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

the rail line eight miles below Amelia Court House. With Grant’s infantry now breathing down his neck, Lee had no choice but to strike westward again, this time toward Lynchburg, where there were Confederate reinforcements and more supplies to be had. The problem was getting there. “Hundreds of men dropped from exhaustion; thousands threw away their arms; the demoralization appeared at last to involve the officers; they did nothing to prevent straggling; and many of them seemed to shut their eyes on the hourly reduction of their commands, and rode in advance of their brigades in dogged indifference.”24

By now, Grant was rapidly closing in on the fleeing Confederates. On April 6, Sheridan’s cavalry caught up with Lee’s rear guard as it was crossing a little tributary of the Appomattox River called Sayler’s Creek, and sliced off 7,000 prisoners with hardly any effort. In a desperate effort to keep Grant from getting any closer, Lee had the bridges over the Appomattox burned, but on the morning of April 7 one Federal corps discovered a neglected wagon bridge over the river and crossed over in hot pursuit. Lee now had one hope, and only one: if he could reach Appomattox Station before the Federal cavalry, he could be supplied there from Lynchburg, and perhaps make a stand that would force Grant to back off and give him maneuvering room. (It might have worked: Grant admitted to John Russell Young that his own logistical tether was so attenuated that “he could not have kept up his pursuit a half day longer.”) But it turned out to be impossible. Sheridan’s cavalry got to Appomattox Station on the evening of April 8, while Lee was still several miles back up the road. When Lee shook out a battle line to back them away the next morning, the early morning fog burned off to reveal two infantry divisions of the 24th Corps and two brigades of the 25th Corps coming up to relieve the federal cavalry, with the 5th Corps of the Army of the Potomac coming up behind them.25

Stopped in front by Sheridan’s horsemen, and pressed from behind by Grant’s infantry, Lee knew that at last the end had come. It was what he had feared from the beginning: “It will all be over—ended—just as I have expected it would end from the first,” Lee lamented. He had gambled on disheartening the North by invading Maryland in 1862 and Pennsylvania in 1863; he had gambled on the siege of Petersburg dragging on long enough to turn Northern voters against Lincoln. None of it had worked, and now his army was trapped. Grant had sent several notes to Lee by courier on April 7 and 8 concerning a possible meeting of the generals, and so Lee sent flags of truce through the lines and asked to see Grant personally. “In ten minutes more,” wrote Union brigadier general Thomas C. Devin about that morning,

the charge would have been ordered for the whole line and we would have been on and over them like a whirlwind. Our men were terribly vexed at the truce. It was laughable to see the old troopers come up to the edge of the hill [overlooking the Confederate positions], look down at the position of the Rebs and go back growling and damning the flag of truce.26

For the dwindling band of Confederates, however, the surrender could not have come more quickly. “Within range of my eye,” wrote a Confederate surgeon, “there were a great number of muskets stuck in the ground by the bayonet, whose owners, heart-sick and fainting of hunger and fatigue, had thrown them away, and gone, none knew whither.” The remainder were living on “corn, stolen from the horses’ feed, and parched and munched as they marched.”27

Grant, who had been pounding along at the head of his army, leaving bag and baggage days behind in the dust, was at that moment in the throes of a migraine, “but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.” Lee selected as a meeting place the home of Wilmer McLean in the little crossroads village of Appomattox Court House, about four miles above Appomattox Station. Grant arrived with his staff later that morning, painfully conscious of the contrast between Lee, immaculate in a full general’s uniform and dress sword, and himself, clad in the only things he owned in the absence of his baggage, a pair of muddy boots and a standard-issue frock coat with his lieutenant general’s shoulder straps sewn on. The meeting was formal, and after some polite chitchat between Grant and Lee about old Mexican War times, they got down to business. Grant’s terms, bearing in mind his discussions with Lincoln, were surprisingly mild. There was no more talk of unconditional surrender: all Confederate soldiers would surrender their arms and promptly be paroled (no ghastly death march to a prison camp, no imprisonment of Confederate officers pending treason trials), all officers could retain their swords and other sidearms, and paroled soldiers could claim any captured horses and mules they wished to take home with them. “This done,” Grant specified, “each officer and man will be allowed to return to his home, not to be disturbed by U.S. authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside.”28

The terms were written out and acknowledged, and then the negotiation was over. Lee walked out onto the porch of the McLean house and (as one of Grant’s staff wrote) “signaled to his orderly to bring up his horse … and gazed sadly in the direction of the valley beyond, where his army lay …”

He thrice smote the palm of his left hand slowly with his right fist in an absent sort of way, seemed not to see the group of Union officers in the yard, who rose respectfully at his approach, and appeared unaware of everything about him. All appreciated the sadness that overwhelmed him, and he had the personal sympathy of