The American Civil War

by John Keegan

  The continuation of the war after that date was certainly impossible, since Lee was outnumbered several times over and had no rations with which to feed his troops. It seems probable, however, that had food been available and if numbers had sufficed, he might well have gone on resisting, as would many of his men. In that sense the South could have survived longer than it did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The End of the War

  LEE, whose retreat towards Lynchburg continued, managed to remain ahead of the Union pursuit during April 8 but by then it was clear to both Union and Confederate headquarters that the arrangement of a formal cessation of hostilities could not be long delayed. The Northern army dominated the field of operations. The Southern army was urgently in need of sustenance which only the enemy could supply. Lee sent another letter, asking Grant to meet him but disdaining any intention to surrender, and asking for a statement of terms. Grant, for once, did not, as he had during the Henry and Donelson campaign and at Vicksburg, insist that the terms be unconditional. An uncharacteristic tenderness informed the letters he began to exchange with Lee. Lee asked Grant to meet him between the two armies’ picket lines, but Grant, emphasising that he had no authority to negotiate peace, refused. Lee kept the rendezvous, but finding Grant absent returned to Appomattox. Meade, meanwhile, was forming the Army of the Potomac into line of battle, for a final and conclusive attack. Grant was with the other column. The impending clash was averted when Meade was informed by one of Sheridan’s officers that the two supreme commanders were closeted at Appomattox. Grant, who was suffering from an acute headache, spent the night of April 8 in a farmhouse at Curdsville. When he rose, still in pain, he joined his staff to ride to the nearby village of Appomattox Court House, where Lee and his headquarters was known to be. Riding into the village street, they were told that Lee was in a house fronting the street; he had arrived a little earlier, and one of Lee’s officers had told a resident whom he met in the street that he wanted the use of a house in which to meet General Grant. Wilmer McLean had moved to Appomattox Court House from Manassas after the battle there, in the hope of avoiding further disturbance by the war. He now showed Lee into the front room of one of the village houses, but Lee deemed the premises too cramped and undignified for the business that had to be done. McLean therefore took him into his own front room. The McLean house was a roomy, double-fronted dwelling with a pillared verandah, built in Federal style. It had a driveway round it and a yard at the rear in which, when Grant and his staff arrived, Lee’s famous horse, Traveller, was tethered. The other officers held back while Grant entered the front room to introduce himself to Lee. They then entered to find seats or to arrange themselves standing. Grant’s opening words to Lee were, “I met you once before, General Lee, while we were serving in Mexico, when you came over from General Scott’s headquarters to visit Garland’s brigade, to which I then belonged. I have always remembered your appearance, and I think I should have recognised you anywhere.” “Yes,” replied Lee, “I know I met you on that occasion, and have often thought of it and tried to recollect how you looked but I have never been able to recall a single feature.”1 The exchange reflected their different appearances. Lee, six feet tall and with classical good looks, stood out in any company. The much shorter and undistinguished-looking Grant was at a physical disadvantage, which was quite cancelled out at this meeting by his status as the victor and Lee’s as the vanquished.

  Lee opened the proceedings by asking, “I suppose, General Grant, that the object of our present meeting is fully understood? I asked to see you to ascertain upon what terms you would receive the surrender of my army.” Grant answered that the terms were as already stated, that those surrendering should be “paroled and disqualified from taking up arms again until properly exchanged, and that all arms, ammunition and supplies to be delivered up as captured property.” Lee nodded his agreement and Grant expressed the hope that there should be an immediate suspension of hostilities to avoid any further loss of life. Grant then called for his message book so that he could write out a draft of terms. To them he added as an afterthought that the personal weapons and baggage of officers were not to be surrendered. Lee then mentioned that in the Confederate army horses and mules were usually the private property of the soldiers. Grant declared that he was unfamiliar with that custom but accepted that many in the Confederate army, being small farmers, would need their horses and mules to put in a crop to see their families through the next winter. He declined to alter the wording of the surrender document but gave Lee his assurance that he would instruct the supervising officers to allow men to take animals they claimed to own. Lee said, “This will have the best possible effect upon the men. It will be very gratifying and will do much toward conciliating our people.”2 Grant next presented his officers, whom Lee acknowledged formally. He was taken aback to be confronted by a man of dark complexion, apparently taking him for a Negro. He was in fact Colonel Ely Parker, a Native American who was reigning chief of the Six Civilized Nations. As the group started to disperse, Lee asked for rations for his men and Grant agreed, after a discussion about numbers, to send what was available; 25,000 rations were distributed. The meeting was courteous on both sides, though Lee had said beforehand that he would have rather died a thousand deaths than meet Grant to arrange surrender. As soon as Lee left the room, the members of Grant’s staff began to bargain with Mr. McLean for mementos. George Custer paid twenty dollars for the table at which Lee had sat; Grant’s table fetched forty. By the time the party left, the room was bare of furniture.

