Terrible Swift Sword (42 page)

The Rebels continued to advance down the road, but with all hope now gone of ever getting past the massed formations of enemy infantry. More V Corps units continued to pour from the woods.

And then, Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry and Gordon's II Corps suddenly recoiled from the nightmare visage of certain annihilation and withdrew to a nearby ridge.

The hilltop gave Sheridan a fine view not only of Gordon's and Fitzhugh Lee's troops but also of the village and Longstreet's corps in the valley beyond it, in ranks facing in the opposite direction, toward Meade's II Corps and VI Corps. Sheridan ordered Devin's and Custer's divisions to attack the Rebels, whose flanks they now overlapped.

But before the charge could properly begin, an aide galloped up to Sheridan with a message from Custer: the Rebels had shown a white flag. Lee had surrendered. It was over.

Chamberlain observed that everyone in the Union ranks seemed pleased with the situation—everyone except Sheridan. “He does not like the cessation of hostilities, and does not conceal his opinion,” Chamberlain wrote.
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An equally pugnacious Custer, with his own truce flag and a phalanx of mounted troops, rode to where Longstreet was conferring with his officers. Custer brashly demanded that I Corps lay down its arms, or Custer and Sheridan would destroy it.

Longstreet angrily replied that he did not obey orders from Yankee subordinates. He then proceeded to lecture Custer about military courtesy, concluding, “Now, go and act as you and Sheridan choose, and I will teach you a lesson you won't forget!” Without another word, Custer rode back to his lines.
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ROBERT E. LEE HAD dressed carefully that morning in a new uniform, along with his ceremonial sword, gold spurs, and sash—all the while dreading the likelihood of his having to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia.

When Gordon's advance was well under way, Lee sent one of his staff officers, Colonel Charles Venable, to Gordon to find out how things were progressing. “Tell General Lee,” said Gordon, “I have fought my corps to a frazzle, and I fear I can do nothing unless I am heavily supported by Longstreet's corps.”
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At that instant, Lee knew that escape was impossible. According to Venable, Lee said, “There is nothing left me but to go and see General Grant, and I had rather die a thousand deaths.”
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Lee summoned Longstreet to his field headquarters; Longstreet brought with him Major General William Mahone and Brigadier General E. Porter Alexander. Lee related what Gordon had reported and asked them what the army should do.

Longstreet replied with a question for Lee: would the destruction of the army aid the Confederacy in any way? Lee said that it would not. “Then your situation
speaks for itself,” Longstreet said. Lee turned to Mahone, who grudgingly agreed that the army must surrender.

When he was asked, Alexander proposed to Lee that the Rebels scatter to the hills like “rabbits or partridges in the bushes” and fight on—the guerrilla war strategy advocated by President Jefferson Davis. Lee patiently explained to Alexander why he would not do that. He refused to transform the Confederate army into “bands of marauders,” he said, whose suppression would require the Union cavalry to “overrun many sections they may never have occasion to visit. We would bring on a state of affairs it would take this country years to recover from.”
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Lee went looking for Grant to discuss surrender terms, while Longstreet and Gordon sought truces with their adversaries.

 

WEST OF APPOMATTOX COURT House, the shooting had largely stopped, but the situation remained muddled and nerve-racking. After the Confederates showed the white flag, Sheridan began riding toward Appomattox Court House to meet with the Rebel commander, Gordon.

He was suddenly fired upon from the woods to his right. Sheridan waved his hat, shouting that there was a truce, but his words were met with another fusillade. He ducked into a swale that shielded him from the woods and rode on.

As he neared the Confederate lines, some Rebels leveled their muskets at him. Gordon ordered the weapons lowered. When a soldier again raised his musket to fire at Sheridan, Gordon slapped it down and admonished the man for ignoring a flag of truce.

A Rebel tried to snatch Sheridan's flag, and Sheridan's color sergeant drew his saber to “cut the man down.” Sheridan ordered the sergeant to take the flag back to his field headquarters. He sent a staff officer to Gordon to demand an explanation for the Confederates' conduct.

