Grant knew that many thousands of hungry Confederate soldiers were within a mile of where they sat, waiting for the results of this meeting. As soon as Lee had signed, Grant said, “I will take steps at once to have your army supplied with rations. Suppose I send over twenty-five thousand rations, do you think that will be a sufficient supply?”
“Plenty,” Lee answered. “Plenty.” He spoke as if overcome by this evidence of the resources of the army that had finally hammered him down. “An abundance.” Lee paused. “And it will be a great relief, I can assure you.”
Before coming, Lee had rejected the idea put forward by some of his diehard officers that his army should slip away in groups and become guerrilla bands operating throughout the South, a development that could have prolonged the fighting for months and even years. Although Lee had said earlier in the day, “Then there is nothing left me but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths,” he had already decided to live the rest of his life in dignified acceptance of defeat, recognizing, as he soon said to an embittered Confederate widow, that “we are all one country now,” and urging all his veterans to take up peaceful pursuits and get on with their lives. For himself, living an example that was an impressive and stabilizing influence for both North and South during the difficult years ahead, Lee would take on the presidency of Washington College, a small war-torn school in western Virginia, and rebuild it into the fine institution that upon his death in 1870 would be renamed Washington and Lee University. While he was still at Appomattox, there was only one thing Lee felt he could not do: in a final brief meeting between Grant and Lee the next day, before they both left the area, Grant told Lee that “there was not a man in the Confederacy whose influence with the soldiers and the whole people was as great as his” and suggested that, in addition to having surrendered his own Army of Northern Virginia, Lee could also “advise the surrender” of the other Confederate forces scattered throughout the South. Lee gave him the same answer that Grant had received concerning Lincoln’s powers: only Jefferson Davis could negotiate on behalf of the Confederacy as a whole. Grant realized that this meant the war might go on for a time, and that Sherman would have to deal with Johnston down in North Carolina, but he did not press the matter. “I knew,” he said of that moment with Lee, “that there was no use to urge him to do anything against his ideas of what was right.”
After the close of the meeting at which the surrender terms were signed, Grant, lost in thought, came down the steps of the house where . he and Lee had conferred. Suddenly he realized that this was Lee in front of him, mounted on Traveller, sitting erect and turning his horse’s head as he started out of the yard, on the way to tell the men who had followed him through so much, and were still willing to fight on, that it was all over. Many Union officers were moving around in the yard, eager to mount their horses and get back to their commands with the news that the surrender was official.
Grant stopped and took off his hat. The yard became silent; every Union soldier there removed his hat and came to attention. Robert E. Lee lifted his hat once and passed through the gate, a man in a gray uniform riding a gray horse. For the remaining five years of his life, he never allowed a word against Ulysses S. Grant to be spoken in his presence.
16
THE DAYS AFTER APPOMATTOX: JOY AND GRIEF
Late on April 9, Grant’s headquarters sent Sherman a telegram that included a copy of the surrender terms, but, partly because of the continuing need for telegrams to travel part of the way to North Carolina by ship and partly because Sherman stuck to his plan to “haul out towards Raleigh” on April 10, it took three days for the message to catch up to his headquarters in the field, between Goldsboro and Raleigh. At five in the morning on April 12, Sherman sent off a telegram to Grant that began, “I have this moment received your telegram announcing the Surrender of Lee’s Army. I hardly Know how to express my feelings, but you can imagine them. The terms you have given Lee are magnanimous and liberal. Should Johnston follow Lee’s example, I shall of course grant the Same. He is retreating before me on Raleigh, and I shall be there tomorrow. Roads are heavy [muddy], but under the inspiration of the news from you, we can march 25 miles a day.”
The word of Appomattox spread through Sherman’s sleeping regiments at dawn, with horsemen cantering through the bivouacs as they shouted, “Lee’s surrendered!” Regiment after regiment exploded with joy. A man from Minnesota wrote, “I never heard such cheering in my life. It was one continuous roar for three hours.” Muskets were fired in the air; fifes and drums played “Yankee Doodle,” and Sherman sent this statement to his units: “Glory to God and our country, and all honor to our comrades in arms towards whom we are marching. A little more labor, a little more toil on our part, the great race is won, and our Government stands regenerated, after four long years of war.”
The festivities continued into the night. Theodore Upson, a long-serving sergeant of the 100th Indiana, left this account of how things went at an encampment that evidently received the news late in the day.
We had a great blowout at Hd Quarters last night … Gen Woods came out saying “Dismiss the guard, Sergeant, and come into my tent.” I thought he was crazy or some thing, so asked for what reason. He said, “Don’t you know Lee has surrendered? No man shall stand guard at my Quarters tonight. Bring all the guards here” … Officers were coming from every direction … He had a great big bowl sitting on a camp table. The General handed me a tin cup. “Help yourself,” he said … I never had drank liquor, and I did not know what it would do to me.
