by Bruce Catton
While the southern leaders strove mightily with phantoms, Lincoln stayed close to Grant’s army; and early in the spring Sherman left his own army safely moored in North Carolina and came up to City Point to see the lieutenant general and the President.
All three of these men knew that before very long the two generals would be called on to state the terms on which they would accept the surrender of the Confederate armies facing them; and Lincoln’s counsel to them could be summed up in his own expression: “Let ’em up easy.” Congress would not be in session this spring. If peace could soon be restored, Lincoln might perhaps be able to get the reconstruction of the Union so far advanced that by December, when the legislators did assemble, measures of vengeance and repression would be impossible. This he greatly wanted. He would destroy the Confederate nation forever, and he would also destroy slavery, but the South itself he would not destroy, nor would he inflict any punishment beyond the fearful punishment which the war itself had already inflicted. Under his direction much killing had been done, yet now Lincoln was repeatedly asking the generals: Cannot this thing somehow be ended without any more fighting? Must we go on with the killing? Grant and Sherman were of his mood, yet both of them told him the business was not yet over. There would be another battle, perhaps two, perhaps more; victory would come, but men still would have to fight for it, and the enormous graveyard that stretched from Minnesota to Florida must grow still more crowded before the last bugle call died on the wind.
Sherman went back to North Carolina, and Grant made ready for the final drive.
The Petersburg lines were more than fifty miles long, running from the south of Petersburg clear around to the northeast of Richmond. All through the previous fall Grant had been extending his lines to his left, reaching out to cut the railroads which the South must hold if it would hold the Confederate capital. It had not been easy going. Lee had foreseen each move and had countered it, and Union troops more than once had been defeated with heavy loss; yet the Union line had been drawn out a little farther each time, and to meet it Lee had been compelled — with constantly dwindling resources — to stretch his own line out in response. His army now was not half the size of the army Grant commanded. The realities of trench warfare, to be sure, were such that men vastly outnumbered could hold their ground against almost any direct assault, but the stretching process could not go on forever. Sooner or later Lee could be made to pull his line so taut that it would break.
No one knew this any better than Lee himself. His only hope (if it could really be called a hope) was to evacuate Petersburg and Richmond, get his army down to North Carolina, join forces with Johnston, and beat Sherman. After that (assuming that the combined armies could in fact defeat Sherman’s mighty host) Lee and Johnston might just conceivably turn north again and defeat Grant … or move off somewhere, form a continuing knot of resistance, and keep the war going a few months longer. This was the only move left on the board. The odds against it were long, but if Lee stayed where he was it was completely certain that in a very few weeks he would be overwhelmed.
Yet he could not move at once. The unpaved roads, wet with winter’s rains, were atrocious, and it was an open question whether Lee’s horses, worn down by scanty forage, disease, and the lack of replacements, could pull his wagon trains and his guns. If he went south he would have to get some sort of advantage. He could get it only by making a sharp, punishing offensive thrust that would knock the Army of the Potomac back on its heels. Such a thrust, late in March, the Confederate commander undertook to make.
He struck on March 25, in the dark hour just before dawn, driving a column of infantry in on a strong point in the Union line known as Fort Stedman, due east of Petersburg. His men attacked without warning, seized Fort Stedman, went running out along the trenches on either side, and sent a spearhead on through to take secondary Union positions in the rear. If they succeeded they would break the Union army in half, Grant would have to pull his left wing back to repair the break, and the Army of Northern Virginia would have a clear road to North Carolina.
They could not succeed. The forts to the right and left of Stedman held, with a sharp flurry of hand-to-hand fighting. The Confederate force that had gone on to the second line went astray and was overwhelmed by Union reserves. A Federal counterattack was launched, the men who had taken Fort Stedman found themselves under heavy fire, Union artillery plastered the Confederate front — and by eight o’clock it was clear that the attack had been a failure. Remnants of the Confederate force got back to their own lines, the Union repossessed Fort Stedman, and Lee had lost nearly five thousand men. Now it would be Grant’s turn.
