The Last Weeks of Abraham Lincoln

by David Alan Johnson

  Honorable E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War, Washington

  General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this afternoon on terms proposed by myself. The accompanying additional correspondence will show the conditions fully.

  U. S. Grant, Lieutenant-General20

  It did not take very long for the news to spread and circulate. Staff officers began riding through the Union lines shouting “Lee surrendered!” General Chamberlain remembered that his men “rent the air with shouting and uproar” when they heard about the surrender.21 Colonel Elisha Hunt Rhodes, who was with his unit outside Appomattox Court House, learned about Lee's surrender when he heard “loud cheering from the front.”22 A short time afterward, General George Gordon Meade “rode like mad down the road with his hat off, shouting, ‘The war is over, and we are going home!’”

  General Grant's wife, Julia, along with the wife of another officer and a half-dozen army and navy officers, were sitting “in the cabin of our boat” during the afternoon when a headquarters attaché entered the cabin.23 As Mrs. Grant remembered the scene, the attaché was very agitated. He held a sheet of paper in his hand, and said, “Mrs. Grant, Madam, may I speak with you for a moment?” She followed the attaché into another stateroom and asked, “What news?”

  “Glad news, but you must not tell on me,” he said. “It would cost me my head if old Stanton knew I had brought the news to you.”24 He then proceeded to read everything that had been telegraphed to Washington regarding the surrender of General Lee to her husband, including the very generous terms of surrender.

  “Now, Madam, forgive me if I have done wrong,” he went on, “but I felt you must know as soon as anyone else, including the president. So I brought you the news.”25

  When Mrs. Grant returned to her guests, everyone did their best to coax the attaché's news out of her. She refused to say anything, but it did not really matter. About twenty minutes later, “a shout went up along the bluffs, and cries of ‘The Union Forever, Hurrah, Boys! Hurrah!’ then told them the glad tidings.”26

  After returning from City Point, the president's first stop in Washington was not the war office, but the house of Secretary of State William Seward. Secretary Seward was still in great pain from the injuries he had received from his accident, and was hardly able to speak. His daughter Fanny recalled that the president had already arrived when she came into her father's room. Frederick Seward, the secretary's son, was also present. “When I went into the room he was lying on the foot of father's bed, talking with him,” she wrote.27 It was a friendly visit—“kind, genial, and unaffected.” The president was doing his best to lift the spirits of his secretary of state, who had also become his friend.

  Lincoln told Seward all about his visit to Richmond, as well as his stopover at the Depot Field Hospital. There were seven thousand men in the wards, he explained, and he shook hands with every one of them. “He spoke of having worked as hard at it as sawing wood,” Fanny said, “and seemed, in his goodness of heart, much satisfied at the labor.”28

  General Lee had surrendered his army, but the war was not quite over yet. General Joseph Johnston's army was still in the field in North Carolina, and other Confederate units were operating in other parts of the South. But Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia were the Confederacy to many Southerners. As Winston S. Churchill somewhat romantically phrased it, General Lee and his army “carried the rebellion on its bayonets.”29 Now he had submitted to General Grant, and any hope of Confederate survival disappeared with his army. “With this surrender perishes the last hope of the rebels and their sympathizers, who have pinned their hopes upon Lee,” an article in Washington's Evening Star stated.30 “When Lee, the wisest and bravest of the confederate leaders, sees no ray of hope for the confederate cause, and voluntarily lays down his arms to prevent further and futile effusion of blood, the most credulous optimist among his followers must accept his judgement as decisive.”

  A British historian observed that Robert E. Lee never understood U. S. Grant, or Grant's basic strategy: “Lee never fathomed Grant.”31 He might have made the same observation regarding Lee and Abraham Lincoln. President Lincoln was just as determined as General Grant to see the war through to its final conclusion, until the Confederate armies had surrendered and all the seceded states had rejoined the Union. He also did everything possible to further the Union cause at the expense of the Confederacy. In September 1862, the president issued a proclamation that suspended habeas corpus. Under this proclamation, President Lincoln had 13,000 people jailed on the vague charge of “disloyalty.” Most of these were Peace Democrats, who were extremely vocal in their support of the Confederacy and their opposition of the war—their point of view was that the war should be ended immediately, the separated Southern states should be granted their independence, and that the Confederate States should be allowed to keep their slaves.

  The proclamation might not have been the most ethical course of action, but it kept thousands of Confederate sympathizers from giving the enemy whatever assistance they might be able to render, from moral support to information regarding troop movements. A Confederate supporter in a Federal prison was just as effectively taken out of the war as a Confederate soldier in a Union prisoner of war camp. Lincoln was prepared to bend the law, break the law, or create his own set of laws in order to put down the rebellion in the South.

  General Lee did not understand what impact President Lincoln was having on the Union war effort, and had not even paid very much attention to Lincoln at all. Most of the South tended either to ignore Lincoln entirely or to ridicule him. The Southern press frequently referred to him as a gorilla or a baboon. (Many Northern newspapers were just as outspoken and insulting in their opinion of Lincoln.) But this tendency was a mistake. Lincoln's determination was as responsible for winning the war as Grant's. President Lincoln never lost faith in the Union's ability to win the war. That faith became infused in General Grant, and was as responsible for Appomattox as anything that Grant accomplished.

