Meanwhile, 450 miles to the south of Richmond in Savannah, Georgia, Sherman had been contemplating his next move and corresponding with Grant about the possibilities. Grant initially wanted Sherman to leave an adequate garrison in Savannah and ship the rest of his force by sea to join Grant in Virginia, but Sherman pointed out that it would take months to assemble the necessary shipping to transport his sixty thousand men to Virginia. As an alternative, he proposed to march his force north more than four hundred miles through the Carolinas and southern Virginia to join Grant outside Petersburg. Along the way his troops would wreak the sort of infrastructure damage they had done in Georgia and demoralize the civilian population. Grant gave his approval.
Sherman’s troops were more than ready for such an operation. Their letters and diaries were virtually unanimous in expressing their longing to visit South Carolina. There secession had been born, and because of secession these men had spent the past three or four years living the hard life of soldiers and seeing many of their comrades killed or maimed. Many wrote during the weeks in Savannah of the debt they owed the Palmetto State and were eager to repay. The soldiers had been on their best behavior in Savannah, but Sherman knew it would be different once they crossed into South Carolina. “I almost tremble for [South Carolina],” he wrote, “but feel she deserves all that seems in store for her.”
On February 1, two days before Lincoln and Seward met with the Confederate commissioners at Hampton Roads, Sherman’s troops began their advance. As in Georgia they marched in two separate wings. The right was the Army of the Tennessee under Howard, comprised of the Fifteenth and Seventeenth corps. The left, newly named the Army of Georgia, was commanded by Henry W. Slocum and composed of the Fourteenth and Twentieth corps. This was to be a much different campaign than the previous one however. The March to the Sea had occurred in a season when good weather was to be expected and had enjoyed mostly good weather. The Carolinas Campaign would be carried out in the rainiest season of the year and would lead right through the low-country swamps. Whereas the campaign in Georgia had generally paralleled the major streams, that in the Carolinas would run perpendicular to all the rivers in those states. The troops would lay scores of miles of corduroy road to accommodate their wagons and would wade hip deep in cold water for miles at a time crossing the flooded swamps.
The Carolinas Campaign also differed from the March to the Sea in that regular Confederate troops attempted to oppose Sherman’s march through the Carolinas. On February 3 a Confederate division of 1,200 men took advantage of overwhelming terrain advantages in trying to stop the Seventeenth Corps from crossing the Salkehatchie Swamp. Two brigades of Federals waded the swamp, sometimes under Confederate fire, and then outflanked the Rebels, forcing them to retreat. The same pattern was repeated again and again as Sherman’s supremely confident veterans overcame natural barriers and steadily increasing numbers of Confederates with seeming ease. Joseph Johnston later wrote that when he heard of the progress of Sherman’s men through the South Carolina swamps in winter, driving Confederate defenders before them, he became convinced that “there had been no such army since the days of Julius Caesar.”
As anticipated, the soldiers destroyed much property in South Carolina. Besides feeding themselves and their draft animals on the produce of the land and also constantly renewing their stock of draft animals at the expense of the farms they passed, they burned many more houses than they had in Georgia. An occupied house was usually safe, but most South Carolinians had fled, leaving their houses empty and thus consigning them to the flames. Even in South Carolina the soldiers did not kill, rape, or otherwise abuse civilians. Day by day Union foraging parties ranged for miles on either side of the army, gathering food supplies and skirmishing with Confederate troops as necessary. Foragers sometimes took over abandoned grist mills and ran them for a day or two, grinding foraged grain until the main column caught up with them. Then they turned over their stock of flour and ranged out ahead again.
Falling back ahead of the steadily advancing Federals were Confederate units released from coastal duty or detached from various other commands. The remnants of the Army of Tennessee were soon on their way to the Carolinas to confront once again their old foes in the western Union armies, now advancing up the eastern seaboard. Commanding the Confederate cavalry opposing Sherman was South Carolina planter grandee Wade Hampton, detached from Lee’s army, where he had led the cavalry after Stuart’s demise.
Hampton was determined that no South Carolina cotton should fall into the hands of Sherman’s Yankees and gave orders for his troopers to set fire to all stocks of cotton in advance of the Union troops. This sometimes created odd situations. When the Federals marched into the town of Orange, South Carolina, they found its business district already in flames, which had spread from the cotton warehouses Hampton’s men had torched. The bluecoats pitched in and helped the townsmen put out the fires. Then they removed the remaining unburned cotton bales from the warehouses, hauled them out a safe distance into the fields, and burned them. Sherman’s men were traveling light and could not transport the bulky, heavy cotton bales. They invariably burned any that Hampton’s men missed.
But Hampton’s men were engaging in another practice far less innocuous. Sherman’s men began to come upon the remains of foraging parties that had been surrounded by superior forces, captured, and then murdered. Some had their throats cut. Others were hanged. Many had crudely lettered signs placed on or with them with statements such as “Death to Foragers.” Foraging was well within the laws and customs of war. Murdering prisoners was not, and Sherman sent a letter to Hampton protesting the murders and asking if they were officially authorized. Hampton responded with a letter of his own, admitting that murdering prisoners was now his official policy and defending it as within his rights. The only way to stop such behavior was to retaliate, so Sherman ordered that henceforth a Confederate prisoner in his army’s possession face a firing squad for each forager found murdered. The Federals carried out that grim step precisely once. The Rebel prisoner who drew the short straw was a middle-aged man, the father of several children, and had recently been conscripted. Thereafter no further retaliation took place, and Hampton’s men went on murdering captured Federals literally up until the final days of the war.