After a while a band came. They played once or twice, drank some, played some more … then they played again but did not keep very good time. Some of them could not wait till they got through a tune till they had to pledge [toast] Grant and his gallant Army, also Lee and his grand fighters … The Band finally got so they were playing two or three tunes at once …
General Woods shook my hand and said he would promote me, that I could consider myself a Lieut. After a little more talk … he made me a Captain, and I might have got higher than that if the General had not noticed the Band was not playing … He found the members seated on the ground or anything else they could find, several on the big bass drum … He got the big drum, other officers took the various horns and started through the camps—every fellow blowing his horn to suit himself and the jolly old General pounding the bass drum for all it was worth.
Of course we all followed and some sang, or tried to sing, but when “Johnny Comes Marching Home Again” and “John Browns Body” or “Hail Columbia” and the “Star Spangled Banner” are all sung together they get mixed so I don’t think the singing was a grand success from an artistic point of view at least.
As the celebrations wound down, Sherman was trying to get in touch with Joseph E. Johnston, to see if he could bring the war to an end on his front. As his men approached North Carolina’s capital of Raleigh, with Johnston’s rear guard clearly trying to avoid contact, Sherman issued orders to cease laying waste the enemy’s country: “No further destruction of railroads, mills, cotton and produce, will be made without the specific orders of an army commander, and the inhabitants will be dealt with kindly, looking to an early reconciliation.”
After an agreement had been reached with Raleigh’s mayor that there would be no resistance–Johnston’s forces had been withdrawn to the north and northwest—Sherman’s advanced troops entered the city. Only one remaining diehard, wearing a blue uniform that made him suspect as a spy, fired revolver shots at them on his own initiative, and he was captured and quickly executed on the grounds that he had violated the surrender agreement.
Then Sherman ordered his army to parade through the streets, bands playing. This display of force was intended to impress the city’s residents with the futility of further resistance, and it did. Major General Henry Slocum’s chief of staff, thirty-five-year-old Union general Carl Schurz, the German-born antislavery orator who had ahead of him a career as a nati
onally prominent newspaper editor and political figure, said of the endless columns, “As far as the eye can reach is a sea of bayonets.” A young Southern woman who was watching wiped her eyes with a handkerchief and said through her tears, “It is all over with us; I see now, it is all over. A few days ago I saw General Johnston’s army, ragged and starved; now when I look at these strong healthy men and see them coming and coming—it is all over with us!” (A small boy who had been told that all Yankees were devils said that he had been watching them pass all morning and hadn’t seen one with horns on his head.) Sherman’s troops were on their best behavior, far different from their actions and attitude in Georgia and South Carolina. The Raleigh Daily Standard soon commented on “the gentlemanly bearing of the officers and men. From General Sherman to the humblest private, we have witnessed nothing but what has been proper and courteous.”
On April 14, Sherman received a letter from Johnston, asking for “a temporary suspension of active operations … to permit the civil authorities to enter into the needful arrangements to terminate the existing war.” This request for a truce was just what Sherman wanted, and he replied that the two armies should remain apart and that “I undertake to abide by the same terms and conditions as were made by Generals Grant and Lee … I will add that I really desire to save the people of North Carolina the damage they would sustain by the march of this army through the central or western parts of the State.”
Sherman felt that, after his meeting with Grant and Lincoln at City Point, he understood exactly what he was empowered to do, and that it was now up to Johnston to consult with “the civil authorities” to which he had referred in his letter. In a telegram to Grant, with a copy for Stanton, Sherman set forth the text of his exchange of letters with Johnston and said that he thought this “will be followed by terms of capitulation.” He repeated his intention of following Grant’s items of surrender agreed upon at Appomattox and added that he would “be careful not to complicate any point of civil policy.” He closed by saying he expected that, once Johnston received the Confederate governmental decision to surrender, “all the details are easily arranged.”
Joseph E. Johnston moved as quickly as he could, visiting scattered and confused Confederate officials in various locations in North Carolina. He finally tracked down Jefferson Davis in Charlotte, only to find the Confederate president talking about raising new Confederate armies and fighting on. Johnston bluntly told Davis that “it would be the greatest of human crimes for us to continue the war” and added that “the only function of government left in his possession” was that of agreeing to negotiations for peace. Davis did not give Johnston authority to do more than surrender his own army, but a meeting between Sherman and Johnston was finally set for April 17.
While Grant had been closing out the military side of the war, Lincoln had visited the enemy capital soon after its defenders evacuated the city. Alerted by Lee, Jefferson Davis and his cabinet had left Richmond the night of Sunday, April 2, and within hours fires were set to destroy the Confederacy’s military records; warehouses filled with cotton, tobacco, and military supplies were also put to the torch. These soon burnt out of control, and other fires started by looters merged into an inferno that engulfed most of Richmond. Everything went up in flames: factories, hotels, business offices, residences. The following morning, federal cavalrymen rode into the still-flaming city, followed by white infantrymen led by a band playing “The Girl I Left Behind Me” and black troops marching to the tune of “Dixie.”
On the same day, Lincoln went from City Point to just-evacuated Petersburg, visited with Grant for an hour and a half, and returned to City Point. (Neither man left a record of what they discussed.) The following morning, April 4, the president left City Point for Richmond aboard the USS Malvern. Coming ashore accompanied by Admiral Porter and a squad of sailors armed with carbines, he was welcomed by Major General Jacob Weitzel, in charge of the Union forces occupying the smoldering enemy capital. As Lincoln walked through cheering crowds of blacks, many of these freed slaves fell to their knees before him, crying out that he was a “Messiah.” Asking them to get back on their feet, Lincoln told them, “Don’t kneel to me. You must kneel to God only and thank him for your freedom.”
