The Real Custer (31 page)

“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!'”
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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?”
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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”

T
he 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 triumphant,” 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.”
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Grant soon had rations issued to Lee's men from their own captured stores.