Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  At first light Lee rose from a brief nap. General Pendleton, his chief of artillery, was surprised to find him wearing his best uniform, a silk sash wound around his waist, his best sword with a gilded lion’s head on its pommel and an ivory grip hanging from a gold-embroidered sword belt. It had been specially commissioned for him in Paris by an admiring Marylander from the swordmaker Louis François Devisme.* His knee-high cavalry boots were gleaming, he wore gold spurs with rowels, and he carried a new pair of pale gray gauntlets. “If I am to be General Grant’s prisoner today I intend to make my best appearance,” he said to Pendleton, perhaps in jest. Out of an army that was reduced to about 28,000 men, “the mere skeleton, the ghost of the Army of Northern Virginia,” Lee now had fewer than 8,000 exhausted, emaciated infantrymen armed and fit for battle and perhaps 2,100 cavalrymen, with which to confront 80,000 Federal troops, but he was as determined to fight as ever. Fitz Lee began his attack at 5 a.m., but early morning fog concealed the action from Lee, although he could hear intense artillery and musket fire just beyond Appomattox Court House. By 8 a.m. the sounds of battle were intense, but Lee had no word of the results. He sent Colonel Venable forward, and Venable soon rode back with General Gordon’s message. “Tell General Lee I have fought my corps to a frazzle, and I fear I can do nothing unless I am heavily supported by Longstreet’s corps.” Since Longstreet’s corps was engaged heavily—and hopelessly—trying to hold off at least two Union corps to the rear, it was instantly apparent to Lee that breaking through the enemy lines was no longer possible: he was surrounded, and the enemy held higher ground on all sides. “Then there is nothing left me to do but go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths.” Whether he said this to himself, as some accounts claim, or to his staff is not entirely clear, but there seems no reason for Lee to be talking to himself, or that he would not have been frank with his staff at this point. “Oh, General,” one of them said, “what will history say of the surrender of the army in the field?”

  Lee’s answer was typical: that history would doubtless have “hard things to say of us,” though this has not in fact proved to be the case, and that if it was the right thing to do he would “take all the responsibility.”

  Lee wanted one more opinion: he sent for Longstreet, and briefly explained the situation. The two men were dismounted, standing in front of the embers of a fire built from fence rails. Longstreet later recorded that Lee’s “brave bearing failed to conceal his profound depression,” but with the blunt common sense that always made his opinion valuable to Lee, Longstreet asked the question nobody else dared to pose. Could “the bloody sacrifice of his army in any way help the cause in other quarters?” Lee thought not, and Longstreet replied, “Then your situation speaks for itself.”

  Lee was still reluctant to make the final move, and sent for Major General William Mahone. It was a cold morning, and Mahone was shivering. He stirred up the embers with his foot, and said he didn’t want Lee to think that he was scared; he was just chilled. Lee nodded—it probably would never have occurred to him that Mahone might be scared. Mahone was talkative too, and asked Lee more questions than Longstreet thought were necessary. With the menacing, bulky General Longstreet glaring at him to get to the point, Mahone finally gave his opinion. It was time for Lee to see General Grant.

  Brigadier General Edward Porter Alexander, Longstreet’s young chief of artillery, appeared. Lee took the trouble to peel the bark off a felled oak so as not to soil his best uniform, and sat down with him. Alexander was in favor of fighting on, and when Lee gently disabused him of that idea, he suggested that the men “be ordered to scatter in the woods & bushes & either to rally upon Gen. Johnston in North Carolina, or to make their way, each man to his own state, with his arms & report to the governor.” He supposed that two-thirds of the army would do so, “like rabbits and partridges in the bushes, and they [the Union Army] could not scatter to follow us.” Lee was not only skeptical of this proposition but actively opposed to it. Though Alexander would later deny that what he had in mind was guerrilla warfare, this was what such a move would have produced. Lee was a supremely well-trained career officer and had the professional’s dislike of guerrilla warfare in all its forms; he compared it to “bushwhacking,” which would turn the South into a prewar “bloody Kansas” on a much larger scale. The last thing Lee wanted was to see his men scattered in the bushes like rabbits and partridges, taking potshots at Federal troops, and he had no doubt about the bloody reprisals that would follow. The man who had captured John Brown and helped to secure the site of his hanging did not want to spawn hundreds or thousands of southern equivalents of Brown, from which “it would take the country years to recover.” Kindly, but firmly, he put the idea out of Alexander’s mind altogether. Lee intended to surrender his army in good order, a formal, disciplined surrender of every man, and of every man’s weapon. No decision Lee made on April 9 was more important for the future of the South than this—his example would bring the war to an end and put an end to the fighting. No suggestion could have made Lee more determined to get on with what he was so reluctant to do than Alexander’s.

