This Great Struggle (58 page)

Lee’s army continued its desperate retreat, crossing to the north bank of the Appomattox River and setting fire to the bridges behind it. Union troops were so close on their heels, however, that they were able to extinguish the fires and follow the Rebels across the river. With the Federals in hot pursuit, Lee had to keep his troops marching rapidly through Farmville, with little time to halt and eat the rations there. One more stockpile of rations lay ahead, twenty-five miles to the west at Appomattox Station, near the town of Appomattox Court House. Yet already the delays at Farmville and at the Appomattox crossing had cost Lee precious time and allowed Sheridan, already on Lee’s left front with a combined force of cavalry and infantry, to gain ground in the race toward that destination.

On April 8, as the armies pushed west toward Appomattox Station, Grant received Lee’s reply to his note. Lee did not agree that further resistance was hopeless but expressed agreement with Grant’s desire “to avoid the useless effusion of blood.” What terms, Lee wanted to know, would Grant offer if the Army of Northern Virginia were to surrender? Grant replied immediately: “Peace being my great desire, there is but one condition I would insist upon, namely that the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified from taking up arms again against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged.” Grant suggested they could meet later that day to conclude the surrender terms.

The terms were as generous as Lee could possibly have hoped, but a note came back from the Confederate general later that day stating that he “did not intend to propose the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, but to ask the terms of your proposition.” Yet Lee still proposed to meet for a discussion with Grant. Grant was disappointed. This looked like another attempt to draw him into broader negotiations involving some kind of political agreement as Davis had attempted to set up in January and Lincoln had repeatedly warned Grant to avoid. He determined not to meet with Lee and resigned himself to continued military operations.

While the notes made their way back and forth the rival forces continued their rapid march to the west. By the evening of that Saturday, April 8, Sheridan’s cavalry had won the race to Appomattox Station. George Armstrong Custer’s division seized the supply trains there and burned them. The rest of Sheridan’s command moved up, blocking Lee’s route west toward Lynchburg and continued flight. The Confederate commander held a council of war with his generals that night to discuss what options remained open to the army. They agreed on a final breakout attempt. If nothing but Union cavalry blocked their path, they ought to be able to push it aside. With Longstreet’s corps providing the rear guard, Gordon’s infantry, supported by Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry, would attempt to break through at dawn the next day, Palm Sunday.

Before the Confederate attack stepped off that morning, Grant was up and writing his reply to Lee’s message of the day before. He had, he said, “no authority to treat on the subject of peace,” that is, a comprehensive agreement between the two governments. He would accept the surrender of Lee’s army if it were offered. Otherwise the fighting must go on.

The fighting flared again early that morning as Gordon’s men launched the Army of Northern Virginia’s last advance. In front of Gordon’s advancing line of battle, a skirmish line of dismounted Union cavalrymen fired and fell back, a process they repeated as the Confederate advance continued. Then Gordon’s men topped a ridge and beyond it saw solid ranks of Union infantry, the Twenty-Fourth and Fifth corps, which had arrived after a hard march to support Sheridan’s troopers. The last Rebel attack stopped almost as soon as it began, as the Confederate officers recognized at once that they, the Army of Northern Virginia, were finally checkmated. “There is nothing left for me to do but to go and see General Grant,” Lee said when informed of the situation Gordon had encountered, and then added, “and I would rather die a thousand deaths.” He sent a flag of truce to arrange a meeting with Grant.

Considerable confusion followed. Headquarters were in motion, and at any given moment it was not easy to know the whereabouts of the commanding generals. The armies were already in contact, with Union forces even then beginning to move into position for attacks that would have overrun what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia. With some difficulty, Confederate staff officers got word to Grant as well as to other Union commanders on the opposite side of the Army of Northern Virginia, where Meade was eagerly preparing to launch a final assault that promised to be much different from all the doomed assaults the Army of the Potomac had staged over the past four years. With difficulty, the bloody finale was avoided. Staff officers arranged a meeting to take place in the home of Wilmer McLean in the village of Appomattox Court House. In a war full of ironies, the final one was that McLean had moved to this out-of-the-way settlement because two major battles had brought war to his front yard at his former residence near Manassas Junction. Now the final act of the war in Virginia was coming to his front parlor.

They met early that afternoon. Lee arrived early, accompanied by three staff officers. Grant had farther to go and arrived some time later, accompanied by Sheridan, Ord, and a number of staff officers. Having ridden hard in recent days, he was mud spattered, while Lee was resplendent in full-dress uniform. Grant and Lee had not met since the Mexican War, and Grant now tried to make a bit of small talk to ease the tension for Lee. He mentioned that he remembered Lee from Mexico, but Lee could not recall the slightly built young lieutenant of the Fourth Infantry.

Lee suggested that they proceed to business, and Grant gave Lee his written terms. They were even more generous than Grant had indicated in his note of the previous day. Not only would the members of the Army of Northern Virginia be paroled, but the terms of the agreement specifically protected them from future prosecution for what they had done the past four years. Military equipment was to be handed over, but officers were expressly permitted to retain their sidearms. Grant would not require Lee to acknowledge his defeat by formally yielding his sword to him at the surrender ceremony. Lee asked if the Confederate cavalrymen and artillerymen could keep their horses, which would soon be needed at home for the spring planting, and Grant readily agreed. The Union general went on to offer to send enough rations to Lee’s camps to feed his entire army, and Lee gratefully accepted.