On February 17 Sherman’s troops marched into Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, past smoldering piles of half-burned cotton that Hampton’s troopers had at least dragged into the streets before torching. That night high winds rose and fanned the heaps into flame, which spread to nearby buildings. Some of the Union soldiers had become drunk on liquor they found in the city and were determined to burn Columbia, as were some of their entirely sober comrades. Nor were they the only ones bent on conflagration that night. By many accounts, recently freed slaves as well as escaped prisoners from another of the infamous Confederate prison pens that had, until a few days before, been just outside of town, also engaged in setting fires, which sprang up at dozens of locations around the city.
Thousands of Union soldiers participated in the battle to fight the fires that night, both in units assigned to the task and as volunteers who hurried in from their camps outside of town. Meanwhile, some of their comrades with opposite intentions cut fire hoses and otherwise hindered the efforts to fight the fires. When the wind finally shifted and the fires went out, about one-third of Columbia, chiefly the business district, was in ashes or smoldering ruins. Among the relatively small number of residences to burn was Wade Hampton’s palatial mansion, one of several he owned. First Baptist Church, scene of the convention that had declared South Carolina’s secession almost four years before, escaped the flames. According to legend, the church’s groundskeeper misdirected vengeance-minded Union soldiers to a nearby Methodist church instead.
Over the days that followed, the Federals methodically destroyed everything of military value in Charleston and then, on February 20, having left adequate food supplies for the population, marched north. As Sherman’s soldiers marched away from the still-smoldering ruins of downtown Columbia, many soldiers speculated as to who or what had started the fire, but few if any would lose sleep over it. Whether they had fought the flames or lit them, Sherman’s soldiers were unanimous in their belief that the fire had been a just retribution for South Carolina’s sins.
On February 17, the same day Sherman’s troops marched into Columbia, Confederate forces, threatened by Sherman’s advance with the prospect of being cut off along the coast, evacuated Fort Sumter. The Union forces on the coast, which had been besieging and bombarding the fort for more than a year and a half, took possession of both the fort and the city of Charleston without opposition. With that, the place where Confederates had, almost four years before, fired the first shots of the war was back in Union hands.
On March 7 Sherman’s troops crossed into North Carolina. They continued to forage, as they had to in order to eat, but the extraneous house burning ceased the moment they crossed the state line. On March 23 Sherman’s columns reached Goldsboro, North Carolina, where they linked up with Schofield and his thirty thousand men. Transported by the navy to the Union-held coastal enclave on the North Carolina coast, Schofield’s army advanced to Goldsboro to reinforce and resupply Sherman, whose force now totaled more than ninety thousand men. From Goldsboro it was less than 150 miles to Grant’s and Lee’s positions around Petersburg and Richmond.
Sherman’s two great campaigns through the interior of the South, first through Georgia and then through the Carolinas, were enormously important in weakening both the ability and the will of the southern people to carry on a hopeless fight. The very fact that Sherman was able to march his troops hundreds of miles through the interior of what purported to be the Confederacy, seemingly unhindered by any efforts of the Confederate army, was evidence of the helplessness of the slaveholders’ republic. The marches did enormous damage to the Confederacy’s continued ability to support armies in the field, destroying warehouses, depots, stockpiles, factories, and hundreds of miles of railroad track.
More important, the mere presence of Sherman’s troops, even though they did not abuse civilians—perhaps all the more because they did not abuse civilians—demoralized Confederates all across the South and especially in the Confederacy’s armies. For southern boys who had given little thought to the issues of the war and enlisted simply to keep the Yankees out of their home counties, the presence of Union troops back home, methodically destroying factories and railroads and confiscating much of the food and livestock, was proof that the war was already lost. A steady trickle of desertion in Lee’s army rose steadily throughout the fall and winter months. One study of a Georgia regiment in Lee’s army revealed that the desertion rate in each company of the regiment was directly proportional to the amount of time Sherman’s troops spent in that company’s home county. More than the fall of Fort Fisher or even the operations around Petersburg, Sherman’s marches tore the heart out of the Confederacy and hastened the end of the war.
Sherman’s campaigns were also evidence that Union forces had by this time so dominated the Confederacy’s western armies as to overrun all of the South east of the Mississippi, except for the part of Virginia between Richmond and the Blue Ridge. Now the main striking power of the Union’s western armies was advancing northward, along the eastern seaboard, and was about to invade Virginia from the south. In a grand strategic sense the movement of the Union’s western armies had been a right-wing left wheel on a continental scale. On the right end of the Union line and thus the outside edge of that enormous left wheel, Grant’s own Army of the Tennessee had started out from Cairo, Illinois, at the beginning of the war; had advanced down the Mississippi Valley all the way to Vicksburg and beyond; had moved east to help secure Chattanooga and take Atlanta, then farther southeast to the Atlantic coast at Savannah; and finally moved north toward Virginia and the last enclave of the rebellion. Lee might continue to hold Richmond and its environs, but in the heartland of the Confederacy, where the really decisive action had taken place, the war was already over except for minor mopping-up operations.
Desperation steadily increased inside the Confederate capital. In the press and elsewhere in Richmond, many complained bitterly of what they saw as the mismanagement of the war. In late January the dissatisfaction boiled up to the point that the Virginia state legislature passed a resolution calling for a wholesale cabinet shake-up. The real target of the criticism was Jefferson Davis, who had throughout the war maintained rigorous personal control of every decision. The censure was most galling for Secretary of War James A. Seddon, a Virginian and a capable administrator whose office nevertheless associated him most closely, second to Davis at any rate, with all that was going badly for the Confederacy. Humiliated by the censure of his home state’s legislature, Seddon resigned on February 1. To replace him Davis chose former U.S. vice president, 1860 presidential candidate, and, more recently, Confederate general John C. Breckinridge.