The emissary returned with an invitation from Gordon to join him and Major General Cadmus Wilcox. As Sheridan and his staff rode over, they encountered more firing by Gordon's men. Sheridan protested to Gordon that his troops had fired at him and were now shooting at Custer's and Devin's men.

“We might as well let them fight it out,” said Sheridan. Gordon replied, “There must be some mistake.”

After writing a note of protest to Lee, Sheridan suggested to Gordon that he send a staff officer to the brigade that was firing and order it to stop. Gordon had no staff officers available, so Sheridan volunteered Lieutenant Vanderbilt Allen to carry his order.

Sheridan recalled his and Gordon's previous encounters—at Winchester and Cedar Creek. “I had the pleasure of receiving some artillery from your Government,
consigned to me through your commander General Early,” he said, referring to the Rebel gun captured at Cedar Creek that bore those mocking words, written by a wag at Tredegar Works. Gordon retorted that while that was true, he had received two artillery pieces that morning “consigned to me through General Sheridan.” His troops had taken the guns from Crook's division.

Reaching the brigade that refused to stop shooting, Lieutenant Allen informed its commander, Brigadier General Martin Gary, that a cease-fire was in effect and that Lee was surrendering. Gary said he would not acknowledge any order from a Yankee, adding, “I don't care for white flags; South Carolinians never surrender.” Minutes later, a Confederate colonel rode up to repeat the order, and Gary reluctantly acquiesced.
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When Gordon brought up the subject of negotiations with Sheridan, the feisty Irishman testily reminded him that Lee had “attempted to break through [his] lines this morning” and that unconditional surrender was the only option. Later, Gordon peevishly wrote that Sheridan's bearing and conversation, “while never discourteous, were far less agreeable and pleasing than those of any other officer of the Union army whom it was my fortune to meet. . . . . There was an absence of that delicacy and consideration which was exhibited by other Union officers.”
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Sheridan was still fractious when Grant's staff officers rode up. They found him pacing unhappily. “Damn them, I wish they had held out an hour longer and I would have whipped hell out of them,” he told Lieutenant Colonel Orville Babcock, Grant's aide-de-camp. A short time later, he asked Adam Badeau, one of Grant's military secretaries, “Is it a trick? Is he negotiating with Grant?” Holding up a clenched fist, Sheridan said, “I've got 'em—I've got 'em like that!”
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THE ENEMY GENERALS, WHO had devoted the past four years to one another's annihilation, now conferred. Ord and Longstreet joined Sheridan and Gordon. Longstreet, who had a copy of Lee's acceptance of Grant's surrender terms, told Sheridan that he feared Meade, ignorant of the situation, might attack his corps. Sheridan sent a staff officer to inform Meade of the current circumstances and another aide bearing Lee's acceptance letter to find Grant.
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Grant was on his way to Appomattox Court House when an officer rode up with Lee's message. “When the officer reached me I was still suffering from the sick headache,” wrote Grant, “but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.”
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Lee arranged to meet Grant that afternoon at the brick home of Wilmer McLean, Rosser's host of the previous night. By the strangest coincidence, McLean had owned a farm near Manassas when the war's first major battle was fought there
on July 21, 1861. After a shell hit the McLean home, the farmer moved his family to the quieter precincts of southern Virginia. But the war had again come to McLean's door.
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WHEN GRANT REACHED THE outskirts of Appomattox Court House, Sheridan, Ord, and some staff officers were waiting for him.

“How are you, Sheridan?” Grant asked.

“First rate, thank you. How are you?” replied Sheridan.

Grant nodded and, glancing at the village, asked whether Lee was there. Sheridan told him Lee was in a brick home up the road.

“Come, let us go over,” Grant replied.

Grant aide Colonel Horace Porter wrote after this encounter, “No one could look at Sheridan at such a moment without a sentiment of undisguised admiration. In this campaign, as in others, he had shown himself possessed of military traits of the highest order.”