Heavy rains slowed all movement, and for a few days the armies marked time. Then Grant struck, crowding a full corps of infantry in on the farthest extremity of the Confederate line; and at the same time Phil Sheridan moved out with his cavalry, leaving the trenches behind and moving up through Dinwiddie Court House to a rain-swept crossroads known as Five Forks — a place from which, if they held it firmly, his troops could quickly go storming north and cut the vital railway lines. Lee sent his own cavalry, plus an infantry division under George Pickett, to halt this thrust, and on April 1 Sheridan got infantry reinforcements of his own, overwhelmed Pickett by sheer drive and force of numbers, capturing most of his force and shattering the rest beyond repair — and Lee’s flank had been turned at last, once and for all. The next day Grant ordered an assault all along the main lines. General Horatio Wright and his VI Corps found a place where Lee’s force had been stretched too thin and broke it — losing two thousand men in the assault, for even when they were woefully undermanned these Petersburg lines were all but invulnerable — punching a wide hole that could not be repaired. On the evening and night of April 2 Lee evacuated Petersburg and Richmond and began his final retreat.
A great fire burned in Richmond when Union troops marched in. Retreating Confederates had fired various warehouses full of goods they could not take with them, and in the wild confusion of defeat these flames got out of hand; the victorious Unionists, coming at last into the capital city of the Confederacy, spent their first hours there as a fire brigade, putting out flames, checking looting, and bringing order back to the desolate town. Lincoln himself came up the James River in a gunboat — he had been at City Point, unable to tear himself away from the military nerve center while the climactic battle was being fought — and he walked up the streets of Richmond with a handful of sailors for an escort, dazed crowds looking on in silence; went to the Confederate White House, sat for a time at Jefferson Davis’s desk, and saw for himself the final collapse of the nation he had sworn to destroy.
Most of Grant’s army never got into Richmond, and neither did Grant himself. They were on the road, pushing along furiously to head Lee off and drive him into a pocket where he could be forced to surrender, Lee was making a good march of it — his Army of Northern Virginia always could cover the ground fast — but Confederate supply arrangements, never good, broke down completely, and the rations that were supposed to be delivered to him along the way never reached him. He lost a day while his details combed the countryside to impress provisions, and the loss of this day killed off whatever chance he may have had. Sheridan and his cavalry, followed by infantry, outraced him, curled around in front, and compelled him to drift west instead of following the roads that led to Joe Johnston.
It was a forced march for both armies, lit with jubilant hope for one, darkened by gloom for the other, a matter of hard trial for the foot soldiers of each one; a pressing on in the darkness, over bad roads, through a somber country where the fires of spring had not yet burned away winter’s brown, barren bleakness. One army had wagon trains filled with food, the other had few wagons and no rations; yet the soldiers of both armies drove on, marching away from mealtimes, knowing only that after four years of it they were at last coming to the end, with tomorrow and all that tomorrow might mean lying somewhere over the next horizon. Meade overtook a part of Lee’s a
rmy at Sayler’s Creek — a soggy little crossing in a bottomland ninety miles from nowhere — and destroyed nearly half of it, taking many prisoners, capturing among others the fabulous General Richard Ewell, who had been Stonewall Jackson’s trusted lieutenant back in the day when the future still was fluid. What was left of the Army of Northern Virginia slogged on over bad roads, taking the last lap on the march to extinction and a deathless legend: and the Army of the Potomac followed, pressing close behind, sending swift tentacles out on parallel roads to get in front and stop the march.
It came to an end at last on Palm Sunday — April 9, 1865 — when Sheridan and his cavalry and a whole corps of infantry got squarely across the road in Lee’s front. The nearest town was the village of Appomattox Court House, and the last long mile had been paced off. Lee had armed Yankees in his front, in his rear, and on his flank. There was a spatter of fighting as his advance guard tried the Yankee line to see if it could be broken. It could not. The firing died down, and Lee sent a courier with a white flag through the lines carrying a letter to U. S. Grant.
