Today, April 9th, marks the 160th anniversary of the surrender of Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee to the Union Army, commanded by Ulysses Grant, in Appomattox, Virginia, ending the American Civil War. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, the Confederacy collapsed gradually, and then all at once.
By 1864, after three grinding years of back-and-forth, often inconclusive struggle, Northern leadership decided that a change of strategies was in order. It would abandon its policy of intentionally limited warfare with its limited results, designed to preserve the South more or less intact, in favor of a new policy of Total War. In keeping with this plan the full weight of the North’s industrial might was to be brought to bear upon the Confederacy, battered and bruised but stubbornly resilient. To bring the South to heel, it would be ground into dust under relentless, merciless Union assaults. Once it had capitulated, the South would be rebuilt as a modern society, shorn of the curse of slavery.
General William T. Sherman’s infamous March to the Sea, right through the heart of Georgia, was the centerpiece of this new strategy. Sherman once famously said “War is hell.” As if to prove his point, the March wrought damage so extreme it would have been visible from space, and is, in fact, frequently cited as a monument to pure destructive spite. What they didn’t steal, they broke. What they didn’t break, they burned. If it moved, they killed it. Every trace of infrastructure was demolished beyond the possibility of repair. Southerners nearing starvation after four years of sacrifice were left with nothing, and prospects as bleak as the ruined landscape that stretched to the horizon.
Though it seemed gratuitously cruel, the March to the Sea was actually meant to force an end to what had become a senseless slaughter. The War was over and the South had lost. This display of overwhelming power would force Confederates to accept this harsh reality and stop fighting. “Enough already,” was the message. To speed the process, Sherman offered generous terms to any Confederates willing to surrender.
And it succeeded. Sherman’s March severed the links between the Southern Army’s main bodies, and effectively broke the back of what resistance remained. With their economy in shambles, their cities aflame, and their communication and transportation networks completely disrupted, Southern resistance rapidly collapsed.
By early April the last remaining Confederate strongholds had been taken; the critical city of Petersburg fell on March 25, following a nine-month, grueling siege. Richmond, the Confederate Capital, fell on April 3. Near desperation, Lee’s remaining forces fled westward with Union General Phil Sheridan in hot pursuit. They didn’t get very far before running into a wall of Federals. Exhausted and bloodied, low on food, ammunition and supplies, surrounded by Union forces smelling blood, Lee’s troops faced certain annihilation. Under a flag of truce, Grant sent an emissary to Lee with a proposal of surrender. After initially pleading for more time, Lee reluctantly conceded. A meeting was scheduled to ratify the agreement.
The bloodiest and most destructive war in American history ended quietly, on April 9, 1865, with a cordial meeting between two distinguished gentlemen in the parlor of a simple country home by a crossroad. They had met before, Lee and Grant, during the Mexican war, twenty years before. Both remembered meeting the other, and they chatted amiably about the shared recollection for a half hour or so before turning to the business at hand. Lee requested Grant’s terms, and he drew them up on the spot.
They were excellent terms. Southern officers and men were to be paroled, not interned, free to return to their homes. They could keep their horses, their sidearms, and their personal effects, including their rifles. They were required to surrender only arms and equipment belonging to the Confederacy. Effective immediately.
When Lee mentioned that his men had been without food for several days, Grant arranged for 25,000 rations to be distributed among them. Lee sincerely thanked Grant for his exceptional generosity, and the two men parted ways with a handshake. Lee rode away, alone, to pass the word on to his men.
There was more work to do, of course, and Lee and Grant met twice more, beginning the following day, to hash out details. A passing-of-arms ceremony was arranged for each of the numerous divisions comprising the Army of Northern Virginia, which Lee directly commanded. Grant also pressed Lee to surrender other forces scattered about the South, commanded by subordinates. Lee declined this request on the grounds that he had no way of communicating with those subordinates, but promised to send word of the surrender by the fastest possible means. In the meantime, Grant commissioned a portable printing press to crank out thousands of official parole passes for southern troopers, which would guarantee safe conduct through Union lines.
Because of poor communications, more than a month would pass before news of the surrender reached the farthest corners of the Confederacy. Because of this lag there were numerous skirmishes and at least one genuine battle. But by early May all but a few holdouts had thrown in the towel, and the War was declared to have ended on May 9, 1865.