  Lee had not yet received Grant’s message telling him that the meeting Lee had proposed for 10 a.m. “would do no good,” since Grant had no authority “to treat on the subject of peace.” He mounted Traveller at about half past eight in the morning, and rode toward Longstreet’s front line. Sergeant Tucker, the chief courier of the Third Corps, rode in front, followed by Lee’s aides colonels Marshall and Taylor, and then, riding alone, Lee. The men cheered him as he passed, though it must have surprised them to see the little party ride through the breastworks that Longstreet’s men had built, and then on toward the enemy’s line, down “the old stage road to Richmond.” After a while, Lee saw a line of Federal skirmishers advancing toward them. Sergeant Tucker raised a white flag and he and Colonel Marshall rode on down the road, expecting to find a member of Grant’s staff, or even Grant himself, waiting. Instead, after a pause, a Federal officer appeared and presented them with Grant’s letter, which Marshall took back to Lee, who read it carefully.

  This was perhaps the most alarming moment of the day for Lee. With every moment that passed his army was being surrounded more tightly, by larger numbers; he had neither asked for nor been granted a truce; and he, the commanding officer, was now half a mile ahead of his own front line, in range of Federal skirmishers. To retreat would be humiliating, to advance an invitation to be shot. He was dictating a reply to Grant when he heard a horse galloping furiously toward him. A Confederate officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Haskell, passed by him, unable to stop his horse, then turned the heaving animal around to give Lee the message from Longstreet that he had found an escape route. But Lee had passed beyond such thoughts. A road that might allow a few cavalrymen to escape would not be large enough for his whole army,* and in any case he was now determined to surrender that army complete and intact, in good order, and with dignity. Lee rebuked the officer for overriding his mare: “Oh, why did you do it?” he asked. “You have killed your beautiful horse.” Then he resumed his dictation, hurrying Marshall on as the sound of firing began to increase on all sides. If fighting resumed, Lee knew that given the disparity of forces and the closeness of the enemy, it would be a bloody last stand, from which there was nothing to be gained. He had now dropped his previous hesitation and qualifications. His note to Grant was short, and to the point.

  April 9th 1865

  General,

  I received your note of this morning on the picket line whither I had come to meet you and ascertain definitely what terms were embraced in your proposal of yesterday with reference to the surrender of this army. I now request an interview in accordance with the offer contained in your letter of yesterday for that purpose.

  Very respectfully,

  Your obt. Servt

  R. E. LEE

  Lt. Gen. U. S. Grant

  Cmmdg U. S. Armies

  This was the message that Grant had
been waiting for since Lee’s letter of April 7. The moment he received it, at about eleven o’clock in the morning, his headache vanished: “the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured,” he wrote. He quickly dictated a message back to Lee that he would “push” forward to the front to meet him, and that Lee should choose the place for the interview. It was unusually generous, and a breach of military tradition, to allow the party requesting a surrender to choose the place—but then Grant hardly knew where he was (“about four miles West of Walker’s Church” was the best he could tell Lee). Appomattox Court House was behind the Confederate lines, and he had no clear idea how to get there. Grant, accompanied by a small staff, would have to ride down muddy back roads while fighting was still going on, in country where a Confederate sharpshooter would hardly pass up the opportunity for a shot at the Federal commanding general. One of his staff warned that it would be a bad idea to shorten the distance by cutting through fields and lots where he Grant might expose himself to “men conspicuous in gray,” and thought that it would be “a very awkward condition . . . if Grant became a prisoner in Lee’s lines instead of Lee in his.”

