The Man Who Saved the Union (57 page)

Grant recalled the moment vividly two decades later. “
When the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache,” Grant said. “But the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.”

He halted, sat down and composed his reply. “
I am at this writing about four miles west of Walker’s Church and will push forward to the front for the purpose of meeting you,” he wrote. “Notice sent to me on this road where you wish the interview to take place will meet me.”

Lee’s courier conducted Grant back through the Confederate lines to where Sheridan was impatient to attack. Sheridan still suspected a ruse and registered concern that with each hour Joe Johnston was getting closer. “
Is it a trick?” he demanded of no one in particular. He gestured at Lee’s army, just several hundred yards away, and snapped his open palm shut. “I’ve got ’em! I’ve got ’em like
that
!” Sheridan told Grant that if he would simply give the nod, he and Ord would settle the issue on the battlefield.

But Grant had had enough of fighting, and he chose to trust Lee. He was escorted to the house of a prosperous farmer named McLean at Appomattox Court House. Lee and a single staff officer awaited him. Several of Grant’s subordinates joined their commander; all noted the contrast between the two commanding generals. “
Lee was tall, large in form, fine in person, handsome in feature, grave and dignified in bearing—if anything, a little too formal,” Adam Badeau recorded. “There was a suggestion of effort in his deportment, something that showed he was determined to die gracefully, a hint of Caesar muffling himself in his mantle.” Lee’s conqueror couldn’t have been more different. “Grant as usual was simple and composed, but with none of the grand air about him,” Badeau said. “No elation was visible in his manner or appearance. His voice was as calm as ever, and his eye betrayed no emotion. He spoke and acted as plainly as if he were transacting an ordinary matter of business. No one would have suspected that he was about to receive the surrender of an army, or that one of the most terrible wars of modern times had been brought to a triumphant close by the quiet man without a sword who was conversing calmly, but rather grimly, with the elaborate gentleman in grey and gold.”

Grant, for his own part, tried to read Lee’s emotions, without luck. “
As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result and was too manly to show it,” Grant recalled.

As for himself, he said: “My own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly.”

The two generals spoke of the old army before the war. Grant remembered Lee better than Lee remembered him, but Lee was tactful enough not to dwell on the discrepancy. Grant would have talked on if Lee hadn’t reminded him what brought them together. Grant summoned his staff secretary, who produced paper, pen and ink. “
In accordance with the substance of my letter to you of the 8th inst.,” Grant wrote, “I propose to receive the surrender of the
Army of Northern Virginia on the following terms, to wit: Rolls of all the officers and men to be made in duplicate. One copy to be given to an officer designated by me, the other to be retained by such officer or officers as you may designate. The officers to give their individual paroles not to take up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged and each company or regimental commander sign a like parole for the men of their commands. The arms, artillery and public property to be parked and stacked and turned over to the officer appointed by me to receive them. This will not embrace the side arms of the officers nor their private horses or baggage. This done, each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their parole and the laws in force where they may reside.”

He handed Lee the letter. The provision permitting the officers their side arms, horses and personal property was a grace note beyond the requirements of the surrender agreement. Lee acknowledged Grant’s gesture, saying it would have a positive effect on his army. Lee asked whether soldiers other than officers—cavalrymen and artillerists principally—would be allowed to keep their horses, too. Grant, guessing that most were small farmers who would have difficulty planting a crop without their horses, said they would. Lee acknowledged this gesture as well.

Lee sat down and wrote a letter accepting Grant’s conditions. He signed the letter, then stood once more. He said his army was hungry. He needed help feeding the men. Grant asked how many he had. Twenty-five thousand, Lee responded. Grant told him to send his commissary and quartermaster to Appomattox Station, where they would receive all they required.

The two men parted and returned to their armies. Grant’s men began
cheering and firing their guns on learning of the surrender. He ordered them to stop. “
The Confederates were now our prisoners,” he explained afterward. “We did not want to exult over their downfall.”

The news was relayed to Washington at once.
Edwin Stanton replied to Grant: “
Thanks be to Almighty God for the great victory.”

  PART THREE  

AND GIVE THE PEACE

“Descended from the gods, Ulysses, cease;
Offend not Jove; obey, and give the peace.”

50

W
HILE
G
RANT AND THE
U
NION ARMY WERE SUPPRESSING A REVOLUTION
in American politics, Lincoln and the Republicans in Congress were making a revolution in American
economics. The Republican party had always been both antislavery and pro-business, but until
1860 it lacked the power to act on either part of its agenda. Lincoln’s election and the subsequent departure of the Southern Democrats from Congress left the party in firm control of the two lawmaking branches of the federal government, and the Republicans soon began fashioning their policy preferences into statutes.

