On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee’s 27,000 gaunt, exhausted soldiers trudged into the village of Appomattox Court House in southern Virginia to find the road ahead of them blocked by thousands of Union cavalrymen. Almost simultaneously, a courier arrived with a message from fleeing President Jefferson Davis, declaring he hoped to fight on. “Tell the President that the war is ending just as I have expected it would from the first,” Lee replied. The words add retrospective depth to Robert E. Lee’s inner anguish when he refused command of the Union army in 1861.
Pursuing Lee’s men was a 120,000-man Union army led by stumpy General Ulysses S. Grant. “Sam” Grant had recovered from his near defeat at Shiloh to win crucial victories in the western theater. President Lincoln had made him the Union army’s commander in chief in March 1864. Like Lee he was a West Point graduate, but his career in the Union army before the war had been undistinguished.
What would the country think if he surrendered, Lee asked his staff officers? One tear-choked young aide replied, “There has been no country, General, for a year or more. You are the country to these men.”
Lee’s thirty-year-old artillery commander, General Edward Porter Alexander, spoke for the younger officers. “Why not disband the army, order the men to scatter like rabbits and partridges in the bushes?”
Here was a moment when a word of assent from Lee would have launched a guerilla war that might have lasted for decades. “The men would have no rations,” Lee said. “They’d have to rob and plunder.”
“A little more blood or less now makes no difference,” Alexander persisted. “Spare the men who have fought under you for four years the mortification of having to ask Grant for terms and have him say unconditional surrender . . . General—spare us the mortification of that reply!”
Unconditional surrender was the merciless terms that the abolitionists in Congress were recommending. Although it was sometimes invoked when demanding the surrender of a fort or a city—Grant had used it twice in his victories over Confederate armies in the West—it had not been invoked in negotiating peace between warring nations since Rome had demanded it of Carthage in 126 BC.
“General Grant will not demand unconditional surrender,” Lee assured Alexander. “He will give us as honorable terms as we have a right to expect.”
West Point’s spirit of brotherhood played a part in Lee’s response. Far more influential were words that President Abraham Lincoln had spoken on March 4, 1865, when he was inaugurated for a second term:
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.
Whether General Lee had read these words, or heard only fragments of them, we do not know. But we can be sure that even fragments would have stirred a profound response in a man who, more than any other soldier, personified the divisions of heart and mind that had begun the war. We know that General Grant had heard the words. In addition, he had conferred with President Lincoln on April 3, when the president visited Richmond after Lee’s army had retreated from the wrecked Confederate capital.
Grant and Lee met in the Appomattox home of man named McLean. After they chatted briefly, Lee asked if Grant was ready to discuss surrender terms. Grant’s reply was succinct and simple. The surrendered men would be paroled and “disqualified from taking up arms again.” Once they gave up their weapons and ammunition, they would be free to return to their homes. They would not be “disturbed by the United States authority” as long as they observed their paroles.
Lee replied with a request. Could the cavalrymen and artillerymen keep their horses? They all owned them privately. Grant instantly agreed. Anyone who claimed a horse or mule would be allowed to take it home “to work their little farms.”
“This will have the best possible effect upon my men,” Lee said. “It will be very gratifying and it will do much toward conciliating our people.”
Next Lee confessed his men were close to starvation. Grant turned to his commissary general, who was sitting nearby. Within hours, fresh beef, salt, hard bread, coffee, and sugar were flowing into the Confederate lines. As the food arrived, Union army bands began playing and artillery batteries fired victory salutes. General Grant ordered an immediate halt to these celebrations. “The rebels are our countrymen again,” he said.1
• • •
On the evening of April 11, 1865, two days after General Lee surrendered, a jubilant crowd gathered in front of the White House and began calling for President Lincoln. Noah Brooks, the reporter for the Sacramento Daily Union who was visiting the president, described the throng as “a vast sea of faces, illuminated by the lights that burned in the festal array of the White House, and stretching far out into the misty darkness.”
Lincoln appeared at the window over the mansion’s main entrance, a place from which he and other presidents often spoke. The crowd fell silent. Instead of a few random remarks, Lincoln had a prepared speech. It swiftly became apparent that he was using this opportunity to begin discussing his postwar policy toward the defeated South.
Brooks held an oil lamp so Lincoln could read the speech, while the president’s young son, Tad, grasped the pages as they were read and fluttered to the floor. Lincoln began by expressing his hope for a “righteous and speedy peace.” Then he turned to what he called “the re-inauguration of national authority” in the South. He warned his listeners that this might be a difficult task. “We, the loyal people, differ among ourselves” about how to reconstruct the shattered Union.
