The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (187 page)

Grant knew nothing of this, of course, just as he would know little or nothing of their later endeavors along that line. He rode on toward his headquarters tent, which had been found at last, along with his baggage, and pitched nearby. He had not gone far before someone asked if he did not consider the news of Lee’s surrender worth passing on to the War Department. Reining his horse in, he dismounted and sat on a large stone by the roadside to compose the telegram Lincoln would receive that night. By the time he remounted to ride on, salutes
were beginning to roar from Union batteries roundabout, and he sent word to have them stopped, not only because he feared the warlike racket might cause trouble between the victors and the vanquished, both of them still with weapons in their hands, but also because he considered it unfitting. “The war is over,” he told his staff. “The rebels are our countrymen again.”

Lee by then was back in the apple orchard he had left four hours ago. The yells that greeted him as he reëntered Gordon’s lines had come in part by force of custom; the troops, for all their cumulative numbness from hunger, weariness, and stress, cheered him as they had always done when he moved among them. Moreover, despite the grinding week-long retreat and its heavy losses, more from straggling than in combat — despite last night’s red western glow of enemy campfires and this morning’s breakout failure; despite the coming and going of couriers, blue and gray, and his own outward passage through their line of battle, accoutered for something more solemn even than church on this Palm Sunday — many of them were still not ready to believe the end had come. One look at his face as he drew near, however, confirmed what they had been unwilling to accept. They broke ranks and crowded round him. “General, are we surrendered? Are we surrendered?” they began asking.

Hemmed in, Lee removed his hat and spoke from horseback to a blurred expanse of upturned faces. “Men, we have fought the war together, and I have done the best I could for you. You will all be paroled and go to your homes until exchanged.” Tears filled his eyes as he tried to say more; he could only manage an inaudible “Goodbye.” Their first stunned reaction was disbelief. “General, we’ll fight ’em yet,” they told him. “Say the word and we’ll go in and fight ’em yet.” Then it came home to them, and though most responded with silence, one man threw his rifle down and cried in a loud voice: “Blow, Gabriel, blow! My God, let him blow, I am ready to die!”

Grief brought a sort of mass relaxation that let Traveller proceed, and as he moved through the press of soldiers, bearing the gray commander on his back, they reached out to touch both horse and rider, withers and knees, flanks and thighs, in expression of their affection. “I love you just as well as ever, General Lee!” a ragged veteran shouted, arms held wide above the crowd. At the orchard he drew rein, dismounted, and walked through the trees to one well back from the road, and there began pacing back and forth beneath its just-fledged branches, too restless to sit down on this morning’s pile of fence rails. “He seemed to be in one of his savage moods,” a headquarters engineer declared, “and when these moods were on him it was safer to keep out of his way.” His own people knew to let him alone, but Federal officers kept arriving, “mostly in groups of four or five and some
of high rank. It was evident that they came from curiosity, or to see General Lee as friends in the old army.” He had small use for any of them just now though, whether they were past acquaintances or strangers. Coming up to be presented, they removed their hats out of deference and politeness, but he did not respond in kind, and sometimes did not even touch his hatbrim in return to their salutes. When he saw one of his staff approach with another group of such visitors, “he would halt in his pacing, stand at attention, and glare at them with a look which few men but he could assume.” Finally, near sundown, when the promised rations began arriving from the Union lines, he remounted and rode back to a less exposed position, under the white oak tree on the ridge where he had slept the night before.

