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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 1 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 2 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. 3 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 4 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. 5 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 6 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 7 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. 8