The Confederate congress was also in a mood to clip the president’s wings and in that frame of mind passed legislation creating the position of general in chief of the Confederate armies. The act was tailored to win Davis’s acceptance, providing that the general in chief was to serve under the president’s command, but the clear intent was to have someone else making the decisions that would guide the Confederate war effort. Even more clearly, the man the legislators had in mind was Lee. Davis signed the bill into law January 23 and on February 6 named Lee to fill it and to continue to serve as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. The Confederate senate promptly approved the nomination. One of Lee’s first actions as general in chief was to persuade Davis to return Joseph Johnston to command, this time in charge of the Confederate forces attempting to impede Sherman’s northward march through the Carolinas. Davis reluctantly acquiesced, comforting himself with the reflection that perhaps with Lee to supervise him, Johnston would do better than he had in the past.
Desperate as might have been the step of reinstating Johnston, the Confederate president was prepared to go even farther. By early 1865 Davis was willing to consider sacrificing the institution of slavery if that was the price of survival. It was one of the strange ironies of war that white southerners who had set out to overthrow national authority in order to protect slavery were now willing to abandon slavery in order to resist national authority. Yet the Confederacy’s shortage of manpower had become so acute as to suggest the hitherto unthinkable expedient of placing rifles in the hands of slaves and using them as soldiers.
Among the first to broach the idea, a year before Davis openly embraced it, was Army of Tennessee division commander Patrick R. Cleburne, who in January read a paper on the subject to his fellow generals of that army in its winter camp near Dalton, Georgia. The Irish-born-and-raised Cleburne may not have understood fully the visceral depth of the issue of slavery in the South. Some of his listeners that evening had gone away in stunned horror, most of the rest in a towering rage. Apprised of the event, Davis ordered it hushed up.
Now, more than a year later, with Cleburne in his grave not far from Franklin, Tennessee, the situation had become sufficiently desperate that the Confederate president had come around to the late general’s point of view. “It is now becoming daily more evident to all reflecting persons,” he wrote early in 1865, “that we are reduced to choosing whether the negroes shall fight for us or against us.” Many others agreed with Davis. As early as October 6, 1864, the Richmond Examiner had come out in favor of enlisting slaves as Confederate soldiers. Others disagreed strongly despite the Confederacy’s obviously desperate plight. Former Confederate cabinet member Howell Cobb of Georgia summed up their view when he astutely noted, “The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the [Confederacy]. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”1
Nevertheless, after intense debate the Confederate house of representatives on February 20, 1865, passed an act for the enlistment of slave soldiers. The Confederate senate approved the bill on March 13 by a one-vote margin, and Davis promptly signed it. A key factor in its passage was Lee’s known advocacy of the use of black soldiers. The new law provided that slaves could be freed only with the consent both of their owners and of their home states. Davis, who at Lee’s urging lost no time in implementing the act, therefore enlisted only those slaves whose masters volunteered them for service and subsequent emancipation. By the end of March, Confederate officers had enrolled two companies, or about two hundred black soldiers, though they had not yet issued them rifles. By that time, the U.S. government had fielded some two hundred thousand black troops.
The month of March also saw Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration to a second term as president of the United States. As the Constitution provided in those days, the event took place on March 4 and, by custom, on a platform erected in front of the East Portico of the Capitol. The weather had been rainy of late, as was seasonable, and the day began under overcast skies. The sun broke through the clouds just as Lincoln stepped to the podium to give one of the most eloquent speeches of his remarkable career of public speaking. After briefly alluding to the path that had taken the nation into civil war and to the prayers of both sides to the same God, beseeching that the war might be avoided or that it might be quickly won, Lincoln concluded,
The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
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 and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.2
It was the shortest, most powerful, and most overtly religious inaugural address in the nation’s history, and it came from a president who was so reticent about his own religion that the personal beliefs of this, the most intensively studied historical figure in America’s past, remain a mystery. He had long since rejected the hard-shell Baptist faith of his parents and had been an atheist or an agnostic in his youth. In the 1850s he had come to believe in God’s existence and seemed to be seeking, but what, if anything, he found, remains unknown. Through it all, the doctrinaire predestinationism of his Calvinist upbringing lingered in his thinking in the form of a vague fatalism, something he called “the doctrine of necessity.” Man had no free will, he thought, but rather thought and did as some power, or Power, ordained he should think and do. Yet Lincoln did not act or speak consistently with that belief. In this, the most fatalistic of his public speeches, he nevertheless urged his listeners to have “firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right” and exhorted them to “strive on to finish the work we are in.”
Robert E. Lee was under no illusions as to the direction in which the war was trending. Grant’s repeated probes and stabs as part of his quasi siege of Petersburg and Richmond were steadily stretching and sapping the Army of Northern Virginia. So too was the steady—and growing—trickle of desertions. Lee knew that his army was rapidly approaching the point at which it could not stretch any farther or hold its lines any longer. He believed the Confederacy’s only remaining military option was for the Army of Northern Virginia to slip free of Grant’s grasp, abandoning Richmond, and head south to link up with Johnston’s small army in North Carolina. The combined Confederate armies would then defeat first Sherman and then Grant. In fact, this was the most forlorn of hopes. Even before Schofield reinforced Sherman, the latter’s command would still have been roughly equal to the total number of troops remaining in the ranks of Lee’s and Johnston’s armies. Nevertheless, the plan was the only card left to play. Early in March Lee notified Davis, and the president accepted the fact that they would soon have to give up Richmond.
Down in North Carolina, Johnston on March 19 launched his first major offensive operation since the Battle of Fair Oaks, just outside Richmond almost three years before. With Sherman’s forces advancing on a broad front that almost invited attack, Johnston took the bait and struck at Slocum’s army near Bentonville, North Carolina. The Confederates scored some limited initial success, but then Sherman’s veterans rallied and held their own. Howard’s Army of the Tennessee moved in to support its comrades in Slocum’s army, and had Johnston lingered a little longer before retreating or had Sherman possessed a bit more of the killer instinct, the Confederate army in North Carolina might have reached its demise there and then. As it was, in the three days of sporadic fighting, Johnston’s army suffered more than 2,600 casualties to scarcely more than 1,500 Union losses.