Grant, Sheridan, Ord, and about a dozen staff officers rode to the McLean home, which Grant entered with Babcock, Sheridan, and Ord. When Sheridan and Ord were introduced to Lee and his aide, Colonel Charles Marshall, Sheridan was struck by the contrast between Lee and Grant. Lee, “tall, commanding,” was dressed in a new uniform and bore a handsome sword, while Grant, much shorter, wore a soiled private's uniform, without sword or insignia, “except a pair of dingy shoulder straps.”
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After the introductions were made, Sheridan and Ord joined McLean and the staff officers on the porch, while Grant and Babcock conferred with Lee and Marshall. Grant puffed on a pipe as he drafted the surrender terms. He confessed later to feeling “sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly.” But the Southern cause, he added, was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought.”

When the surrender document was copied and signed, Lee offered his sword to Grant; he declined it. Then, Babcock stepped onto the porch, “twirled his hat around his head once,” and invited Sheridan, Ord, and the Union staff officers into the McLean parlor. They approached Lee almost reverentially, respectful of his reputation and elegant bearing—all except Sheridan.

He bluntly requested that Lee return the two dispatches that Sheridan had sent him that morning—those protesting being fired upon during the truce. Sheridan told Lee that he had not had time to make copies. Lee removed the notes from a breast pocket and handed them to Sheridan, saying, “I am sorry. It is probable that my cavalry at that point of the line did not fully understand the agreement.”
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Lee turned to Grant and said that his men had no rations, but he was expecting several trainloads from Lynchburg. “When they arrive,” he said, unaware that Sheridan's cavalry had seized them, “I should be glad to have the present wants of my men supplied from them.” As all eyes turned toward Sheridan, Grant assured Lee that the Rebels would be fed as soon as possible. Sheridan told Grant that he would distribute the captured Rebel rations.
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Lee stepped outside, signaled to an orderly to bridle Traveller, and gazed across the valley toward his army as he put on his buckskin gauntlets. Every movement, every gesture, every glance by their dreaded nemesis became etched in the memories of the Union staff officers watching from the McLean porch.

Lee “smote his hands together several times in an absent sort of way,” observed Newhall, as Traveller was brought around. Grant stepped onto the porch and touched his hat to Lee, who returned the salutation. He then departed on “his chunky gray horse,” as Sheridan drolly observed. As Lee passed through his army's bivouac, cheers erupted from his men. Stone-faced, Grant mounted Cincinnati and rode away in silence.
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AFTER LEE AND GRANT had gone, the Yankee officers began furiously bidding for McLean's parlor furniture. Ord bought the table upon which Lee had signed the surrender agreement. Sheridan got the table where Grant had drafted the terms, handing McLean two $10 gold pieces—he had carried them throughout the war in case he was captured.

Sheridan presented the table to Custer as a gift for his wife, Libbie, with whom Sheridan had struck up a friendship in July during a dance on the presidential steamer
River Queen
while it was docked at City Point. Custer rode off with the table balanced on his shoulder. In a note to Mrs. Custer accompanying the gift, Sheridan wrote, “Permit me to say, Madam, that there is scarcely an individual in our service who has contributed more to bring this about than your very gallant husband.”
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His buttery words to Mrs. Custer notwithstanding, Sheridan credited Grant with the Union victory. Before Grant took command, Lee had “never met an opponent he did not vanquish,” and on the rare occasions when he did lose a battle, he always escaped. But in facing Grant, Lee was “for the first time, overmatched.” Grant's “harmony of plan”—the coordination of campaigns on many fronts—forced the Confederacy to “yield to our blows.”
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For his part, Lee wrote that the single factor most responsible for his defeat was his shortage of mounted troops. Lee had sent his principal cavalry force, under Wade Hampton, to the Carolinas to obtain fresh horses, leaving the Army of Northern
Virginia with fewer than 5,000 cavalrymen to face Sheridan's 13,000 troopers. “Our small force of cavalry was unable to resist the united Federal cavalry under Sheridan,” wrote Lee.
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THE CAVALRY CORPS WAS pointedly excluded from the April 12 surrender ceremony. Sheridan's lack of “delicacy” during his encounters with Gordon and Lee at Appomattox was surely one reason, but the Rebels' smoldering resentment of Sheridan's hard-riding troopers was probably the primary one. Lee had even requested that Sheridan's pickets not fraternize with the Rebels. While Sheridan undoubtedly felt the snub, there is no record of his thoughts about it.