Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (87 page)

But the attack was beaten back, and with it, the last of the Army of Northern Virginia’s fabled aggressiveness faded. On March 27 Grant once again began sliding the Army of the Potomac around to his left, looking to cut Lee’s last supply line into Petersburg, the Southside railroad. On April 1 Philip Sheridan’s 12,000 cavalrymen, supported by the infantry of the 5th Corps of the Army of the Potomac, overran the last Confederate outpost on the extreme end of Lee’s lines at Five Forks, effectively shutting off the Southside. At four the next morning the entire left of the Federal line went over the top against Lee’s trenches, and only the stubborn resistance of two small Confederate forts kept the entire Army of Northern Virginia from collapsing into Federal hands that night.
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That one night, however, was enough for Lee. He had been anticipating the necessity of “abandoning our position on the James River” since February, when he sketched out a what-if strategy for James Longstreet. After informing Jefferson Davis that the Petersburg lines could no longer be held, Lee skillfully pulled his army out of the Richmond fortifications and crossed what was left in the Petersburg trenches over onto the north side of the Appomattox River. There, he turned west, designating Amelia Court House as the rendezvous point for the whole army. He planned to meet the last supply trains out of Richmond at Amelia Court House and, afterward, pick up a spur line of the Richmond & Danville railroad that would take the Army of Northern Virginia south to join Johnston in the Carolinas. Davis, with a small escort and the official papers and records of the Confederate government, also headed west, staying ahead of Lee and the army and ultimately turning and escaping to the south. Richmond was abandoned, left to its mayor to be surrendered to Grant on April 3, 1865. Fires set by the Confederate provost marshal to destroy the arsenal and magazines roared out of hand and rioters and looters took to the streets until at last Federal soldiers, their bands savagely blaring “Dixie,” marched into the humiliated capital and raised the Stars and Stripes over the old Capitol building.
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Lee, meanwhile, struggled westward to Amelia Court House. He was dogged by two major problems, one of which was the geographical position of his army. Except for the troops Grant detached to occupy Richmond, Grant and the Army of the Potomac were on the south side of the Appomattox River, and as soon as Lee bolted westward, so did Grant, pacing Lee step for step on his side of the Appomattox, keeping between Lee and the never-never land to the south, never letting Lee get far enough ahead to curl around the head of the Federal columns and break for the Carolinas. Lee’s other problem surfaced as soon as he concentrated his men at Amelia Court House on April 5. In the last hours in Richmond, the orders that were to have sent supply trains to meet Lee’s men in Amelia Court House were never received, or perhaps were never given in the first place. Either way, Lee found only limited supplies of food waiting for him there. He also found that the last troops out of Richmond, mostly the men of Richard Ewell’s corps, were still on their way to Amelia Court House.
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Lee was forced to waste an entire day foraging and waiting for Ewell to catch up, and by the time he was ready to move on, he found that Sheridan’s cavalry had cut the rail line eight miles below Amelia Court House. With Grant’s infantry now breathing down his neck, Lee had no choice but to strike westward again, this
time toward Lynchburg, where there were Confederate reinforcements and more supplies to be had. The problem was getting there. “Hundreds of men dropped from exhaustion; thousands threw away their arms; the demoralization appeared at last to involve the officers; they did nothing to prevent straggling; and many of them seemed to shut their eyes on the hourly reduction of their commands, and rode in advance of their brigades in dogged indifference.”
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By now, Grant was rapidly closing in on the fleeing Confederates. On April 6, Sheridan’s cavalry caught up with Lee’s rear guard as it was crossing a little tributary of the Appomattox River called Sayler’s Creek, and sliced off 7,000 prisoners with hardly any effort. In a desperate effort to keep Grant from getting any closer, Lee had the bridges over the Appomattox burned, but on the morning of April 7 one Federal corps discovered a neglected wagon bridge over the river and crossed over in hot pursuit. Lee now had one hope, and only one: if he could reach Appomattox Station before the Federal cavalry, he could be supplied there from Lynchburg, and perhaps make a stand that would force Grant to back off and give him maneuvering room. (It might have worked: Grant admitted to John Russell Young that his own logistical tether was so attenuated that “he could not have kept up his pursuit a half day longer.”) But it turned out to be impossible. Sheridan’s cavalry got to Appomattox Station on the evening of April 8, while Lee was still several miles back up the road. When Lee shook out a battle line to back them away the next morning, the early morning fog burned off to reveal two infantry divisions of the 24th Corps and two brigades of the 25th Corps coming up to relieve the federal cavalry, with the 5th Corps of the Army of the Potomac coming up behind them.
