Mourning Lincoln (6 page)

When the real news came, the most critical part was that Lee had surrendered his entire army, with not a remnant left to fight. Just days after the fall of Richmond, the general and his escaping troops had found themselves surrounded and trapped by the forces of Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Philip Sheridan. Lee had been hoping to meet up with General Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina, but by the evening of April 6, as Confederate desertion continued apace, the Army of the Potomac overpowered the men at a place called Sayler’s Creek, ending in more than seven thousand Confederate casualties and prisoners. On April 7, Grant proposed the enemy’s surrender, and over the next two days, messengers conveyed a series of exchanges through the lines, until the two generals agreed to convene in the Virginia village of Appomattox Court House, about a hundred miles west of Richmond. The morning of April 9 saw a brief and ultimately futile Confederate assault, and soon Lee arrived to concede defeat. The surrender of
the Army of Northern Virginia was not technically synonymous with Confederate surrender, since fragments of other armies remained in the field, and through late May there would be skirmishes from North Carolina to Texas. But it didn’t matter anymore. The
entire army:
that was the phrase Grant used in his communication to Sherman, and that was the point Sherman passed on to the officers and soldiers. It was the part that echoed over and over, from the lips of Tennessee farmers to the pens of abolitionist Boston ladies. Lee’s surrender made inevitable the end of the Confederacy.
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Rippling outward, beginning that day and extending for weeks into the remotest corners of the nation, word traveled. At Appomattox, African Americans lined the road to honor Union soldiers. Something so long prayed for, “yet it seems impossible that it has come,” wrote Thomas Morris Chester in Richmond, as he watched elderly men and women weep, pray in gratitude, and call out their jubilations. In that once capital city, former slaves congregated—some well dressed, others in field-hand rags—to promenade and sing about John Brown. Children jumped rope and rolled hoops. To the heartbroken Confederate Henri Garidel, the “shouts of joy of the Negroes” made the city “tremble as much as the cannon.” On Roanoke Island off North Carolina, freedmen and women bowed their heads in prayer, then gave three cheers and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The city of Charleston was “wild with rejoicing” as black celebrants sang “Glory to God.”
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Black and white Union soldiers mostly expressed their elation with deafening noise. The men of a Connecticut regiment had been advancing on the rebel army when an aide-de-camp rode beside the line to relay the news, prompting instant cheers “from a hundred thousand throats.” A Vermont soldier at Appomattox found himself among acres of troops yelling and discharging weapons amid “Toasts and cheers and music,” followed by “music cheers and Toasts.” At City Point, Virginia, General George Meade rode down the line in a carriage, tossing his hat in the air, turning a weary march of the 139th New York into a euphoric parade. In camp in North Carolina, soldiers formed an obedient row to hear an officer read a telegram, then went wild. When word arrived via northern newspapers delivered to a dock or a depot, the reaction was the same.
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Everywhere, the men “kicked up” and “hurrahed good.” They did handstands, rolled in the springtime mud, and drank whatever liquor was at
hand (“I could dance a double shuffle for 6 hours if I had half a pint,” claimed a limping soldier). Regimental musicians—fife and drum, brass bands—kept up the bedlam. In Raleigh it sounded as though “every tree in the surrounding woods was screaming.” In East Tennessee, the all-night roar of the musketry resonated across the landscape just the same as a battle. From army hospital beds, even the most mangled soldiers reveled in the news. A week later, it still seemed “almost incredible,” as if the men would wake up to find their enemies as determined as ever. Thinking of Robert E. Lee, one man “had a sort of impression that we should fight him all our lives.” Marching in North Carolina, white Union soldiers tore down a slave whipping post and set it on fire.
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WHITE SOUTHERNERS EVERYWHERE
, like Rodney Dorman in Jacksonville, reacted with astonishment of an entirely different order. A retreating officer likened the turn of events to “a thunderbolt from heaven.” For the Confederate army, Lee’s surrender completed the gloom of Richmond’s downfall. The imprisoned private Henry Berkeley described a “most intense mental anxiety.” Already heavy hearts sank faster with each crack of celebratory Yankee gunfire. One Virginia lieutenant called it the “
saddest day of my life
,” underlining each word. For a Tennessee private, the whole world had stopped. “Minutes seem days, and days are months,” he wrote in his diary. In Texas, an army surgeon found himself haunted by “rivers of blood, Southern blood,” flowing through a ruined landscape of mourning widows and orphaned children. A few of the men refused to believe it was true. “Sick at heart, but not conquered yet,” wrote the Tennessee private. Or as a Virginia rebel retorted to a Yankee, “It ain’t over yet.” For most, though, the war was indeed over, at least for now. Across two pages of his journal, Captain Henry Chambers of the Forty-Ninth North Carolina poured out his “bitter, bitter humiliation.” With Yankees, including Negro soldiers, in the role of taunting conquerors, all hope of southern independence was “blasted!” When rain fell, Chambers picked up on the metaphor. “Nature weeps over Liberty’s death,” he wrote, diligently ignoring emancipation, since liberty was for white people only.