  The terms that General Grant proposed to General Lee at Appomattox were simple and generous, in keeping with the terms that President Lincoln had outlined at City Point: all Confederate officers and men would be allowed to return home, and were not to be disturbed by any United States authorities; officers would be allowed to keep their side arms, horses, and personal property; the men in the ranks who claimed to own a horse or mule would be allowed to take the animal home. There would be no imprisonment for any of General Lee's men. This point of view was at least partially inspired by President Lincoln—Grant had shown consideration toward Confederate prisoners during his campaign against General Lee's army—and certainly followed Lincoln's tendency toward leniency for the South.

  When William Crook reported for work at the White House on Monday morning, he found that the president was already at his desk, sorting through the pile of unanswered mail. He looked up and said, “Good morning, Crook, how do you feel?”1

  Crook responded that he was feeling “first rate,” and asked the president how he was feeling that morning. “I am well, but rather tired,” the president answered.2 Crook noticed that President Lincoln did appear to be very tired; “his worn face made me understand, more clearly than I had done before, what a strain the experiences at Petersburg and Richmond had been.” Now that all the excitement of the past few weeks was over, along with General Grant's campaign in Virginia, the stress Lincoln had been under was making itself even more obvious.

  William Crook spent the entire day at the White House, close by the president. It turned out to be a particularly busy day. President Lincoln had been away from his office for over two weeks. “Seventeen days of absence,” is the way Crook phrased it, which meant that seventeen days of correspondence had to be read and answered.3 Also, the office was “thronged with visitors,” as it usually was when Lincoln was present. Some people came to congratulate the president on General Lee's surrender, some came to offer advice on how to deal with C
onfederate leaders now that the war was almost over, and some came looking for jobs and appointments. “We settled back into the usual routine,” Crook said. “It seemed odd to go on as if nothing had happened.”

  President Lincoln and William Crook must have been the only two people in the country, or at least in the North, who were having a normal, routine Monday. Throughout the North, the day had been proclaimed a legal holiday, as well as a day of thanksgiving. Newspapers spread the news of Lee's surrender. The Detroit Free Press announced, “Glory! Glory!! Glory!!! The Rebellion Ended! Lee's Whole Army Surrendered!”4 The New York Times said, “Hang Out Your Banners, Union Victory! Peace! Surrender of General Lee and His Whole Army.”5 The Albany Evening Journal gave its headline a moral slant: “General Lee and His Army Have Surrendered! Slavery and Treason Buried in the Same Grave!”6

  “The tidings were spread over the country over the night, and the nation seems delirious with joy,” Gideon Welles remarked. “Guns are firing, bells ringing, flags flying, men laughing, children cheering.”7 Secretary Welles went on to speculate, “There may be some marauding and robbing and murder by desperadoes” in Texas “or at remote places beyond the Mississippi,” but the surrender of General Lee, “the great Rebel captain,” virtually assures the end of the war—“the termination of the Rebellion,” in Secretary Welles's words.

  Secretary Welles was wrong when he said that only unorganized resistance would be possible from remaining Confederate forces, or that any further fighting could only happen in Texas or west of the Mississippi. General Joseph Johnston's army was still active in North Carolina, and William Tecumseh Sherman was in position to move against it. In his memoirs, General Sherman wrote, “Promptly on Monday morning, April 10th, the army moved straight on Smithfield,” where General Johnston's army was camped.8 General Sherman had not yet heard the news of Appomattox and was advancing against Johnston, prepared to follow him “wherever he might go.”

  But as far as Washington, DC, was concerned, the war was over. The attitude of the general public in Washington was “forgive and forget,” at least according to the Marquis de Chambrun.9 “Columns of Confederate prisoners constantly traverse Washington,” the Marquis reported. “Not a hostile shout greets their passage.” Pedestrians seemed determined not to look at them, or pay any attention to them at all, “as though not wishing to hurt the feelings of these misled creatures.”

  Now that the war was over, “the words peace, pardon and clemency can be heard,” a reaction that seemed to have taken the marquis completely by surprise. “It is impossible to imagine the rapidity with which the temper of the North has altered and to what extent it is spreading everywhere I go,” he said.10

  The marquis did not seem to be all that inclined toward clemency himself, at any rate not as far as slavery was concerned. He wrote that he would like to invite “our French Southern sympathizers” to travel to one of the Southern states, and to “become acquainted with the frightful details of the institution.”11 While he was visiting City Point, Chambrun had been shown “an instrument used to chain up the slaves on market days,” which he described as “an iron manacle” that confined the wrist. “In seeing the irons worn by these unfortunates, and the corruption of the society which…profited by their labor,” anyone who held a favorable opinion of the Confederacy “might alter their opinion of the regime.”