  None of these thoughts seems to have occurred to Grant now that his migraine had passed; nor did he know that Lee was in a similarly dangerous position. Lee was still sitting on Traveller in what would be called no-man’s-land, and it was becoming apparent that the Federals intended to attack toward just the spot where Lee and his party sat on their horses. A Union officer rode through his own skirmish line to ask the Confederate party to withdraw, and Lee used the opportunity to send another hastily penciled note to Grant, this time asking for “a suspension of hostilities,” in other words, a truce. Before it could reach Grant a Federal officer informed Lee that the attack could not be delayed and warned him to withdraw. Obliged to ride back through his own lines, he sent his final note of the day to Grant. Lee dismounted and lay down to rest under an apple tree in a small orchard, until his aide Colonel Taylor finally brought him the news that Major General Meade had agreed to a formal truce until two o’clock. Shortly after noon a Federal officer, Colonel Orville E. Babcock of Grant’s staff, and his orderly, accompanied by a Confederate officer, rode over and dismounted, handing Lee Grant’s letter, which said that Grant was on the way to meet him.

  Longstreet thought that Lee had never looked grander or more impressive than he did at that moment. Lee worried that the delay might cause Grant to impose harsher terms, but Longstreet, an old friend of Grant’s, thought not. In any case, the next move was up to Lee. He rode to Appomattox Court House, pausing at a small stream to let Traveller drink, accompanied by Marshall, Taylor, Babcock and his orderly, and Sergeant Tucker, in search of an appropriate place for what would become the most famous meeting in American history. Marshall was sent ahead to make a selection—the choice was not a wide one. Major Wilmer McLean showed him around the village. The first place they saw was a bare shell of a house with no furniture, which Marshall thought was unsuitable. McLean then offered his own home, a modest but handsomely furnished little redbrick house with white trim and a big front porch. By an extraordinary coincidence Major Wilmer McLean’s farm had been part of the battlefield at the First Battle of Manassas, and he had moved to Appomattox so his family would not be further exposed to the war. Now, as was so often the case, the war had caught up with him. McLean would later remark that the war started in his backyard and ended in his parlor. In any case, Marshall accepted his offer, then rode back to Lee’s party.

  Colonel Taylor “had no heart for being present at the surrender,” and Lee, with his usual magnanimity toward his staff, let him off the hook, taking only Colonel Marshall, who had borrowed a decent sword, a pair of gauntlets, and a clean shirt collar for the occasion. Lee, his orderly, Colonel Marshall, Colonel Babcock, and Sergeant Tucker dismounted in the yard in front of the house, and Tucker took the horses off to let them graze. Lee climbed the six wide wooden steps up to the porch—one can imagine with what reluctance—entered the hall, turned left into the parlor, and nodded his approval.

  The McLean house has been painstakingly reconstructed since then—at one time it was taken to pieces, with the idea of reassembling it in Washington, D.C., as a Civil War museum. The parlor, or “front room,” is handsome, but very small. Marshall records that he, Lee, and Babcock sat there for about half an hour. Babcock’s orderly was sent out to meet Grant on the road outside. Marshall, who was in the room, reports that he, Lee, and Babcock “talked in the most friendly and affable way.” There must have been a certain amount of coming and going to create an appropriate mise-en-scène for the surrender. The furniture is heavy, bulky, and overstuffed; a handsome, imposing fold-down desk stands to the right of the big fireplace that dominates the room. The sofa and easy chairs that were grouped around it are missing, both in contemporary prints, drawings, and paintings of the surrender, and in its present form. Somebody—perhaps Major McLean’s house servants—must have either removed some of the furniture or pushed it against the walls. Two small tables were placed on either side of the parlor: the one on the left a marble-topped side table, with a handsome wicker armchair behind it; the one on the right a smaller mahogany side table, behind which was placed the large leather upholstered swivel chair taken from the desk. Only a couple of small, formal chairs remain, and neither of them looks comfortable or inviting. Lee may have sat, but it seems unlikely that Marshall and Babcock did.

