Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  On March 25 Lee launched a surprisingly powerful strike against the northern end of the Federal siege lines, reasoning that a breakthrough there would force Grant to contract elsewhere, which would open the way for Lee and much of the army to rush south to Johnston. Though the attack initially broke through, it soon lost momentum, not least because Grant’s well-organized intelligence system had been informing him for some time that Lee was calling in outposts and guards from elsewhere, which Grant correctly read as a desperate buildup for an attack. “We are watching closely,” he told Dana, and the watching paid off.97 That left Lee with nothing to do but hope to get his entire army out in the field before the Yankees severed the last link out of Petersburg, the Southside Railroad to Danville.

  A miserable rain soaked both armies at the end of the month, but Grant told Julia that bad as the weather was for his men, “it is Consoling to know that it rains on the enemy as well.”98 On April 1, however, Federal cavalry under Sheridan collapsed Lee’s right flank at Five Forks. “I am feeling well and full of confidence,” Grant wrote his wife after the news.99 All the next day he pressed the whole Confederate line, and Lee knew he could stay in place no longer. He sent a telegram to Breckinridge saying he must evacuate during the night, and advised that the government prepare to leave Richmond. Soon a telegram arrived from the president with news that the government was not ready for a sudden move, archives had yet to be packed, and no one had arranged transportation. In fact, only the War Department was ready to go, thanks to Breckinridge. When Lee read the president’s message he tore it to pieces, muttering to no one in particular that “I am sure I gave him sufficient notice.”100

  From the time his defensive lines first enveloped Petersburg, Lee felt painfully aware of the hardships of “its good people,” and looking back on the city as he rode out in the night to march westward, he felt sorrowful for their lot as he abandoned them.101 His hope was to outrun the Federals, reach supply depots at Lynchburg, and then turn south into North Carolina to link with Johnston more than a hundred miles away. Even more distant was any likelihood that he could make it happen. As his depleted legions made their way west, Lee’s temper grew short from the frustration and anguish. Riding past a battery on the road, he saw a soldier exhibiting what he called “poor march discipline” and ordered him arrested, perhaps the only time in the war Lee ordered an arrest face to face.102 Meanwhile, the Federals occupied first the abandoned Confederate works, and then Richmond on April 3. Grant admitted that there might yet be “some more hard work,” but the prize was within grasp.103 He communicated with Lincoln daily, and sometimes several times a day, the news in every telegram better than in the one before. On April 5 Lee reached Amelia Court House expecting to find a trainload of supplies, only to discover that Grant’s spies had diverted it. Forced to keep moving hungry, Lee pressed on the next day, and that morning Breckinridge caught up to him and they conferred briefly. That night they met again in Farmville, only after a third of the army had been lost at Sayler’s Creek when it became isolated from the rest by the Appomattox River as the Yankees closed in. Lee had not much more than 25,000 soldiers remaining.

  Lee met with Breckinridge again on the morning of April 7. Neither later divulged what they discussed. Surely much centered on avoiding battle if at all possible, and getting the remnant of the army away to link with Johnston. However, they also probably spoke of possible terms if Lee could not escape. Campbell had remained in Richmond hoping to meet with Lincoln to make their arguments for restoration. If brought to bay by Grant, Lee could try to make that same case with him if the reward were not just the Army of Northern Virginia, but all remaining Confederate forces. Coincidentally, just hours later Grant sent a note through the lines to Lee suggesting that further resistance meant only more useless bloodletting and asking Lee to surrender. Lee’s reply reached him the next day, denying that the situation was yet that critical, but asking what terms Grant might propose before he considered the call for capitulation. “Peace being my great desire,” Grant responded, he had but one condition: that on surrendering, the Confederates go home and not take arms again unless properly exchanged, which he of course knew would never happen.

