ON THE CHILL and overcast morning of April 12, three days after the signing of the surrender terms, the Army of Northern Virginia was to perform its last act as a unit. It was to march up the sloping road to Appomattox Court House. There, on the outskirts of the village, where the road flattened out, each successive division was to halt, face the blue-clad Federal formations, and lay down its arms. Grant had already left this area, and Lee was closing down his headquarters; neither would be present at this ceremony, although Lee would still be with his troops when they returned to camp without their muskets.
By chance, the Union general appointed to receive the surrender, and the Confederate general who was to lead up the first of the Southern divisions, were living symbols of the distances that men had traveled to kill each other in this war. They were also representative of the diverse sources from which both North and South drew officers who had never previously served in the military.
Joshua Chamberlain of Maine, newly promoted to major general, had been a professor of religion and Romance languages at Bowdoin College. Given a leave of absence to study in Europe during the years 1862 and 1863, he had instead entered the army and risen to be colonel of the famous Twentieth Maine, winning the Congressional Medal of Honor for his defense of Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg. He had received the last of his several wounds when he was hit twice at Hatcher’s Run, just two weeks before.
Chamberlain was as fine a Union soldier as could be found; his Southern opposite number in this last necessary business was Major General John B. Gordon of Georgia, whose Second Corps had made the final doomed attack on Palm Sunday morning. This war’s start had found him, aged thirty, in the business of developing coal mines. Some of his miners formed an infantry company and elected him captain; from this totally inexperienced beginning, he had risen to be a general of exceptional ability, and was Lee’s hardest-fighting corps commander during the last year of the war. The most obvious of his many wounds was a deep gash in his thin face.
Shortly after breakfast, six thousand men of a Federal division lined up to receive the surrender. There were troops from Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania. Soon they saw the long, dispirited column of Confederates trudging up the road from the river, muskets on their shoulders for the last time. Gordon was at their head on horseback, the expression on his scarred face as crushed as those of his men. The first unit behind him was an understrength regiment of two hundred and ten men, the survivors of the Stonewall Brigade, which had started the war with forty-five hundred eager recruits. Behind them came many famous regiments, so few left in each that the red Confederate battle flags at their heads followed each other by short intervals. At a distance it looked like a parade of massed banners—to Chamberlain, watching them come, “The whole column seemed crowned with red.”
The Confederates were nearly abreast of the Union ranks. As far as they knew, the blue-clad division of their late enemies was simply there to see to it that they laid down their arms. Suddenly the Southerners heard bugles and drums. The soldiers of the United States Army were lifting their muskets to the position of Carry Arms in a salute to the Confederate States Army.
The effect was electric. Chamberlain, who had given the order to salute, watched the Confederate general react:
Gordon at the head of the column, riding with heavy spirit and downcast face, catches the sound . . . looks up . . . wheels superbly, making with himself and his horse one uplifted figure, with profound salutation as he drops the point of his sword to the boot toe; then, facing to his own command, gives word for his successive brigades to pass us with the same position of the manual,—honor answering honor. On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum . . . but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!
The Confederates halted and turned, lines of men in grey rags looking from twelve feet away into the eyes of men they had been shooting at seventy-two hours before. Chamberlain thought, “It is by miracles we have lived to see this day,—any of us standing here.”
It was the soldiers who were showing the nation how a war should be ended. No Southern poet could say more than this, from General Chamberlain:
Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood, men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond . . .
Veterans that they were, Lee’s soldiers stacked their muskets with precision and few shows of emotion, but when each regiment in succession had to give up the flag it had followed into battle, placing it on a stack of surrendered muskets, the tears and curses and cries of pain began again. Men ran out from the ranks to kiss their flags good-bye. Some tore them from their staffs and hid them among themselves as they marched off—a practice quickly stopped after consultation between Union and Confederate officers. A few regiments marched up without a banner; the flag was tucked inside someone’s tunic, or torn into a score of small secreted pieces that would become framed heirlooms in Southern houses.
