The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

  He had arrived from Burkeville around midday, shortly after Wright’s infantry topped the hills overlooking Farmville from the south, and established headquarters in the local hotel, a rambling brick structure on the main street, two blocks short of where the still-burning wreckage of the town’s two bridges released twin plumes of smoke above the swollen Appomattox, now a barrier to pursuit of the Confederates, who apparently were free at last to take some badly needed rest on the far side. Couriers soon were coming and going, however, back and forth across the broad hotel veranda, and all the news was good. Yesterday’s forays along Sayler’s Creek, which had netted some 6000 butternut prisoners, had cost the attackers fewer than 1200 casualties, only 166 of them killed. Best of all, though, was the news that Humphreys was over the river, four miles below, and moving westward to deny the rebels the rest they thought they had won when they fired the bridges in their rear. He was, as Grant said later, “in a very hazardous position,” but the sound of his guns, roaring nearer and nearer from the northeast, gave evidence that his boldness was paying off. Besides, he would not stay unsupported long; Grant told Wright to throw a footbridge over the Appomattox, tied to the charred pilings of the railroad span, and use it to reinforce Humphreys as soon as possible with his whole corps. Including Crook’s troopers, who would cross by an upstream ford, close to 40,000 Federals would then be on the north bank of the river. That was twice the strength to which Lee by now had dwindled or been cut: surely enough for Wright and Humphreys to perform the task of simultaneously driving and delaying him when he continued (as he would be obliged to do, if he could get away to try) his efforts to move westward to Lynchburg, where rations were known to be waiting in abundance.

  For all its heft, this northside push involved no more than half Grant’s army, and only half his plan for Lee’s undoing. The other half — exclusive of Parke’s corps, which had been given the laborious non-combat chore of shifting one track of the Southside Railroad an inch and a half inward, all the way from Petersburg to Burkeville, to accommodate the narrower-gauged Union cars and locomotives and thus provide a high-speed supply line running close in the moving army’s rear from the high-piled docks at City Point — would move south of the Appomattox, and also westward, unimpeded, to outmarch and cut the old fox off before he reached his goal. Sheridan, in fact, after sending Crook to support the convergence on Farmville, had already set out in that direction from Sayler’s Creek this morning with his other two divisions, riding hard for Prince Edward Courthouse, a dozen miles west of Rice, on the chance that Lee might succeed in giving his pursuers the slip and pass through there, en route to Danville and a combination with Johnston. Nothing came of that, but presently a wire reached headquarters from the bandy-legged cavalry commander, who had covered better than twenty miles of winding road by early afternoon. He was moving instead to Appomattox Station, twenty-five miles out the Southside line from Farmville, to intercept eight supply trains loaded with rations Lee had ordered shipped from Lynchburg to feed his troops when they rounded the nearby headwaters of the Appomattox River. Grant was quick to act on this; indeed, had begun to act on it before he received the information, by sending Griffin after Sheridan with instructions to do all he could to keep up with the fast-riding horsemen then on their way to Prince Edward. Now he added Ord’s corps to this southside interception force, with the difference that Ord was to move by a more direct route, due west out the railroad. This too would be a 40,000-man effort, and Grant himself would go along to see that everything went as planned, leaving to Meade the supervision of the march beyond the river, until such time as the two halves, slogging westward along its opposite banks, came together near its source, like upper and nether millstones, to grind between them whatever remained by then of Lee’s bedraggled army.

  That should occur by tomorrow evening, or Sunday morning at the latest. Meantime he had little to do but wait for Wright to complete his footbridge, just up the street from the hotel, and Ord to get started out the railroad; Griffin was already west of Rice, slogging after Sheridan, and Humphreys’ guns were still booming aggressively, two or three miles beyond the river. Despite his mud-spattered clothes, which he had not been able to change since getting separated from his baggage on the twilight ride to Jetersville two nights back, Grant was in a pleasant frame of mind. “Let the thing be pressed,” Lincoln had wired him this morning, and he was proceeding to do just that, being similarly convinced that the iron was hot for striking. He saw the end in sight at last. What was more, he believed that Lee must see it, too, outnumbered two-to-one as he was by each half of the well-fed and superbly equipped army that soon would be driving him westward up the opposite bank of the dwindling Appomattox. According to Wright, who had talked with him yesterday after his capture, even so stout a fighter as Dick Ewell had confessed that the Confederate cause was lost “and it was the duty of the authorities to make the best terms they could while they still had a right to claim concessions.” To continue the conflict under present conditions, he added, “would be but very little better than murder.”

  Grant rather thought so, too, and presently said as much. Shortly before 5 o’clock, Ord and Gibbon came by headquarters for a final check with him before setting out westward, and as the conference drew to a close he suddenly fell silent, musing, then looked up, and in what Gibbon called “his quiet way,” remarked: “I have a great mind to summon Lee to surrender.” He seemed to have surprised himself almost as much as he surprised his listeners, but there was no doubt that he meant what he said, for he called at once for ink and paper and began to write accordingly.

  Headquarters Armies of the United States,

  April 7, 1865 — 5 p.m.

  General R. E. Lee,

  Commanding C. S. Army.