Back up in Virginia Lee planned to attack a Union bastion named Fort Stedman, located along Grant’s lines just east of Petersburg. If the attack was successful, Grant might have to pull back his left wing, which now extended ten miles to the southwest of Petersburg, in order to shore up his broken lines east of town. That would give Lee the opportunity to take his army and slip around the Union left to head for North Carolina and the hoped-for rendezvous with Johnston.
Lee entrusted the job to Major General John B. Gordon, now commanding the Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia. Gordon planned the operation meticulously, and the Confederates launched their assault in the predawn darkness at 4:15 a.m., March 25. Initially they had things all their own way, surprising the defenders and overrunning Fort Stedman and several smaller neighboring works. Then the attack bogged down in the disorganization that always followed the storming of defenses. Union artillery took the captured fort under heavy fire, and then a Union counterattack swept back over the captured positions, sending the surviving Confederate attackers fleeing back across no-man’s-land under deadly fire of rifles and artillery.
It was over by 8:00 that morning. Union casualties totaled about one thousand, Confederate about four times that many. Union reserves in that sector had easily repulsed the brief penetration, and Grant had had no need to shift any troops from other sectors. Lincoln arrived at Grant’s headquarters later that morning and mentioned the Battle of Fort Stedman in a cable he sent to Secretary of War Stanton informing him of his safe arrival: “There was a little rumpus up the line this morning, ending about where it began.” Such was the impact the Army of Northern Virginia made in its last great offensive.
Grant had been planning an offensive of his own, to be led by Sheridan and aimed once again at the right flank of the Confederate position around Petersburg, aiming as always toward cutting the rail lines southwest of Petersburg. Along with his cavalry, Sherman would also have the Fifth Corps. His troops moved out on March 29, swinging well to the southwest, beyond the ends of both side’s entrenchments. They clashed that first day with Confederate forces patrolling the roads and drove the Rebels back. The next day, however, saw heavy rain that turned the roads to quagmires, slowing the march. While Sheridan’s men slogged through the mud, Lee recognized the threat and shifted George Pickett’s division of infantry from the other end of the line out to a position to counter Sheridan. He also reinforced Pickett with the cavalry division of Major General W. H. F. Lee, the son of Robert E. Lee.
On the last day of March, Pickett’s command met Sheridan’s advance near Dinwiddie Court House. Though he suffered twice as many casualties as the Federals, Pickett managed to halt Sheridan’s advance and even drive the blue-jacketed troopers back a short distance. Union mistakes and unfamiliarity with the lay of the land and the location of the Confederate positions were helpful to Pickett in that day’s fighting. That night Pickett learned that a large formation of Union infantry (the Fifth Corps) was moving up from the east in support of Sheridan’s cavalry. Fearing that he would be flanked, Pickett ordered his men to fall back from their position northwest of Dinwiddie Court House.
Learning of Pickett’s withdrawal, Lee (the father) was displeased. Dinwiddie lay only about eight miles from the vital Southside Railroad, and Pickett’s force was all Lee could spare for the vital task of keeping Sheridan away from the tracks. Though Pickett had planned to fall back to a position behind Hatcher’s Run, scarcely a mile and a half from the railroad, Lee recognized that if Sheridan gained control of the key road junction known as Five Forks, three miles from the Southside, he would be in a position from which it would be almost impossible to prevent him from breaking the railroad. Lee therefore sent Pickett orders to entrench in front of the key intersection and “hold Five Forks at all hazards.”
Pickett obeyed, and his men spent the morning of All Fools’ Day digging in just south of the crossroads. By the middle of the day, Pickett felt confident enough in the strength of his position and doubtful enough as to whether Sherman would persevere in the operation after the check he had received the day before to accept an invitation from several of his fellow officers to attend a shad bake two miles to the rear. When he went, he neglected to inform subordinates of his absence, leaving his command effectively leaderless. While Pickett and his hosts enjoyed their meal of fish, Sheridan, having finally overcome the difficult terrain, struck hard at the position around Five Forks. As the Confederate lines crumbled, Pickett failed to hear the roar of battle, apparently because of unfavorable atmospheric conditions. By the time he returned to his command, it was reeling back in headlong retreat, and Sheridan held Five Forks.
Notified later that evening of the results of the fighting around Five Forks, Grant immediately recognized its significance. He ordered every cannon and mortar along the whole length of his lines to open fire on the Confederate positions and keep firing all through the night. At dawn Grant’s infantry surged forward in a mass assault all along the front. The badly thinned Confederate lines broke in multiple places. Hurrying to a breach in his own sector, Confederate corps commander A. P. Hill encountered the advancing Union troops, who shot him dead. Elsewhere Confederate defenders clung tenaciously to several key forts, delaying the Union advance.
Desperately struggling to extricate his army from the collapsing position around Petersburg and Richmond, Lee hastily wrote to Davis notifying him that the two cities would fall that day and that if the Confederate government wanted to get out, the time had come. Davis was attending services at St. Paul Episcopal Church in Richmond when the sexton quietly handed him the note from Lee. Davis silently read it, then rose and left, leaving the other congregants to guess its meaning. He supervised the hasty packing up of remaining government files, and then he and most of his cabinet boarded one of the last trains out of the city, hoping to reestablish the seat of government in Lynchburg, Virginia, a little more than one hundred miles to the west of Richmond. Back in the former Confederate capital, panic reigned and looting raged among the civilian populace as the Confederate rear guard set fire to military installations and depots to prevent their falling into Union hands. The flames spread and destroyed much of the city.
Lee succeeded in getting most of his troops out of the doomed enclave around Richmond and Petersburg and marched west, hoping to get clear of Grant’s pursuit and turn southwest and then south to link up with Johnston’s army. Lee’s army, though much depleted, was in high spirits at being out of the entrenchments and back on open roads in unspoiled countryside, the sort of environment in which the army had won its great victories under Lee two years before. If anyone in the gray-clad ranks thought the army’s demise was near, he generally kept quiet about it.
