This April 9th probably will pass quietly with only a few Americans thinking about what happened on this day in 1865. Indeed, it may now be some kind of hate crime to think or speak about it.
But 157 years ago today both the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia (ANV) were preparing to have another bloody go at each other in the countryside around Appomattox, Virginia. That clash, of course, never occurred.
Instead of more war, General Robert E. Lee met Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at the Mclean House in Appomattox. After four years of war, and extraordinary human and material carnage, Lee surrendered his beloved army, and for all intents and purposes the Confederacy, to Grant. The latter allowed generous terms to Confederate soldiers, requiring only that the sign a parole before they left for home. Grant also learned that many of the mounted Confederates owned the horses they rode, and that the animals were needed for farm work when their owners reached home. Grant let those who owned horses take them home, and also provided rations for the departing Confederate soldiers.
Even before meeting with Grant, Lee had given America with one of the greatest gifts it has ever received, perhaps that it will ever receive. That morning, after telling his staff and the ANV’s general officers that he would be seeing Grant to surrender the army, he faced a group of his younger generals. They asked him to let them disburse the army — still over 20,000 strong — in small groups and wage a guerrilla war against the North as a means to keep the Confederacy alive. Lee refused.
Later in his memoirs, Lee’s best gunner and engineer, Brigadier-General Edward Porter Alexander, who was among those asking Lee to disperse the army and keep fighting, related the scene as follows.
[A]s Christian men, Gen. Alexander, you and I have no right to think for one moment of our personal feelings or affairs. We must consider only the effect which our action will have upon the country at large.
Suppose I should take your suggestion & order the army to disperse & and make their way to their homes. The men would have no rations & would be under no discipline. They are already demoralized by four years of war. They would have to plunder and rob to procure subsistence. The country would be full of lawless bands in every part, & a state of society would ensue from which it would take the country years to recover. Then the enemy’s cavalry would pursue in the hopes of catching the principal officers, & wherever they went there would be fresh rapine & destruction.
And as for myself, while you young men might afford to go to bushwhacking, the only proper and dignified course for me would be to surrender myself & take the consequences of my actions.
But it is still in the early spring, & if the men can be quietly & quickly returned to their homes there is time to plant crops & begin to repair the ravages of war. That is what I must now try to bring about. I expect to meet General Grant at ten this morning in the rear of the army and to surrender this army to him. [1]
Alexander listened and concurred, and no more was said of the matter. In his memoirs Alexander wrote that, after the event,
… I thought I had never half known before what a big heart & brain our general had. I was so ashamed of having proposed to him such a foolish and wild cat scheme as my suggestion had been that I felt like begging him to forget that he had ever heard it. … It seemed now an inestimable privilege to serve under him to the very last moment & that no scene in the life of the Army of Northern Virginia would be more honorable than the one which was now to close its record. [2]
God bless and keep General Robert Edward Lee, flawed like all Christians, but one of the greatest men America has ever produced.
Endnotes:
–1.) Gary W. Gallagher, (Ed.). Fighting for the Confederacy. The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989, pp. 532-533
–-2) p. 533
