HUU Sermon Archives

Lee and Grant at Appomattox

by James J. Geary
April 9, 2006

Reading:

The following is from the last four paragraphs of the book, A Stillness at Appomattox. - - -

One of Ord's soldiers wrote that the army should have gone wild with joy, then and there; and yet, he said somehow they did not. Later there would be frenzied cheering and crying and rejoicing, but now . . .now, for some reason, the men sat on the ground and looked across at the Confederate army and found themselves feeling as they had never dreamed that the moment of victory would make them feel. "I remember how we sat there and pitied and sympathized with these courageous Southern men who had fought for four long and dreary years all so stubbornly, so bravely and so well, and now, whipped, beaten, completely used up, were fully at our mercy — it was pitiful, sad, hard, and seemed to us altogether too bad."

Down by the roadside near Appomattox Court House, Sheridan and Ord and other officers sat and waited while a brown-bearded little man in mud-spattered uniform rode up. They all saluted him, and there was a quiet interchange of greetings, and then General Grant tilted his head toward the village and asked: "Is General Lee up there?

Sheridan replied that he was, and Grant said: "Very well. Let's go up."

The little cavalcade went trotting along the road to the village, and all around them the two armies waited in silence. As the generals neared the end of their ride, a Yankee band in a field near the town struck up "Auld Lang Syne."

They say "never say never." So I didn't say "never" last September. And here I am again, this time to talk about General Robert E. Lee's surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House 141 years ago today.

It was Bernie, a member and now chair of the Sunday Services committee, who came up with the idea that a talk on Appomattox would be appropriate for this Sunday. She mentioned it to my wife Pat, also a member of the committee. Pat suggested I could do the talk; but didn't think I would want to. By the time I decided I wanted to get up here again, Bernie was already working on a service, which she graciously postponed it. Thank you Bernie.

Well, I do think it's an appropriate subject for today. I also think it's an appropriate subject for me. Because 41 years ago I was executive director of the Virginia Civil War Commission. That commission, made up largely of legislators, was charged by the General Assembly with putting on a four-year state-wide observance of the centennial of the Civil War — a war in which Virginia played such a prominent role. The centennial lasted from 1961 through 1965. And Appomattox was the climax.

To go back a little, in 1955 I was a reporter for the Associated Press in Richmond. I suggested to my boss that I go to the site, and then write a story on the 90th anniversary of Lee's surrender. He okayed it, and I drove to the Appomattox Court House National Historic Park, expecting to find a crowd and some kind of ceremony. To my surprise, aside from the Park Service staff, the only other person there beside me was a stringer for the New York Times.

Little did I know, nor could I have known, that in ten years to the day I would be back there in triumph; that I would be essentially in charge of the State of Virginia's100th anniversary observance of Lee's surrender, an observance that I and my staff and a local committee headed by Congressman Wat Abbitt of Appomattox had organized. It was attended by both U.S. Senators, all 10 Virginia congressmen, by many of the State department heads, and by a number of state legislators. There were some 12 thousand spectators, including Robert E. Lee IV and General U.S. Grant III. That was a lot of spectators for that relatively sparsely populated part of the state.

I had persuaded the great Civil War historian, Bruce Catton, to deliver an address. Catton spoke from the portico of the reconstructed courthouse. As I knew he would, he gave a very sensitive talk about that climactic day. He described the surrender scene as " one of the great dramatic moments in the American story. Quite properly," he said, "it was underplayed; nobody tried to strike an attitude or intone words for the record, and the two principals, Grant and Lee, behaved with quiet dignity and a deep sense of responsibility."

For me the observance was the supreme day of triumph of my working career. I gave Catton a ride back into Richmond, and we had dinner together.

Well, so much for the ego-trip part of my talk . . . . .

Lee's surrender at Appomattox, that Palm Sunday, came at the end of a week's retreat from Petersburg and Richmond. On April 2nd,after a 10-month siege of Petersburg, Grant's forces had at last penetrated Lee's thinning lines . The Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, and the rest of the government had to abandon Richmond. They took one of the last trains to Danville.

Before leaving town, the Confederate soldiers defending Richmond set fire to arsenals and military warehouses. The fire got out of control, burning more of the city than the enemy had burned at Atlanta or Columbia. Union troops entering the city the next morning put out the fires and they restored order in a city where law and order had broken down.

Lee's army made its way west, harassed all the way by Union forces. Lee's hope to join General Joe Johnston's army in North Carolina was frustrated by General Philip Sheridan's cavalry and by 50,000 Union infantry across his path to the south. In desperation Lee headed for Lynchburg where he hoped to resupply his army.

But his army was falling apart. He had lost 4000 men the week before at Petersburg in an abortive attempt to break through the middle of Grants lines. Then two-thirds of the way to Appomattox, he lost 5000 or more troops when they were cut off at Saylors Creek. Lee was left with 35,000 soldiers, only 8000 of whom constituted an effective fighting force.

At Appomattox, when Lee learned that his path to the west was blocked, not just by Sheridan's cavalry, but by a large body of infantry that had outraced him, he said: "there is nothing left for me to do but go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths."

As you know, Appomattox was the end of the line for the Confederacy. There were a couple of other Southern armies, but they soon gave up. When Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, the war was essentially over. It was that army that had held the Union at bay for four long years, with devastating losses of life on both sides.

