As Custer set off in pursuit of the rebels, he passed General Kershaw and a group of Confederate prisoners and raised his hat to them. “There goes a chivalrous fellow,” Kershaw said, “let’s give him three cheers.” Custer then had his band strike up the unofficial Confederate anthem, “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” to the whoops and yells of the prisoners.25
After Sailor’s Creek, Lee’s army crossed to the north bank of the Appomattox River and pressed west toward Lynchburg, pursued by II and VI Corps. V Corps and Merritt’s cavalry stayed on the opposite bank, moving along the Southside Railroad and seeking to cut off Lee’s retreat at Appomattox. “Lee’s army was rapidly crumbling,” Grant wrote of these last days. “Many of his soldiers had enlisted from that part of the State where they now were, and were continually dropping out of the ranks and going to their homes.”26 But most of Lee’s men were willing to fight as long as he led them.
Late in the afternoon of April 8, Custer came in sight of Appomattox Station, where he spied locomotive smoke. Four trains were at the station, their cars loaded with supplies for Lee’s hungry army—the provisions the rebels had expected at Farmville. Custer quickly sent a regiment around the station to block the track toward Lynchburg, then galloped down the road and “enveloped the train as quick as winking.”27 They took the trains without losing a man, but the alert crew of one engine managed to fire it before it could be seized. Custer assembled engineers and brakemen from his ranks and ordered the trains east down the line toward the advancing Federal infantry.
The timing was critical. As Custer was arranging the trains’ movement, artillery fire broke out. Confederate Brigadier General R. Lindsay Walker had been sent with twenty-five guns from the Third Corps Reserve Artillery to secure the trains for Lee’s approaching troops, and was firing on Custer from a nearby hill. “Not expecting a fight at that place, the enemy was somewhat disturbed and demoralized by the appearance of our forces,” Augustus Woodbury of the 2nd Rhode Island regiment wrote, “and especially indignant at the loss of his supplies, upon which he had almost laid his hand.”28
Custer hastily organized an assault, which made little progress against the grapeshot and canister from the massed guns. After several attempts and with the hour growing late, Custer grew impatient. “Boys,” he said, “the Third Division must have those guns. I’m going to charge if I go alone.” Custer led a final charge on the rebel artillery, overwhelming the defenders, and, said Captain Luman H. Tenney of the 2nd Ohio Cavalry, “our boys did not stop until they had passed the Court House where the camp-fires marked the location of the rebel army along the hillsides.”29 In addition to the twenty-five guns he had faced, plus five others, Custer’s men seized a hospital train, between 150 and 200 supply wagons, and 1,000 prisoners from the reserve artillery and the lead elements of Lee’s army heading for the station.30
As the rest of the Cavalry Corps arrived, Sheridan pressed toward Appomattox Court House as far as he could without infantry support, bidding Generals Ord, Gibbon, and Griffin to move up quickly to close the trap.31 “If General Gibbon and the Fifth Corps can get up to-night we will perhaps finish the job in the morning,” Sheridan wrote Grant. “I do not think Lee means to surrender until compelled to do so.”32
Sheridan was right. That night Lee held a war council with his Corps commanders, Longstreet, Gordon, and Fitz Lee. Earlier in the day, he had told a doubting General Pendleton that “we have yet too many bold men to think of laying down our arms.” And even after the loss of their supplies to Custer, Lee wanted to make a final attempt to break out toward Lynchburg. Fitz Lee and Gordon would strike Sheridan with Longstreet guarding the rear, then the entire army would push through west. When Gordon asked where he should stop to make camp, Lee replied, “The Tennessee line.”33
That night Custer worked himself to exhaustion preparing for the critical day to come. His men were “so near the enemy they could almost hear each other breathe in the midnight darkness.”34 The general sat by a campfire waiting for the dawn and fell asleep upright with a coffee cup in his hand.