  Lee wrote back asserting that “I did not intend to propose the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia.” Then he went on to add that since “the restoration of peace should be the sole object of all,” he would like to meet with Grant to discuss how his proposed terms “may affect the C. S. forces under my command, & tend to the restoration of peace.” Lee’s meaning depended on how his note was read. Did he mean he would not discuss surrendering the army immediately facing Grant? Or had he not meant to limit his inquiry to just his army? He was willing to talk about something affecting “the C. S. forces under my command.” Since he was general-in-chief, that meant the entire Confederate army, in effect the Confederacy itself.104 Lee was attempting to do now what Breckinridge and Campbell had hoped he would do weeks before.

  Lee said nothing about restoration of the Union or the end of slavery. Both were foregone conclusions, but there were other considerations of importance to Southerners, as there were many kinds of peace. Would Confederate officers and men be proscribed in any fashion, or would they have their full rights in a new Union? Would their leaders like Davis face indictment and trial for treason, or be left unmolested? Would they be secure in their real property, or face further confiscation as punitive retribution or to recompense the North for its war debt? Would their own war debts abroad be assumed by Washington? Most of all, could their sitting governors and legislatures be allowed to continue in office, and would they be allowed to send representatives to Congress with full rights? Would the relation of the states to the federal government be the same as before, or were they to be thereafter entirely subordinate to the central authority? Were they to have the Union of 1860, or something newer and less palatable?

  By speaking of “the C. S. forces under my command,” Lee hinted that in return for something approaching reunion on the basis of the prewar status quo, he would consider a universal surrender, though he probably hoped that talks with Grant might lead to an armistice followed by a voluntary dissolution of Confederate forces. This would mean not a defeat but a “withdrawal” with honor from the war. Further resistance in the interest of Confederate independence might be a fantasy, but with perhaps up to 150,000 men under arms between Virginia and Texas, the Confederates still had power to make the Yankees pay dearly in blood and treasure for victory. Like Breckinridge and Campbell, Lee regarded that as something to trade in return for some political and social concessions, and an end to conflict short of the humiliation of surrender. Most significantly, Lee hinted at all this with no consultation with Davis, who was trying to reestablish his government in Danville. Davis had been willing to negotiate before, and Lee could assume that he would again, though independence was always Davis’s sine qua non. For Lee, in this extremis, it was not. He knew he proposed the death of the Confederacy in return for concessions. All of that he implied in those few brief words about restoration and the forces under his command.105

  Grant quashed that immediately by responding on the morning of April 9 that “I have no authority to treat on the subject of peace,” and therefore he saw no purpose served in meeting. While an isolated Lee could exercise considerable latitude in any negotiation, Grant could not. In a meeting with Lincoln just a dozen days before, the president made clear that he was to capture Lee’s army or force its surrender on the terms Grant had already proposed, but nothing more. He was not to discuss questions of a political or social nature. All of that would be up to Lincoln and Congress afterward. If there had ever been a time when the Campbell-Breckinridge-Lee plan for peace had a hope, the time was past. Lee realized that when he received Grant’s reply. By now his army was almost surrounded, starving, and his only route of escape to the west cut off by Sheridan’s cavalry. His options were gone, and as soon as he received Grant’s refusal at about eight-thirty that morning,
he accepted the inevitable and responded by asking for a meeting to discuss the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia.

  Grant and Lee met in the parlor of a private home in the village of Appomattox Court House. Grant had hoped to avoid any formal surrender ceremony. “These are our people,” he explained later. “They are not foreigners, but they belong to us and we to them, and all we want is for them to stop fighting, and for us all to live at peace and as a Union.”106 There had been no pomp at Fort Donelson or Vicksburg, and he wanted none now, sensing that it accorded with Lincoln’s wishes. It would only humiliate the vanquished and do nothing to smooth their transition to citizenship. Still, there was no keeping several of his staff away, and a few of his generals, while for his part Lee arrived with only Taylor and Marshall.

