It is a pity that no painting has been made of the moment—Lee, on Traveller, holding the battle flag, which streams behind him in the breeze; the smoke of the battle below him; the shamefaced, half-starved soldiers around him. This is in some ways a finer moment than that shown in the famous mural by Charles Hoffbauer in the Virginia Historical Society, where at the center Lee sits erect and dignified on Traveller, surrounded by his generals and lit by the summer sun as if there were a halo around his head. The central panel of the Hoffbauer murals, which is called Summer of the Confederacy, is an imaginary scene, since it shows all of the South’s great generals arranged neatly, mounted or on foot, on a verdant hill around Lee, who is bathed in the light of glory: a painting of an apotheosis rather than a historical moment. But Lee wrapped in the folds of the Confederate battle flag, his eyes fixed on the horizon, determined to fight on—he is reported to have said, with vehemence, “I wish to fight here”—could have been a subject as heroic and visually striking as David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps: the fierce old warrior, eyes flashing, clutching that symbolic flag and determined to fight on, in the presence of the ragged veterans who had, for once, failed him.
Lee did not yet know the worst of it. Most of Ewell’s corps was surrounded and would surrender, and Ewell himself would be captured by the end of the day, as was Lee’s oldest son, Custis, commanding a division. The next day was full of confused and bloody fighting as Lee sought to bring what remained of his army—principally Longstreet’s corps and the cavalry, a total of at most 12,000 infantrymen and 3,000 cavalry troopers on horses that were in even worse shape than their riders—to Farmville, where supplies were waiting. When they got there, they found that confusion and poor staff work had prevented the destruction Lee had ordered of the one bridge remaining over the Appomattox River. Federal troops poured over it, and fighting continued into the darkness. At nightfall Lee sought shelter in a cottage near a church, and sometime between nine-thirty and ten that night a courier brought him a message sent through the lines from General Grant.
Headquarters, Armies of the United States
April 7, 1865—5 p.m.
General R. E. Lee
Commanding C. S. Army
General: The results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility for any further effusion of blood, by asking of you to surrender that portion of the C. S. Army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.
Very respectfully,
Your obedient servant,
U. S. Grant
Lieutenant-General
Commanding Armies of the United States
Longstreet had joined Lee in the cottage, and Lee handed him the message. Longstreet read it, slowly and carefully, and shook his head. He handed it back. “Not yet,” he said.
Considering the abuse to which Longstreet has been subjected over the years, it is interesting that Lee still wanted him close at hand, and still sought his advice. Longstreet would never sugarcoat the truth; nor would he hide his opinion from Lee, even when he knew it would annoy his commander. The Army of Northern Virginia was still fighting. There was still a hope—remote, but not unrealistic—that it might be possible to reach Lynchburg, but Longstreet’s comment illustrates very clearly that both men knew by then that surrender was almost inevitable. The casualties and the rate of desertion of the past two days had convinced Lee of that, but so long as what remained of his army was fighting, Lee would not surrender.
Longstreet was the only man with whom Lee shared the letter from Grant, and Longstreet’s reaction to it belies the theory that he had been reluctant to fight at Gettysburg. Now, when further resistance was hard to justify except for the sake of honor, Longstreet was determined to continue fighting. He was “competent, wise, forbearing and compassionate, Lee’s friend and greatest source of strength.” In the final, critical moment of the war, “He was there to back Lee up, not to pull him down,” as Longstreet may or may not have said, but as he certainly did. For Lee, now, honor was paramount—not the cause of the Confederacy, which was clearly lost; not victory, which was now unthinkable; but the honor of the army he led, and of course his own, which he could trace back through generations of Lees and Carters. If there was to be an ending, it must be endured with dignity. His concept of honor was not, like that of the Japanese samurai, suicidal or self-sacrificial; nor would he have harbored vainglorious thoughts like Napoleon’s* about his future place in history—he was too much a Christian for that. But he had been shocked to the core by the sight of the men—his men—running from the enemy. Lee knew his duty, and it is to his credit that Longstreet understood it.
Lee did not reply to Longstreet. It was now his duty to reply to Grant’s letter. He wrote the message himself, in a firm, clear hand on a single sheet of paper. He did not ask his aide Marshall to write out a draft for him. Whether he discussed it with Longstreet or Marshall is not known. Marshall claims to have written out Lee’s reply, but he may have meant that he made a copy of it for Lee’s records, since the message is clearly in Lee’s handwriting. Marshall also writes that there was “some discussion” of it. If so, it did not involve many people—Lee may have been reluctant to let the news leak out that he was ever so slightly opening the door to surrender, and perhaps too he was simply sure of what he wanted to write, and determined to keep it simple.