At Appomattox, General Lee showed his greatness of spirit and of character. I quote the following rather extensive passage from Bruce Catton's book, Never Call Retreat:

"To him, as he prepared to meet Grant, came a trusted lieutenant who urged him not to surrender but simply to tell his army to disperse, each man takin g to the hills with his rifle in his hand: let the Yankees handle guerilla warfare for a while and see what they could make of that.

Lee replied that he would have none of it. It would create a state of things in the South from which it would take years to recover, Federal cavalry would harry the length and breadth of the land for no one knew how long, and he himself was "too old to go bushwhacking"; even if the army did break up into die-hard bands of irreconcilables, he said, "the only course for me to pursue would be to surrender myself to General Grant."

This was the last anybody heard about taking to the hills. The officer who suggested this course wrote that Lee "showed me the situation from a plane to which I had not risen, and when he finished speaking, I had not a word to say."

And Catton continues: "The unquenchable guerrilla warfare this officer had been hinting at was perhaps the one thing that would have ruined America for ever. It was precisely what Federal soldiers like Grant and Sherman dreaded most — the long, slow-burning, formless uprising that goes on and on after the field armies have been broken up, with desperate men using violence to provoke more violence harassing the victor and their own people with a sullen fury no dragoons can quite put down.

"The Civil War was not going to end that way (although it was natural to suppose that it might, because civil wars often do end so) and the conquered South was not going to become another Ireland or Poland, with generation after generation learning hatred and the arts of back-alley fighting.

"General Lee ruled it out, not only because he was General Lee, but also because he had never seen this war as the kind of struggle that could go on that way. He understood the cause he served with complete clarity," Catton continued. "His South meant neither revolution nor rebellion; it simply desired to detach itself and live in its own chosen part of an unchanging past, and Mr. Davis," Catton wrote, " had defined it perfectly when he said that all his people wanted was to be left alone."(1)

Grant also deserves credit, as Catton points out. He gave generous terms. Lee's soldiers were to lay down their arms, accept paroles, and then go to their homes. The officers could keep their side arms. Men could take their horses so they could do the spring plowing.

"Beaten men," Catton wrote, " were not to be paraded through Northern cities and then held in prison camps while the government made up its mind how to punish men taken in rebellion. Grant, in fact, made punishment impossible, inserting a clause specifying that these men were never to be disturbed by Federal authorities as long as they observed their paroles and obeyed the laws. Some time later, this kept vengeance-minded officials in Washington from putting Lee on trial for treason."

I've dwelt on this high-minded ending of the war because it brings to mind some of the problems this country has faced in the aftermath of 9/11 and in the Iraqi war. It also makes one wonder whether such views can prevail in Iraq where tribal hatreds go back deep into the history of the Muslim religion. What will happen to Iraq if civil war, already so evident, continues to engulf the country? Will there then be any hope of a unified Iraq? What will the Bush administration do, and what will happen to our soldiers who are so roundly hated by so many in Iraq and throughout the Muslim world?

The war in Iraq is terrible, but it can get much, much worse if an explosion of civil war occurs and tribal hatreds are given free rein. And in a precarious world, who knows what it might lead to for the people of the West.

All wars are terrible. The American Civil War, like most civil wars, was especially appalling. It pitted one American against another American, virtually all of them of the same ethnic group, the same nationality, with a common origin, traditions, and language, and the same religion. And they were very religious, men on both sides praying to the same God for victory and for protection from dying.

The casualties were horrendous. More than 620,000 soldiers lost their lives in four years of combat, 360,000 Yankees and 260,000 Confederates. That, according to the historian James M. McPherson, is equal to Americans lives lost in all other American wars up to an including Vietnam — The American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean War. The population of the whole country at the time was only about 32 million, of whom three million were slaves.

The casualties in the early part of the war were high because the commanders were using Napoleonic era tactics of close-order formations. But Civil War rifles had four times the range and accuracy of the shoulder arms used by soldiers of Napoleon's day. Later, when trench warfare took over, offensive charges against entrenched troops led to very heavy casualties for the attacking soldiers.

The Civil War centennial was observed more by Southern states than by northern states. Virginia put on by far the largest and most expensive centennial of any state. Yet, as the centennial was being organized, there was a lot of talk in Richmond and elsewhere that Virginia should ignore it. Why celebrate a defeat? We replied we were not celebrating defeat, we were observing the anniversary of a monumental chapter in Virginia's history.

And we observed it with dignity. The commission was adamant there should be no waving of the bloody shirt. And in the end there was general recognition that we had marked the four-year anniversary impartially, that we had walked a fine line, and that it had been well done.

In a final published report on our program and the enthusiastic response throughout the state, I wrote the following introduction:

"Certainly it was fitting that Virginia, of all states, should mark well the centennial anniversary of a chapter in her history so cataclysmic as to be almost beyond comprehension. . .

"One need only begin with the terrible emotional convulsion of secession — the mother of states, almost the mother of the nation, the state whose prestige had been so great that she contributed four of the first five presidents — turning away, leaving the union she had done so much to create. Then add to this four long years of fratricidal war on her own soil, her sons the chief captains, her capital the symbolic prize, her young men in the front ranks.

"Who now could say that Virginia should have ignored and permitted to be forgotten this period, such a short time ago, when within her borders so much courage ran so high, when sacrifice was supreme, when dedication was fierce and from the heart — by Virginians, by non-Virginians, by sons of the South, and sons of the north."

(1)Catton, Bruce. Never Call Retreat. Phoenix Press; Pbk edition (December 31, 2001)

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