  When Grant returned to camp, his staff gathered round expecting him to discuss the surrender. Instead Grant asked General Rufus Ingalls, “Do you remember that old white mule so-and-so used to ride when we were in the city of Mexico?” The old white mule remained the subject of conversation for some time. Not until after supper would Grant discuss the surrender and then not for long. He shortly announced his intention to leave for Washington next day. In practice, he did not depart until the day after. In the interval he had ridden into the lines of the surrendered army, where he and Lee exchanged salutes and then returned to sit on the verandah of the McLean house and receive visits from old friends in the Confederate ranks, including Longstreet, who had been at his wedding, and Pickett, among others. When, at noon, Grant rode off to take the train to Washington, Lee departed for Richmond. Grant had forbidden demonstrations of rejoicing, sending a message to his soldiers stating “The war is over, the rebels are our countrymen again and the best sign of rejoicing after victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations in the field.”3

  While Lee rode to Richmond, Jefferson Davis, with his cabinet, was travelling south, first by train, then, escorted by a troop of Tennessee cavalrymen, on horseback. He want first to Danville, Virginia, where he learnt of Lee’s surrender, a bitter blow. He went next to Greensboro and Charlotte, in North Carolina, then to Abbeville, South Carolina. His flight was to last thirty days and cover 400 miles, culminating at Irwinville, Georgia, where on May 10 he and his wife and what remained of his entourage were captured by men of the 1st Wisconsin and 4th Michigan Cavalry. Disrespectfully, for he maintained his dignity to the end, he was mocked and jeered by his captors as they rode him away to imprisonment at Fortress Monroe, where he would spend two years, the first weeks in chains. Lincoln, brought to Richmond by ship, sat in Davis’s office only forty hours after he had left it.

  Meanwhile, other Union cavalrymen were searching the countryside for John Wilkes Booth. Booth, a successful and well-known actor but a fanatical devotee of the Confederate cause, had, with others, spent much of March and April 1865 plotting to do harm to President Lincoln. They first thought of kidnapping him and holding him to ransom for the sake of concessions, then realised that a kidnap attempt would fail and decided on assassination. There were half a dozen conspirators, mainly misfits and dropouts. Booth was by far the most impressive of the gang, a strikingly handsome twenty-seven-year-old actor who was earning $20,00
0 a year on the stage.

  On the evening of April 14, Good Friday in 1865, Booth entered Ford’s Theatre, six blocks from the White House, where the well-known comedy Our American Cousin was playing. He found his way to Lincoln’s box, where Lincoln and his wife were sitting close together, and, drawing a pistol, shot the president in the back of the head. Then shouting, “Sic semper tyrannis” (So perish all tyrants), a familiar Latin tag which happened to be the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia, he leapt twelve feet to the stage and hobbled off. He had broken his leg, but having a horse tethered nearby, he made his escape, bluffed his way past a sentry on the Potomac bridge, and escaped into the Virginia countryside. There during the next twelve days he passed from the house of one Confederate sympathiser to another, not all of whom knew he was the hated assassin, until on April 26, while taking refuge in a tobacco barn on the farm of a family named Garrett on the Rappahannock River, he was run to earth. Found by questing Union cavalrymen, he challenged them to a shoot-out but their officer threw in a burning twist of hay which set fire to the whole building. While Booth hobbled about inside, one of the soldiers outside fired a shot which mortally wounded him.