The Constitution prevented a legislative assault on slavery, compelling Lincoln to employ his authority as commander in chief to justify the Emancipation Proclamation. But the positive reaction to the proclamation inspired the president to broader reform; he called on Congress to approve and send to the states a
thirteenth, emancipating amendment to the Constitution, which the legislature duly did.

Aiding business came more easily. Lincoln and the Republicans in Congress raised tariffs, boosting the profits of American manufacturers. They underwrote a
transcontinental railroad, immediately throwing contracts to the hundreds of firms engaged in the construction of the road and prospectively knitting the country into a vast single marketplace for the purveyors of American products. They established a national currency and a national banking system, to enhance the war effort but to facilitate commerce as well. They crafted laws to shift hundreds of millions of acres of public land and hundreds of millions of dollars in other natural resources to the private sector. They spent previously unthinkable amounts of money on all manner of commodities and manufactures,
for the primary purpose of defeating the rebellion but with the secondary result of accelerating the industrialization that had begun to reshape America before the war began. In dozens of other areas they made government the protector and promoter of the business interests of the country. And in providing Grant and his armies the wherewithal to defeat the Southern political revolution they ensured the extension of their economic revolution to the far corners of previously semifeudal Dixie.

The fate of the two revolutions—the failure of the South’s political revolution, the success of the North’s economic revolution—was stunningly apparent at the war’s end. The South was devastated, its productive resources spent and shattered, its people exhausted and despondent, its legal system broken, its folkways untenable. The North was invigorated by the war, its industry surging ahead, its wealth and population growing apace, its values reigning triumphant. If characteristic Southerners were sons of planters who returned from the war to find their birthright in ruins and former slaves who, though free, had little idea how they would make a living, typical Northerners were industrialists and financiers who saw handsome opportunity in every direction, workers who manned the booming mines and mills, and farmers who were rapidly transforming agriculture into an industry of its own.

The one small cloud on the horizon of Republican dreams for more of the same was the result, ironically, of the victory so brilliantly achieved. The Republican monopoly on power wouldn’t last forever; the South, upon being effectively rejoined to the Union, would send senators and representatives to Congress once again. If the old guard in the South had its way, these legislators would be
Democrats likely to obstruct and subvert the Republican agenda. The Republicans in Washington, who since April 1861 had been doing everything possible to keep the South from leaving the Union, in April 1865 suddenly found reason to delay the South’s return.

J
ulia Grant grew proud as the fame of her husband increased, but she also grew worried. She had fretted since girlhood about a subtle misalignment of her eyes, which a minor operation could have corrected. “
I had never had the courage to consent,” she explained afterward. “But now that my husband had become so famous I really thought it behooved me to look as well as possible.” She discreetly consulted a physician, who informed her that she had missed her opportunity: the surgery worked
on young persons only. She went to her husband and confessed her vanity and disappointment. “What in the world put such a thought in your head?” he replied. She answered, through tears: “Why, you are getting to be such a great man, and I am such a plain little wife, I thought if my eyes were as others, I might not be so very, very plain.” Years later she still remembered his response. “He drew me to him and said, ‘Did I not see you and fall in love with you with these same eyes? I like them just as they are.’ ” She remembered as well her feeling: “My knight, my Lancelot!”

She spent the last winter of the war at City Point with him, often at his very side. Grant’s associates at first wondered at her presence. During the final weeks, when Sherman arrived from Carolina for consultation, she sat in the corner of Grant’s office writing personal letters. Grant asked Sherman half seriously whether Julia should move somewhere else. “
I don’t know,” Sherman responded. “Let me see.” He turned to Julia. “Mrs. Grant, can you tell me where the Tombigbee River is?” She missed by several counties. He asked if she could locate the Chattahoochee. Again far off. Sherman turned back to Grant. “I think we may trust her,” he said.

She got the news of Lee’s surrender from the City Point telegraph operator, who swore her to secrecy until the official word arrived. When it did she joined the celebration and urged her husband to savor his victory by returning to Richmond. “No,” he replied. “I will go at once to Washington.” She persisted, provoking his anger. “Hush, Julia,” he said. “Do not say another word on this subject. I would not distress these people. They are feeling their defeat bitterly, and you would not add to it by witnessing their despair, would you?”