreds of thousands of rations stockpiled at major cities and rail junctions.
“Any Confederate who walked home to Alabama without a crust in his pocket probably did so out of pride rather than necessity,” the ranger explained.
As so often on my journey, I was reminded that what I thought I knew about the War was based more on romance than on fact. Fables about Appomattox were so rife that a former park ranger had written a book called Thirty Myths About Lee’s Surrender, and a sequel offering twenty-one more. One of the most enduring misconceptions was that Lee’s surrender marked the end of the Confederacy. In fact, Lee surrendered only the 28,000 men under his command, leaving another 150,000 or so rebels in the field. The last land battle didn’t occur until a month later, at Palmito Ranch in Texas; it resulted, ironically, in a Southern victory. The last Confederate general to capitulate was Stand Watie, a Cherokee who surrendered his Indian troops on June 23rd. Meanwhile, a Confederate cruiser called the Shenandoah kept seizing Union whalers in the Bering Sea until late June and remained on the loose until docking at Liverpool on November 6, 1865, a full seven months after Lee’s surrender.
Once we’d toured the few restored buildings, there wasn’t much else to see. Appomattox Court House remained a tiny village verged by rolling woods and pastures. This spareness amplified the eloquence of what happened there. In contrast to so many sites we’d toured, battlefield heroism didn’t figure much in the picture. Instead, Appomattox honored a much rarer, less heralded virtue in America: reconciliation, mixed with what might be called sportsmanship. Grant frowned on celebration by his troops, and confessed to feeling sad and depressed “at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which people ever fought.”
Lee, for his part, proved equally graceful in defeat. He struck a rancorous passage from the draft of his farewell address, which an aide had prepared. Instead, Lee simply thanked his men for “four years of arduous service, marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude.” He later urged his fellow Southerners to accept defeat and serve the reunited nation. “True patriotism sometimes requires of men to act contrary at one period to that which it does at another,” he wrote after the War to P. G. T Beauregard. “The motive that impels them—the desire to do right—is precisely the same.”
At the formal stacking of arms, the oft-wounded hero of Gettysburg, Joshua Chamberlain, ordered his men to honor their foes with silence and a chivalrous gesture called “shoulder arms.” His Confederate counterpart, John Brown Gordon—whose battle scars numbered thirteen—responded with a flourish that Chamberlain described in his memoir. Gordon, Chamberlain wrote, wheeled his horse to face the Union general, touched the mount “gently with the spur so that the animal slightly reared, and as he wheeled, horse and rider made one motion, the horse’s head swung down with a graceful bow, and General Gordon dropped his sword-point to his toe in salutation.” It was hard to imagine modern Americans ending any contest with such grace, much less one that lasted four years and claimed over a million casualties.
Leaving the park, we stopped at a small graveyard established in 1866 by local women. It contained the graves of nineteen men who died in a brief fight at Appomattox just before the surrender. Eighteen of the graves were Confederates, but one had a headstone that read: “USA UNKNOWN Union Patriot.” It seemed remarkable, only a year after the War, that women who had seen their own husbands and sons march off to fight were willing to lay a Yankee to rest here, alongside Confederates.
But the graveyard also bore signs of the prideful defiance that quickly resurfaced in the post-War South, undoing so much of the reconciliation attempted at Appomattox. A plaque erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy listed the number of Lee’s men at 9,000, less than a third of the true total, thus making the odds faced by the rebels even more overwhelming. The inscription read: “After four years of heroic struggle, in defense of principles believed fundamental, Lee surrendered the remnant of an army still unconquered in spirit.”
AFTER FOUR DAYS of arduous touring, I too felt ready to surrender and trudge home. But Rob insisted we press sixty miles west to Lexington, in the Shenandoah Valley. Lexington was the second city of Confederate remembrance: Medina to Richmond’s Mecca. Stonewall Jackson taught college in Lexington before the War and Robert E. Lee after it. Both men lay buried there. So did their horses. “Well, not exactly buried,” Rob said, offering no details.
So we wound out of Appomattox, past a billboard for “Bruce and Stiff Funeral Home” and into the Appalachian foothills. Driving at sunset through one of the loveliest stretches of Virginia, I found myself humming “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and feeling oddly melancholy, as Grant had at Appomattox. We’d reached the War’s traditional end point, its period, and the darkening hills underscored the South’s hard-fought demise. “It’s views like this,” Rob said, as we crested the Blue Ridge and rolled into the Shenandoah Valley, “that make you appreciate what Jimmy Olgers said about people fighting for their land.”