  One of Booth’s accomplices had tried and nearly succeeded in murdering Secretary of State Seward. The vice president, Andrew Johnson, survived, because his nominated assailant lost his nerve. It was estimated that seven million people lined the track of the train carrying Lincoln’s body, which had lain in state in the White House, back to Springfield for burial in Illinois. The death of Lincoln, mourned as a national tragedy and a sort of martyrdom, left the government in severe disarray, with a host of problems unresolved. For several years there had been much debate in the North over Reconstruction, or how the South should be treated after the Union was restored. Reconstruction did not mean, as it might to modern ears, the physical rebuilding of the war-ravaged states. There was no thought at all, nor would there have been support for, a financial programme to restore the South’s economic life. Reconstruction meant the rebuilding of the Union, a subject on which Northerners held very varied ideas. Lincoln had wanted to begin by pardoning, after they had taken an oath of loyalty, all Southerners, who would thus preserve their rights of property except in slaves. Excepted were those who had held office in the Confederate government or high military rank. The state governments were to be reconstituted by election, the right to vote going to those who had sworn loyalty, so long as they numbered 10 percent of the electorate in the last pre-war election of 1860. These provisions were incorporated into a peace convention which the officers of the federal government correctly condemned as a little better than a peace treaty. Jefferson Davis, in refuge at Goldsboro, North Carolina, was not unnaturally only too willing to accept these terms, but Washington repudiated them all. The war had not been fought to end in what was virtually a recognition of Southern sovereignty.

  Some experiments in restored state governments were made before the end of the war, in those states wholly occupied by the Union, such as Louisiana and Arkansas. In some states the suffrage was extended to blacks, though with great reluctance. Over the coming years it was almost everywhere withdrawn by the passage of what became known as “Black Codes.”

  Blacks obtained less from Reconstruction than Lincoln had intended, particularly economically. Among the freed slaves there was a universal hunger for land, which they almost always lacked the money to purchase. On the other hand, their former owners needed their labour to bring farms and plantations back into cultivation. The solution to the impasse proved to be the sharecropping system, by which owners leased land in return for a portion of the crop. Because it entailed the commitment of the following year’s crop against credit, the system effectively reimposed that binding of the black to a particular plot under a particular master which had been almost the most hated feature of plantation slavery. Northern opinion never really concerned itself, however, with the ex-slaves’ economic lot. Far more important in the eye of Northern reformers was the establishment of their electoral rights. Northern Republicans, overwhelmingly the controlling faction in the occupied regions, wanted to be assured that blacks would be allowed to vote, though at home they showed little enthusiasm for the admission of blacks to the electoral process. In the South, assuring that the blacks would not exercise decisive electoral power, or even any power at all, became an object that united almost all white Southerners.

  Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor as president, was a Southerner who scarcely troubled to disguise his sympathy for the defeated. His insistence on attempting to rescue members of his race from the consequences of rebellion provoked in 1866-68 a political crisis almost as great as that which had led to rebellion in 1861. The president and Congress were at loggerheads. Congress, though by no means as benevolent as its most radical members claimed it to be, fundamentally disapproved of Southern resistance to Reconstruction and of the president’s efforts to further that resistance. The most important evidence of Congress’s reformism was its promulgation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1866. It was effectively a bill of rights, guaranteeing the new black citizens their political and legal equality. Johnson urged the Southern states not to ratify it, a requirement if it were to become law, and they followed his bidding. This, however, was only a delaying measure. The amendment was later ratified and became law. Presidential opposition so outraged Congress, however, that in March 1867 it passed a Reconstruction Act that imposed its desired version of a post-war settlement on the South by diktat. Ten former Confederate states (Tennessee, always strongly Unionist, had been readmitted to the Union in 1866) were grouped into five military districts each ruled by a military governor with extensive powers. When law and order had been assured, states were to organise conventions to amend state constitutions so as to conform with the Constitution of the United States, including the incorporation of the Fourteenth Amendment. When these stages had been completed, the conforming state could be readmitted to the Union and to representation in the federal Congress. Faced with a process that threatened black intervention in state politics, most Southern states demonstrated their readiness to persist with their provisional governments, hastily established after the surrender and in effect continuations of the Confederate regimes. As a result, Congress had to empower the military governors to impose its will. It was grudgingly accepted and between 1868 and 1870 all ten former Confederate states still outside the Union were readmitted. In 1869, to confirm the progress thus achieved, Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment, which in brief but unambiguous terms stated that citizens’ rights were not to be limited by “race, color or previous condition of servitude.” Within five years of the end of the war, it might therefore have appeared that the purposes for which the war had been fought, including emancipation as well as restoring the union, had all been achieved.