  General: The results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the C. S. Army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.

  Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

  U. S. GRANT, Lieutenant General,

  Commanding Armies of the United States.

  Brigadier General Seth Williams, Grant’s inspector general, charged with delivery of the message under a flag of truce, set out at once for High Bridge to cross the river there and make his way through Humphreys’ lines to Lee’s. He would have saved time, and spared himself and his orderly and their mounts two thirds of the roundabout nine-mile ride, if he had waited for the VI Corps engineers to complete their footbridge over the Appomattox. They did so by sundown, and Wright’s lead division began crossing shortly afterwards, marching three abreast up the street in front of headquarters, where Grant came out and took a seat on the veranda to watch the troops swing past “with a step that seemed as elastic,” a staffer observed, “as on the first day of their toilsome tramp.” On that day he had called them “as good an army as ever fought a battle,” and now they returned the compliment in kind. Passing thus in review, they spotted their rather stumpy, dark-bearded commander on the hotel porch, his cigar a ruby point of light in the deepening shadows, and cheered him lustily to show that whatever reservations they had felt in the past were as gone as his own. He left his chair and came to the railing, still quietly smoking his cigar, and they cheered louder at this reduction of the distance between them. When night fell, bonfires were kindled for illumination along both sides of the street. The effect was one of a torchlight parade as the men broke ranks to snatch brands from the fires, then fell back in to flourish them overhead, roaring the John Brown song while they slogged on toward the river and Lee’s army on the other side.

  Grant did not wait for the last of Wright’s cheering veterans to march past the hotel. After finishing his smoke he turned in early, retiring to a room in which the manager falsely assured him Lee had slept the night before.


  Three miles to the north, where Mahone still held his position near Cumberland Church, Captain H. H. Perry, adjutant of the brigade sent by Longstreet to reinforce the left, went forward around 9 o’clock to investigate a report that a flag of truce had been advanced by the enemy in front. He proceeded with caution, for there had been a similar incident about an hour earlier, which ended when the butternut pickets, suspecting a Yankee trick, opened fire at the first hail from the twilit woods across the way. Now here were the truce-seekers back again, if that was what they had been in the first place. The young Georgia captain picked his way carefully to a point some fifty yards in front of the lines, where he stopped amid a scattering of blue-clad dead and wounded, hit in the last assault, and called for the flag: if that was what it was. It was: for now there appeared before him, resplendent in the light of the rising moon, what he later described as “a very handsomely dressed Federal officer” who introduced himself as Brigadier General Seth Williams of Grant’s staff. Highly conscious of the contrast they presented, no less in looks than in rank — “The truth is, I had not eaten two ounces in two days, and I had my coattail then full of corn, waiting to parch it as soon as the opportunity might present itself” — Perry said later, “I drew myself up as proudly as I could, and put on the appearance as well as possible of being perfectly satisfied with my personal exterior.”

  Williams measured up to the occasion. Formerly the “efficient and favorite” prewar adjutant at West Point, including a time while R. E. Lee was superintendent, he had served McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, and Meade in the same capacity, with emphasis on his ability to celebrate the amenities. Now, as Grant’s I.G. and special envoy — despite the loss, an hour ago, of his orderly in the fire that greeted his first attempt to open communications — he demonstrated that same ability in the moonlit clearing between the lines of Humphreys and Mahone. Once the formal introductions were concluded, he produced a handsome silver flask and remarked, as Perry afterwards recalled, “that he hoped I would not think it an unsoldierly courtesy if he offered me some very fine brandy.” The Georgian, who had nothing to offer in return but the unparched corn in the tail of his coat, found himself in a dilemma. “I wanted that drink awfully,” he said later. “Worn down, hungry and dispirited as I was, it would have been a gracious godsend if some old Confederate and I could have emptied that flask between us in that dreadful hour of misfortune. But I raised myself about an inch higher, if possible, bowed and refused politely, trying to produce the ridiculous appearance of having feasted on champagne and pound cake not ten minutes before.” Williams — “a true gentleman,” his then companion would declare — returned the flask unopened to his pocket, and for this Perry was most grateful down the years. “If he had taken a drink, and my Confederate olfactories had obtained a whiff of the odor of it, it is possible that I should have caved.” Spared this disgrace, he received from Williams the letter from Grant to Lee, together with a request for its prompt delivery; after which the ragged captain and the well-groomed brigadier “bowed profoundly to each other and turned away,” each toward his own lines.

  A courier soon reached Lee’s headquarters in the cottage near Cumberland Church. Longstreet, still with his chief though the time by now was close to 10 o’clock, watched as he studied the message. There was no emotion in his face, and he passed it to his lieutenant without comment. Old Peter read the surrender request, then handed it back. “Not yet,” he said.

  Lee made no reply to that, but he did to Grant’s letter; first, to refuse acceptance of the responsibility therein assigned him for such blood as might still be shed, and second, to explore the possibility — however remote — that his adversary might be willing to reopen the Ord-Longstreet peace discussions he had broken off so abruptly the month before, disclaiming any “authority” in such matters. As soon as Old Peter went out into the night, rejoining his troops for the march that had begun to get under way at moonrise, Lee wrote his answer on a single sheet of paper and gave it to the courier to be sent across the lines.

