Download A Talk Delivered by James J. Geary Before the Harrisonburg

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A Talk Delivered by James J. Geary
Before the Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalist Congregation
April 9, 2006
Lee and Grant at Appomattox
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. ”
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.”