Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

This did not mean, however, that Lincoln was willing to grant the Confederates any kind of blank check. Lincoln had been willing, as early as mid-1863, to allow friends and intercessors to open up secret negotiations with Richmond, but only on terms Jefferson Davis at once rejected. As late as February 1865 Lincoln himself came down to Hampton Roads to meet with a Confederate peace commission headed by his old friend Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president. Lincoln offered to swap $400 million in United States bonds if the Confederate states would rejoin the Union and adopt the Thirteenth Amendment prospectively, with the understanding that it would be gradually phased in over a period of—as Stephens later claimed Lincoln said—five years. But the negotiations foundered on Lincoln’s insistence that the Confederate states abandon all claim to treat with the United States as a separate government, and the Hampton Roads conference in particular turned up empty after Jefferson Davis dismissed any form of surrender.18

Lincoln even went so far, after his meeting with Grant and Sherman, as to authorize members of the Virginia legislature to assemble as a Union government—but only if they understood that there would be “no receding by the Executive of the United States on the slavery question.” And then, after reflecting on the inadequacies of this proposal, Lincoln cancelled it a week later. He wanted peace, and he wanted it done quickly enough that he could supervise it. But he would brook Southern foot-dragging on Reconstruction no more than he would welcome Radical meddling.19

Sherman, and possibly Grant as well, mistook Lincoln’s desire for the fastest Union solution to peace as a desire for any solution so long as it was fast, and as a result, both Grant and Sherman came away from their meeting with the president in possession of a certainty about Lincoln’s easygoing intentions that Lincoln himself did not entirely share. Neither Grant nor Sherman could have realized how quickly they were going to have to deal in hard terms with that uncertainty, since almost all of their generals believed that at least one more major battle in Virginia would probably have to be fought. “The great fight may yet be fought out in this vicinity,” George Meade warned in March. That apprehension was not necessarily misplaced, either, since Lee staged a breakout attempt from the Petersburg lines on March 25, lunging toward Fort Stedman, on the far right of Grant’s lines.20

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.21

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.22

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.23

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