“It was a beautiful Sunday morning, fair dawn of a fairer day,” Chaplain Humphreys wrote of April 9, 1865. “The country was white and pink with the beautiful blossoms of the plum, the peach, and the pear.”35 But as Captain Tenney of the 2nd Ohio Cavalry penned in his diary, “9th. Sunday. Fighting commenced early.”36 Gordon’s rebel infantry advanced strongly against the dismounted Federal cavalry, who pulled back slowly. Custer spied some men from the 10th Connecticut sheltering by a fence during the move and shouted to them, “Boys, this is your last fight. There is nothing but a battery over there. When you take that the war will be over.”37 The 14th Virginia Cavalry regiment claimed to have captured Custer around this time, “but in the confusion [he] made his escape.”38
The Confederates pushed ahead and managed to clear one of the roads to Lynchburg, allowing Fitz Lee’s cavalry to try to flank the Federals on the left. But Charles Griffin and the V Corps had moved up behind the withdrawing Federal cavalry and mounted a vigorous counterattack. The rebels were pushed back hard, and when Lee sent word to Gordon asking how the battle was proceeding, he replied to the courier, “Tell General Lee I have fought my corps to a frazzle, and I fear I can do nothing unless I am heavily supported by Longstreet’s corps.”
Lee knew the end had come. “There is nothing left me but to go and see General Grant,” he said to Lieutenant Colonel Charles S. Venable, “and I had rather die a thousand deaths.” Lee sent word to Grant, who was approaching from the east, asking for terms. But along the front, the battle continued. Longstreet, seeing Gordon’s Corps weakening, set his final battle line. Men dutifully fell into their places in the ranks, but this was not the army it once was. “Their faces were haggard, their step slow and unsteady,” a member of McGowan’s South Carolina Brigade wrote. “Bare skeletons of the old organizations remained, and those tottered along at wide intervals.”39
Custer’s division had moved to the right of the Union line, opening the way for the attack by V Corps. But his men were not out of the fight. He called his troops to mount and assembled them for a charge into the weakening rebel left flank and to their camps beyond. As Custer was waiting for Devin’s division to deploy to his right, a Confederate soldier appeared on the field on a running horse with a white towel on the end of his sword. Captain Robert Sims, of Longstreet’s staff, had been sent by Lee to inform Gordon that talks were under way with Grant, and then to request a halt to the Federal attack.40
“The enemy perceiving that Custer was forming for attack,” Sheridan wrote, “had sent the flag out to his front and stopped the charge just in time.” E. G. Marsh was with the 15th New York Cavalry at the front of the line when Sims rode up. Custer “did not wish to halt,” Marsh recalled. “He wished to whip them completely; but we had to stop and wait the arrival of the flag of truce, and listen to the message from Lee.”41 When Sims delivered his message asking for a cessation of hostilities, Custer replied, “We will do no such thing. We have your people now where we want you, and will listen to no terms but unconditional surrender.”42
“Well sir,” Sims replied, “we will never submit to that.” But he agreed to take Custer’s message to Gordon. Sims rode off with Custer’s chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Whitaker, and presently Custer followed with an orderly, holding a white handkerchief. They reached the Confederate line at a position held by the Rockbridge Artillery, and the rebels, “not exactly appreciating the situation and covetous of good boots,” dismounted the orderly to acquire his footwear and were about to do the same to Custer. George looked about for the commander of the unit; by chance it was Major Wade Hampton Gibbes, Class of 1860, Emory Upton’s tormentor at West Point. “Gibbes I appeal to you for protection,” he said. Gibbes intervened and escorted Custer and his orderly to General Gordon’s headquarters.
Custer repeated his demand for unconditional surrender to Gordon, who refused. “Sheridan directs me to say to you, General,” Custer said,
“if there is any hesitation about your surrender, that he has you surrounded and can annihilate your command in an hour.” Gordon replied that since the senior commanders of both armies were engaged in surrender talks, if Sheridan “decides to continue the fighting in the face of the flag of truce, the responsibility for the bloodshed will be his and not mine.”
Custer then asked to be taken to Longstreet and was escorted by Major R. W. Hunter of General Gordon’s staff, and Gibbes. As he approached Lee’s old warhorse, Custer said, “In the name of General Sheridan I demand the unconditional surrender of this army!”