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Stopped in front by Sheridan’s horsemen, and pressed from behind by Grant’s infantry, Lee knew that at last the end had come. It was what he had feared from the beginning: “It will all be over—ended—just as I have expected it would end from the first,” Lee lamented. He had gambled on disheartening the North by invading Maryland in 1862 and Pennsylvania in 1863; he had gambled on the siege of Petersburg dragging on long enough to turn Northern voters against Lincoln. None of it had worked, and now his army was trapped. Grant had sent several notes to Lee by courier on April 7 and 8 concerning a possible meeting of the generals, and so Lee sent flags of truce through the lines and asked to see Grant personally. “In ten minutes more,” wrote Union brigadier general Thomas C. Devin about that morning,

the charge would have been ordered for the whole line and we would have been on and over them like a whirlwind. Our men were terribly vexed at the truce. It was laughable to see the old troopers come up to the edge of the hill [overlooking the Confederate positions], look down at the position of the Rebs and go back growling and damning the flag of truce.
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For the dwindling band of Confederates, however, the surrender could not have come more quickly. “Within range of my eye,” wrote a Confederate surgeon, “there were a great number of muskets stuck in the ground by the bayonet, whose owners, heart-sick and fainting of hunger and fatigue, had thrown them away, and gone, none knew whither.” The remainder were living on “corn, stolen from the horses’ feed, and parched and munched as they marched.”
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Grant, who had been pounding along at the head of his army, leaving bag and baggage days behind in the dust, was at that moment in the throes of a migraine, “but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.” Lee selected as a meeting place the home of Wilmer McLean in the little crossroads village of Appomattox Court House, about four miles above Appomattox Station. Grant arrived with his staff later that morning, painfully conscious of the contrast between Lee, immaculate in a full general’s uniform and dress sword, and himself, clad in the only things he owned in the absence of his baggage, a pair of muddy boots and a standard-issue frock coat with his lieutenant general’s shoulder straps sewn on. The meeting was formal, and after some polite chitchat between Grant and Lee about old Mexican War times, they got down to business. Grant’s terms, bearing in mind his discussions with Lincoln, were surprisingly mild. There was no more talk of unconditional surrender: all Confederate soldiers would surrender their arms and promptly be paroled (no ghastly death march to a prison camp, no imprisonment of Confederate officers pending treason trials), all officers could retain their swords and other sidearms, and paroled soldiers could claim any captured horses and mules they wished to take home with them. “This done,” Grant specified, “each officer and man will be allowed to return to his home, not to be disturbed by U.S. authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside.”
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The terms were written out and acknowledged, and then the negotiation was over. Lee walked out onto the porch of the McLean house and (as one of Grant’s
staff wrote) “signaled to his orderly to bring up his horse … and gazed sadly in the direction of the valley beyond, where his army lay …”

He thrice smote the palm of his left hand slowly with his right fist in an absent sort of way, seemed not to see the group of Union officers in the yard, who rose respectfully at his approach, and appeared unaware of everything about him. All appreciated the sadness that overwhelmed him, and he had the personal sympathy of every one who beheld him at this supreme moment of trial. The approach of his horse seemed to recall him from his reverie, and he at once mounted. General Grant now stepped down from the porch, moving toward him, and saluted him by raising his hat. He was followed in this act of courtesy by all our officers present.