Grant was determined to make it happen. Thus far in the war no major army had been chased down after a defeat, trapped, and forced to surrender— unless one counted Pemberton’s army, which had taken refuge in Vicksburg after its defeat at Champion Hill. Lee was no Pemberton and would not hole up in a fortress for Grant to besiege. Grant would have to catch him, and he set out to do so. He ordered his troops to follow Lee immediately. Only those that had been on the east side of Richmond actually got to pass through the newly captured city. The Army of the Potomac, which had striven to take Richmond since its days under McClellan three years before, bypassed the city, marching west in hot pursuit of its old nemesis the Army of Northern Virginia. While Meade and his army followed close at Lee’s heels, Sheridan with his cavalry as well as Major General E. O. C. Ord, commanding the Army of the James in place of the finally discredited Butler, strove to pass Lee’s flanks and block his escape.
While the armies marched rapidly west, Lincoln on April 4 arrived in Richmond by boat on the James River. The city had been in Union hands less than twenty-four hours and was lightly occupied. Accompanied only by his son Tad, whose twelfth birthday this was, Lincoln went ashore at the landing and walked through the town. Alarmed at this appalling lapse of security, Porter hastily gathered a squad of armed sailors and set out after the president. While Richmond’s whites glowered resentfully or peered at him through nearly shut window blinds, the black population flocked into the streets to greet and celebrate the man they considered their deliverer from bondage. Before leaving town, Lincoln visited the Confederate White House and sat pensively in a chair Jefferson Davis had occupied not two days earlier.
That same day, April 4, Lee’s army reached Amelia Court House, on the Richmond & Danville Railroad about forty miles west-northwest of Petersburg and the same distance west-southwest of Richmond. There the elements of Lee’s army that had been in the trenches around Petersburg joined those that had been holding the lines east of Richmond. More important, however, was what had not arrived at Amelia Court House. During the evacuation of the lines, Lee had given orders for the commissary department to load supplies from the Richmond depots onto several trains and ship them out the Richmond & Danville to Amelia Court House so that the army would find them waiting when it arrived. Somehow in the confusion of that last day in Richmond, the ammunition had moved out as ordered, but the much more desperately needed rations had gone astray. Now Lee found himself with nothing to feed his hungry army. Reluctantly he gave orders for the army to spend the next twenty-four hours at Amelia while foraging parties fanned out in the vicinity to seize food. They found little enough, and by the time the army marched on again, it had lost what little lead it had over Grant’s pursuing columns.
The Confederates had gone little more than seven miles on their resumed march when they found Sheridan’s cavalry blocking the southwest fork of the road at Jetersville. With Union infantry bearing down on the rear of his army, Lee could not afford to slow his pace in order to push the cavalry out of the way. That left no option but to continue to the west, not toward Danville now, as originally planned, but toward Lynchburg. The immediate goal was Farmville, where the commissary department gave Lee to understand he could expect to meet another shipment of rations. So the Army of Northern Virginia slogged wearily onward, no longer maneuvering toward Johnston and the forlorn hope of a combination against Sherman but simply fleeing like a deer half a step ahead of the pursuing wolf pack.
The next day, April 6, Lee’s army marched by two roads, as armies always did when quick marching was necessary and parallel roads were available. Longstreet’s large corps took the southerly road while the smaller corps of Ewell and of Richard H. Anderson took the northerly. Union infantry pressed close after the rear of the columns while Union cavalry, supported by more infantry, harassed both flanks. At Rice’s Station, twelve miles beyond Jetersville, Longstreet again found Union troops, this time Ord’s Army of the James, firmly blocking any possible turn to the south toward North Carolina and Johnston’s army.
While Longstreet was busy skirmishing near Rice’s Station, Union infantry pressed so close to the rear of Ewell’s column that he had to turn at bay to hold them back. This caused the northerly of Lee’s two columns to stretch thin, as Anderson’s corps did not immediately halt. Sheridan, commanding the Union cavalry on that flank, saw the opportunity and sent two of his divisions in headlong attack. They ripped through Anderson’s column, turned, and came crashing down on Ewell’s flank and rear as his troops were fighting against Union infantry along the valley of Sayler’s Creek. Trapped, Ewell’s men surrendered in droves, and presently Ewell himself surrendered as well. In all, nearly three thousand Confederates were killed or wounded at Sayler’s Creek, and another six thousand were captured. Union losses totaled a little more than one thousand. Lee personally rallied the fleeing remnants of Anderson’s corps and borrowed troops from Longstreet to help stabilize the situation, but the debacle had cost his already badly depleted army almost a third of its strength.
“If the thing is pressed,” Sheridan wrote Grant that day, “I think that Lee will surrender.” A copy of the dispatch made its way back to Grant’s supply base at City Point, east of Petersburg, where Lincoln was anxiously awaiting news of the campaign. On April 7 the president fired off a dispatch of his own to Grant, noting Sheridan’s message and adding, “Let the thing be pressed.” Grant had every intention of doing just that. He was already conducting the most aggressive pursuit by any major army in the war, and he was not about to let up. That same day he had sent Lee a message by a flag of truce: “The result 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 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.” While he waited for a reply, he kept his troops in rapid pursuit of Lee’s dwindling force.
Lee’s army continued its desperate retreat, crossing to the north bank of the Appomattox River and setting fire to the bridges behind it. Union troops were so close on their heels, however, that they were able to extinguish the fires and follow the Rebels across the river. With the Federals in hot pursuit, Lee had to keep his troops marching rapidly through Farmville, with little time to halt and eat the rations there. One more stockpile of rations lay ahead, twenty-five miles to the west at Appomattox Station, near the town of Appomattox Court House. Yet already the delays at Farmville and at the Appomattox crossing had cost Lee precious time and allowed Sheridan, already on Lee’s left front with a combined force of cavalry and infantry, to gain ground in the race toward that destination.
