Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

every one who beheld him at this supreme moment of trial. The approach of his horse seemed to recall him from his reverie, and he at once mounted. General Grant now stepped down from the porch, moving toward him, and saluted him by raising his hat. He was followed in this act of courtesy by all our officers present.29

George Henry Mills of the 16th North Carolina watched Lee ride slowly back up the road toward his regiment: “As he passed the men all ran down to the road and surrounded him, everyone trying to shake hands with him, many of them in tears.” Lee took off his hat and spoke briefly: “Boys, I have done the best I could for you. Go home now, and if you make as good citizens as you have soldiers, you will do well, and I shall always be proud of you. Goodbye, and God bless you all.” To Mills, Lee “seemed so full that he could say no more, but with tears in his eyes” he rode off toward his headquarters, “and that was the last we ever saw of him.”30

The next day was consumed with the administrative paperwork of the surrender—making up parole lists, printing parole forms, Lee issuing his farewell order to the Army of Northern Virginia, and the handover of the rebel cavalry’s equipment. The day following, the Confederate artillery surrendered its guns, and on April 12 the infantry of the Army of Northern Virginia marched out of its pitiful little camps for the last time. When Lee abandoned the Petersburg siege lines, he could still count 56,000 men in the ranks; now, the Army of Northern Virginia only had 26,018 names to put on the parole lists. 31

They tramped defiantly down their last road through the center of Appomattox Court House to where units of the Army of the Potomac were drawn up, on either side, to watch them stack their still-gleaming weapons and furl their shredded star-crossed battle flags. Waiting for them by the roadside was the 1st Brigade, 1st Division, 5th Corps, under the command of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Four years before, Chamberlain had been a professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College; two years before, at Gettysburg, Chamberlain and his 20th Maine Volunteers had held Little Round Top. Now, commanding his own brigade, Chamberlain impulsively brought his men to attention and ordered a salute to the ragged Confederates. At the head of the Confederate column rode General John B. Gordon, who was startled and uncertain at what Chamberlain’s men were about to do. But then, as it dawned on Gordon what Chamberlain meant, he slowly and deliberately returned it.

… When the head of each division column comes opposite our group, our bugle sounds the signal and instantly our whole line from right to left, regiment by regiment in succession, gives the soldier’s salutation, from the “order arms” to the old “carry”— the marching salute. Gordon at the head of the column, riding with heavy spirit and downcast face, catches the sound of shifting arms, looks up, and, taking the meaning, wheels superbly, making himself and his horse one uplifted figure, with profound salutation as he drops the point of his sword to the boot toe; then facing to his own command, gives word for his successive brigades to pass us with the same position of the manual,—honor answering honor. On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word nor whisper of vain-glorying, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!32

Two days later, far away in Raleigh, North Carolina, William Tecumseh Sherman received a note from Joseph E. Johnston asking if he was willing to make “a temporary suspension of active operations.” Johnston had never really been able to stop Sherman once he had rolled out of Georgia. Charleston, which had defied everything the Federal navy could throw at it from the sea, dropped tamely into Sherman’s bag as his fire-eyed army marched past on land. On March 6, Sherman’s men splashed across the Pee Dee River into North Carolina, making a union with Grant a matter of only a few weeks. Johnston made just one serious effort to slow Sherman down, at Bentonville, North Carolina, on March 19, but Sherman merely brushed him aside. “Johnston had the night before marched his whole army … and all the troops he had drawn from every quarter, determined, as he told his men, to crush one of our corps and then defeat us in detail,” Sherman reported to Grant three days later, but “we pushed him hard, and came very near crushing him,” and Sherman was now “satisfied that Johnston’s army was so roughly handled … that we could march right on to Raleigh.”33

On April 12, Johnston was summoned to Greensboro, North Carolina, by Jefferson Davis, who had escaped from Virginia and who spoke hopefully of raising new armies to carry on the war. Johnston briefly told him that “to attempt to continue the war” was hopeless. “Having neither money nor credit, nor arms but those in the hands of our soldiers, nor ammunition but that in their cartridge-boxes, nor shops for repairing arms or fixing ammunition, the effect of our keeping the field would be, not to harm the enemy, but to complete the devastation of our country and ruin of its people.” Any further continuation of it would be “the greatest of human crimes.” Davis wearily gave him permission to open negotiations with Sherman, and on April 14 Johnston sent his note through the lines, begging to be given the same terms Grant had given Lee.34

Another two hundred miles south, in Charleston harbor, an immense crowd of Federal soldiers and New York celebrities had gathered in the ruins of Fort Sumter to watch Major General Robert Anderson once more raise the same flag he had taken down four years before, to the day.