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Article 36
America’s Birth At
Appomattox
Anne Wortham
LINCOLN’S ATTITUDE
It would of course be easy to make too much of the general air of reconciliation.… And yet by any standard this
was an almost unbelievable way to end a civil war,
which by all tradition is the worst kind of war there is.1
—Bruce Catton
We are not enemies, but friends.… Though passion may
have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The
mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart, and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of
the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by
the better angels of our nature. —Abraham Lincoln
Reconciliation was an explicit policy goal of Abraham Lincoln’s, which he made clear to Generals Grant and Sherman and
Adm. David Dixon Porter in a conference aboard the River
Queen at City Point, Virginia, after his visit to the front on March
27, 1865. Lincoln knew that unless “the better angels of our nature” could be asserted by unambiguous action at war’s end, there
was no hope for the new birth of freedom and the national community he believed was possible. The problem for Lincoln was
how to simultaneously end the war and win the peace. As Bruce
Catton puts it, he argued that the Union’s aim should be not so
much to subdue the Confederacy as to checkmate those forces of
malice and rancor that could jeopardize peace. For if the North
won the war and lost the peace, there would be no way to realize
his hope that “the whole country, North and South together,
[would] ultimately find in reunion and freedom the values that
would justify four terrible years of war.”3
In the only existing documentation of the meeting, Admiral
Porter wrote:
On April 9, 1865, eighty-nine years after the Continental
Congress declared the independence of “thirteen united
States of America,” the United States of America was born
at the residence of farmer Wilmer McLean in the hamlet of
Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. Civil War historian
James Robertson has said, “Lee signed not so much terms of
surrender as he did the birth certificate of a nation—the United States—and the country was born in that moment.”2 An
American nationality in the sense of a general feeling of being American above all else did not yet exist when Grant and
Lee put their names to the surrender document. But there
were at work nineteenth-century values, ideas, and attitudes
that transcended sectional loyalties, that remained intact
throughout the war, and made possible the birth of the United
States as a nation.
I will look at the function of friendship, battlefield comradeship and courtesy, and shared nationality in that process; and argue that these qualities of association—as well
as the high value the combatants placed on courage, duty,
honor, and discipline—enabled the Federals and Confederates to achieve what Robert Penn Warren called “reconciliation by human recognition.” I intend to show how
reconciliation was played out in numerous meetings between Union and Confederate officers and soldiers at Appomattox between April 9, 1865, when Lee surrendered,
and April 12, when the Confederates stacked their arms,
folded their flags, and were paroled.
My opinion is that Mr. Lincoln came down to City Point
with the most liberal views toward the rebels. He felt confident that we would be successful, and was willing that the
enemy should capitulate on the most favorable terms.…
He wanted peace on almost any terms.… His heart was
tenderness throughout, and, as long as the rebels laid down
their arms, he did not care how it was done.4
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Article 36. America’s Birth At Appomattox
There were mutual introductions and shaking of hands,
and soon was passed about some whiskey (General
[Romeyn] Ayres furnished the whiskey and he alleges it
was a first class article) and mutual healths were drank
and altogether it was a strange grouping. The rebel officers were all elegantly dressed in full uniform. Gradually the area of the conference widened. From the steps
the conferring party got into the street, and before it
closed some were seated on the steps, and others, for
lack of more comfortable accommodations, chatted cosily, seated on a contiguous fence.6
Lincoln knew that the peace and reconciliation he envisioned
would not stand a chance without generous surrender terms. He
expected Grant, “the remorseless killer,” and Sherman, “destruction’s own self,” to “fight without mercy as long as there
must be fighting, but when the fighting stopped they [must] try
to turn old enemies into friends.”
Lincoln knew his fellow citizens, and he was
confident that while they were politically
disunited, the raw material of reconciliation
resided in their hearts.