With that, the meeting ended, and the two commanders returned to their armies. Grant allowed his men no cheering or noisy celebration. “The Confederates were now our countrymen,” he later explained, “and we did not want to exult over their downfall.” At the formal surrender ceremony three days later, Brigadier General Joshua L. Chamberlain, commanding the Union troops detailed to conduct the proceedings, gave his men the order “Present Arms” as the Confederates marched up, saluting the courage and fortitude of foes they had fought for four years. The former Rebels returned the salute, laid down their rifles as required, and marched away.

FINAL SURRENDERS AND THE ASSASSINATION OF LINCOLN

When the war ended in Virginia, it was essentially over everywhere else because by the end of the war, Virginia was all that was left of the Confederacy. While Lee and his army had clung tenaciously to their enclave in the Old Dominion State, Union power had so thoroughly crushed Confederate strength throughout the rest of the South that by the time Lee surrendered, all that remained for Union forces in the rest of what had been the Confederacy was mopping up residual pockets of resistance. These dissolved quickly as other Confederate forces surrendered on learning of the outcome at Appomattox. Johnston and Sherman finalized the surrender of the former’s army on April 26, and Confederate General Richard Taylor surrendered the remainder of Confederate forces east of the Mississippi on May 4. Confederate forces west of the Mississippi officially surrendered on May 26. Jefferson Davis remained on the lam until May 10, when Union cavalry apprehended him near Washington, Georgia. Throughout these weeks, men continued to shoot each other, in small numbers, as they would do throughout the twelve-year period of quasi peace that followed, but the clash of armies was over.

On the evening of April 11, Lincoln made a speech from a window of the White House to a jubilant crowd that gathered on the lawn and semicircular drive below. While his son Tad held a light nearby, the president read from a prepared script. This was a glad occasion, he observed, as the fall of Richmond and the surrender of Lee’s army gave “hope of a righteous and speedy peace.” In all of this, he admonished, “He from whom all blessings flow [i.e., God], must not be forgotten.” As for himself, Lincoln disclaimed any credit for the recent events, giving it instead of Grant and his army.

Lincoln warned that the coming years would be “fraught with difficulty.” Northerners who may have agreed on restoring the Union and even freeing the slaves disagreed strongly about what it would take to place the southern states back in what Lincoln called their “proper practical relation” to the rest of the Union and its people, and they even disagreed as to what that “proper practical relation” would look like. Lincoln defended the beginnings he had made in reconstructing southern state governments and said future plans should remain flexible. He hoped, however, that former black soldiers, at least, as well as other “very intelligent” blacks, would be granted the vote.

At least one of Lincoln’s listeners was enraged by his endorsement of blacks voting. Prominent actor John Wilkes Booth was in the crowd that night. A bitter racist, Booth turned angrily to his companion David Herold. “That means nigger citizenship,” Booth hissed. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through.” A few minutes later, as they left the White House grounds, Booth said to another associate, Lewis Powell, “That is the last speech he will ever give.”

At twenty-six Booth was the youngest of the four actors in his renowned family. With black hair, striking black eyes, and athletic figure, Booth was celebrated by some as the most handsome man in the country and was said to be quite a favorite with the ladies. He was also known for his energetic acting, including occasional leaping stage entrances. Less well known was the fact that Booth was a Confederate sympathizer who hated blacks, abolitionists, and, most of all, Abraham Lincoln. During the war Booth had served as part of a network of Confederate agents in the Washington area. For the past few months, as the Confederacy tottered toward its end, Booth had headed a conspiracy of which both Herold and Powell were members to kidnap Lincoln and spirit him to Richmond. Whether this was an official Confederate operation remains disputed. After Appomattox, the plan changed, at least in Booth’s mind, from kidnapping to assassination.

On the morning of Good Friday, April 14, Booth learned that the President and Mrs. Lincoln, as well as General and Mrs. U. S. Grant, would be sitting in the presidential box at Ford’s Theater that night for the play
Our American Cousin.
Booth saw his chance. Throughout the day, while Lincoln held a cabinet meeting and then went for a pleasant, lighthearted carriage ride with his wife, the first such in years, Booth made preparations to assassinate the president that night while he watched the play. Two of Booth’s accomplices were to assassinate the vice president and secretary of state, at their separate dwellings, thus decapitating the U.S. government. Other conspirators were ready to aid the three assassins’ escape, and they could also rely on the Confederate espionage network in surrounding Maryland.

The Lincolns were late arriving at the theater that evening, and with them were not Ulysses and Julia Dent Grant but rather Mary Todd Lincoln’s young friend Clara Harris and her fianceé, Major Henry Rathbone. The general had begged off at the urging of his wife, who had recently been offended by one of Mary Todd Lincoln’s increasingly frequent jealous tirades toward any woman who came near her husband. Miss Harris and her fianceé were last-minute replacements. The actors paused as the president and his party entered and made their way up to the dress circle, or first balcony, and then around to the enclosed presidential box, overlooking the right-hand side of the stage as the audience viewed it. The orchestra played “Hail to the Chief,” and, with the president and his companions in their seats, the play resumed.

Booth knew the piece well, a comedy about a gold-digging British mother and daughter and the American man they mistakenly believed to be heir to a great fortune. In act 3, scene 2, would come a point when the only actor left on stage would bawl out a string of humorous insults directed at the recently exited actress portraying the mother. A roar of laughter was guaranteed to follow, and that would be Booth’s moment. As the scene began, Booth silently crept into the presidential box, behind its occupants and shielded from the view of the audience except for perhaps a few seated in the dress circle on the far side of the stage, but their attention was directed to the action below, as was that of the Lincolns and their guests. It was about 10:11 p.m.