Upon the Altar of the Nation (76 page)

While the rebels knew the lenient terms of their surrender, they did not know how they would be received by the triumphant Yankees. Would they be jeered? Assaulted? The answer came soon enough as they reached the Federal column where Chamberlain and his officers waited. A bugle sounded. Immediately the Union line snapped to attention and went through the traditional manual of arms, beginning with the position of “salute,” and then back to “order arms,” and “parade rest.” Chamberlain did not command his officers to “present arms,” because that was reserved for the highest honor.

But still the command was respectful and this was not lost on Gordon. Hearing the salute, he immediately wheeled his horse and dropped the point of his sword to the boot toe, ordering his men to dip the Confederate banner and answer with the same “carry honors” as they marched, rank upon rank, past the respectful Yankees—“honor answering honor.” Chamberlain described the scene: “On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word nor whisper of vain-glorying, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!”
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Over the next few days, 28,231 soldiers were fed and paroled at Appomattox under the compassionate terms dictated by Grant. In retrospect, he had clearly exceeded his powers as general and negotiated the future of his nation.
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From the start, the political and military leaders had been closely intertwined within their respective countries, and over time, the generals had gained more and more authority. To be sure, Grant’s terms were in accord with Lincoln’s wishes, but the fact remains that it was Grant who set the terms for Lee’s unconditional surrender and not his commander in chief.

With Lee’s surrender, the North had a military icon of its own. Grant was not only the army’s greatest general but, more important, the people’s greatest general. Only their religious-like faith in his leadership could have permitted the rivers of bloodshed to wash through their homes and towns. But they believed. Grant had a plan and now the fruits of that plan were evident.

In his memoirs, written years later, Sheridan took a brief respite from his own glorification to praise Grant. In highlighting the campaign to “get Lee,” Sheridan fastened on his commander’s “imperturbable tenacity”: “When his military history is analyzed after the lapse of years, it will show, even more clearly than now, that during these as well as in his previous campaigns he was the steadfast centre about and on which everything else turned.”
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On April 15, Lee returned to his house in Richmond to monitor events and wait out the remainder of the war. Jefferson Davis had escaped south, vowing to continue the fighting “indefinitely” and refusing to rule out guerrilla warfare. On April 20 a concerned Lee, no doubt mindful of Grant’s earlier prompt, wrote what was perhaps the most important letter in the course of the entire war. In it, he urged Davis to forgo guerrilla strategies: “A partisan war may be continued, and hostilities protracted, causing individual suffering and the devastation of the country, but I see no prospect by that means of achieving a separate independence ... to save useless effusion of blood, I would recommend measures be taken for suspension of hostilities and the restoration of peace.”
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Lee’s wise counsel was soon circulated throughout the general corps of the Confederate army and weighed far more heavily on their decisions than any words from President Davis in flight.
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In Georgia, a spirit of “brotherhood” encompassed war-weary veterans who, days earlier, were prepared to kill. A spirit of mutual forgiveness and admiration (at least among white soldiers) set in almost immediately. They, after all, fought a just war.

The women would not be so forgiving. They had experienced Sherman’s hard war most personally and directly, with no postwar fellowship of warriors to heal the wounds or salve the hatreds. In North Carolina, where soldiers from both armies “grouped together around the fires,” the women raged. The war against them was not just, and their forgiveness would not be forthcoming. A furious Emma Holmes responded to Appomattox by saying: “Peace on such terms, is war for the rising generations.”
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Had Davis had his way with guerrilla warfare, Holmes’s words might well have been prescient. Thanks in large part to General Lee, he would not prevail, but this generation of Southern women would remember. Even as they deified Lee, they would demonize Northern generals and soldiers. Satan himself would be incarnated in Confederate female memory not in the “butcher” Grant (he, after all, concentrated the killing on fields of battle where it belonged), but in Sherman. The one most sympathetic to the white South and least sympathetic to abolition emerged in Southern memory as the epitome of dark malice and barbarism.
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On April 12, the last major city of the Confederacy capitulated as Federal troops under General E. R. S. Canby drove the last Confederate defenders out of Mobile, Alabama. That same day President Davis met with Generals Johnston and Beauregard and his cabinet. Over the objections of Davis and the ever-loyal Judah Benjamin, the generals insisted that Sherman could not be defeated and that further hostilities would be virtually suicidal. For the first time, the generals broke ranks with their commander in chief. And their view prevailed. As news of Lee’s surrender reached the generals that afternoon, they agreed that “the Southern Confederacy was overthrown.”