3. Telegram in Cipher
Until this Palm Sunday of 1865 the word Appomattox had no meaning. It was a harsh name left over from Indian days, it belonged to a river and to a country town, and it had no overtones. But after this day it would be one of the haunted possessions of the American people, a great and unique word that would echo in the national memory with infinite tragedy and infinite promise, recalling a moment in which sunset and sunrise came together in a streaked glow that was half twilight and half dawn.
The business might almost have been stage-managed for effect. No detail had been overlooked. There was even the case of Wilmer McLean, the Virginian who once owned a place by a stream named Bull Run and who found his farm overrun by soldiers in the first battle of the war. He sold out and moved to southern Virginia to get away from the war, and he bought a modest house in Appomattox Court House; and the war caught up with him finally, so that Lee and Grant chose his front parlor — of all the rooms in America — as the place where they would sit down together and bring the fighting to an end.
Lee had one staff officer with him, and in Mr. McLean’s front yard a Confederate orderly stood by while the war horse Traveler nibbled at the spring grass. Grant came with half a dozen officers of his own, including the famous Sheridan, and after he and Lee had shaken hands and taken their seats these trooped into the room to look and to listen. Grant and Lee sat at two separate tables, the central figures in one of the greatest tableaus of American history.
It was a great tableau not merely because of what these two men did but also because of what they were. No two Americans could have been in greater contrast. (Again, the staging was perfect.) Lee was legend incarnate — tall, gray, one of the handsomest and most imposing men who ever lived, dressed today in his best uniform, with a sword belted at his waist. Grant was — well, he was U. S. Grant, rather scrubby and undersized, wearing his working clothes, with mud-spattered boots and trousers and a private’s rumpled blue coat with his lieutenant general’s stars tacked to the shoulders. He wore no sword. The men who were with them noticed the contrast and remembered it. Grant himself seems to have felt it; years afterward, when he wrote his memoirs, he mentioned it and went to some lengths to explain why he did not go to this meeting togged out in dress uniform. (In effect, his explanation was that he was just too busy.)1
Yet the contrast went far beyond the matter of personal appearance. Two separate versions of America met in this room, each perfectly embodied by its chosen representative.
There was an American aristocracy, and it had had a great day. It came from the past and it looked to the past; it seemed almost deliberately archaic, with an air of knee breeches and buckled shoes and powdered wigs, with a leisured dignity and a rigid code in which privilege and duty were closely joined. It had brought the country to its birth and it had provided many of its beliefs; it had given courage and leadership, a sense of order and learning, and if there had been any way by which the eighteenth century could possibly have been carried forward into the future, this class would have provided the perfect vehicle. But from the day of its beginning America had been fated to be a land of unending change. The country in which this leisured class had its place was in powerful ferment, and the class itself had changed. It had been diluted. In the struggle for survival it had laid hands on the curious combination of modern machinery and slave labor, the old standards had been altered, dignity had begun to look like arrogance, and pride of purse had begun to elbow out pride of breeding. The single lifetime of Robert E. Lee had seen the change, although Lee himself had not been touched by it.
Yet the old values were real, and the effort to preserve them had nobility. Of all the things that went to make up the war, none had more poignance than the desperate fight to preserve these disappearing values, eroded by change from within as much as by change from without. The fight had been made and it had been lost, and everything that had been dreamed and tried and fought for was personified in the gray man who sat at the little table in the parlor at Appomattox and waited for the other man to start writing out the terms of surrender.
