The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  By disposition Wilcox was nervous and fussy, so his soldiers called him “Old Billy Fixing.” On duty he was precise and exacting. In easy company he was kindly, generous, friendly, and informal. For a photograph he would dress to the teeth in his best uniform and glare viciously into the camera. On the battlefield, however, he wore a short round jacket and a broad-brimmed straw hat and prodded his mount, an old white pony, with a long hickory switch.14

  Wilcox had proved himself not just indestructible over the years, but reliable—he reported to battle with the day-in-day-out regularity of a bureaucrat punching a time clock. He was one of the most able brigadiers and then division commanders in Lee’s army. Lee could always count on his battlefield savvy, tactical instinct, and powers of observation to do what needed to be done. His talents belied his class standing at West Point—fifty-fourth—only four files removed from George Pickett at the bottom. It was generally thought that his finest hour had been at Chancellorsville in early May 1863, when alone with his brigade at Salem Church, he had held the Union army off Lee’s flank and helped turn the battle in the Confederate favor.15

  Now here he was at Appomattox, having seen better days. He dismounted and shook hands all around. Was he so cold he had to wear that overcoat? Gibbon asked.

  “It’s all I have,” said Wilcox glumly.

  He opened his coat. Underneath he was wearing only his underclothes. He pointed to a pair of saddlebags on his nag. “That’s all the baggage I have left,” he said.

  Then turning to Sheridan, he entered a formal complaint: “You have captured all of the balance, and you can’t have that until you capture me!”

  Henry Heth, in spiffy contrast, was clad in his best gray uniform and able to explain to Wilcox how he had managed it. When he found that the Federals were capturing baggage, Heth had put on his newest outfit to keep it out of enemy hands.16

  The conversation on the courthouse steps drifted quickly from fashion considerations to other more important matters—war and peace among them, and the contents of the various flasks being passed around. Mutual healths were toasted, and the little group began spreading out from the steps into the square and onto the nearby fence. Gordon entertained the group with details about how he thought the Confederacy was about played out. The last hope had been riding on his attempt to break through on the Lynchburg road that morning.

  It was decided that pending Lee’s anticipated meeting with Grant, which was expected momentarily, hostilities should not be resumed or troops moved from their present positions on either side without due and timely notice. Gibbon proposed that if Grant and Lee couldn’t come to terms and stop the fighting, they should order their soldiers to fire only blank cartridges to prevent further bloodshed.

  The generals continued this rump negotiating session and reunion for nearly an hour and a half. Uncountable pairs of field glasses were trained on them from both armies. It was “a singular spectacle,” a reporter wrote.17

  For the West Pointers among them it was a particularly poignant reunion. It had never been in their hearts to hate the classmates they were fighting. Their lives and affections for one another had been indelibly framed and inextricably intertwined in their academy days. No adversity, war, killing, or political estrangement could undo that. Now, meeting together when the guns were quiet, they yearned to know that they would never hear their thunder or be ordered to take up arms against one another again.

  But this reunion at the courthouse square was but a meeting awaiting a more important meeting, which would decide if it was to be peace or war. After an hour and a half it broke up. The officers scattered, all hoping there would be no further bloodshed, all regretting that they had not the power among them to end the fighting at once.18

  Early in the afternoon Lee rode into Appomattox and entered the ample living room of the Wilbur McLean house, a spacious home on the square. Soon after, Grant entered the town, rode through the square, dismounted, strode up the wide steps, across the porch, and into the house to meet his old adversary. Two and a half hours later Lee’s army surrendered.