Gen. Joshua Chamberlain overheard two West Point classmates who had been combatants for four years renewing an old
acquaintance. “Well Billy, old boy, how goes it?” the Union officer said. “Bad, bad, Charlie, bad I can tell you; but have you
got any whiskey?”7
But could reconciliation be coaxed out of defeat? There were
reasons to think it possible. Lincoln knew his fellow citizens, and
he was confident that while they were politically disunited, the raw
material of reconciliation resided in their hearts. Indeed, friendliness and respect were present within the armies, and there was now
less bitterness between them than when the war began. Yet another
resource was the extraordinary resilience of the friendships between the former West Pointers leading those armies. Finally,
whether he knew it or not, but must have sensed, Lincoln had a
most reliable resource in the antisecessionist gray commander himself, Robert E. Lee—but not until he was defeated.
When we consider the pain, suffering,
and death these men had inflicted upon
one another and their comrades, how are
we to explain their apparent lack of
resentment and bitterness?
When we consider the pain, suffering, and death these men
had inflicted upon one another and their comrades, how are we
to explain their apparent lack of resentment and bitterness?
How could one so easily drink of the cup of fraternity with
someone who has been shooting at him and his comrades—and
sometimes hitting the mark—for four years? Can vanquished
and victor really be friends?
Well, yes—if the fellow who had been shooting at you was a
friend before he was your enemy, and if he was bound to you by
that precious ethos called the “spirit of West Point.” Vindictiveness was not the order of the day for these men. They just
wanted it over. Indeed, two months before, on February 25,
Union Gen. Edward Ord met under a flag of truce with his
former classmate, Confederate Gen. James Longstreet, and discussed the possibility of Lee and Grant declaring peace on the
field. Now, as the officers waited for Grant and Lee, John
Gibbon, a North Carolinian whose three brothers fought for the
Confederacy, proposed that if Grant and Lee couldn’t come to
terms and stop the fighting, they should order their soldiers to
fire only blank cartridges to prevent further bloodshed. By
noon, when Grant still had not appeared, the West Pointers rode
back to their respective lines, all hoping, as Gibbon said, “that
there would be no further necessity for bloodshed.”
WEST POINT 1: A CHEERFUL
COLLOQUY
If one would have a friend, one must be willing to wage
war for him: and in order to wage war, one must be capable of being an enemy.… In one’s friend, one shall
find one’s best enemy.
—Frederich Nietzsche
“The soldiers did not need to be told that it would be well to
make peace mean comradeship. All they needed was to see somebody try it,” writes Catton. 5 Well, on Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865,
there were plenty of occasions to see the vanquished and the victorious extend the hand of friendship. On the morning of that dramatic day, white flags of truce were held aloft as messengers rode
between the lines, and a cease-fire was in place until the anticipated
surrender meeting between Grant and Lee. By late morning the
contending armies stood on either side of the town, with their picket lines out, their guns silent, nervously contemplating the meaning
of surrender and ever alert for the resumption of hostile fire. But
gathered on the steps of the Appomattox Courthouse, awaiting the
arrival of the two commanding generals, was a curious group of
Union and Confederate generals, most of them West Point graduates, and many of them from the same graduating classes.
As historian Frank Cauble points out, because of the more
significant surrender meeting that everyone was anticipating,
this earlier conference of officers has been largely overlooked
and seldom mentioned in Civil War histories. However, the
sight of these former combatants was “a singular spectacle,”
wrote New York reporter L.A. Hendrick.
CONDITIONAL SURRENDER
Another year would go by before President Andrew Johnson,
on April 2, 1866, proclaimed “that the insurrection… is at an
end and is henceforth to be so regarded.” But Grant and Lee’s
task of reconciliation could not wait for the U.S. government’s
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
Lee asked that those of the enlisted men who owned their
horses be permitted to keep them. At first Grant rejected this request, but then he changed his mind. Since this was the last
battle of the war, the men needed their horses to put in their
spring crops, and since the United States did not want the
horses, he said he would instruct the parole officers to “let every
man of the Confederate army who claimed to own a horse or
mule to take the animal to his home.” It was ironic that for four
years Grant had tried to kill these men, and now he didn’t want
to stand in the way of their planting their crops so they could
live. But Grant now saw himself as an instrument for a lasting
peace. He extended his generosity further by ordering his army
to share its rations with the hungry rebels.