7th Apl ’65
Genl
I have read your note of this date. Though not entertaining the opinion you express of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of N. Va.—I reciprocate your desire to avoid useless effusion of blood, & therefore before considering your proposition, ask the terms you will offer on condition of its surrender
Very respy your obt. Servt
R. E. Lee
Genl
Lt. Genl. U.S. Grant
Commd Armies of the U. States
That night the remnants of the army continued to march slowly and painfully toward Lynchburg. The Appomattox River and the Southside Railroad were on his left; the James River was on his right; his movement westward carried him into the point of a narrowing < with the bulk of Grant’s army marching parallel to Lee’s. Lee was running a risk that he was advancing into a trap, but he was dependent on the supply trains that had been sent on to Appomattox Station and Pamplin’s Station. If he could reach those stations before the Federals, feed his men and horses, and advance in good order to Lynchburg, there was still a chance of continuing the fight farther south, and it was his duty to pursue that chance. Those who saw him remarked on his calm, confident expression, but by the afternoon of Saturday, April 8, many of those around Lee were no longer either calm or confident; in fact there seems to have been what is called in Britain a “round robin,” in this case an unwritten consensus among some of Lee’s generals to persuade him to surrender. Brigadier General William Pendleton was deputized to broach the subject with Lee on behalf of the others.
Longstreet dissociated himself from this attempt, though clearly he was aware of it. Lee in any case declined to accept Pendleton’s suggestion, although whether as vehemently as Pendleton remembered when he came to write this conversation down is open to question. Lee may have been more embarrassed than angry—the night before, he had already asked what terms Grant would offer for the surrender of the army, and he would not have wanted to discuss the possibility of surrendering with his senior officers until he knew them. It is also possible that Lee failed to realize that his reply to Grant’s letter of April 7, however carefully worded, had opened up what Winston Churchill in a later war would call the “slippery slope” of surrender negotiations.*
The different accounts of what occurred on April 8 undoubtedly derive from the fact that almost all those involved later sought to present their own behavior in the best possible light, except for Lee himself. We know what people said to him—or
what they wrote that they said to him long after the war—but we cannot be sure what he said, and he made no effort to write his own account, or to correct theirs. Lee had already put his foot, however hesitantly, on the bridge Pendleton was asking him to cross, but he did not want to be dictated to by his own generals, and he was not interested in his generals’ well-meaning attempt to urge him to surrender or to share the responsibility for it. On the contrary, he saw it as his moral and military duty to shoulder the full responsibility himself.
This may account for a certain testiness in Lee’s behavior on the afternoon of April 8—he did not know what Grant would reply to his letter; he did not want the news that he had written to Grant to spread through the army and further demoralize it; and he was, as always, trying to determine where his duty lay: to fight on at the cost of more “effusion of blood,” or to surrender,—and if the latter, on what terms? This may explain the abruptness, so unlike Lee, when he dismissed General Anderson, presumably for his failure at Sayler’s Creek. Lee also relieved Pickett of his command, though Lee’s order never reached him. Pickett had been unlucky at Gettysburg, and again at Sayler’s Creek; Lee may also have felt that Pickett had been too vocal in complaining that Lee was responsible for destroying his regiment at Gettysburg. It was a question not so much of Pickett’s opinion as of military discipline. He was not entitled to complain about his commanding officer.
On the evening of April 8 Grant’s reply to Lee’s letter arrived. In it he stated that peace was his great desire, and that he had only one condition: “namely, that the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified for taking up arms against the Government of the United States, until properly exchanged.” Out of courtesy, Grant made the same mistake that General Pendleton had made, by offering “to meet any officers you name” to arrange the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, thus sparing Lee the humiliation of surrendering in person. This was a delicate point: General Lord Cornwallis had shrunk from surrendering his army personally at Yorktown, and appointed General O’Hara to represent him. Even then O’Hara ostentatiously tried to hand his sword to the French general Count Rochambeau instead of to Washington, a discourtesy toward the American commander that Rochambeau refused to allow. Lee’s father had been present on that famous occasion, and later criticized Cornwallis for deviating “from his general line of conduct, dimming the splendour of his long and brilliant career.” In no circumstances would Lee ever do what his father had condemned. If it came to surrender he would do it himself, and hand his sword over to Grant.
Lee still had not made up his mind. He showed the letter to one of his aides, Colonel Charles Venable, and asked, “How would you answer that?” Venable replied, “I would answer no such letter.” But that was not the advice Lee had been looking for. There was no way he could bring himself to avoid replying to Grant’s letter—it was a matter not only of courtesy, but of duty. “Ah, but it must be answered,” he gently reproved Venable, and sat down to do so at once. Again, he wrote in his own hand, leaving it to Marshall to make a copy.