Longstreet was unimpressed. “I am not the commander of the army,” he replied, “and do not have the authority to give its surrender. Nor do you have the right to request it. And you are within the lines of the enemy without authority, addressing a superior officer, and in disrespect to General Grant as well as myself; and even if I was the commander of the army I would not receive the message of General Sheridan.”
“If you do not surrender you will be responsible for the bloodshed to follow,” Custer barked, using Gordon’s line.
“Go ahead and have all the bloodshed you want!” Longstreet snapped back, and began to give orders to his staff to bring up divisions that he knew, but maybe Custer did not, existed on paper only.
Custer, surprised, said, “General, probably we had better wait until we hear from Grant and Lee. I will speak to General Sheridan about it. Don’t move your troops yet.” Custer, having failed in his attempt to bluff his way to bagging Lee’s entire army, returned to Union lines escorted by Gibbes. When he was out of earshot Longstreet laughed. “Ha! ha! that young man has never learned to play the game of ‘Brag!’”43
The fighting slowly ceased as word of the truce spread along the front. Gunfire was replaced with cheers on the Union side. “Lee has surrendered!” Captain Tenney wrote. “Oh the wild and mad huzzas which followed! Pen can not picture the scene. The four years of suffering, death and horrid war were over. Thank God! Thank God!! was upon every tongue. Peace, home and friends were ours. Yes, thank God! What wonder that we were crazy with joy?”44
“We all dismounted, and such a scene of handshaking and embracing I have never elsewhere witnessed,” Chaplain Humphreys recalled. “Some tossed their hats and cheered; some rolled on the ground, yelling like Indians; some sobbed like children, only with exuberance of happiness. It was the very madness of joy.”45 Across the field the rebels were sobbing in grief at the idea they were to surrender, even half-starving and faced with a superior force.
Grant was awaiting Lee at the house of Wilmer McLean in Appomattox. Sheridan had ridden to town and met with Gordon, and other Union officers converged on the scene for what was to be one of the most important meetings in American history. In his memoirs General Horace Porter placed Custer in the room, and he appears there in a well-known painting of the surrender conference by Tom Lovell.46 But while others were drawn to McLean’s parlor to witness history, Custer, who was responsible for so much of it, was back near the truce line indulging his boyish instincts. After returning from Longstreet’s headquarters, Custer sought out Alexander Pennington.
“Let’s go and see if we can find Cowan,” he said. Colonel Robert V. Cowan of North Carolina, formerly of the Class of 1863, was the tallest man in the Corps in Custer’s day. He had been found deficient in English and mathematics in his plebe year of 1860 and sent home. Cowan commanded the 33rd North Carolina in Wilcox’s division, was wounded at Chancellorsville, and participated in Pickett’s Charge under Trimble. Custer and Pennington went to the picket line on a stream bank and asked for Colonel Cowan. A messenger went back, and presently Cowan rode up and jumped his mount across the ditch.
“Hello, you damned red-headed rebel!” Custer said, and the three laughed. They were soon joined by Lieutenant Colonel Orville E. Babcock, third in the Class of May 1861, and then on Grant’s staff. But Babcock did not come to relive old times; he was a member of the party escorting Robert E. Lee to McLean House. Lee had spotted the small gathering as he crossed a bridge 150 yards away and sent Babcock to tell them he did not want fraternization. The West Pointers separated, and Babcock rode back to Lee, who was soon out of sight.47 Then the group reconvened. They chatted for quite a while, no doubt remembering West Point days and refighting the battles of the previous four years. Meanwhile, the conference at McLean House assembled and concluded, after which Custer and the others heard cheers erupt from the Confederate lines. They watched as General Lee rode back down the road.