The surrender terms were entirely consistent with the policy
of reconciliation that Lincoln had articulated back in March.
According to Admiral Porter, when Lincoln learned of the surrender terms, he was “delighted” and exclaimed “a dozen times,
‘Good!’ ‘All right!’ ‘Exactly the thing!’ and other similar expressions.” Confederate Porter Alexander was also moved by
Grant’s generosity at Appomattox and wrote later: “Gen.
Grant’s conduct toward us in the whole matter is worthy of the
very highest praise & indicates a great & broad & generous
mind. For all time it will be a good thing for the whole United
States, that of all the Federal generals it fell to Grant to receive
the surrender of Lee” (emphasis in the original).8
Union soldiers like Maj. Holman Melcher of the 20th Maine
were also impressed by Grant’s magnanimity and resolved to
follow his example. In a letter to his brother, Melcher noted that
“the good feeling between the officers and men of the two
armies followed General Grant [who] set us the example by his
conduct at the surrender.” He went on to “confess” what no
doubt many Union officers and soldiers felt—that “a feeling of
indignation would rise within me when I would think of all the
bloodshed and mourning these same men had caused. But it is
honorable to be magnanimous to a conquered foe. And as civilized men and gentlemen, we strive to keep such feelings of hatred in subjection.”9
Melcher’s attitude confirmed Lincoln’s insight that, as
Catton puts it, “if the terms expressed simple human decency
and friendship, it might be that a peace of reconciliation could
get just enough of a lead so that the haters could never quite
catch up with it.” But it would require just the level of self-control that Melcher imposed on himself.
Having signed the certificate of birth, Grant and Lee still had
to attend to the business of delivering a deathblow to the idea of
secession while simultaneously injecting some vitality into the
promise of this new beginning. They did so by word and deed.
When news of the surrender reached the Union lines, the men
began to fire a salute and cheer, but Grant issued orders forbidding any demonstrations. He wrote later that “the Confederates
were now our prisoners, and we did not want to exult over their
downfall.” While Grant taught his men to resist acts of humiliation, Lee’s assignment was to instill stoic dignity.
The Confederates could not believe what had transpired. Orderly
Sgt. James Whitehorne of the 12th Virginia, wrote in his diary, “I
was thunderstruck.… What would Jackson, Stuart, or—any of
[those who had been killed fighting under Lee] say about us?… It is
official certification of the end of the war. They knew it had to
begin with the surrender terms themselves. Grant finally arrived
from the field between 1:30 and 2:00 and entered the McLean
house where Lee was waiting. By 3:00 the surrender documents
were signed, the two commanders had shaken hands, and Lee
had mounted Traveller and returned to his lines. At 4:30 Grant
telegraphed Washington, informing the secretary of war that
Lee had surrendered “on terms proposed by myself.”
Gen. Ulysses S. Grant standing at Cold Harbor, Virginia, in June 1864 (National Archives).
They agreed that all officers and men of the Army of
Northern Virginia should be paroled and disqualified from
taking up arms against the government of the United States until
properly exchanged; that they should turn over all arms, artillery, and public property to the Union army; but that officers
should not be deprived of their sidearms, horses, and baggage.
In stating that “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 paroles and the laws in force where
they may reside,” Grant effectively made it impossible for Lee
to be tried for treason.
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Article 36. America’s Birth At Appomattox
on the porch of the McLean house waiting for his officers to prepare his army to leave Appomattox, they began arriving with many
of Grant’s old comrades. Along with Phil Sheridan, John Gibbon,
and Rufus Ingalls came the beloved Confederate Cadmus Wilcox,
who had been best man at Grant’s wedding. Confederate Henry
Heth, who had been a subaltern with Grant in Mexico, was joined
by his cousin George Pickett, who also knew Grant from Mexico.
Pickett and Heth were friends of Gibbon, whose Union division
bore the brunt of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. Federal George
Gordon and a number of others also came along.
humiliating in the extreme. I never expected to see men cry as they
did this morning. All the officers cried and most of the privates broke
down and wept like children and Oh, Lord! I cried too.”