After visiting the Confederate White House that Jefferson Davis had occupied until forty-eight hours before, Lincoln was driven through the city in a carriage and met with John A. Campbell, a former justice of the United States Supreme Court who had served as the Confederacy’s assistant secretary of war. The president had last seen Campbell in early February, at the unsuccessful talks that became known as the Hampton Roads Peace Conference, held aboard Lincoln’s steamer River Queen in the waters off Fort Monroe on the Virginia coast. On that occasion, Lincoln and his secretary of state William Seward had met with Campbell, Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens, and the Confederacy’s secretary of state R.M.T. Hunter, only to find that the South’s representatives still would not consider any peace that did not leave the Confederacy as an independent nation entitled to practice slavery.
As he left Richmond, Lincoln said to General Weitzel, speaking of the defeated Southerners, “If I were in your place, I’d let ‘em up easy, let ’em up easy.” Back at City Point two days later, knowing that Jefferson Davis was still fleeing, Lincoln wrote Weitzel: “It has been intimated to me that the gentlemen who have acted as the Legislature of Virginia, in support of the rebellion, may now … desire to assemble at Richmond, and take measures to withdraw the Virginia troops, and other support from resistance to the General [federal] government. If they attempt it, give them permission and protection.” With this, Lincoln was recognizing for the moment at least the legitimacy of Virginia’s Confederate legislature to act on behalf of Virginia in cooperating with the federal government—something that would soon bring him once again into a confrontation with the Radicals, who felt that a legislature that had voted to secede from the Union had no authority whatever, and that the only government suitable for a defeated Confederate state was a military occupation.
Everyone who saw Lincoln at this time, in Washington and anywhere else, was struck by the sorrow marked on his face. The poet Walt Whitman, who profoundly admired Lincoln and had spent the war working with the wounded in military hospitals in the Washington area, had recently described Lincoln in a letter to a friend he had met in the course of his work, a nineteen-year-old Confederate captain from Mississippi who lost a leg at Fredericksburg and was taken to Washington as a prisoner: “He has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.” In addition to bearing the enormous responsibilities of the convulsive national crisis for the past four years, Lincoln had truly meant it when in his Second Inaugural Address on March 4 he had said, “With malice toward none; with charity for all.” Above even his constant concern for his soldiers and their families—in his speech he pledged “to care for him who has borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan”—he loved the entire nation, the South as well as the North, and was painfully aware of the passions bred by four years of war. On the one hand, he had such Radicals as Congressman George W. Julian of Indiana, who three years before had said, looking ahead to a Union victory, “Let us convert the rebel States into conquered provinces, remanding them to the status of mere Territories, and governing them as such in our discretion.” Since then Julian had developed that view into this, from a speech he made on the House floor on February 7, less than a month before Lincoln’s “With malice toward none” address: “Both the people and our armies … have been learning how to hate rebels as Christian patriots ought to have done from the beginning.” On the other hand, Lincoln was equally aware of Southern emotions such as those expressed after the surrender at Appomattox, when a Union general told Confederate general Henry A. Wise that he hoped there would be good relations between North and South. Wise, a former governor of Virginia, replied, “There is
a rancor in our hearts that you little dream of. We hate you, sir.”
Apart from the great issues that weighed upon him, Lincoln, like Sherman, had experienced personal tragedy during the war. A year and a half before the Shermans’ son Willy died at the age of nine, the Lincolns’ eleven-year-old son William Wallace Lincoln had died of malaria in Washington. (Jefferson Davis and his wife Marina also lost a child when their five-year-old son Joseph Evan Davis fell to his death from a porch fifteen feet high at the Confederate White House in Richmond in 1864.)
With all his cares, Lincoln spoke of himself as “very greatly rejoiced” by the news of Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox on April 9. The day after that, talking to a crowd in Washington that had brought along two or three bands to serenade him, Lincoln said, “I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever heard. Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted … that we fairly captured it.” As the crowd applauded, Lincoln added, to more applause and laughter, “I presented the question to the Attorney General, and he gave it as his opinion that it is our lawful prize.”
The next evening, as he made a much longer speech, the public saw a different Lincoln, thoughtful and intense. Here was the eve of peace, but throughout the war he had never been able to get a consensus in Congress for his specific plans for the postwar treatment of the South, and had opposed the Radicals in such a way that they could not enact their harsher views into law. His mood at the moment seemed to match the weather. It was a misty night; reading by the light of a candle held by an aide, Lincoln began speaking to an enthusiastic crowd that had gathered beneath the shadowy second-floor balcony window of the White House, expecting to hear a victory speech. He began as his listeners expected him to, saying, “We meet this evening, not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart,” and added, paying tribute to the recent successes of “General Grant, his skillful officers, and brave men,” that “no part of the honor, for plan or execution, is mine.”
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Page 40