We reached Lexington at first dark. Navigating past a strip mall called Stonewall Square and into a gracious quarter of antebellum homes, we spotted a shop-window poster for a musical called Stonewall Country playing that night at an outdoor theater. The show seemed a fitting way to conclude a Gasm that had taken as one of its principal themes the mercurial career of Stonewall Jackson.
At the start of the musical the director welcomed the audience, then glanced at us and said, “I’d be particularly interested to know what you two think of the show.” I’d become so accustomed to traveling in uniform that at first I didn’t know what he meant. The director needn’t have worried; the costumes looked fine and the show offered an irreverent tour of the landscape we’d just explored. There was Jeb Stuart, in silk sash and thigh-high boots, singing “I’m a daylight earthshaker, I’m a midnight merrymaker.” Then came “A. P. Hill’s Blues,” a mournful recap of the rash general’s clashes with his superiors. And throughout there was Stonewall, a cartoonishly stern figure, sucking on lemons as a choir mocked his catatonia during the Seven Days battle with a tune called “Seven Day Freak-Out.”
Rob became enamored with one of the hoop-skirted actresses, so we lingered after the show to pay our respects. Then Rob spotted her leaving with an actor whose uniform Rob regarded as the worst in the show. “Fucking typical,” he moaned. “Chicks always dig farbs. You’ll see flamers in purple jackets who look like Barney and they’re the ones getting all the chicks.”
I gently observed that the hardcore look had its drawbacks in the chick department. Rob glared at me. “What are you saying? I should stop washing my beard in bacon grease?”
It was late. A cold rain lashed the theater’s circus-like tent. Even Rob wasn’t keen to sleep in a torrent beside Stonewall’s grave, as we’d originally planned. So we tossed our bedrolls on the boards where we’d just watched Stonewall Country performed. Rob dutifully recorded all the hits we’d made that day, then scribbled evasively, “Midnight. Camp in Stonewall Country.” He snuffed the candle and said, “I don’t want a written record of farbing out.”
FARBS GOT CHICKS; they also got sleep. For the first time all week we managed more than a wretched doze. It was a good thing we’d found cover; over breakfast, we learned from a waitress that flash-flooding had washed out roads and drowned several people.
As rain kept pelting down, we toured the Virginia Military Institute, where Stonewall taught Artillery Tactics and Natural and Experimental Philosophy (this academic combo wasn’t as strange as it sounded; in the 1850s, natural philosophy was akin to physics). Stonewall’s name and a Horatio Alger-ish quote attributed to him adorned VMI’s barracks: �
��You May Be Whatever You Resolve To Be.” A statue of Stonewall overlooked the parade ground, beside the cannons used by his troops at Manassas.
Stonewall also held sway at Jackson Memorial Hall, a chapel that doubled as a museum filled with relics of the martyred professor, including the india-rubber slicker he wore at Chancellorsville and a copy of Bartlett’s Spherical Astronomy that Stonewall used in classes. Inside the textbook, a cadet had scribbled of Jackson: “The Major skinned me this morning by asking extra questions on Venus. I wish he would leave me and Venus be.” Other students found Jackson so stiff and stultifying that they dubbed him “Tom Fool,” “Square Box,” and “Old Jack,” though he was only in his thirties at the time. Like Ulysses Grant, a failure at a succession of jobs in the 1850s, Stonewall Jackson found success in war that he never enjoyed in civilian life.
The museum’s prized exhibit was Jackson’s war-horse, Little Sorrel—or what remained of him. The gelding’s tattered hide had been stretched over a plaster of Paris body and mounted on a diorama-like platform scattered with dirt and leaves. The dumpy, dull-brown horse stood stiffly, as though at attention, still wearing a saddle and bridle that Jackson used in the War.
For Little Sorrel, this was the end of a long, strange ride that began in 1861, when Jackson procured the horse from a captured Union train. Jackson, an awkward rider, liked the gelding’s gentle gait (“as easy as the rocking of a cradle,” he wrote his wife). Mount suited master in another way; both were unimpressive physical specimens whose attributes only became obvious in battle. Though described by one of Jackson’s comrades as “a dun cob of very sorry appearance,” Little Sorrel proved tireless on the march and calm under fire. The horse survived a bullet wound at Manassas and bolted only once, when Jackson was shot while riding him at Chancellorsville.