The emotions of the weary and humiliated men in Lee’s tattered army ranged from bitterness and anger to sadness and acceptance. But they were relieved when they learned that they
would be paroled and free to go home rather than sent to Northern
prisons. They were also grateful for the much-needed rations. But
men need more than rations; they need meaning. And only Robert
E. Lee, their beloved Marse Robert, could satisfy that most
pressing of human needs by reinforcing their sense of honor, legitimating their pride, and redirecting their tired fury.
Grant talked with them until it was time to leave. He later
wrote that the officers “seemed to enjoy the meeting as much as
though they had been friends separated for a long time while
fighting battles under the same flag. For the time being it looked
very much as if all thought of the war had escaped their
minds.”13 No doubt somewhere deep in their hearts were the
sentiments of the West Point hymn traditionally sung at the last
chapel service before graduation:
Having signed the certificate of birth,
Grant and Lee still had to attend to the
business of delivering a deathblow to the
idea of secession while simultaneously
injecting some vitality into the promise
of this new beginning.
When shall we meet again?
Meet ne’er to sever?
When will Peace wreath her chain
Round us forever?
Our hearts will ne’er repose
Safe from each blast that blows
In this dark vale of woes,—
Never—no, never.14
In his farewell order to the army, Lee praised their “four
years of arduous service, marked by unsurpassed courage and
fortitude,” told them that they were brave and had “remained
steadfast to the last,” and urged them to peacefully return to
their homes, taking with them “the satisfaction that proceeds
from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed.” He ended
by honoring them: “With an increasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your country, and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous consideration for myself, I bid
you all an affectionate farewell.”11
What Lee accomplished in his address, says Bruce Catton,
was to set the pattern, to give these men the right words to take
with them into the future. “Pride in what they had done would
grow with the years, but it would turn them into a romantic
army of legend and not into a sullen battalion of death.”
There were Federals, like General Chamberlain, who would
not begrudge the Confederates the sentiments that Lee tried to
instill in them. Although he believed they were wrong in their
beliefs, “they fought as they were taught, true to such ideals as
they saw, and put into their cause their best.” Reflecting on the
parade of Confederates stacking their arms and flags, Chamberlain, who was appointed to command the formal surrender of
arms, said: “For us they were fellow-soldiers as well, suffering
the fate of arms. We could not look into those brave, bronzed
faces, and those battered flags we had met on so many fields
where glorious manhood lent a glory to the earth that bore it,
and think of personal hate and revenge.”12
These friends were a band of brothers whom historian James
McPherson describes as “more tightly bonded by hardship and
danger in war than biological brothers.” Now, on this spring day
in April, the guns were quiet, and, as historian John Waugh points
out, they “yearned to know that they would never hear their
thunder or be ordered to take up arms against one another again.”
By the time Longstreet arrived to join other Confederate and
Union commissioners appointed to formulate the details of the
surrender ceremony, Grant had apparently moved inside to a
room that served as his temporary headquarters. When Longstreet walked by on the way to the room where the commissioners were meeting, Grant looked up and recognized him. He
rose from his chair and, as Longstreet recalled, “with his oldtime cheerful greeting gave me his hand, and after passing a few
remarks offered a cigar, which was gratefully received.”15
Grant, addressing Longstreet by his nickname, said jokingly,
“Pete, let us have another game of brag, to recall the days which
were so pleasant to us all.”16 The two men had been best friends
since West Point. They had served together for a time in the
same regiment at Jefferson’s Barracks, Missouri. Longstreet introduced Julia Dent, his distant cousin, to Grant and was present
at their marriage vows. Three years after Appommatox, in 1868,
Longstreet endorsed Grant’s presidential candidacy and attended his inauguration.
WEST POINT 2: SAM GRANT’S
COMRADES
Three years after Appommatox, in 1868,
Longstreet endorsed Grant’s presidential
candidacy and attended his inauguration.