  In the ragged Confederate lines, hearts began to break. The shock of the news that Lee had surrendered was “terrible,” a South Carolina soldier wrote, “appalling, numbing, crushing. It is as if a mighty concord of instruments were instantaneously smitten with silence—as if a star were struck from the firmament of glory and hurled into abysmal depths of darkness.”19

  “Such scenes as followed were never before witnessed in the old Army of Northern Virginia,” mourned Stonewall Jackson’s ex-gunner, William Poague. “Men expressed in various ways the agonizing emotions that shook their souls and broke their hearts. Some cried like children. Others sat on the ground with faces buried in hands, quietly sobbing. Others embraced friends, their bodies trembling and shaking. Others, struck dumb and with blanched faces, seemed to strain their eyes to catch the form of some awful horror that suddenly loomed before them.”20

  Frederick M. Colston, a Confederate ordnance officer, saw tears “in many eyes and on many cheeks where they had never been brought by fear.”21 “Ragged and dirty, gaunt with hunger, and physically exhausted,” a soldier said, “men went into paroxysms of grief or rage, tears running down grizzly old faces of some, while others broke up their guns, swords, or drums. We knew not what was to become of us.”22

  “I would rather have embraced the tabernacle of death,” said white-haired Brigadier General Henry A. Wise.23

  For the rank and file in the Union army, the first week in April had been days of fierce enthusiasm and fiery excitement, “red hot days,” one of them said. For four years many of them had followed the basic philosophy of their kind, going “where we were told, if we could conveniently get there,” and staying “where we were put till it evidently was time to leave.” But when the news came out of the McLean House at about three in the afternoon, the air on the Union side was in the next minute “black with hats and boots, coats, knapsacks, shirts and cartridge-boxes, blankets and shelter tents, canteens and haversacks”—anything that could be hurled skyward. Soldiers fell without embarrassment on one another’s necks, laughing and crying. Brawny, lumbering, bearded men embraced and kissed like schoolgirls and danced and sang and shouted, stood on their heads, and played leapfrog with one another. The war, the cruel, ghastly, unending war was over and they had won.24

  John Gibbon threw nothing in the air and hugged nobody. But a powerful feeling of triumph and relief swept over him. He didn’t let it show, would never let it show, out of respect for his Confederate friends and classmates, whose anguish he understood. That afternoon General Grant informed Gibbon that he was to head the three-general delegation to work out the details of the formal surrender with three Confederate counterparts. Gibbon with his corps and Charles Griffin’s Fifth Corps was to remain at Appomattox to oversee the surrender, and to collect the public property and arms. Gibbon spent that night in a tent between the lines, and slept more soundly in front of his pickets than he had behind them only the night before.25

  Another general got orders from Grant later that night. Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain, of Maine, one of the most heroic and sensitive of Grant’s officers, was told he was to handle the formal surrender of the Confederate infantry. Grant had demanded that there be a formal surrender, and he wanted the ceremonies to be as simple as possible. He wanted nothing done to humiliate the manhood of the southern soldiers, who had fought the Union army so bravely and so desperately all these months, all those years. He could trust Chamberlain to see that it was done right.26

  The next morning in a drizzling rain, Lee and Grant met one more time at the edge of town and talked on their horses. After they had conversed for a short while, Grant motioned to Gibbon, who waited at a discreet distance with other generals and staff. Gibbon rode forward.

  Lee received him courteously, but gravely and without indicating that he had ever seen him before, although they had known one another in the old army.

  “Gen.
Lee is desirous that his officers and men should have on their persons some evidence that they are paroled prisoners, so that they will not be disturbed,” Grant told Gibbon.

  Lee explained that he desired to do simply what was in his power to protect his men from anything disagreeable.

  Gibbon said he thought that could be arranged. He carried in his corps a small printing press. He could have blank forms struck off to be filled in and issued to each Confederate soldier, signed by their own officers and distributed as required.

  Lee assented, then said to Grant, “You have excepted private horses from the Surrender. Now most of my couriers and many of the artillery and cavalry own their own horses. How will it be about them?”

  Grant at once turned to Gibbon. “They will be allowed to retain them.” He then turned back to Lee. “They will need them in putting in their spring crops!”27 Grant had tried to kill these men for four bloody years, and now he was concerned that they get their spring crops in the ground so that they might live. The time had come for peace.