The surrendering went on for six hours. When the last of the casualty-shrunken grey units marched up, a Confederate described what happened: “. . . someone in the blue line broke the silence and called for three cheers for the last brigade to surrender. It was taken up all about him by those who knew what it meant. But for us this soldierly generosity was more than we could bear. Many grizzled veterans wept like women, and my own eyes were as blind as my voice was dumb.”
As the first of Lee’s surrendered contingents marched back into their camp, feeling naked without their muskets, bayonets, and cartridge boxes, Lee and his staff were disbanding the headquarters of the Army of Northern Virginia. Later this morning Lee would give the order “Strike the tent!” So often this command to take down the tent and pack it in a wagon had been called out by Lee’s deep voice on a morning that saw great movements, and thousands dead by sunset. Now it would mean that the last reports had been received, the last orders given, and this army would cease to exist.
It was left to a Union cavalry sergeant from Massachusetts to record Lee’s departure from his army. Assigned to the detachment of horsemen who were to escort Lee and some of his staff along the road to his rented house in Richmond, this trooper found a headquarters that was, as it had been all through the war, a place of spartan simplicity. In this grove of white oaks, chestnut oaks, and Virginia pines, there were the captured tents with “U.S.” on them, and the captured ambulance that Lee used as an office. A few wagons, some horses—the only hint that some of the officers under these trees had lived on handsome plantations was the presence of several black servants who cooked, washed clothes, and chopped wood. Some had been freed by their masters before this war; others had been slaves until today.
The Union cavalry sergeant wrote that his detachment was:
. . . courteously received and asked to wait until General Lee and his staff had breakfasted and completed arrangements for their departure. We dismounted a short distance away. General Lee seated himself at a table made from a hard tack box and ate his last breakfast (consisting of hard tack, fried pork and coffee without milk), with the Army of Northern Virginia. He was dressed in a neat, gray uniform and was a splendid looking soldier.
Commanding officers of corps and divisions of the Confederate army and other officers then came to take leave of him. He was a short distance from me and his conversation was evidently words of encouragement and advice. Almost every one of the officers went away in tears. Then we mounted, and General Lee’s party started through the lines of the remnant of the Army of Northern Virginia for his home in Richmond.
Then commenced an ovation that seemed to me a wonderful manifestation of confidence and affection for this great military chieftain. From the time we left his camp till we passed the last of his regiments the men seemed to come from everywhere and the “Rebel Yell” was continuous.
The lieutenant in charge of the sixteen Union cavalrymen of the escort had been told to render whatever service Lee wished—ride with him the hundred miles to Richmond, or let him proceed by himself whenever he wished to do that. The lieutenant later noted in his diary that he “escorted them about 12 miles on the road to Richmond, which was strewn with dead mules and wreckage.” At that point Lee overtook a few soldiers of the Stonewall Brigade who, having been the first to lay down their arms in the morning, were already along the road to their homes, two hundred and fifty miles away at the far end of the Valley of Virginia. Lee took out a map he had used for less peaceful purposes and went over it with his veterans, pointing out their quickest route home. When he said good-bye to them, he told them to think of the future and not the past, and to be as loyal citizens as they had been soldiers.
Then Lee said to the Union cavalry lieutenant, “You see I am in my own country and among friends and do not need an escort. I am giving you unnecessary trouble, and now request you to withdraw your men and rejoin your command.”
That was Lee speaking as a professional officer; the lieutenant told the last of their parting: “. . . he shook my hand and wished me a safe return to my home, with tears in his eyes.”
Back at Appomattox, General Chamberlain watched the rest of the Confederate camp dissolve:
Now on the morrow, over all the hillsides in the peaceful sunshine, are clouds of men on foot or horse, singly or in groups, making their earnest way as if by the instinct of the ant, each with his own little burden, each for his own little home.