April 9, 1865

 "I think the Union Army may have had something to do with it."

Variously attributed to Gen. George Pickett, Captain Robert Bright and others, on how the South lost the Civil War.

One hundred and fifty six  years ago, Robert E. Lee arrived, in a spotless gray uniform, carrying a ceremonial sword,  at a house at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia owned by Wilmer McLean.  I'm not sure how much General Lee said to Mr. McLean on the occasion, but it is well known that Mr. McLean's farm was the site of the opening battle of the war at Manassas and he moved to be farther away from the war, but the war came to him, and his pallor was the site of the war's effective end.

Lee was on the run, his army starving and when he reached a railroad station where food and supplies were supposed to be waiting, he found the train had already left, apparently ordered on to Richmond to rescue Confederate documents belonging to the government, under orders of someone, perhaps Jefferson Davis. And the train took all the food for Lee's army with it. The classic bureaucratic SNAFU. Lee later blamed his defeat on that. Of course, his defeat was a long time in the making and that was just one more nail in the coffin.

I Will Make Georgia Howl--O. Youngblood 

Lee had consulted with his most trusted general, Longstreet, who had not thought their situation hopeless just days earlier, but when the relief train disappeared, Lee got reports about massive desertions and decided to surrender.

It had taken Abraham Lincoln over 2 years to find generals good enough to defeat the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. but eventually, he got Ulysses S. Grant, who devised the strategy of maximal pressure on the Confederate armed forces. He pounded Lee without respite and he send William Tecumseh Sherman to punish the Confederates from the West, through Tennessee down through Georgia, so there could be no shuttling of Southern armies between fronts. And Grant found Phillip Sheridan and George Armstrong Custer who pursued Lee's Army of Northern Virginia like hounds to the fox.

The fact is, Lee was outgeneraled by Grant, and by Grant's predecessor, George Meade, who took control of the high ground at Gettysburg and laid waste to Lee's army when he launched Pickett's charge.

But Meade was too timid to follow Lee, to close in for the kill, and Lincoln replaced him with Grant, who was not timid. 

After the war, not immediately after, but 50 to 70 years later, when most of the veterans were aging and dying off, the usual excuses of the defeated began to consolidate in the myth of "The Lost Cause" which promulgated the lie that the Confederate armies were never beaten on the battlefield but simply overwhelmed by the numbers of Union troops, by the industrial might of the Northern industries.

While it was true that by Appomattox the Army of Northern Virginia was literally starving and when Lee asked Gant if he could feed Lee's 20,000 starving troops, Grant said yes, of course. He could do that because he had insured his own supply lines, unlike Lee.

Grant

The idea of Southern armies fighting against huge odds, outnumbered but fighting the Union armies to a standstill, has been examined by many historians and found to be mostly false, most effectively by William Marvell ("Lee's Last Retreat") who examined army records from both sides and found that for the most part the armies had equal numbers of men on the battlefield.

And there were clear routs of the Confederate army, against all odds, as happened at Lookout Mountain, when Union soldiers simply did not stop climbing the mountain to attack the entrenched Confederates at its summit and ran the Rebels off the field. The boys in blue astonished even their officers and Grant, watching it happened, was amazed.

So the gallant Southern gentlemen were ground down, killed and defeated by an army of even more determined men.

Sheridan

And what was really remarkable about these two sides was that the Southern army should have been more motivated: The Union army was invading the South, was marching through their own homeland. After three years of mostly defeats, the Union army got a chance to vote itself out of the war and nobody would have been surprised if they had. But in November of 1964, they voted to continue the war by voting in large proportions for Lincoln. They had suffered so much and they did not want to give up.

On a visit to Fort Sumter a few years ago, I joined a group gathered around a man in Park Ranger gray and green wearing a Smoky Bear hat. That's the way tours are given at the fort--you get off the ferry and break up into groups of 20 or 30 visitors and listen to the Park Rangers who guide you around the grounds. My group's docent was not a Park Ranger, it turns out. He wore no badge. He was a volunteer docent and he started in on the saintly Robert E. Lee until I could take it no longer and finally, as politely as I could, interjected: "You know, history is one long argument, I know. But Robert E. Lee was as vicious a slaver as existed in those times. And that war was about slavery, not state's rights. As Lincoln said when introduced to Harriett Beecher Stowe: 'So this is the little lady, who wrote the book that started the great big war.' And Lincoln said in this 2nd inaugural address, 'Everyone knew that this peculiar interest [slavery] was the cause of the war.' He was there. Neither you nor I were."

The docent skulked off to lick his wounds but later called out to me, from a safe distance of twenty yards: "There was only one slave owner at Appomattox and he wasn't wearing gray."

Custer

Which is one of those half lies upon which disinformation is so often built.

First of all, technically, the house in which the surrender was signed belonged to a slave owner, Mr. McLean.

Secondly, it is true Grant owned a slave--his wife's family  had owned slaves--but Grant got one and could not abide the idea and freed him in under a year.

Lee, it might be argued did not own slaves. His wife did, though, 189 of them, who Lee managed. In fact, on the death of his wife's father, those slaves were supposed to be freed, as was stipulated in the will, but Lee refused to free them and three slaves, feeling betrayed, having been promised their freedom, escaped. When Lee recaptured them, he had them stripped and lashed and then "sold them South" to plantations where life was far less comfortable.

A vicious slaver, Lee.

So, at Appomattox, yes, technically you might twist reality enough to claim Grant owned the slave and Saint Robert did not, but, no, that's just a lie when you get right down to it.

Two bits are always mentioned about Grant when Appomattox comes up:

1. He wore a private's shirt with shoulder straps bearing 3 stars and was muddy and worn down.

2. He had a crushing sick migraine which instantly stopped when he got Lee's letter asking for surrender. 

This makes the case for Grant, a humble man in the face of the imperious Lee and Grant burdened greatly by the pressure of command.

All that is likely, in essence, true. 

Grant was no Lincoln. He issued the infamous Order #11 expelling Jews from the department under his command when he heard Jewish merchants were black marketing cotton sales. Lincoln quickly countermanded this order, because Lincoln, a lawyer, knew you cannot vilify a person for being a member of a class of people.

But Grant was a good judge of men, as he once observed when Lincoln looked at the diminutive Sheridan and wondered where Sheridan was big enough to be an effective commander, "He'll be big enough for the purpose, when the fighting begins."

That was true of Sheridan and it was true of Grant.