  The interview that followed is enshrined in American memory. It was the second time they had met since Mexico City. Lee claimed to remember Grant well, though that was more likely just courtesy. Certainly Grant remembered Lee. Neither was at his best. Grant had a migraine headache and later confessed to feelings of sadness and depression, as more than three years of anticipation of this moment released a flood of empathy.107 This was not just the end of the Army of Northern Virginia, and presumably the war. It was also the end of the greatest, and only, sustained success of his life. Surely that was not on his mind just now, but his own future from this moment on was almost as uncertain as Lee’s. Meanwhile, behind his dignified self-control, Lee felt almost overwhelmed. People who saw him then and the next day thought him depressed and his mind wandering.

  Grant tried small talk to mask his ill ease until Lee brought them to the point. He wanted it over with. Grant reiterated Lincoln’s terms. Lee agreed and asked to have them in writing. Handed the document, Lee read and approved, speaking only once to note the “happy effect” a provision for officers to retain their horses and side arms would have. Explaining that his cavalrymen and artillerymen owned their own horses, Lee observed that they were not covered in Grant’s draft, a clarification amounting to a hint that Grant took. Thereupon Lee wrote a letter of acceptance, and was on the verge of leaving when he asked if Grant could provide rations and forage for his men and animals. Grant’s immediate response was to ask how much he wanted and then told Lee to send his quartermasters and commissaries to get as much as they needed. After naming officers to work out the details of paroling the Confederates, Lee and Grant exchanged farewells and left, Lee first. As Lee mounted Traveller to return to his lines, Grant came out onto the porch and down a few steps to raise his hat, the officers behind him following his salute. Lee raised his own hat in response and rode away.108 With him went an atmosphere of tension and discomfort that had pervaded throughout the interview.

  Lee returned to his headquarters to break the news to his soldiers. Grant cut short an impromptu artillery salute in celebration. “We did not want to exult over their downfall,” he wrote later. He knew enough of defeat and humiliation to know its sting. That done, he made plans to immediately go to Washington to halt the “useless outlay of money” on purchasing further supplies for his army. He never quite stopped being a quartermaster.109

  17

  GRANT AND LEE IN 1868

  GRANT WANTED TO see Lee one more time, and without a room full of onlookers. The next morning he wired his friend and patron Washburne the news of the surrender, and then rode toward Lee’s headquarters under a white flag.1 Lee rode to meet him, but neither dismounted. They had met in war the day before. This was their first meeting in peace, and Grant wanted to expand it beyond Appomattox. The suddenness of the collapse somewhat surprised Grant, having thought the war in Virginia might last through the summer; nonetheless, he had assumed that when the Confederacy did start to topple, it would go quickly. On reflection he even thought it perhaps better that he had not taken Petersburg in June 1864. If he had, then Lee likely would have evacuated and withdrawn into the state’s interior, possibly even resorting to the option of dispersing his army into guerrilla bands that might have prolonged the war for years.2

  At the meeting Lee tried to negotiate subtly, observing that the South was a huge country, and though remaining Confederate forces could scarcely prevent an ultimate victory, the Yankees might have to move their armies across that landscape several times to complete their conquest. He hoped no more blood need be shed, but he could not tell what might happen. Presumably, he said nothing about an armistice and negotiations, but somewhere in there was a vague hint that generous terms, and perhaps some guarantees of civil and property rights afterward, might yield a full and immediate cease-fire. Grant had a wider peace on his mind, for he replied that he thought further fighting could be averted if Lee, as the one Confederate with more military and civil influence than any other, would “advise” all remaining Confederates to surrender. Loyal to the last to his subordination to his chief executive, Lee said he could not do that without first consulting Davis, which by implication suggested he was willing to do so if Davis agreed. Davis was unpredictable, and in any event they could not be sure if he was still in Danville—which he was not—raising the possibility that Lee wanted to buy time. Grant was not selling, however. As usual, he wanted something now, yet he also knew and understood enough of Lee to know he would not compromise when it came to his duty, and so did not press the matter.3 They would not meet again for four years.