  Such, however, was not the case. The South had been beaten but had not been fundamentally changed. Anti-black feeling was a universal emotion and state localism more powerful than loyalty to the union. Almost none of the former Confederate states were under the government of men who accepted Congress’s desire for equality and the untrammelled rule of law. Ingenious political minds, of which there were a plethora in the South, soon found ways to preserve white supremacy and deny black rights without formally transgressing the dictate of Congress. This informal secession was to persist for a century, and result in a rigidly segregated society, until the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.

  The Civil War at its start was a unique conflict, in which the combatants tried to do their worst to each other by drill-book learning. The wonder is that they could function at all. They scarcely could; the early engagements of the war justified the contemptuous dismissals of European observers, who viewed them as conflicts between armed mobs. What lent purpose was the determination of the men in the ranks to turn themselves into soldiers, by sheer effort of will. The process was slow and laborious. As late as Gettysburg, there were few regiments on either s
ide that knew how to fight effectively. The performance of the 20th Maine at Little Round Top, though it changed position under fire, was due to the dynamic leadership and force of character of its commander, Joshua Chamberlain, but Chamberlains were few. Their numbers were diminished, moreover, by the startlingly high casualties, particularly among officers, always inflicted in battle. Civil War armies were destroyed almost as fast as they were formed. The 7th New York Heavy Artillery, one of several heavy artillery regiments converted to infantry after the Army of the Potomac’s disabling losses in the Overland Campaign, lost 291 men killed and 500 wounded in its last stages. So high was the fatality rate, and that of wounding, that it is a rational enquiry to ask how the Civil War soldier sustained his courage, suppressed his fear, and returned to combat. James McPherson, the Civil War’s leading contemporary historian, has devoted one of his studies of the war to that subject. In For Cause and Comrades (1997), McPherson separates the questions into three: What impelled a soldier to enlist? What motivated him to fight? What sustained his steadfastness? The first question is the easiest to answer. The Northern volunteers of 1861-62 joined up because they were outraged by the South’s assault on the integrity of the republic, a motive which most retained throughout their service, even though it was undermined by combat fatigue and homesickness as the war protracted. An impressively large proportion of the early volunteers served throughout the war if they escaped wounds or capture. Such emotions were offset by what Professor McPherson identifies as the sentiments of “duty, honor, country,” very much like those that underlay enlistment in the first place. Such motives were reinforced by the recognition that, having journeyed through the war thus far, their sacrifice would be nullified if they gave up before the decision had been achieved. Persistence was always attacked, however, by the brute facts of battle when the stress of battle supervened. Then the men in the ranks overcame their fear by sensing the greater fear of being thought a coward. In letters home almost all soldiers tried to explain how they bore the terror of facing the enemy and why they refused to seek a way out, emphasising their horror of being thought a coward, particularly by comrades known to their families. It is exactly true that of the Civil War soldier, as of most soldiers in most wars, his greatest fear was of fear itself. Primary fear was entirely rational, since the risk of death or wounding in battle was very high. One in ten Union soldiers was wounded, one in sixty-five killed, while one in thirteen died of disease. Confederate figures were similar but less than those of the Union, because of the South’s lack of white numbers. As long as the war persisted and casualties were inflicted at that rate, Northern victory was foreordained. Certainty, however, was prejudiced by the effect of military losses and occasional setbacks.