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George Henry Mills of the 16th North Carolina watched Lee ride slowly back up the road toward his regiment: “As he passed the men all ran down to the road and surrounded him, everyone trying to shake hands with him, many of them in tears.” Lee took off his hat and spoke briefly: “Boys, I have done the best I could for you. Go home now, and if you make as good citizens as you have soldiers, you will do well, and I shall always be proud of you. Goodbye, and God bless you all.” To Mills, Lee “seemed so full that he could say no more, but with tears in his eyes” he rode off toward his headquarters, “and that was the last we ever saw of him.”
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The next day was consumed with the administrative paperwork of the surrender—making up parole lists, printing parole forms, Lee issuing his farewell order to the Army of Northern Virginia, and the handover of the rebel cavalry’s equipment. The day following, the Confederate artillery surrendered its guns, and on April 12 the infantry of the Army of Northern Virginia marched out of its pitiful little camps for the last time. When Lee abandoned the Petersburg siege lines, he could still count 56,000 men in the ranks; now, the Army of Northern Virginia only had 26,018 names to put on the parole lists.
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They tramped defiantly down their last road through the center of Appomattox Court House to where units of the Army of the Potomac were drawn up, on either side, to watch them stack their still-gleaming weapons and furl their shredded star-crossed battle flags. Waiting for them by the roadside was the 1st Brigade, 1st Division, 5th Corps, under the command of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Four years before, Chamberlain had been a professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College; two years before, at Gettysburg, Chamberlain and his 20th Maine Volunteers had held Little Round Top. Now, commanding his own brigade, Chamberlain impulsively brought his men to attention and ordered a salute to the ragged Confederates. At the head of the Confederate column rode General John B. Gordon, who was startled
and uncertain at what Chamberlain’s men were about to do. But then, as it dawned on Gordon what Chamberlain meant, he slowly and deliberately returned it.

… When the head of each division column comes opposite our group, our bugle sounds the signal and instantly our whole line from right to left, regiment by regiment in succession, gives the soldier’s salutation, from the “order arms” to the old “carry”— the marching salute. Gordon at the head of the column, riding with heavy spirit and downcast face, catches the sound of shifting arms, looks up, and, taking the meaning, wheels superbly, making himself and his horse one uplifted figure, with profound salutation as he drops the point of his sword to the boot toe; then facing to his own command, gives word for his successive brigades to pass us with the same position of the manual,—honor answering honor. On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word nor whisper of vain-glorying, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!
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Two days later, far away in Raleigh, North Carolina, William Tecumseh Sherman received a note from Joseph E. Johnston asking if he was willing to make “a temporary suspension of active operations.” Johnston had never really been able to stop Sherman once he had rolled out of Georgia. Charleston, which had defied everything the Federal navy could throw at it from the sea, dropped tamely into Sherman’s bag as his fire-eyed army marched past on land. On March 6, Sherman’s men splashed across the Pee Dee River into North Carolina, making a union with Grant a matter of only a few weeks. Johnston made just one serious effort to slow Sherman down, at Bentonville, North Carolina, on March 19, but Sherman merely brushed him aside. “Johnston had the night before marched his whole army … and all the troops he had drawn from every quarter, determined, as he told his men, to crush one of our corps and then defeat us in detail,” Sherman reported to Grant three days later, but “we pushed him hard, and came very near crushing him,” and Sherman was now “satisfied that Johnston’s army was so roughly handled … that we could march right on to Raleigh.”
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On April 12, Johnston was summoned to Greensboro, North Carolina, by Jefferson Davis, who had escaped from Virginia and who spoke hopefully of raising new armies to carry on the war. Johnston briefly told him that “to attempt to continue the war” was hopeless. “Having neither money nor credit, nor arms but those in the
hands of our soldiers, nor ammunition but that in their cartridge-boxes, nor shops for repairing arms or fixing ammunition, the effect of our keeping the field would be, not to harm the enemy, but to complete the devastation of our country and ruin of its people.” Any further continuation of it would be “the greatest of human crimes.” Davis wearily gave him permission to open negotiations with Sherman, and on April 14 Johnston sent his note through the lines, begging to be given the same terms Grant had given Lee.
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