  During the afternoon, while the president was still sorting through his accumulated work, a crowd moved onto the White House grounds and began calling for Lincoln. Members of the band of the Quartermaster's regiment came along with the crowd, playing “excellent music.” The president eventually came to the window and spoke to the “immense number of people.”12

  The president was in a pleasant mood. “I am very greatly rejoiced to find that an occasion has occurred so pleasurable that people cannot restrain themselves,” he said, to everyone's amusement.13 He went on to say that he was not planning to give a speech at that particular moment, because he had already prepared a speech for the following night, “and I shall have nothing to say if you dribble it out of me before.” But so as not to disappoint everyone, President Lincoln requested the band to play “Dixie,” calling it one of the best tunes he had ever heard. The Confederates had attempted to appropriate the song, he joked, but it had been captured fairly and was now a legal trophy. “I presented the question to the Attorney General,” he explained, “and he gave it as his legal opinion that it is our lawful prize.” The crowd burst into laughter and applause. The president disappeared from the window and went back to work.

  A few hours later, another large group made their way to the White House to call for a speech. Just as he had done earlier, President Lincoln turned everyone away with a few good-natured remarks. He planned to give a speech on the following night, he said, but he was not ready to say anything just then. “Everything I say, you know, goes into print,” he joked, and said that he did not want to make any mistakes or misstatements that would almost certainly find their way into the newspapers. With that, he said good evening and went back inside.14

  But the president was not yet finished in his dealings with the public. At about six o'clock, a delegation of fifteen men presented themselves at the White House; President Lincoln met them in the corridor just inside the front door. After everyone was formally introduced, the man who made the introductions gave a short speech. “It was a very pretty speech,” according to William Crook, “full of loyal sentiments and praise for the man who had safely guided the country through the great crisis.”15

  The president very politely listened to the speech. After the man finished, the delegation presented Lincoln with a portrait of himself. “When he saw his own rugged features facing him from an elaborate silver frame,” Crook wrote, “a smile broadened his face.”16 The president then added a few words of his own, although they were probably not the remarks the delegation was expecting.

  “Gentlemen, I thank you for this token of your esteem,” he said. “You did your best. It wasn't your fault that the frame is so much more rare than the picture.”17 Every member of the group would have a story about President Lincoln when he went home, and another tale would be added to the Abraham Lincoln legend.

  The fighting may have stopped, but the habit of war continued for the men in the field. “It seemed queer to sleep last night without fearing an attack,” Colonel Elisha Hunt Rhodes wrote outside Appomattox Court House, “but the rebels are now all under guard.”18 Colonel Rhodes spoke with some of the Confederates, and discovered that they were as glad that the fighting had ended as the men of the Second Rhode Island regiment. “They all seemed surprised at our kind treatment of them, and I think General Grant's way of managing affairs will help us on the peace that must come.” The men of both armies, Union and Confederate, were looking forward to the coming peace after four years of carnage.

  General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was surprised by the number of Confederates who came over to the Union camp to visit—“to come over and see what we were really made of, and what we had left for trade.”19 They came to barter for food, for shoes, for tobacco, and sometimes just to talk, brothers-in-arms across the lines. “The inundation of visitors grew so that it looked like a county fair, including the cattle-show.” So many Confederates came that senior officers finally had to forbid all visitors.

  When General Grant tried to pass through the lines with several staff officers to meet with General Lee, he was stopped by Confederate pickets. They had been stopping Union troops for the past four years, and the habit was not easy to break. Colonel Horace Porter noted with a touch of sarcasm, “The practice which had so long been inculcated in Lee's army of keeping Grant out of its lines was not to be overturned in a day.”20 The general was “politely requested” by the pickets to wait until they contacted headquarters for instructions.

  As soon as General Lee received word that General Grant was being detained at the picket line, he immediately rode out to receive his guest. They met on a
knoll that overlooked the lines of both armies and saluted each other by raising their hats. The other officers also raised their hats before withdrawing, leaving Grant and Lee alone to confer with each other.

  The topic of their conversation was the surrender of the remaining Confederate armies in the field. General Grant began the discussion by expressing his hope that the war would soon be over, not just in Virginia but throughout the country. General Lee responded by saying that he also hoped that all fighting would soon end and also trusted that everything possible would be done “to restore harmony and conciliate the people of the South.”21 The emancipation of the slaves should not be a hindrance to restoring relations between North and South, he went on to say. He did not know what the other Confederate forces would do, including Joseph Johnston's army, and he had no idea what course of action Jefferson Davis might pursue, but it was his considered opinion that all other Confederate armies should follow his lead, “as nothing could be gained by further resistance in the field.”

  Since General Lee was of the opinion that further resistance was useless, General Grant suggested that he should advise the remaining Confederate armies to surrender, “and thus exert his influence in favor of immediate peace.”22 General Lee responded that he would have to consult with Jefferson Davis before he could take any such action. When Grant suggested that he do just that, talk to President Davis about the subject, Lee responded that this would be stepping beyond his duties as a soldier. Besides, “the authorities” would almost certainly arrive at the same conclusion without his “interference.” General Lee would not allow himself to become involved in any situation that might be taken as overstepping his authority as an officer, or with interfering with the authority of President Davis. General Grant later commented, “I knew there was no use to urge him to do anything against his ideas of what was right.”23 He let the matter drop.