T
he next day, April 10, some of Grant’s generals asked for permission to enter the Confederate lines to meet old friends. As he sat
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
It resembled a picnic rather than a picket line. They like
ourselves were glad the war was over. We exchanged
knicknacks with them, and were reminded of the days
when at school we swapped jews-harps for old wooden
toothed combs. The articles we exchanged that night
were about the same value.22
“The mere presence of conflict, envy, aggression, or any
number of other contaminants does not doom or invalidate a friendship,” says professor of English Ronald Sharp.17 Much of the behavior of the West Pointers can be explained by the enormous
strength of their friendships to withstand the horror of war. As
Waugh points out, “It had never been in their hearts to hate the
classmates they were fighting. Their lives and affections for one
another had been indelibly framed and inextricably intertwined in
their academy days. No adversity, war, killing, or political estrangement could undo that.”18 In his poem, “Meditation,” Herman
Melville, who visited the Virginia battlefront in the spring of 1864,
celebrated their comradeship in the following verse:
Chamberlain wrote of receiving Confederate visitors all the
next day. “Our camp was full of callers before we were up,” he
recalled. “The inundation of visitors grew so that it looked like
a country fair, including the cattle-show.”
J. Tracy Power notes that Confederates
were impressed by Federal soldiers who shared rations
or money with them and carried on pleasant, and sometimes friendly, conversations about the end of the war.
Maj. Richard Watson Jones of the 12th Virginia was
visited by a Federal officer he had known before the war
when they attended the same college. Sgt. James Whitehorne described the scene when the Federal entered the
Confederate camp. “We saw him come up and hold out
his hand—the Major did nothing for so long it was painful. Then he took the offered hand and I had a feeling the
war was really over.”23
Mark the great Captains on both sides.
The soldiers with the broad renown—
They all were messmates on the Hudson’s marge,
Beneath one roof they laid them down;
And, free from hate in many an after pass,
Strove as in school-boy rivalry of the class.19
With some exaggeration, former West Pointer Morris Schaff
wrote some forty years later that when “the graduates of both
armies met as brothers” they symbolically “planted then and
there the tree that has grown, blooming for the Confederate and
blooming for the Federal, and under those whose shade we now
gather in peace.”20 Our knowledge of the hatred and vengeance
that Northerners and Southerners, including many West
Pointers, felt toward each other and of the political conflicts attending Reconstruction might lead us to argue with the vision of
West Pointers planting the tree of peace at Appomattox. But we
cannot deny that, as their various diaries, letters, and memoirs
document, that is what they thought they were doing.
It was in just such conduct that Bell Wiley, in his study of the
common soldier, saw “undeveloped resources of strength and
character that spelled hope for the country’s future.”24 For his
own part, Whitehorne declared, “After all, I never hated any one
Yankee. I hated the spirit that was sending them to invade the
south.”
TWO SIDES BUT ONE IDENTITY
EMBATTLED CIVILITY
I
n his moving tribute to the men in gray, Chamberlain asserted
that “whoever had misled these men, we had not. We had led
them back home.” While it is true that Confederates had seceded from the Union politically, they had not left the Union culturally. A significant overarching factor in the reconciliation of
the former combatants was the fact that the soldiers “were not
alien foes but men of similar origin.” The Civil War was not a
conflict between Southern Cavaliers and New England Puritans, between a nation of warriors and a nation of shopkeepers,
or, as abolitionist Wendell Phillips insisted, between a civilization based on democracy and one based on an aristocracy
founded on slavery. Rather, it was, in the words of Walt Whitman, “a struggle going on within one identity.” Robert Penn
Warren concurs in his argument that the nation that went to war
“share[d] deep and significant convictions and [was] not a mere
handbasket of factions huddled arbitrarily together by historical
happen-so.”25
A well-known paradox of the Civil War, writes Alan Nolan,
was that “although fighting against each other with a devastating ferocity, the enlisted men and officers of the two sides tended to trust each other and did not see themselves in the manner
of soldiers in most wars.”21 By the time Grant took command
of the troubled Army of the Potomac in 1864, as Catton put it,
“a fantastic sort of kinship”—“a queer combination of antagonism and understanding”—had grown up in regard to the Army
of Northern Virginia. “There was no soft sentimentality about
it, and the men would shoot to kill when the time for shooting
came. Yet there was a familiarity and an understanding, at times
something that verged almost on liking, based on solid respect.”