  When the meeting broke up, Gibbon, Griffin, and Major General Wesley Merritt, the three Union negotiators, accompanied by a number of other officers and escorted by a member of James Longstreet’s staff, rode through the Confederate picket line. Longstreet, Gordon, and Brigadier General William Pendleton, Lee’s chief of artillery and the gospel-preaching father of young Sandie Pendleton, now dead like Jackson, were to represent the Confederate army.

  Longstreet was absent from his headquarters, but Gordon and Pendleton were immediately sent for. Pendleton looked to Gibbon very much like Lee and nearly as old. Gordon, whom Gibbon had met for the first time the day before, was a man of about his own make and height, and Gibbon was struck with him. Gordon’s pleasant face and remarkably polished manners had impressed them all. Like Birkett Fry, Gordon had been riddled with bullets—five times at Antietam alone—and a deep scar ran across his left cheek. When his wife had hurried to his side after Antietam, she looked at his black and shapeless face and bandaged limbs and blanched. Hoping to reassure her, he had said, “Here’s your handsome husband; been to an Irish wedding.” Her answer was a stifled scream.28

  The two delegations arranged to meet immediately in a room somewhere on the Appomattox Court House square. They rode back through the Union lines accompanied by Rooney Lee and Gibbon’s former classmate, Cadmus Wilcox, who presumably was better dressed than he had been the day before. On the way they overtook two more of Gibbon’s ex-classmates, Henry Heth and George Pickett, who were riding together into the Union lines. On the road they also met Lee and Longstreet, and Longstreet turned back to ride with them to the town.

  The six peacemakers began their meeting in a room at the hotel, but it was so bare and cheerless that Gibbon suggested they adjourn to the McLean house where Lee and Grant had met the day before. At the suggestion of the others, Gibbon began writing out several clauses to govern the surrender. The first four were quickly adopted. But at the fifth, they all hesitated. It was more thorny than the rest: Who should be included in the surrender, and who not? Longstreet suggested that the list embrace all Confederate troops belonging to the Army of Northern Virginia, except such cavalry as had escaped and any artillery that had been beyond twenty miles of Appomattox Court House at the time Grant and Lee were meeting at the McLean house. This was unanimously adopted, the terms were drawn up in final form, and signed.

  It was agreed that the Confederate infantry was to march by brigades and detachments to a designated point to stack arms and deposit their flags, sabers, and pistols; and then to march to their homes under the charge of their officers. That afternoon the cavalry and artillery began surrendering, and Gibbon’s printing press began turning out parole passes. Since thirty thousand would be required, it promised to take all night and probably all the next day. So Gibbon ordered a detail of qualified printers recruited from the army to work in relays until the job was finished. There seemed to be more than enough men in the ranks with this specialized talent. Gibbon reasoned that if they had needed fifty watchmakers or blacksmiths, they would have just as readily found them. After four years of organized war, it was an army prepared for anything.29

  Grant came up and sat on the porch of the McLean house as he waited for his officers to prepare his army to leave Appomattox. As he sat there, his generals began arriving with many of Grant’s old comrades from the Confederate army, who had been his friends far longer than they had been his enemies, and who were now his friends again. Sheridan, Gibbon, and Rufus Ingalls brought Cadmus Wilcox, the best man from Grant’s wedding day. As Longstreet passed—another old and dear friend who had been present at his marriage vows—Grant called out and rose to greet him affectionately and offer him a cigar. Heth, who had been a subaltern with Grant in Mexico, came up on the porch, and Gordon and Pickett and a number of others. Grant received them all cordially and talked with them until it was time to leave. About noon he rode out of Appomattox for the last time, without entering Confederate lines.30

  The next day, the eleventh, Confederate cavalrymen and artillerymen finished surrendering their guns, ammunition, and flags. It was a foggy, gloomy day. “The very heavens seem to sympathize with my humour and my country’s agony,” a Confederate soldier said.31