Lincoln was aware that a number of abolitionist Republican politicians in Congress did not agree with the policy of forgiveness he had enunciated in his second inaugural speech. Senators Ben Wade of Ohio and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan and their allies wanted to prosecute Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederate leaders for treason, and hang them. Then they planned to rule the South as a captured province, divided into military districts. Senator Wade had made it clear that he had no hesitation about forcing Lincoln to accept this policy. Senators were not the president’s “mere servants, obeying everything that we may ascertain to be his wish and will,” Wade had snarled.
Lincoln was now in even stronger disagreement with Wade and his circle. The president’s visit to ravaged Richmond had appalled him. Southern civilization had been all but eradicated. There were no courts, no banks, no police. Union army officers told the president that other southern cities were not in much better condition.
Along with restoring the government of the Southern states as swiftly as possible, Lincoln told his listeners that he wanted to give African Americans the right to vote. He planned to begin by conferring the privilege “on the very intelligent and those who had served our cause as soldiers.”
Those words showed how far Abraham Lincoln had travelled from the politician who had assured Illinois voters in 1858 that he did not think blacks and whites could live together, and that colonization was the only solution to racial peace. Now he was saying he favored black participation in the electorate, and by implication full citizenship for all the ex-slaves when education made them ready for its privileges and duties.2
Among the listeners in the crowd was the mustachioed actor John Wilkes Booth and burly Lewis Paine, his partner in an already simmering plot against Lincoln’s life. When the president said he wanted to give the vote to blacks, Booth turned to Paine and muttered: “That’s the last speech he’ll ever make.”3
• • •
Listening to Lincoln’s words at a nearby White House window was a visitor who was a link to George Washington. Adolphe, the Marquis de Chambrun, was a grandson of the Marquis de Lafayette through his daughter Virginie. Chambrun had come to Washington, DC, in February 1865 as an informal representative of the French government. Relations between America and France had been strained by Emperor Louis Napoleon’s decision to set up a puppet government in unstable Mexico, headed by Archduke Maximilian of Austria. The venture was a foolish fragment of the dream of a New World empire that had led Napoleon Bonaparte to his ruinous invasion of Saint-Domingue (Haiti).4
Chambrun had charmed Mrs. Lincoln and become part of the White House’s inner circle. Mary Lincoln had invited the Frenchman to accompany them when she and the president visited ruined Richmond. Chambrun had seen the liberated slaves of that city singing joyous hymns in the street and falling on their knees with cries of gratitude to the president. It was a remarkable fulfillment of Lafayette’s dream of joining George Washington in eliminating slavery from the republic they had fought to create.5
In early 1862, Lincoln had testified to another link to Washington when he warmly approved a proposal to read the founder’s Farewell Address aloud in Congress. It was a perfect way to underscore the president’s decision to make the primacy of the Union the central reason for his decision to resist southern secession. His 1863 proclamation, emancipating the slaves of the seceded states, was intimately linked in Lincoln’s mind with the war powers Washington and his collaborator James Madison had made sure that the Constitution gave the president.
After his reelection in 1864 made it clear that the war was almost won, Lincoln took a step that confirmed his deep personal commitment to freedom for all Americans. He backed and even encouraged abolitionists in Congress who called for an amendment to the Constitution banning slavery from all the states of the American Union. Lincoln welcomed its passage, because it removed once and for all the possibility that sometime in the future a hostile Supreme Court might declare the Emancipation Proclamation unconstitutional. The amendment, Lincoln said, was “a King’s cure for all the evils” of slavery.
• • •
As Lincoln ended his speech, people in the audience called out for a song. An army band had serenaded them for a half hour before the president appeared at the White House window. Many if not most of the listeners expected the president to choose one of the war’s hymns to vengeance: “John Brown’s Body” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
“Dixie,” Lincoln said. He was telling the crowd that the South’s favorite song (and one of his favorites) belonged to everyone now. It was another way of saying America was one country again.
• • •
On April 12, Lincoln met with his cabinet and discovered several of them disapproved of his policy of forgiveness toward the South. Ohio-born Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who shared many abolitionist views, was especially vehement. “It would surely bring trouble with Congress and the people would not sustain you,” he growled. The president assured him and the other doubters that he would do his best to meet their objections.6
Two days later, Lincoln convened another cabinet meeting and resumed discussing his policy. This time everyone, even the short-tempered Stanton, agreed with his approach. Frederick Seward, the son of the secretary of state, who sat in on the meeting for his ailing father, reported that there was “a unanimously kindly feeling toward the vanquished Confederates and a hearty desire to restore the peace and safety of the South with as little harm as possible to the feelings and property of the inhabitants.”
General Ulysses Grant was at this cabinet meeting. Lincoln nodded with approval as the general told how he had advised Robert E. Lee’s soldiers to go back to their homes and families, and promised they would not be harassed or prosecuted if they did no more fighting.