Sometimes history turns on the smallest details. Almost anyone else would have given in to the little voices demanding blood, and would with grim satisfaction have visited righteous vengeance upon the vanquished, prostrate foe. But Fate had chosen a man of higher caliber, whose gruff exterior belied a compassionate, sensitive, and discerning nature, a nature very much on display that eventful day.
A model of magnanimous forbearance, Grant’s surrender agreement did much to win over uneasy and suspicious Southerners, who had fully expected to receive a stiff dose of victors’ justice. And so, improbably, the surrender went forward with barely a ripple of discontent. And the prospect of reconciliation, once inconceivable, suddenly seemed possible.
But history turned again just a few days later, on April 14, 1865, with the egregious, utterly pointless murder of Abraham Lincoln as he enjoyed a rare night out to see a play, a light comedy called Our American Cousin. Confederate firebrand John Wilkes Boothe, a famous actor and well-known man about town, was instantly identified as the killer.
Not that he made any effort to conceal his identity. After firing the fatal shot, Boothe very theatrically leaped from the President’s box to the stage directly below. But as he fell, one of his feet snagged on some bunting, so that he landed awkwardly, breaking a leg. Without even missing a beat, he struggled to his feet and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis,” (“Thus be it ever to tyrants”) before lurching offstage and escaping in the confusion. Most people in the audience did not understand what had happened, and assumed that Boothe’s appearance was part of the show.
The assassination of Lincoln was meant to be the main act of a four-part drama. Originally Lincoln, General Grant, Secretary of State William Seward, and Vice President Andrew Johnson were all to be killed at the same time, effectively decapitating the Federal government. But General Grant, scheduled to accompany Lincoln to the theater, begged off at the last minute, and thus was spared. The assassin that Boothe had assigned to kill Johnson lost his nerve, and instead drank himself into a stupor at a hotel bar. And Seward, confined to bed after a recent, nearly fatal carriage accident, somehow survived the savage knife attack against him, which also severely injured Seward’s son and a bodyguard.
Twelve days later, following a massive manhunt, Boothe was cornered on a farm in rural northern Virginia. Refusing to surrender, he was shot through the neck and fell, paralyzed. As he lay dying, he asked a soldier to lift his hands so that he could see them. Boothe stared at them intently for a few moments, whispered “useless . . . useless,” and then died as dawn was breaking in the east. He was twenty-six years old.
The assassination of Lincoln was a spectacularly foolish and self-destructive act, because in many ways Lincoln was the South’s greatest champion. He was the inspiration behind Grant’s generous terms of surrender. He also adamantly opposed punitive terms of reconciliation for the Rebels, a disposition shared by very few of his fellow Northerners. Although many had been willing to go along with Lincoln just to have the damned thing be over, this openness to leniency died with the President. As details of the Rebel conspiracy gradually became known, Northern forgiveness turned to rage, and the stage was set for the imposition of severe retributive measures.
These measures, which came to be known as Reconstruction, divided the South into five military districts, each with its own Federal Occupation force, and imposed harsh terms that lasted for years. The resentment spawned by the intentional humiliation lasted far longer. With the South’s social order wrecked and its economy in ruins, Southern society dissolved into violent chaos. And reconciliation would not come for many decades.
The Civil War was the ultimate inflection point for the young American Nation, and the terms of its conclusion reordered everything that was to follow. It could have ended very differently. By 1863 much of Union had tired of the struggle and was ready to let the South go. But the shattering, completely unexpected defeat of Lee’s forces at Gettysburg on July 4 of that year* changed the mood and the trajectory. It became an open secret that the South could no longer prevail. Dixie’s defeat became a “when,” not an “if.” It was only a matter of timing.
How different the world would be had that not happened. Slavery likely would have lingered a few more years, but eventually would have come to an end one way or another. Its continuation in a rapidly modernizing world would have been simply unthinkable. The South might have remained a backwater, poorly developed society, barely a nation, lagging far behind its Union cousin, easy prey for unscrupulous foreign powers. Prideful as always, we can nevertheless imagine Dixie casting the occasional wistful gaze northward, forlornly wondering, perhaps, if the other side should have won after all.
*Gettysburg wasn’t the South’s only costly loss. The very same day, Vicksburg, Mississippi also surrendered to Union forces under Ulysses Grant, following a month-long siege.