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If rain felt like nature’s tears, Confederate men joined in, unembarrassed. At Appomattox, everyone from privates to officers “broke down and wept
like little children,” one man recorded, “and Oh, Lord! I cried too.” When General Lee bade his men good-bye, “not a dry eye could be seen,” another wrote, and many “sobbed aloud in uncontrollable anguish.” The man didn’t know how long this ritual went on, for as soon as he shook hands with Lee, he left the scene, “almost blind of tears.” For Henri Garidel, the grief of defeat took a toll on his body. “My heart was so heavy that I was almost suffocating,” he wrote the day after Lee’s surrender, his symptoms spreading to include a stomach ailment and heartburn. “Unhappiness,” he reported, “is going to kill me.”
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Gloom and anger engulfed the Confederate home front. In Richmond, Lucy Fletcher had seen the crowds of black people in the streets (deceived by the Yankees into leaving their masters, she felt sure), actually “enjoying themselves,” she spluttered, “negro & Yankee, Yankee & negro, ad nauseum.” After Union victory, she sat alone inside a shattered church, unable to quiet the “anxious forebodings,” as she pled with God to “overrule this terrible calamity.” Time felt distorted, just as it had for men in the field. For nineteen-year-old Mary Cabell in Lynchburg, the shock turned weeks into years, then compressed years into days. When Cabell thought back to the rebel victory at Fort Sumter and the jubilee that had followed Virginia’s secession five days later, surrender felt like “a wild, dreadful, bewildering dream.” The mood around Eliza Andrews in Mayfield, Georgia, was one of “complete revulsion,” with no more talk of “fighting to the last ditch,” since, she conceded, “the last ditch has already been reached.” Emma Le-Conte was simply incredulous: “
We
give up to the
Yankees!
How
can
it be?” Why, if the problem was inferior numbers, then Jefferson Davis should have called out the women, for “we would go and
fight
, too.” The future was impossible to imagine, unless you thought about leaving the United States altogether, or maybe committing suicide.
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Unionists in the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, where the white population had divided sharply over the war, marked the occasion in ways that reflected local dissension. To Anna Ferris in Wilmington, the pealing bells seemed to be ringing in a thousand years of peace, while in Lexington, a small crowd of soldiers, poor whites, and African Americans remained subdued. In Baltimore, bells rang and cannons fired, but many white residents refused even to place a candle in their
windows. One black man at first thought all the nighttime noise signaled a rebel attack. “Surrender of Lee and his whole Caboodles,” he wrote when definitive word came. “Bully for Grant.”
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Up north, it was easier for the victors to imagine their own exhilaration as universal. Sextons rang church bells, women rang dinner bells, men fired the town cannons, boys burst firecrackers, and housewives and servants got to work sewing bunting, cutting streamers from white flannel, and searching for scraps of complementary red and blue. In Washington, from the White House to the humblest homes of freedpeople, “light answered light,” wrote Julia Shepard, taking in the calcium illumination on public buildings, the bonfires and bursting rockets in the streets, and the windows lit up by a million candles that made midnight look like noontime. Downtown Chicago blazed with bonfires at eleven o’clock at night, and in Hartford a street carnival lasted till dawn. In New York the next morning, a newsboy breathlessly hawked the extra, calling out, “Surrender of Lee’s army, ten cents and no mistake.”
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When Mary Peck heard the church bells ringing off schedule, she at first thought someone had died in her tiny town near Albany. When she wrote the word “victory” in a letter to her husband at the front, she underlined it and added two exclamation points; the words “Lee has surrendered” merited a triple underline. Pausing from her domestic chores, Peck watched as farmers passing along the road threw their caps in the air and cheered. How she longed to join them, but “I am a woman,” she wrote, “so I only said
Thank God!