This second ride was through the ranks of the First Corps, and Longstreet saw him coming. “The road was packed by standing troops as he approached,” Old Peter was to write, “the men with hats off, heads and hearts bowed down. As he passed they raised their heads and looked at him with swimming eyes. Those who could find voice said goodbye; those who could not speak, and were near, passed their hands gently over the sides of Traveller.” From point to point there were bursts of cheers, which the dark-maned gray acknowledged by arching his neck and tossing his head, but Longstreet observed that Lee had only “sufficient control to fix his eyes on a line between the ears of Traveller and look neither to the right nor left.” He too had his hat off, and tears ran down his cheeks into his beard. Back on the white oak ridge he stood for a time in front of his tent — “Let me get in. Let me bid him farewell,” the men were crying as they thronged forward — then went inside, too choked for speech. Later he came out and sat by the fire with his staff. He told Marshall to prepare an order, a farewell to the army, but he had little heart for talk and turned in early, weary from the strain of perhaps the longest and no doubt the hardest day he had ever known.

A cold rain fell next morning. He kept mainly to his tent until shortly after 9 o’clock, when word came that Grant, on the way to see him, had been stopped by pickets who had been put out yesterday to prevent the troops of the two armies from engaging in possible squabbles. Embarrassed, Lee set out at a gallop and found his distinguished visitor waiting imperturbably on a little knoll beside the road, just south of the north branch of the Appomattox. He lifted his hat in greeting, as did the other; then they shook hands, sitting their horses in the rain while their aides retired beyond earshot, and began to talk. Grant had come to ask Lee to use his influence — “an influence that was supreme,” he later said — to help bring the war to an early end by advising his subordinates, in command of the other armies of the South, to lay down their arms under the terms he himself had received the day before. Lee replied, in effect, that he agreed that further resistance
was useless, but that he felt obliged as a soldier to leave all such matters to his Commander in Chief; in any case, he could do nothing without conferring with him beforehand. Grant did not persist — “I knew there was no use to urge him to do anything against his ideas of what was right” — but he deeply regretted the refusal, he declared long afterward, because “I saw that the Confederacy had gone a long way beyond the reach of President Davis, and that there was nothing that could be done except what Lee could do to benefit the Southern people. I was anxious to get them home and have our armies go to their homes and fields.”

He was also anxious to get himself to Burkeville, where, thanks to the hard-working IX Corps, he could take the cars for City Point and get aboard a fast packet for Washington. By now the war was costing four million dollars a day, and he wanted to get back to the capital and start cutting down on expenses. So the two parted, Grant to set out for Burkeville and Lee to return to his own lines. Within them, the latter encountered Meade, who had recovered from his indisposition and ridden over to see him. Lee at first did not recognize his old friend. Then he did, but with something of a shock. “What are you doing with all that gray in your beard?” he asked, and his Gettysburg opponent replied genially: “You have to answer for most of it.” As they rode together toward headquarters, the soldiers camped along the road began to cheer, and Meade, not wanting to misrepresent himself, told his color bearer, who had the flag rolled up: “Unfurl that flag.” The bearer did, and drew a sharp retort. “Damn your old rag!” a butternut veteran called from beside the road. “We are cheering General Lee.”

Back in his tent Lee talked for a time with Meade, then turned to the writing of his report on the campaign that now was over. “It is with pain that I announce to Your Excellency the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia,” the document began. Walter Taylor did most of the work on this, as he had on all the others, but Lee also conferred with Charles Marshall, whom he had instructed to draw up an order bidding the troops farewell. Marshall, a former Baltimore lawyer and grandnephew of the illustrious Chief Justice, had delayed preparing the address — because all the coming and going around headquarters had left him no time, he said, but also because of a certain reluctance, a feeling of inadequacy for the task. “What can I say to those people?” he asked a friend this morning, still avoiding getting down to putting pen to paper. Lee settled this by ordering the colonel to get into his ambulance, parked nearby with a guard on duty to fend off intruders, and stay there until he finished the composition. Marshall, his writer’s block effectively broken, soon emerged with a penciled draft. Lee looked it over and made a few changes, including the deletion of a paragraph he thought might “tend to keep alive the feeling
existing between the North and South”; after which the Marylander returned to the ambulance, wrote out the final version of the order, and turned it over to a clerk for making inked copies which Lee then signed for distribution to the corps commanders and ranking members of his staff.