“I received at a late hour your note of today,” Lee wrote. “In mine of yesterday I did not intend to propose the surrender of the Army of N. Va—but to ask the terms of your proposition. To be frank, I do not think the emergency has arisen to call for the surrender of this Army, but as the restoration of peace should be the sole object of all, I desired to know whether your proposals would lead to that and I cannot therefore meet you with a view to surrender the Army of N. Va.—but as far as your proposal may affect the C.S. forces under my command & tend to the restoration of peace, I shall be pleased to meet you at 10 a.m. tomorrow on the old stage road to Richmond between the picket lines of the two armies.”
This letter is somewhat ambiguous, and seems to have puzzled Grant when he received it. Possibly Lee was having second thoughts, still hoping that he might feed his troops and get them to Lynchburg, yet it also seems to suggest that he was open to a broader peace negotiation, not just a surrender of “the forces under my command.” This was a sensitive subject for Grant, who had been rapped gently on the knuckles by Secretary of War Stanton and President Lincoln in March 1865 for passing on Lee’s delicately worded suggestion that a meeting between Major General Edward Ord and Longstreet to discuss prisoner exchanges might be extended into one between himself and Grant to discuss “a military convention” with a view to reaching “a satisfactory adjustment of the present unhappy difficulties.” Grant had been firmly reminded that he was to have no dealings on the subject of peace with Lee, and that any further communication must be only for the purpose of accepting the surrender of Lee’s army.
If Lee was playing for time, his hopes would soon be dashed. That evening the troopers of the twenty-three-year-old Major General George Armstrong Custer reached Appomattox Station. After a fierce but brief fight, his men seized three of the seven trains. Of the others, the Confederates took three back to Farmville and burned the fourth. Thanks to Custer, Lee’s hopes of feeding his army as it marched toward Lynchburg were dashed. The three trains that had escaped were now farther away, and there was some doubt that he could reach them. Lee’s line was now facing south, his left anchored on a small hill to the east of Appomattox Court House, the tiny town behind his center; and to his right Fitz Lee’s cavalry held high ground to the east of the town, just south of the Appomattox River.
By now Grant was ensconced in a Confederate colonel’s empty house, stripped for use as a Confederate hospital. He was suffering from one of the severe migraine headaches that plagued him when he was under pressure and removed from the comforting presence of Mrs. Grant, or on occasion the bottle, and which he attempted to cure by a then conventional remedy: sitting with his feet in a tub full of hot water and mustard, and with “a mustard plaster” placed on his wrists and “the back part of his neck.”
Still in pain, he roused himself in the early hours of the morning to write to Lee, pointing out that as “he had no authority to treat on the subject of peace, the meeting proposed for ten a.m. to-day could lead to no good. . . . The terms upon which peace can be had are well understood. By the South laying down their arms they will have that most desirable event, save thousands of human lives, and hundreds of millions of property not yet destroyed.”
There is a slight tone of asperity in Grant’s reply—perhaps as a result of his headache, perhaps because he was simply impatient to get on with the surrender. It was not like Grant to lecture anyone, let alone General Lee, but he no doubt felt he had already made the terms of surrender clear, and by now his own generals were warning him that Lee’s letter might be a delaying tactic, that Lee was merely buying time for Johnston’s army to arrive from North Carolina. Grant instinctively doubted this—he had a great respect for Lee’s sense of honor—and understood the precise military scope of Lee’s position. Lee had not yet asked for a truce; he had merely suggested a meeting to discuss the exact terms of surrender he would be offered if he decided to surrender. In the meantime, fighting would go on unabated. Grant had negotiated the surrender of Fort Donelson in 1862 and of Vicksburg in 1863, and the niceties of surrender negotiations were familiar to him. He was back in the saddle in the early morning of Sunday, April 9, Palm Sunday, head still throbbing, and rode on “to the head of the column,” where the fighting was now intense.
Lee had spent the night bivouacked in the woods, about two miles northeast of the village of Appomattox Court House. His “ambulance and his headquarters wagons were entangled somewhere among the trains” in the chaos of retreat, so he was obliged to do without his tent and camp furniture. The glow from campfires all around him told its own story—he was surrounded by Federals. If it was only Federal cavalry in front of him, there was some hope that his infantry could push through it, and give the army time to reach Lynchburg. Late that night Lee held his last council of war. He stood in front of his own campfire in the chill of the night; Longstreet, silent and pensive, sat on a log smoking his long, curved pipe; and generals Gordon
and Fitz Lee sat on a blanket. Lee gave his last orders for an attack: Fitz Lee’s cavalry must try to cut a way through the enemy, supported by Gordon’s infantry, while the rear guard under Longstreet held the hastily dug trenches for as long as possible against the bulk of the Federal infantry coming up behind them. They all agreed to fight on to the end so long as there remained any glimmer of hope. Longstreet was among those who were most determined to fight on.
Clouds of Glory Page 78