  At about one-thirty they heard the clatter of many hooves. As he rode, Grant had been gathering those whom he wanted to attend the surrender. Lee, Marshall, and Babock rose, and General Grant entered the room, removing his plain, “dark-yellow” string gloves. He was embarrassed by what has been called his “private’s uniform,” which was creased, rumpled, and splattered with mud, as well as by the fact that he was not wearing a sword, having ridden in straight from the field. In fact, Grant never wore a soldier’s uniform, though he stuck to that claim in his memoirs—a natural claim for a general turned politician, who knew more voters were privates than generals.* Grant wore a plain uniform coat with two rows of gilt buttons, worn open, and ending above the knees; a waistcoat with smaller gilt buttons; and a white shirt and collar with a narrow black bow tie. He wore on each shoulder a simple bar, bordered in a single, thin line of gold braid, bearing the three stars of a lieutenant general. His black uniform hat, rather like a modern Stetson, with a gold embroidered hat cord ending in two small gilt “acorns” in front, was standard issue for general officers. Grant, even at his best, was not a “dressy” general, and the contrast between him and Lee in his best uniform must have been striking. At any rate it struck Grant, who apologized for his “rough garb” and lack of a sword. Lee was also at least five inches taller than Grant, with the erect carriage of a cavalry officer, while Grant was a natural “sloucher.” From appearances, it might have seemed to a stranger that Grant was about to surrender to Lee, rather than the other way around. Grant described the moment perfectly in his memoirs: “What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it.” Another observer wrote that Lee’s “demeanor was that of a thoroughly possessed gentleman, who had a very disagreeable duty to perform, but was determined to get through it as well and as soon as he could.”

  There was a brief moment of embarrassment because while Grant remembered him from the Mexican War, Lee could not “recall a single feature” of Grant’s. Nevertheless, they chatted amicably for several minutes, while about a dozen Federal officers entered the parlor and stood against the walls. Some of these Lee knew by sight, including generals Sheridan and Ord. He may have been a little surprised by the presence of Grant’s secretary Lieutenant Colonel Ely Parker, a full-blooded Seneca Indian, whom he apparently supposed was black until Parker was introduced to him. “I am glad to see at least one real American here,” Lee sai
d politely. Parker replied with equal politeness, “We are all Americans, sir.” Lee seems to have had no objection to being put on display, as it were—he and his secretary Lieutenant Colonel Marshall were the only Confederate officers in the small room.

  Grant and Lee continued to chat for some time about Mexico—it may have been a relief for them both to talk about the past, rather than the present. In fact Grant found the conversation so “pleasant” that he almost forgot what they were there for until Lee, in Grant’s words, “called [his] attention to the object of our meeting.” Grant still seems to have been reluctant to get down to business, but finally said in a soft voice, “The terms I propose are those stated substantially in my letter of yesterday—that is the officers and men surrendered to be paroled and disqualified from taking up arms again until properly exchanged, and all arms, ammunition and supplies to be delivered up as captured property.”

  Lee nodded, and after a brief exchange, he suggested that Grant “commit to writing” the terms he had proposed. At this point, both men sat down, Lee placed his hat and gloves neatly on the marble-topped table; his military secretary Marshall stood against the fireplace, behind Lee’s left shoulder. Grant sat at the smaller of the two tables. The two men did not quite face each other. Lee was seated so as to face directly ahead toward the door; Grant was seated so as to look at Lee’s left profile. There was no great space between the two tables, and with the Union officers standing around the two seated men it must have been difficult for Lee to sit motionless before an audience of his enemies, all staring at him, while he looked toward the door with dignity and composure. Grant called for his “order-book”; lit a pipe; scribbled away for a few minutes with pencil, pausing a couple of times to make a correction or add a sentence; then looked up. Lee’s sword caught his eye—it was far and away the most handsome one in the room. Grant paused again, added a few lines, then asked Parker to look the draft over. Parker made a few small corrections, and returned it to Grant, who rose and carried the order book over to Lee. Taking his reading glasses from his pocket, Lee polished them carefully with a handkerchief, placed them on his nose, and began to read.