On April 8, as the armies pushed west toward Appomattox Station, Grant received Lee’s reply to his note. Lee did not agree that further resistance was hopeless but expressed agreement with Grant’s desire “to avoid the useless effusion of blood.” What terms, Lee wanted to know, would Grant offer if the Army of Northern Virginia were to surrender? Grant replied immediately: “Peace being my great desire, there is but one condition I would insist upon, namely that the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified from taking up arms again against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged.” Grant suggested they could meet later that day to conclude the surrender terms.
The terms were as generous as Lee could possibly have hoped, but a note came back from the Confederate general later that day stating that he “did not intend to propose the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, but to ask the terms of your proposition.” Yet Lee still proposed to meet for a discussion with Grant. Grant was disappointed. This looked like another attempt to draw him into broader negotiations involving some kind of political agreement as Davis had attempted to set up in January and Lincoln had repeatedly warned Grant to avoid. He determined not to meet with Lee and resigned himself to continued military operations.
While the notes made their way back and forth the rival forces continued their rapid march to the west. By the evening of that Saturday, April 8, Sheridan’s cavalry had won the race to Appomattox Station. George Armstrong Custer’s division seized the supply trains there and burned them. The rest of Sheridan’s command moved up, blocking Lee’s route west toward Lynchburg and continued flight. The Confederate commander held a council of war with his generals that night to discuss what options remained open to the army. They agreed on a final breakout attempt. If nothing but Union cavalry blocked their path, they ought to be able to push it aside. With Longstreet’s corps providing the rear guard, Gordon’s infantry, supported by Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry, would attempt to break through at dawn the next day, Palm Sunday.
Before the Confederate attack stepped off that morning, Grant was up and writing his reply to Lee’s message of the day before. He had, he said, “no authority to treat on the subject of peace,” that is, a comprehensive agreement between the two governments. He would accept the surrender of Lee’s army if it were offered. Otherwise the fighting must go on.
The fighting flared again early that morning as Gordon’s men launched the Army of Northern Virginia’s last advance. In front of Gordon’s advancing line of battle, a skirmish line of dismounted Union cavalrymen fired and fell back, a process they repeated as the Confederate advance continued. Then Gordon’s men topped a ridge and beyond it saw solid ranks of Union infantry, the Twenty-Fourth and Fifth corps, which had arrived after a hard march to support Sheridan’s troopers. The last Rebel attack stopped almost as soon as it began, as the Confederate officers recognized at once that they, the Army of Northern Virginia, were finally checkmated. “There is nothing left for me to do but to go and see General Grant,” Lee said when informed of the situation Gordon had encountered, and then added, “and I would rather die a thousand deaths.” He sent a flag of truce to arrange a meeting with Grant.
Considerable confusion followed. Headquarters were in motion, and at any given moment it was not easy to know the whereabouts of the commanding generals. The armies were already in contact, with Union forces even then beginning to move into position for attacks that would have overrun what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia. With some difficulty, Confederate staff officers got word to Grant as well as to other Union commanders on the opposite side of the Army of Northern Virginia, where Meade was eagerly preparing to launch a final assault that promised to be much different from all the doomed assaults the Army of the Potomac had staged over the past four years. With difficulty, the bloody finale was avoided. Staff officers arranged a meeting to take place in the home of Wilmer McLean in the village of Appomattox Court House. In a war full of ironies, the final one was that McLean had moved to this out-of-the-way settlement because two major battles had brought war to his front yard at his former residence near Manassas Junction. Now the final act of the war in Virginia was coming to his front parlor.
They met early that afternoon. Lee arrived early, accompanied by three staff officers. Grant had farther to go and arrived some time later, accompanied by Sheridan, Ord, and a number of staff officers. Having ridden hard in recent days, he was mud spattered, while Lee was resplendent in full-dress uniform. Grant and Lee had not met since the Mexican War, and Grant now tried to make a bit of small talk to ease the tension for Lee. He mentioned that he remembered Lee from Mexico, but Lee could not recall the slightly built young lieutenant of the Fourth Infantry.
Lee suggested that they proceed to business, and Grant gave Lee his written terms. They were even more generous than Grant had indicated in his note of the previous day. Not only would the members of the Army of Northern Virginia be paroled, but the terms of the agreement specifically protected them from future prosecution for what they had done the past four years. Military equipment was to be handed over, but officers were expressly permitted to retain their sidearms. Grant would not require Lee to acknowledge his defeat by formally yielding his sword to him at the surrender ceremony. Lee asked if the Confederate cavalrymen and artillerymen could keep their horses, which would soon be needed at home for the spring planting, and Grant readily agreed. The Union general went on to offer to send enough rations to Lee’s camps to feed his entire army, and Lee gratefully accepted.
With that, the meeting ended, and the two commanders returned to their armies. Grant allowed his men no cheering or noisy celebration. “The Confederates were now our countrymen,” he later explained, “and we did not want to exult over their downfall.” At the formal surrender ceremony three days later, Brigadier General Joshua L. Chamberlain, commanding the Union troops detailed to conduct the proceedings, gave his men the order “Present Arms” as the Confederates marched up, saluting the courage and fortitude of foes they had fought for four years. The former Rebels returned the salute, laid down their rifles as required, and marched away.