  A few minutes later some Union officers including Meade visited Lee in his lines, and one staff officer noted not only the general’s grave manner, but also that he seemed extremely depressed, “which gave him the air of a man who kept up his pride to the last, but who was entirely overwhelmed.” Moreover, in speaking with Meade and others, Lee’s mind seemed to wander, though he did aver that peace could be made at once if the Union adopted a conciliatory policy.4 Perhaps his distraction resulted from trying to organize his thoughts for the tasks remaining to him. He needed to notify President Davis of his actions and it was his duty to file a final report. Harder still, he must find a way to say farewell to his loyal old veterans.

  Lee gave Marshall the task of composing the farewell, while Taylor gathered such reports as he could from which to write a report of the last several days, the gist of which was that, outnumbered in his reckoning by five to one, his men unfed and exhausted, he felt he might have fought his way out of the encirclement to buy one more day, but a surrender would have been inevitable.5 While that was in preparation, Lee edited Marshall’s draft of what would be General Order No. 9 and had copies made to be read through the remnant of his army. They had fought heroically for four years, it began, and were now forced to “yield,” but only to overwhelming enemy strength. He did so to save more blood. Grant’s terms were honorable, and they could go home conscious of “duty faithfully performed.” He said nothing about their fallen cause, which would only emphasize their situation and needlessly irritate the Federals, and closed saying, “I bid you an affectionate farewell.”6 That night he shared a last quiet supper with his staff, none of whom felt much like talking.

  Lee chose not to be present at the formal ceremony two days later when his tattered legions marched past the victors to lay down their rifles and banners. Early on the morning of April 12 he left in company with Taylor and Major Giles B. Cooke. His stopped to see his brother Carter on the way, finally rode across the James bridge into Richmond on the afternoon of April 15, and went immediately to the house he rented on Franklin Street, though not without a few cheers from civilians, and even a few Union soldiers, on the sidewalks.7 Only then, probably, did he learn that the night before President Lincoln had been shot and was now dead. For the next several days he sequestered himself at home with Mary, and was scarcely seen on the streets for several weeks.8 He slept as much as he could, and talked with Mary and all of his children who gathered. He told them the story of Appomattox, how he had barely 8,700 men, and how they were all resolved to cut their way out and fight on if Grant had demanded his usual unconditional surrender. However, Lee said Grant’
s terms “were so honorable” that he accepted, to save further loss of life.9 That, at least, is how he preferred to remember it at the moment. After a few days he also concluded that he had one more duty to perform. As a paroled prisoner of war, he no longer had authority over remaining soldiers in the field, but he feared for their safety. On April 20, knowing nothing more than that Davis and his government had fled Danville after his surrender, and were then in or near Charlotte, North Carolina, he wrote a letter to the president. It was the sort of letter Campbell and Breckinridge had hoped for in February, and the first step to realizing what Grant sought in their April 10 meeting. Lee painted a frank picture of the demoralization of his army during the past winter, of how their fighting spirit had left them, followed by the onset of epidemic straggling and desertion. Almost 19,000 men had simply disappeared in the final weeks. No Confederate army could now be reconstituted in Virginia, let alone sustained, and he regarded affairs west of the Mississippi as hopeless. Making no mention at all of Johnston and his army facing Sherman, or of other scattered smaller forces in Alabama, Lee regarded the only alternative remaining to them as a partisan war, Confederate forces disbanding and taking to the hill and mountain country and sniping at Union forces in small bands. He rejected that out of hand as prolonging needless suffering, and as ultimately futile. “I see no prospect,” he concluded, “of achieving a separate independence.” He recommended that Davis take steps to suspend hostilities, meaning to secure an armistice leading to “the restoration of peace.”10 Even with his own army off the board, he felt that remaining Confederates might possibly gain something from negotiation if the Yankees would talk.