Now, on April 9, despite the fact that it was officially forbidden
to prevent unpleasant contacts between members of the two
armies, as soon as the surrender was announced there was quite
a bit of visiting back and forth between the lines among Union
and Confederate troops. Pvt. Charles Dunn of the 20th Maine
reported that there was considerable trading that night.
While it is true that Confederates had
seceded from the Union politically, they had
not left the Union culturally.
The two picket lines were within speaking distance, and
we were on speaking terms with the “Johnnies” at once.
There was nothing that resembled guard duty that night.
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Article 36. America’s Birth At Appomattox
things which had always seemed essential beneath the word
‘American.’ In some mysterious way that nobody quite understood, the army not only mirrored the change but represented
the effort to find a new synthesis.”29
America was becoming American. Johnny Reb and Billy
Yank were creating a new kind of American and a new awareness of America. As Warren points out,
Whether consciously acknowledged by them or not, Northerners and Southerners shared significant elements of national
identity that the war could not annihilate. By national identity I
do not mean nationalism, to quote Merle Curti, “in the sense of
both confidence in the strength of the federal government and
devotion to the nation as a whole,” which in the nineteenth century was only a hope, an aspiration. Rather, I mean shared nationality in the sense that, again, quoting Curti, rank-and-file
Americans “[cherish] the Union as a precious symbol of a revered past and a bright future, identifying it with abundance, opportunity and ultimate peace.”26
The social, cultural, philosophical, and ideological differences between the combatants have been fully documented.
But, as Wiley concluded, “the similarities of Billy Yank and
Johnny Reb far outweighed their differences. They were both
Americans, by birth or by adoption, and they both had the weaknesses and the virtues of the people of their nation and time.”
Alan Nolan concurs: “They shared the same revolutionary experience, the same heroes, the same Founding Fathers; and, despite the south’s departure from the Bill of Rights in the effort
to protect slavery, they shared, at bottom, a sense of political
values.”27
The War meant that Americans saw America. The farm
boy of Ohio, the trapper in Minnesota, and the pimp of
the Mackerelville section of New York City saw Richmond and Mobile. They not only saw America, they saw
each other, and together shot it out with some Scot of the
Valley of Virginia or ducked hardware hurled by a Louisiana Jew who might be a lieutenant of artillery, CSA.30
Out of the cauldron of hell into which were thrown Billy Yank,
Johnny Reb, their immigrant comrades, as well as the black soldiers they all despised, came a pluralistic national community.
THE NATIONALIZATION OF LEE
In the decades following the war, as Americans became more
American, so too did Robert E. Lee’s image. By the turn of the
century he was nationally elevated to a hero status shared by only
a handful of individuals, such as Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson. In their study of the transformation of Lee’s image, Thomas Connelly and Barbara Bellows report: “A writer in Harper’s
Weekly proclaimed him ‘the pride of a whole country.’… The
New York Times praised Lee’s ‘grandeur of soul,’ and the Nation
called Lee ‘great in gentleness and goodness.’ ”31
America was becoming American.
Johnny Reb and Billy Yank were creating
a new kind of American and a new
awareness of America.
A key element of the national identity that Northerners and
Southerners shared was a vision of the nation as the promised
land to which God had led his people to establish a new social
order that was to be, as John Winthrop said in 1630, “a city upon
a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal
falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so
cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be
made a story and a by-word through the world.”28
The sense of being on show and tested before God and the
world was no less true of Civil War combatants than it was for
the Puritans. And just as persistent was the corollary concern
of Americans that they would fall short of the vision. Because
of this “fear of falling away,” as historian Rupert Wilkinson
calls it, Northerners and Southerners alike were faced with
two basic philosophical questions: Are we worthy of our revolutionary forebears? Are we undoing, by our divisiveness, all
that they worked so hard to obtain? Both sides compared
America with its past and found themselves wanting. Both invoked the Revolutionary-Constitution era in seeking redemption of the Republic.