The other man was wholly representative too. Behind him there was a new society, not dreamed of by the founding fathers: a society with the lid taken off, western man standing up to assert that what lay back of a person mattered nothing in comparison to what lay ahead of him. It was the land of the mudsills, the temporarily dispossessed, the people who had nothing to lose but the future; behind it were hard times, humiliation and failure, and ahead of it was all the world and a chance to lift oneself by one’s bootstraps. It had few standards beyond a basic unformulated belief in the irrepressibility and ultimate value of the human spirit, and it could tramp with heavy boots down a ravaged Shenandoah Valley or through the embers of a burned Columbia without giving more than a casual thought to the things that were being destroyed. Yet it had its own nobility and its own standards; it had, in fact, the future of the race in its keeping, with all the immeasurable potential that might reside in a people who had decided that they would no longer be bound by the limitations of the past. It was rough and uncultivated and it came to important meetings wearing muddy boots and no sword, and it had to be listened to.
It could speak with a soft voice, and it could even be abashed by its own moment of triumph, as if that moment were not a thing to be savored and enjoyed. Grant seems to have been almost embarrassed when he and Lee came together in this parlor, yet it was definitely not the embarrassment of an underling ill at ease in a superior’s presence. Rather it was simply the diffidence of a sensitive man who had another man in his power and wished to hurt him as little as possible. So Grant made small talk and recalled the old days in the Mexican War, when Lee had been the polished staff officer in the commanding general’s tents and Grant had been an acting regimental quartermaster, slouching about like the hired man who looked after the teams. Perhaps the oddest thing about this meeting at Appomattox was that it was Grant, the nobody from nowhere, who played the part of gracious host, trying to put the aristocrat at his ease and, as far as might be, to soften the weight of the blow that was about to come down. In the end it was Lee who, so to speak, had to call the meeting to order, remarking (and the remark must have wrenched him almost beyond endurance) that they both knew what they were there for and that perhaps they had better get down to business. So Grant opened his orderly book and got out his pencil. He confessed afterward that when he did so he had no idea what words he was going to write.
He knew perfectly well what he was going to say, however, and with a few pauses he said it in straightforward words. Lee’s army was to be surrendered, from commanding general down to humblest private. All public property would be turned over to the United States Army — battle flags, guns, muskets, wagons, everything. Officers might keep their side arms (Grant wrote this after a speculative glance at the excellent sword Lee was wearing) and their horses, but the army and everything it
owned was to go out of existence.
It was not, however, to go off to a prison camp. Throughout the war Lincoln had stressed one point: the people of the South might have peace whenever they chose just by laying down their arms and going home. Grant made this official. Officers and men, having disarmed themselves, would simply give their paroles. Then they could go to their homes … and here Grant wrote one of the greatest sentences in American history, the sentence that, more than any other thing, would finally make it impossible for any vengeful government in Washington to proceed against Confederate veterans as traitors. Having gone home, he wrote, officers and men could stay there, “not to be disturbed by the United States authorities so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside.” When the powerful signature, “U. S. Grant,” was signed under that sentence, the chance that Confederate soldiers might be hanged or imprisoned for treason went out the window.
Having written all of this, Grant handed it over for Lee to read.
Lee’s part was not easy. He made a business of getting out his glasses, polishing them carefully, crossing his legs, and adjusting himself. Once he borrowed a lead pencil to insert a word that Grant had omitted. When he had finished he raised a point. In the Confederate army, he said, horses for cavalry and artillery were not government issue; the soldiers themselves owned them. Did the terms as written permit these men to take their horses home with them? Grant shook his head. He had not realized that Confederate soldiers owned their steeds, and the terms he had written were explicit: all such animals must be turned in as captured property. Still — Grant went on to muse aloud; the last battle of the war was over, the war itself was over except for picking up the pieces, and what really mattered was for the men of the South to get back home and become civilians again. He would not change the written terms, but he supposed that most of Lee’s men were small farmers anxious to return to their acres and get a crop in, and he would instruct the officers in charge of the surrender ceremonies to give a horse or a mule to any Confederate soldier who claimed to own one, so that the men would have a chance “to work their little farms.” And in those homely words the great drama of Appomattox came to a close.