Having signed his parole he might have left then, as Grant had done by noon on this rainy Monday; yet he did not. The formal surrender ceremony was set for Wednesday — the required turning over of all “arms, artillery and public property,” in accordance with the terms accepted — and he stayed on, not to take an active role as a participant, but simply to be on hand, if not in view, when his men faced the sad ritual of laying down their shot-torn flags and weapons. He continued to keep to his tent, however, through most of the waiting time, while all around him, despite the pickets both sides had posted to discourage fraternization, blue-clad visitors of all ranks drifted through the camps for a look at their one-time enemies. For the most part they were received without animosity; “Success had made them good-natured,” one grayback uncharitably observed. A Federal colonel noted that the Confederates “behaved with more courtesy than cordiality,” and it was true. “Affiliation was out of the question; we were content with civility,” one explained. Union troops, on the other hand, were friendly and outgoing; “in fact almost oppressively so,” a butternut declared. “We’ve been fighting one another for four years. Give me a Confederate five-dollar bill to remember you by,” a bluecoat said, and his hearers found nothing offensive in his manner. Sometimes, though, a discordant note would be struck and would bring on a fiery answer — as when a Federal major, seeking a souvenir to take home, asked a Confederate staff captain for the white towel he had carried as a flag of truce on Sunday. “I’ll see you in hell first!” the angered staffer replied. “It is humiliating enough to have had to carry it and exhibit it; I’m not going to let you preserve it as a monument of our defeat.” Similarly, when a visiting sergeant tried to open a friendly discussion by remarking: “Well, Johnny, I guess you fellows will go home now to stay,” he found that he had touched a nerve. The rebel was in no mood to be gloated over. “You
guess
, do you?” he said hotly. “Maybe we are. But don’t be giving us any of your impudence. If you do, we’ll come back and lick you again.”

Much of Tuesday, with rain still murmurous on the canvas overhead, Lee spent working on his last report. He finished and signed it next morning, April 12, while his veterans, in Longstreet’s words, “marched to the field in front of Appomattox Courthouse, and by divisions and parts of divisions deployed into line, stacked their arms, folded their colors, and walked empty-handed to find their distant, blighted homes.” The weather having faired, they made as brave a show as their rags and sadness would permit; “worn, bright-eyed men,” a
Federal brigadier would call them. They seemed to him “purged of the mortal, as if knowing pain or joy no more,” and he asked himself as he watched them pass before him “in proud humiliation … thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours.… Was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured?” They had been whipped about as thoroughly as any American force had ever been or ever would be, short of annihilation, but it was part of their particular pride that they would never admit it, even to themselves. “Goodbye, General; God bless you,” a ragged private told his brigadier commander over a parting handshake at the close of the surrender ceremony. “We’ll go home, make three more crops, and try them again.”

They left in groups, dispersing by routes as varied as their destinations, and one of the smallest groups was Lee’s. He rode with Taylor and Marshall northeast into Buckingham County, bound for Richmond, and stopped for the night, some twenty miles out, in a strip of woods beside the road. To his surprise he found Longstreet there before him, likewise headed for a reunion with his family. Once more they shared a campsite, then next morning diverged to meet no more. The burly Georgian was assailed by mixed emotions, partly as a result of having encountered his friend Grant on Monday, shortly before the blue commander’s departure for Burkeville. “Pete, let’s have another game of brag to recall the old days,” Grant had said, and though there was no time for cards he gave him a cigar, which Longstreet said “was gratefully received.” Moved by the reunion, he later wondered: “Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?” and remarked, not without bitterness, that the next time he fought he would be sure it was necessary.

But that was by no means a reaction characteristic of the veterans now trudging the roads in all directions from the scene of their surrender. They were content with “the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed.” The words were part of Lee’s final behest they took with them from the farewell issued two days ago, near Appomattox Courthouse.