Civil War combatants were also bound by their perception of
the changes swirling around them in the wider society as well as
within their armies. “Always the army reflected the nation,”
writes Catton. And the nation itself was changing. Increased immigration, factory production, and urbanization eroded and destroyed old unities— “unities of blood, of race, of language, of
shared ideals and common memories and experiences, the very
The Americanization of Lee began long before he surrendered. When Brig. Gen. Samuel Crawford, in the 5th
Corps of the Army of the Potomac, visited briefly with
Lee the day after his surrender to Grant, he told Lee that,
should he go North, he would find that he had “hosts of
warm friends there.” With tears in his eyes, Lee said, “I
suppose all the people of the North looked upon me as a
rebel traitor.” Far from it. An unlikely contributor to his
elevation was Julia Ward Howe, the abolitionist who
wrote “Battle Hymn of the Republic”:
A gallant foeman in the fight,
A brother when the fight was o’er,
The hand that led the host with might
The blessed torch of learning bore.
No shriek of shells nor roll of drums,
No challenge fierce, resounding far,
When reconciling Wisdom comes
To heal the cruel wounds of war.
Thought may the minds of men divide,
Love makes the heart of nations one,
And so, the soldier grave beside,
We honor thee, Virginia’s son.32
The nationalization of Lee is a very American cultural practice: the elevation of worthy “native sons”—beyond the soil of
their birth, beyond the privileges or lack of privileges of their
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
head of his surrendering corps told Chamberlain, “General, this
is deeply humiliating; but I console myself with the thought that
the whole country will rejoice at this day.” Another told him, “I
went into that cause and I meant it. We had our choice of
weapons and of ground, and we have lost. Now that is my flag
(pointing to the flag of the Union), and I will prove myself as
worthy as any of you.”35
class, beyond the dogma of their creed—to the position of national icon. In 1900 Virginia’s son was inducted into the newly
established Hall of Fame for Great Americans along with Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. In 1934,
Virginia presented statues of Lee and Washington to Congress to
be placed in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, which houses
statues of outstanding citizens from each of the states. The Lee so
honored—the Lee that won over the nation and was praised by
every American president—was, as Connelly and Bellows describe him, “the man of basic American values of decency, duty,
and honor, the devotee of unionism trapped in 1861 by conflicting loyalties.” Lee was the postwar nationalist, driven by an
unswerving determination to help restore the old Union.
References
1. Bruce Catton, The Centennial History of the Civil War: Never
Call Retreat, vol. 3 (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1965), 455–56.
2. James Robertson Jr., Civil War Journal: Robert E. Lee: A History
TV Network Presentation, Time-Life Video (Alexandria, Va.: Time,
1994).
3. Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (New York: Doubleday
and Co., 1957, 340.
4. David Dixon Porter, quoted in Philip Van Doren Stern, An End to
Valor: The Last Days of the Civil War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Co., 1858), 103–104.
5. Catton, Stillness at Appomattox, 341.
6. L.A. Hendrick, “Conferences of Commanding Officers,” Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register, 22 April 1865. Quoted in Frank
Cauble, The Surrender Proceedings: April Ninth, 1865, Appomattox
Court House (Lynchburg, Va.: H.E. Howard, 1987), 43–44.
7. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, The Passing of the Armies: The
Last Campaign of the Armies (Gettysburg, Pa.: Stan Clark Military
Books, 1995 reprint ed.), 244.
8. Gary Gallagher, ed., Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal
Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander (Chapel Hill,
N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 540.
9. William Styple, ed., With a Flash of His Sword: The Writings of
Maj. Holman S. Melcher, 20th Maine Infantry (Kearny, N.J.: Belle
Grove Publishing Co., 1994), 219.
10. J. Tracy Power, Lee’s Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern
Virginia From the Wilderness to Appomattox (Chapel Hill, N.C.:
University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 282.
11. Thomas Connelly, Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in
American Society (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University
Press, 1978), 367.
12. Chamberlain, Passing of the Armies, 270.
13. Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters: Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: Selected Letters 1839–1865 (New York: Library
of America, 1990), 744.