  7th Apl ’65

  Genl

  I have recd your note of this date. Though not entertaining the opinion you express of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of N. Va. I reciprocate your desire to avoid useless effusion of blood, & therefore before considering your proposition, ask the terms you will offer on condition of its surrender.

  Very respy your obt Svt

  R. E. LEE, Genl

  Lt Genl U. S. Grant,

  Commd Armies of the U States.

  Old Peter cleared his camps well before midnight, but presently, in accordance with instructions to assume the more rigorous task of guarding the rear, halted to let Gordon take the lead on the westward march up the left bank of the Appomattox. The army thus had a head and a tail, but no middle now that the other two corps had been “dissolved” in battle and by Lee; Wise’s still sizeable brigade — practically all that remained of Johnson’s division — was assigned to Gordon, in partial compensation for his losses at Sayler’s Creek, while skeletal fragments of the other three divisions, under Pickett, Heth, and Wilcox, were attached to Longstreet, thereby rejoining comrades they had not seen since the Petersburg breakthrough sundered them, six days back. That left Richard Anderson and Bushrod Johnson troopless, and George Pickett not much better off with only sixty armed survivors; Lee solved the problem by formally relieving all three of duty, with authorization to return to their homes before reporting to the War Department. Anderson and Johnson left that afternoon, but Pickett’s orders apparently went astray. In any case he was still around, that day and the next, still nursing grievances over rejection of a report in which he had sought to fix the blame on others for his Gettysburg repulse. Lee may or may not have known about the Five Forks shad bake, a week ago today, but subsequently, when he saw his fellow Virginian ride by headquarters, ringlets jouncing, air of command intact, he reacted with dark surprise. “I thought that man was no longer with the army,” he remarked.

  Otherwise, aside from continuing hunger and fatigue, there was much that was pleasant about this sixth day’s march, especially by contrast with the five that had gone before. Not only had the weather improved, the plodding graybacks noted when the sun came up this Saturday morning, but so had the terrain, barely touched by war till now. It was a day, one pursuing Federal wrote, “of uneventful marching; hardly a human being was encountered along the way. The country was enchanting, the peach orchards were blossoming in the southern spring, the fields had been peacefully plowed for the coming crops, the buds were beginning to swell, and a touch of verdure was perceptible on the trees and along the hillsides. The atmosphere was balmy and odorous; the hamlets were unburnt, the farms all tilled.” Best of all, no roar of guns disturbed what a South Carolinian called “the soft airs, at once warm and invigorating, which blew to us along the high ridges we traversed.” Fitz Lee, whose horsemen trailed the column at a distance of two miles, reported the enemy infantry no closer to him than he was to his own, while the blue cavalry seemed equally disinclined to press the issue. Still, there was a driving urgency about the march, an apprehension unrelieved by the lack of direct pressure, and the need for it was evident from even a brief study of the map. On the left, the dwindling Appomattox soon would cease to be a barrier to whatever Union forces were in motion on the other side. A dozen miles beyond that critical point, westward across a watershed traversed by the Southside Railroad, the James River flowed northeast to reënter the tactical picture as a new barrier — one that was likely to be controlled by whichever army rounded the headwaters of the Appomattox first. If it was Lee’s, he could feed his men from the supply trains he had ordered sent to Appomattox Station, then press on next day to take shelter behind the James. If on the other hand the Federals got there in time to seize his provisions and in strength enough to block his path across the twelve-mile watershed, the campaign would be over. Alexander, the First Corps artillerist, saw this clearly. Examining on the map
the “jug-shaped peninsula between the James and the Appomattox,” he noted that “there was but one outlet, the neck of the jug at Appomattox Station.” Both armies were headed there now, north and south of the river that had its source nearby — and “Grant had the shortest road.”

  What was likely to come of this was plain enough to a number of high-ranking officers who had conferred informally about it the previous evening while waiting to set out on what they judged might well be their last march. Concluding that surrender would soon be unavoidable, they requested William Pendleton, the senior of the group, to communicate their view to Lee and thus, as Alexander put it, “allow the odium of making the first proposition to be placed upon them,” rather than on him. Neither Longstreet nor Gordon took part in the discussion, and when Pendleton told them of it next morning, seeking their endorsement, both declined. Old Peter, in fact — saying nothing of the message from Grant, which he had read the night before — was quick to point out that the Articles of War provided the death penalty for officers who urged capitulation on their commanders. As for himself, he said angrily, “If General Lee doesn’t know when to surrender until I tell him, he will never know.”

  Pendleton, who had been at West Point with Lee before leaving the army to enter the ministry, bided his time until midday, when he found his fellow graybeard resting in the shade of a large pine beside the road. Like Longstreet, after hearing him out, Lee said nothing of Grant’s message — or of his own reply, in which, by requesting terms, he had already begun the negotiations Pendleton was recommending — but rather expressed surprise at the proposal. “I trust it has not come to that,” he said sternly, even coldly. “We certainly have too many brave men to think of laying down our arms.”