  The next day was no better, chill and gray and depressing. It was April 12, four years to the day that the Confederate guns had opened fire on the little Union garrison at Fort Sumter and started the war. Joshua Chamberlain had been ordered to have his lines formed to accept the surrender of the Confederate infantry at sunrise. He positioned his soldiers along the principal street of the town, from the bank of the Appomattox to the courthouse, facing the last line of battle. His troops, a representative portion of the Union army, were as much remnants as the soldiers whose surrender they were about to receive—tattered veterans themselves from Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York.

  At about nine in the morning the Confederate infantry began to come, for the last time, “with the old swinging route step and swaying battle-flags,” the Stonewall Brigade in the lead.32 At their head rode John Gordon, with a grief “which almost stifled utterance.”33 Chamberlain watched them come with compassion welling in his heart. He would not let this once proud army surrender to him without a salute from his own. He passed the order, and as the head of the rebel columns drew opposite the Union line, a single bugle blared and the entire Union column from right to left, regiment by regiment in succession, passed from “order arms” to “carry.”34 It was the marching salute, “a soldierly salute to those vanquished heroes—a token of respect from Americans to Americans, a final and fitting tribute from Northern to Southern chivalry.”35

  Gordon caught the sound of the shifting arms and looked up. Instantly taking its meaning, he wheeled, making of himself and his horse one uplifted figure and dropping the point of his sword to his boot toe in a returning salute. He then ordered his own successive brigades to pass at carry arms—“honor answering honor.” On the Union side there was no further sound of trumpet, no roll of drum, not a cheer nor a word or whisper of vainglorying, but “an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead.”36

  The Confederates fixed bayonets, stacked arms, then hesitating, removed their cartridge boxes and laid them down.

  “Good-bye, gun,” one Confederate soldier said to his musket, “I am darned glad to get rid of you. I have been trying to for two years.”37

  In agony, they folded their flags, “battle-worn and torn, bloodstained, heart-holding colors,” and laid them down. Some Confederate soldiers rushed from the ranks, bent over the flags and pressed them to their lips “with burning tears.”38 Gordon watched sadly. The tattered and faded banners his men were laying on the stacked guns appeared to him like “trappings on the coffin of their dead hopes.”39

  “What visions thronged as we looked into each other’s eyes!” Chamberlain later wrote. Recollections of past battles flooded his own m
emory as he sat on his horse and took the surrender, regiment after regiment and division after division, throughout the morning and afternoon. It was by miracles, he thought, that any of them standing there had lived to see this day. When the day ended, in the dusk of the evening, the long lines of scattered cartridge boxes were set on fire and “the lurid flames wreathing the blackness of earthly shadows [gave] an unearthly border to our parting.”40

  Paroled in those three wrenching days at Appomattox were 28,231 Confederates—all that was left of Lee’s army: 22,349 infantry; 1,559 cavalry; 1,747 general headquarters and miscellaneous troops; and 2,576 artillerymen with 63 cannon.41

  To Edward Porter Alexander, Longstreet’s artillery commander, the next day seemed to usher in a new life in a new world. “We had lived through the war,” he marveled. “There was nobody trying to shoot us, and nobody for us to shoot at. Our guns were gone, our country was gone, our very entity seemed to be destroyed. We were no longer soldiers, and had no orders to obey, nothing to do, and nowhere to go.”42

  Now the “instinctive love of home” called them all. To some the thought was bittersweet. “Home to many, when they reached it,” a soldier said, “was graves and ashes.” At any rate, he thought, “there must be somewhere on earth, a better place than a muddy, smoky camp in a piece of scrubby pines—better company than gloomy, hungry comrades and inquisitive enemies, and something in the future more exciting, if not more hopeful, than nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep, nothing to do and nowhere to go.”43