When the war ended in Virginia, it was essentially over everywhere else because by the end of the war, Virginia was all that was left of the Confederacy. While Lee and his army had clung tenaciously to their enclave in the Old Dominion State, Union power had so thoroughly crushed Confederate strength throughout the rest of the South that by the time Lee surrendered, all that remained for Union forces in the rest of what had been the Confederacy was mopping up residual pockets of resistance. These dissolved quickly as other Confederate forces surrendered on learning of the outcome at Appomattox. Johnston and Sherman finalized the surrender of the former’s army on April 26, and Confederate General Richard Taylor surrendered the remainder of Confederate forces east of the Mississippi on May 4. Confederate forces west of the Mississippi officially surrendered on May 26. Jefferson Davis remained on the lam until May 10, when Union cavalry apprehended him near Washington, Georgia. Throughout these weeks, men continued to shoot each other, in small numbers, as they would do throughout the twelve-year period of quasi peace that followed, but the clash of armies was over.
On the evening of April 11, Lincoln made a speech from a window of the White House to a jubilant crowd that gathered on the lawn and semicircular drive below. While his son Tad held a light nearby, the president read from a prepared script. This was a glad occasion, he observed, as the fall of Richmond and the surrender of Lee’s army gave “hope of a righteous and speedy peace.” In all of this, he admonished, “He from whom all blessings flow [i.e., God], must not be forgotten.” As for himself, Lincoln disclaimed any credit for the recent events, giving it instead of Grant and his army.
Lincoln warned that the coming years would be “fraught with difficulty.” Northerners who may have agreed on restoring the Union and even freeing the slaves disagreed strongly about what it would take to place the southern states back in what Lincoln called their “proper practical relation” to the rest of the Union and its people, and they even disagreed as to what that “proper practical relation” would look like. Lincoln defended the beginnings he had made in reconstructing southern state governments and said future plans should remain flexible. He hoped, however, that former black soldiers, at least, as well as other “very intelligent” blacks, would be granted the vote.
At least one of Lincoln’s listeners was enraged by his endorsement of blacks voting. Prominent actor John Wilkes Booth was in the crowd that night. A bitter racist, Booth turned angrily to his companion David Herold. “That means nigger citizenship,” Booth hissed. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through.” A few minutes later, as they left the White House grounds, Booth said to another associate, Lewis Powell, “That is the last speech he will ever give.”
At twenty-six Booth was the youngest of the four actors in his renowned family. With black hair, striking black eyes, and athletic figure, Booth was celebrated by some as the most handsome man in the country and was said to be quite a favorite with the ladies. He was also known for his energetic acting, including occasional leaping stage entrances. Less well known was the fact that Booth was a Confederate sympathizer who hated blacks, abolitionists, and, most of all, Abraham Lincoln. During the war Booth had served as part of a network of Confederate agents in the Washington area. For the past few months, as the Confederacy tottered toward its end, Booth had headed a conspiracy of which both Herold and Powell were members to kidnap Lincoln and spirit him to Richmond. Whether this was an official Confederate operation remains disputed. After Appomattox, the plan changed, at least in Booth’s mind, from kidnapping to assassination.
On the morning of Good Friday, April 14, Booth learned that the President and Mrs. Lincoln, as well as General and Mrs. U. S. Grant, would be sitting in the presidential box at Ford’s Theater that night for the play Our American Cousin. Booth saw his chance. Throughout the day, while Lincoln held a cabinet meeting and then went for a pleasant, lighthearted carriage ride with his wife, the first such in years, Booth made preparations to assassinate the president that night while he watched the play. Two of Booth’s accomplices were to assassinate the vice president and secretary of state, at their separate dwellings, thus decapitating the U.S. government. Other conspirators were ready to aid the three assassins’ escape, and they could also rely on the Confederate espionage network in surrounding Maryland.
The Lincolns were late arriving at the theater that evening, and with them were not Ulysses and Julia Dent Grant but rather Mary Todd Lincoln’s young friend Clara Harris and her fianceé, Major Henry Rathbone. The general had begged off at the urging of his wife, who had recently been offended by one of Mary Todd Lincoln’s increasingly frequent jealous tirades toward any woman who came near her husband. Miss Harris and her fianceé were last-minute replacements. The actors paused as the president and his party entered and made their way up to the dress circle, or first balcony, and then around to the enclosed presidential box, overlooking the right-hand side of the stage as the audience viewed it. The orchestra played “Hail to the Chief,” and, with the president and his companions in their seats, the play resumed.
Booth knew the piece well, a comedy about a gold-digging British mother and daughter and the American man they mistakenly believed to be heir to a great fortune. In act 3, scene 2, would come a point when the only actor left on stage would bawl out a string of humorous insults directed at the recently exited actress portraying the mother. A roar of laughter was guaranteed to follow, and that would be Booth’s moment. As the scene began, Booth silently crept into the presidential box, behind its occupants and shielded from the view of the audience except for perhaps a few seated in the dress circle on the far side of the stage, but their attention was directed to the action below, as was that of the Lincolns and their guests. It was about 10:11 p.m.
Holding his loaded and cocked, single-shot .44-caliber Deringer pistol, Booth edged closer to Lincoln’s back, close enough to have reached out and touched the president, as actor Harry Hawk, in the role of Asa Trenchard, now held the stage alone and led up to his roundhouse denunciation of the avaricious Mrs. Mountchessington. “Don’t know the manners of good society, eh?” bellowed Hawk. “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal, you sockdologizing old mantrap.”
As the house rang with laughter, few theatergoers noticed the muffled report of the pistol or the puff of white powder smoke in the presidential box. In the seconds that followed, however, more of them became aware of what appeared to be a scuffle in the presidential box. Major Rathbone stepped toward Booth, who slashed the officer’s arm with a large knife, then clambered over the rail and leaped to the stage. Catching one of his spurs on the bunting, he landed awkwardly and stumbled. Limping to center stage he waved his knife and shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis”—so always to tyrants. It was the state motto of Virginia and supposedly what Brutus had said when he killed Julius Caesar. Booth may also have added, “The South is avenged.” Accounts vary. Then he turned and fled, slashing wildly and ineffectually at the terrified Hawk, who was only too eager to get out of his way. Offstage and out a back door of the theater went the assassin, then into the alley, where a horse was waiting for him. Hurriedly mounting despite the pain of what would turn out to be a broken bone in his lower leg, he was off for the Maryland countryside. The crowd, some of whom still thought that the whole bizarre spectacle was part of the evening’s entertainment, had been too stunned to react.