14. Quoted in George Pappas, To the Point: The United States Military Academy, 1802–1902 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993), 322.
15. James Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox [1896] (New
York: Konecky and Konecky, 1992), 630.
16. Jeffrey Wert, General James Longstreet: The Confederacy’s
Most Controversial Soldier (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994),
404.
17. Ronald Sharp, Friendship and Literature: Spirit and Form
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986), 120.
18. John Waugh, The Class of 1846: From West Point to Appomattox: Stonewall Jackson, George McClellan and Their Brothers (New
York: Warner Books, 1994), 500.
19. Herman Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War [1866].
Quoted in Richard Dilworth Rust, ed., Glory and Pathos: Responses
of Nineteenth-Century American Authors to the Civil War (Boston:
Holbrook Press, 1970), 177.
20. Morris Schaff, The Spirit of Old West Point, 1858–1862 (Boston:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1907), 140, 251–53
21. Alan Nolan, Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil
War History (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press,
1991), 158.
In truth, America had never been united, but
now it was on the road toward becoming
American.
But Lee is the supreme paradoxical American hero. As
McPherson insightfully points out, Lee’s heroism has to be seen
in terms of his gigantic role in prolonging the war longer than it
might have been. When Lee took command of the Army of
Northern Virginia in June 1862, the Confederacy was on the
verge of collapse. In the previous four months, it had lost its
largest city, New Orleans; much of the Mississippi Valley; and
most of Tennessee; and Maj. Gen. George McClellan’s Army of
the Potomac had moved to within five miles of Richmond, the
Confederate capital. McPherson cites the irony of Lee’s command as follows:
Within three months Lee’s offensives had taken the
Confederacy off the floor at the count of nine and had
driven Union forces onto the ropes. Without Lee the
Confederacy might have died in 1862. But slavery
would have survived; the South would have suffered
only limited death and destruction. Lee’s victories prolonged the war until it destroyed slavery, the plantation
economy, the wealth and infrastructure of the region,
and everything else the confederacy stood for. That was
the profound irony of Lee’s military genius.33
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF APPOMATTOX
I
n an April 12 telegram to Grant, who had departed for Washington two days earlier, General Gibbon informed him that “the
surrender of General Lee’s army was finally completed today,”
then went on to comment on the meaning of Appomattox: “I
have conversed with many of the surrendered officers, and am
satisfied that by announcing at once terms and a liberal, merciful policy on the part of the Government we can once more have
a happy, united country.”34
This is what Lincoln wanted. In truth, America had never
been united, but now it was on the road toward becoming American. And this is how it sounded: A Confederate officer at the
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Article 36. America’s Birth At Appomattox
31. Thomas Connelly and Barbara Bellows, God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 83.
32. Julia Ward Howe, “Robert E. Lee,” in Lois Hill, ed., Poems and
Songs of the Civil War (New York: Gramercy Books, 1990).
33. James McPherson, Drawn With the Sword: Reflections on the
American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996),
158.
34. Quoted in Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command [1968] (New
York: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1994), 473.
35. Chamberlain, Passing of the Armies, 266.
22. Quoted in J.J. Pullen, The Twentieth Maine (Philadelphia: J.B.
Lippincott Co., 1957), 270.
23. Quoted in Power, Lee’s Miserables, 283.
24. Bell Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb and the Life of Billy Yank
[1943, 1952], reprint, Essential Classics of the Civil War (New York:
Book-of-the-Month Club/Louisiana State University Press, 1994),
361.
25. Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (New York:
Random House, 1961), 83.
26. Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 423–24.
27. Nolan, Lee Considered, 157.
28. John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” (1630), reprinted in Daniel Boorstin, ed., An American Primer, vol. 1 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1966), 22.
29. Catton, Stillness at Appomattox, 216.
30. Warren, Legacy of the Civil War, 13.
Anne Wortham is associate professor of sociology at Illinois State University.
From The World & I, May 1999, pages 295–305, 307–309. Copyright © 1999 by The World & I Magazine. Reprinted with permission.
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