“As he proceeded into his lines there was a grand rush toward him of his men and officers,” Pennington wrote, “cheering, I suppose, to give him heart, for he seemed very much depressed as he rode by us.”48 Custer and Pennington bade Cowan goodbye and headed toward the town. That was the last they saw of the “damned red-headed rebel.” When the time came formally to surrender his regiment, Cowan refused; he handed over command to Major J. A. Weston, and rode off south.49
At McLean House the souvenir hunt had begun. McLean had moved to Appomattox from Manassas after the first engagement of the war, to get as far from the conflict as he could. But now the war had come to him, and Horace Porter saw him “charging about in a manner which indicated that the excitement was shaking his nervous system to its center.”50 Officers began bargaining with him for objects from his house. Every item in the parlor—tables, chairs, pens, papers, even young Lula McLean’s doll called the “silent witness”—became targets for relic hunters. Reporter Edward A. Paul, present at the surrender, noted, “Before twenty-four hours I doubt if there is much of the [McLean] house left—such a penchant have Americans for trophies.”51
General Ord paid forty dollars for the marble-topped table at which Lee sat. Custer’s chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Whitaker, bought the chair Lee sat in, and Colonel Henry Capehart bought the one used by Grant. McLean had refused to sell the chairs, throwing to the floor the money that was pressed into his hands. The colonels forced their way out with the chairs anyway, and later a cavalryman appeared, handed McLean a ten-dollar bill, and rode off.52 Horace Porter had loaned his pencil to Lee and retrieved it afterward. Mrs. McLean “sold everything in the room that day except the . . . red and green carpet,” Libbie Custer noted, adding that if she had had the foresight to cut the rug into small squares and sell them individually, she could have “bought the adjacent farm from the proceeds.”53
When Custer arrived at McLean House, Sheridan presented him with a small, wooden, oval-topped table to give to Libbie. His note to her read,
My Dear Madam: I respectfully present to you the small writing-table on which the conditions for the surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia was written by Lt.-General Grant, and permit me to say, madam, that there is scarcely an individual who has contributed more to bring about this desirable result than your very gallant husband.
Sheridan also gave Custer the white linen dishtowel Sims had carried to the Union lines as a flag of truce.54 George left McLean House in high spirits, holding the table slung over his back; Horace Porter said he looked like Atlas carrying the world.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“LIKE THE CHARGE OF A SIOUX CHIEFTAIN”
The two armies awoke to a cold, drizzly morning on April 10. The sense of calm was disorienting; after the previous frenzied week, there was no urgency, no sense of expectation or danger. It was the first slow morning many of the men had experienced in some time. Porter Alexander said that the day after the surrender “seemed to usher in a new life in a new world. We had lived through the war. 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.”1
Custer issued a general order to the soldiers of the 3rd Cavalry Division. “With profound gratitude towards the God of Battles, by whose blessings our enemies have been humbled, and our arms rendered triumpha
nt,” he began, he wished to express his “admiration of the heroic manner in which you have passed through the series of battles which to-day resulted in the surrender of the enemy’s entire army.” Custer went on to praise their courage, noting they had “never lost a gun, never lost a color . . . never been defeated . . . [and] captured every piece of artillery which the enemy has dared open up on you.” He hoped that these actions had finally brought the war to a close “and that, blessed with the comforts of peace, we may soon be permitted to enjoy the pleasures of home and friends. . . . Speaking for my self alone,” he concluded, “when the war is ended and the task of the historian begins, when those deeds of daring which have rendered the name and fame of the Third Cavalry Division imperishable are inscribed upon the bright pages of our country’s history, I only ask that my name be written as that of the Commander of the Third Cavalry Division.”2
Along the lines, the troops from the opposing armies were visiting each other’s camps; the rebels in particular were looking to barter for breakfast. “Our camp was full of callers before we were up,” Joshua Chamberlain recalled. They came to “see what we were really made of, and what we had left for trade.” The visiting and trading grew to the point “that it looked like a county fair, including the cattle show.”3 William Swinton of the New York Times wrote, “Hostile devisement gave place to mutual helpfulness, and the victors shared their rations with the famished vanquished. In that supreme moment these men knew and respected each other.”4 Grant soon had rations issued to Lee’s men from their own captured stores.
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