& went in the house—&
cried
.” With her young son shouting, “Mama we’ve whipped the rebels,” the family’s two black servants quit work and took the boy into town to celebrate. In Cincinnati, African Americans hoisted a sign reading, “All men are born equal.” In Sacramento, residents burned Jefferson Davis in effigy. In Iowa, Hattie Schenck thought she could see the horses making merry, and in New Hampshire, Henry Thacher thought even “inanimate matter” was filled with joy. Everywhere, Union supporters prayed, for victory was a sure sign of God’s graces.
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Prayer was more trying for Confederates, who had convinced themselves all through the war that God favored their cause. Now as they asked for reversal and retribution, they could attribute the outcome only to divine mystery or maybe to their own sins. Ardent rebel Ellen House surmised that her people had “depended too much” on General Lee and “too little
on God.” In Norfolk, twenty-one-year-old Cloe Whittle made herself read the Bible before she could bring herself to think about God’s will. Even then, she couldn’t fathom the Lord’s purposes, and neither could anyone she knew. It wasn’t simply that the Confederacy had lost. It was that black men had fought in the uniforms of the conquering army, and now black people were free. God was working out his plan, she recited, as if by rote, but it was “so hard, hard, very hard” to make sense of it. After all, didn’t the Bible condone slavery? For Whittle, as for so many of her compatriots, the quest to understand became an ongoing spiritual endeavor. In mid-June, she would still be begging God for guidance. “I feel in a measure calmed & soothed by leaving the fate of my beloved country in my Father’s hands,” she ventured, still thinking of the failed nation as her homeland. Yet the sight of Yankees occupying the streets made it impossible to stifle the humiliation and bitterness.
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Abraham Lincoln had invoked God’s will, alongside the horrors of slavery, in his second inaugural address only a month before the Confederacy’s end, calling North and South alike guilty in sustaining human bondage. God, Lincoln had said then, would make the war continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” Now abolitionists readily connected victory to the end of human bondage, recording the final overthrow of the “hell-born slave-holders’ rebellion” and proclaiming the American flag a symbol of freedom for people “of every color.” At the same time, at least some white victors assumed the conquered rebels to be acquiescent. Because Union army chaplain Hallock Armstrong felt sure the southern planters were “more than eager to give up slavery,” he also believed that the North should “forgive and forget.” Quaker Anna Ferris likewise shunned a “cruel or vindictive triumph,” advocating “pity & mercy for the fallen foe.” Union success, she reasoned, was Confederate salvation, and both sides would regenerate together through policies of moderation and magnanimity.
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But images of a united nation moving forward came more readily to white people. Black abolitionists, for their part, sounded notes of caution. “If we feel less disposed to join in the shouts of victory which fill the skies,” the editors of the
New York Anglo-African
wrote, “it is because with the cessation of the war our anxieties begin.” That was an ominous assertion in the face of euphoric festivities, but the end of bondage, they made clear, never-theless
left “an immense margin for oppressions akin to slavery.” At Faneuil Hall in Boston, Frederick Douglass sounded a similar note, informing his listeners on April 4 that “hereafter, at the South, the negro will be looked upon with a fiercer and intenser hate than ever before.”
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Skeptical Union supporters also interrupted their revelry to ponder the mild, even indulgent, terms of Confederate surrender. White abolitionist Lydia Maria Child felt “weary of seeing the U.S. bow before those arrogant rebels,” for it seemed to her that Robert E. Lee had conducted himself more like a righteous conqueror than a defeated traitor. Indeed, she worried that the lenient terms of surrender would only make Confederates “
more
arrogant.” In Boston, Mary Putnam was indignant that Lee and his officers could take their sidearms home, and Caroline Dunstan took every flag out of her New York windows, “mortified at what I consider Grants surrender to Lee,” she wrote. One soldier in the field deplored the release of Confederate prisoners who swore loyalty to the Union; watching Virginia men “squirm considerably” as the provost marshal administered the oath of allegiance on April 9, he judged every one of the pledgers “a rebel at heart,” suddenly in need of protection from the government they had fought to overthrow. General John Wolcott Phelps expressed disgust that Lee’s farewell to his troops mentioned duty to “
their country
” and invoked inferior numbers as the sole cause of defeat. “There was no admission of error or wrong,” Phelps fumed, with Lee evincing an “unbroken spirit” and appearing to reserve the possibility of “future opposition.” Perhaps the editors of the
Anglo-African
said it best: Confederates would “lay down their arms to-day in the hope of taking them up again at a future day,” with “larger hopes of success.” Confederate women too, the black journalists warned, “brood rebellion,” teaching their children to hate the Yankees.
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