That night Johnston summarized the impossible task the army faced, but even more, the loss of a home front. Lee’s surrender broke the back of civilian resolve just as surely as a defeat for Sherman at Atlanta would have clinched McClellan’s election. At last, three and a half years and hundreds of thousands of sacrificed lives later, Johnston could say to Davis that the
people
“are tired of the war, feel themselves whipped, and will not fight.” Therefore, Johnston continued, the South had no choice but to surrender, and it must begin with Sherman. With these words, as the historian Mark Grimsley recognizes, “Johnston thus did what no American commander has ever done, before or since: he exercised the full weight of his military position to tell his government how to conclude a war.”
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Lincoln and his cabinet, meanwhile, were already past the war and thinking about reconstruction. Secretary of War Stanton ordered the draft halted and discontinued the purchase of war matériel. On the morning of Good Friday, April 14, General Robert Anderson raised the Federal banner over Fort Sumter—almost exactly four years after lowering the same flag to the victorious rebels. Henry Ward Beecher preached the conciliatory sermon he promised. That evening, Lincoln intended to relax by attending the theater.

O
n the night of April 14, 1865, President Lincoln was shot by the actor John Wilkes Booth while sitting in the audience at Ford’s Theater. Booth’s plans also included the assassination of Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward. In this way he thought to dismantle the government and achieve Southern independence through terror. A hulking associate of Booth’s, Lewis Paine, succeeded in stabbing Seward several times, but did not kill him. Vice President Johnson was immediately called to the William Peterson house, where Lincoln lay dying. At 7:22 the next morning, Lincoln died. In announcing the tragedy, Secretary of War Stanton purportedly intoned in words both sad and prophetic: “Now he belongs to the ages.”

At 11:00 a.m. on April 15, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase administered the oath of office to Andrew Johnson, with Bible in hand. After issuing the oath, Chase announced, “You are the President. May God guide, support, and bless you in your arduous labors.” Johnson answered, “The duties of the office are mine. The consequences are with God.” With that, Johnson bent to kiss the Bible and the succession was complete.
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When news of Lincoln’s assassination reached the soldiers in the field, they were devastated. In a letter to his brother, D. M. Corthell observed how Lincoln’s death “no doubt produced a deeper horror in the army then any where else. The indignation of the soldiers is beyond description. Mr. Lincoln was a good man and a great man and I believe the Rebels have lost their best friend.” He then added prophetically, “Mr. Johnson I think will treat them with greater severity.”
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For James Bates, who marched with Sherman from Atlanta to Wilmington, the news hit hard:

Northern papers and preachers saw, in Lincoln’s assassination, “the last victim of the Slave Power.” Predictably, some secular papers focused on the gory details. By midnight, the
Philadelphia Inquirer
wrote, “[t]he President was in a state of stupor, totally insensible, and breathing slowly, the blood oozing from the wound at the back of his head. The surgeons were exhausting every possible effort of medical skill, but all hope was gone. The parting of his family with the dying President is too sad for description.”
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On Easter Sunday, following Lincoln’s assassination, William F. Morgan of Manhattan employed Christ’s last words to form a eulogy: “His precious life was wasted, and the last expiring breath only sufficed for the exclamation, ‘It is finished!’ ” For the South, Morgan held no sentiments but revenge: “Let the south be held answerable, and drink from the chalice which she had prepared for the lips of those she had been so long wont to despise and count of no reputation.” Then in words that belied the sentiment, he concluded that Northerners “still do claim for the North, in the sight of Heaven, that [the war] has not been carried on in a spirit of bitterness or revenge.”
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In fact, themes of revenge permeated the secular and religious press and, even more immediately, the pulpit in the weeks and months following Lincoln’s assassination. Robert Russell Booth, pastor of Mercer Street Presbyterian Church in New York City, typified the clerical response when he urged, “Let them [the South] perish! In the grave of our martyred President, let the last vestige of them be buried, and let their memory rot, never to be spoken of with approval hereafter by a true patriot or Christian man.”
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Besides seeking vengeance Northern preachers, writers, and statesmen immediately set out to complete Lincoln’s incarnation as the messiah of the reunited Republic. On the same Easter Sunday that Morgan preached in Manhattan, George Boardman explained to his Presbyterian congregation in Binghamton, New York, that the only parallel to Lincoln was Christ: “His murderer has effected his apotheosis. Our beloved chief magistrate was removed at the height of his fame, his reputation unsullied, the equal of Washington, and beyond Washington, a martyr to the cause of Constitutional liberty. The name of ABRAHAM LINCOLN has entered into history, almost the only one without a spot.... The man dies, but the cause lives. Even Jesus died, but his cause survives and prevails; and ours, so far as it is coincident with his, can never be overthrown.“
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