This change of mood, if not of mind, suggests Lincoln the politician had been at work, reassuring the cabinet critics that he would listen to their advice in the months to come. The president ended the discussion by noting that Congress was not in session. If he and the cabinet were “wise and discreet,” they could get the governments of the southern states in successful operation before the legislators returned in December. “We can accomplish more without them,” he said. There were too many men among them who had “good motives” but were full of “hate and vindictiveness.” There was no doubt that he was talking about Senator Wade and his fellow abolitionists.7
• • •
In Charleston, South Carolina, on that same day, April 14, 1865, abolitionists celebrated raising the American flag over Fort Sumter. The city had been in Union hands since General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army had occupied it after their destructive march through Georgia. The chief speaker was the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Beside him on the platform sat William Lloyd Garrison, the man who had launched the abolitionist movement.
Beecher had been a strong supporter of the Union cause throughout the war. Garrison too, while not always able to restrain his sharp tongue, had backed the president after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. A grateful Lincoln had yielded to their desire to go to Charleston for the symbolic flag raising.
Henry Ward Beecher paid no attention whatsoever to Lincoln’s inaugural plea for malice toward none and charity towards all. “I charge the whole guilt of this war upon the ambitious, educated, plotting political leaders of the South,” he roared. There could be no lasting reunion without the kind of retribution that the God of the Old Testament so often visited upon the enemies of ancient Israel. “God shall say: Thus shall it be to all who betray their country!”8
Nothing illustrates the psychological and spiritual limitations of the abolitionists more than this heartless speech, flung in the face of a defeated South. The seeds of a hundred years of future sectional and racial antagonism were in those words. One of their first by-products was an indictment for treason against Robert E. Lee, issued by a Federal grand jury three months later. General Grant threatened to resign as the Union army’s commander in chief and the charge was dropped.9
Late on the night of April 14, the telegraph in the Union army’s Charleston headquarters clicked words that changed the history of the nation and the world: “The President was shot in a theater tonight and perhaps mortally wounded.”
• • •
If Lincoln had lived to serve out his term, could he have overcome the abolitionist haters and maintained a policy of forgiveness that healed the wounds of the war? Would he have been able to win acceptance and equality for black Americans in both the North and the South? No one can or should minimize the hugeness of both these tasks. But one of the most important things to remember about Lincoln was the nickname his White House aides gave him: The Tycoon.10
Four years of wielding the presidency’s war powers had made him a political leader in every sense of the word: a man who was ready to master every challenge that confronted him, from winning the most terrible war in America’s history to surmounting the difficulties of peace. He had become a master at rallying a divided people at war. Now he was ready to master the even more difficult art of modifying the public mind for the politics of peace. During the war his aides placed dozens of anonymous articles in key newspapers, backing his policies. The Associated Press, coming into its own as a news source for papers everywhere, seldom published anything that opposed his views. Reporters like Noah Brooks became virtual disciples, committed to his ideals.
At least as important for meaningful reconciliation were numerous southerners who were ready to cooperate with Lincoln. None was more central to this hope than Robert E. Lee. Even before the last Confederate armies surrendered, Lee had given an interview to a northern reporter. He told the man that he was prepared “to make any sacrifice or perform any honorable act that would lead to the restoration of peace.”11
• • •
Let us close with a recollection of the potential Lincoln, the Tycoon with this southern ally, in the words of a senator who visited him on the last day of his life. The senator was used to seeing a haggard, sleepless president enduring a seemingly interminable war. On April 14, the visitor could scarcely believe his eyes. Lincoln’s “whole appearance, poise and bearing had marvelously changed,” the senator said. “He seemed the very personification of supreme satisfaction. His conversation was exhilarating.”12
The senator was looking at a triumphant Tycoon. It is heartbreaking—but also somehow inspiring—to imagine what this extraordinary man might have accomplished if he had lived. Remembering this Lincoln may persuade the Americans of the twenty-first century to achieve the central message of his legacy—and the reason for writing this book—genuine brotherhood between North and South, and between blacks and whites. An understanding of the diseases of the public mind that caused the war’s cataclysm of blood and fury is now possible, thanks to the work of generations of historians. The truth, as Lincoln once remarked, is often “the daughter of time.”
• • •
When the Marquis de Chambrun heard the news of Lincoln’s assassination, the stricken Frenchman remembered the day he and the president and Mrs. Lincoln were returning from their visit to Richmond. As they approached Washington, DC, the capitol’s looming dome reminded Mary Lincoln of her husband’s congressional critics. “This place is full of enemies,” she said.
“Enemies?” Lincoln said. He shook his head, thinking of the devastated South. “We must never use that word again.”13