Into the shocked moment of silence that followed came Major Rathbone’s shout, “Stop that man!” and Clara Harris’s cry, “He has shot the President!” Another moment of speechless silence, and then pandemonium broke loose. Among the bedlam, three off-duty army surgeons made their way to the box to tend Lincoln’s wound. The bullet entered behind the president’s left ear and lodged behind his right eye. A brief examination was all that was needed to show these men, who shared vast experience in gunshot wounds, that the president could not live more than a few hours. Believing the half-mile carriage ride on Washington’s rutted streets might cause the president’s immediate death, they carried him out of the crowded theater and across the street to the boardinghouse of William Peterson. There at 7:22 the next morning Lincoln died without having regained consciousness since the shooting.
At about the same time that Booth shot Lincoln, his accomplice Powell bluffed his way into the Seward house with the false story of being a delivery-man for a pharmacy. The secretary of war had recently suffered severe injury in a carriage accident and was confined to bed. Forcing his way through the house and into Seward’s sickroom, Powell pistol-whipped the secretary’s grown son, Frederick, and attacked the helpless man in his bed, stabbing him several times but failing to kill him. The brave resistance of Seward’s male nurse, an army sergeant, as well as his other grown son, and the screams of Seward’s daughter, which threatened to bring rescuers to the house, finally persuaded the hulking Powell to flee. George Atzerodt, whom Booth had assigned to assassinate Vice President Johnson at his room at the Kirkwood House, instead spent the night in a bar getting drunk.
Lincoln’s death called forth a mighty wave of anger and grief throughout the North. Thousands filed past his casket as it lay in state under the rotunda of the Capitol. Hundreds of thousands more paid their respects at the many cities and towns where his funeral train paused in its twelve-day trip back to Springfield, retracing the roundabout route of Lincoln’s journey from the Prairie State to Washington for his first inauguration little more than four years before. On the way, Lincoln lay in state in Philadelphia, New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Chicago—eleven cities in all. And between cities, among the small towns and farmlands not meriting formal stops, additional thousands of Americans stood with bowed heads along the railroad right-of-way as the brightly polished funeral train, draped in mourning and decorated with U.S. flags and a portrait of Lincoln just below the headlight, rolled by at a stately twenty miles per hour.
The anger was directed toward anyone whom people saw as being behind the assassination or in some way responsible for it or potentially profiting from it. The feeling was most dangerous among the hardhanded midwestern soldiers who filled the ranks of Sherman’s armies, then encamped not far from Raleigh, North Carolina, while their commander negotiated for the surrender of Johnston’s Confederate army. The Army of the Tennessee, the most consistently successful of the Union armies, had more regiments from Lincoln’s home state of Illinois than from any other. On the night news arrived of the assassination, a large body of its troops set out in a blind rage with the purpose of laying the capital city of North Carolina in ashes. Even an appeal from John Logan, their favorite general, who had led them to victory at the Battle of Atlanta, went unheeded. Logan finally had to deploy a battery of artillery and threaten to blast his own men with canister before they would turn back. A number of soldiers wrote in diaries and letters that if the surrender negotiations should fall through and the war continue a few more weeks, the South would feel the hard hand of war to a degree not previously imagined. Fortunately, it never came to that. Many southerners also expressed sadness at Lincoln’s murder if for no other reason than that it would obviously lead to much harsher treatment for the conquered South.
Booth and his accomplices were the subjects of an unprecedented manhunt, with massive rewards offered for information leading to their apprehension. After his escape from Washington immediately after the crime, Booth joined fellow conspirator David Herold and made his way southeastward through a part of Maryland in which support for the Confederacy had been strong, receiving help at several points along the way from members of the former Confederate espionage network. Dr. Samuel Mudd set Booth’s broken leg early on the morning of April 15, while Lincoln still clung to life back at the Peterson House. Booth and Herold crossed the Potomac by boat on the night of April 23 and continued their journey south, still aided by members of the Confederate espionage ring of which Booth had been part. Tips from various sources led searching Union cavalry three nights later to the farm of Richard H. Garrett, south of the Rappahannock River in Caroline County, Virginia, where Booth and Herold were staying under aliases. Cornered in Garrett’s tobacco barn, Herold came out and surrendered, but Booth, brandishing a revolver and visible through the slats in the building’s semiopen sides, refused and was fatally shot by one of the cavalrymen.
In addition to Herold, seven more of Booth’s accomplices were rounded up in the days following the assassination and subsequently tried and convicted. Herold, Powell, Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt, whose Washington boardinghouse had been the headquarters for the espionage ring and for the Lincoln murder conspiracy, were hanged in Washington that summer. The others received prison sentences, all of which concluded with their pardon in 1869 by Andrew Johnson.
The final surrender of Confederate troops east of the Mississippi took place at Citronelle, Alabama, on May 4, the same day Lincoln was buried up in Springfield. On May 10 Union cavalry captured Jefferson Davis, and President Johnson issued a proclamation stating that armed resistance was at an end, though the last skirmish between organized troops of the Union and Confederacy did not take place until May 12, at Brazos Santiago, Texas. On May 23 the Army of the Potomac paraded through the streets of Washington, between sidewalks packed with cheering citizens. The event was known as the Grand Review, and it continued the next day when Sherman’s western armies paraded through Washington to a similar heroes’ reception. The conventional war—the war of waving flags, marching armies, and thundering cannon—was over. But the conflict to shape the society that would emerge from the great struggle was only beginning.