ON
April 9, 1865 — Palm Sunday — Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Gen. Robert
E. Lee negotiated their famous “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of surrender. In
the ensuing celebration, a relieved Grant told his men, “The war is
over.”
But
Grant soon discovered he was wrong. Not only did fighting continue in
pockets for weeks, but in other ways the United States extended the war
for more than five years after Appomattox. Using its war powers to
create freedom and civil rights in the South, the federal government
fought against a white Southern insurgency that relied on murder and
intimidation to undo the gains of the war.
And
yet the “Appomattox myth” persisted, and continues today. By severing
the war’s conflict from the Reconstruction that followed, it drains
meaning from the Civil War and turns it into a family feud, a fight that
ended with regional reconciliation. It also fosters a national amnesia
about what wars are and how they end, a lacuna that has undermined
American postwar efforts ever since.
Disunion: The Civil War
America’s most perilous period, revisited through essays, diaries and archival images.
Appomattox,
like the Civil War more broadly, retains its hold on the American
imagination. More than 330,000 people visited the site in 2013. In
Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” as in many other popular portrayals, the
meeting between Lee and Grant suggests that, in the words of one United
States general at the surrender, “We are all Americans.”
Although
those words were allegedly spoken by Ely Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca
Indian, and although hundreds of thousands of African-Americans fought
for the nation, the “we” in the Appomattox myth all too often is limited
to white Americans. In fanciful stories of Grant’s returning a
ceremonial sword to Lee, or of the United States Army’s saluting its
defeated foes at the laying-down-of-arms ceremony, white Americans
fashioned a story of prodigal sons returning for a happy family
portrait.
Grant
himself recognized that he had celebrated the war’s end far too soon.
Even as he met Lee, Grant rejected the rebel general’s plea for “peace”
and insisted that only politicians, not officers, could end the war.
Then Grant skipped the fabled laying-down-of-arms ceremony to plan the
Army’s occupation of the South.
To
enforce its might over a largely rural population, the Army marched
across the South after Appomattox, occupying more than 750 towns and
proclaiming emancipation by military order. This little-known occupation
by tens of thousands of federal troops remade the South in ways that
Washington proclamations alone could not.
And
yet as late as 1869, President Grant’s attorney general argued that
some rebel states remained in the “grasp of war.” When white Georgia
politicians expelled every black member of the State Legislature and
began a murderous campaign of intimidation, Congress and Grant extended
military rule there until 1871.
Meanwhile,
Southern soldiers continued to fight as insurgents, terrorizing blacks
across the region. One congressman estimated that 50,000
African-Americans were murdered by white Southerners in the first
quarter-century after emancipation. “It is a fatal mistake, nay a wicked
misery to talk of peace or the institutions of peace,” a federal
attorney wrote almost two years after Appomattox. “We are in the very
vortex of war.”
Against
this insurgency, even President Andrew Johnson, an opponent of
Reconstruction, continued the state of war for a year after Appomattox.
When Johnson tried to end the war in the summer of 1866, Congress seized
control of his war powers; from 1867 to 1870, generals in the South
regulated state officials and oversaw voter registration, ensuring that
freedmen could claim the franchise they had lobbied for. With the
guidance of military overseers, new biracial governments transformed the
Constitution itself, passing the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.
The
military occupation created pockets of stability and moments of order.
Excluded from politics before the war, black men won more than 1,500
offices during Reconstruction. By 1880, 20 percent of black families
owned farms.
But
the occupation that helped support these gains could not be sustained.
Anxious politicians reduced the Army’s size even as they assigned it
more tasks. After Grant used the military to put down the Ku Klux Klan
in the Carolinas in 1871, Congress and the public lost the will to pay
the human and financial costs of Reconstruction.
Once
white Southern Democrats overthrew Reconstruction between the 1870s and
1890s, they utilized the Appomattox myth to erase the connection
between the popular, neatly concluded Civil War and the continuing
battles of Reconstruction. By the 20th century, history textbooks and
popular films like “The Birth of a Nation” made the Civil War an
honorable conflict among white Americans, and Reconstruction a corrupt
racial tyranny of black over white (a judgment since overturned by
historians like W. E. B. DuBois and Eric Foner).
Beyond
the problem of historical accuracy, separating the war and the military
from Reconstruction contributes to an enduring American amnesia about
the Army’s role in remaking postwar societies. Many of the nation’s wars
have followed the trajectory established at Appomattox: Cheers at the
end of fighting are replaced by bafflement at the enduring conflict as
the military struggles to fill the defeated government’s role, even as
the American public moves on. After defeating Spain in the
Spanish-American War, the Army undertook bloody campaigns to suppress
rebellions and exert control over the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico.
After World War II, a state of war endured into the 1950s in the
occupation of Japan and Germany. And in the recent wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq, the United States military’s work had barely begun when the
fighting stopped — and the work continues, in the hands of
American-backed locals, today.
While
it is tempting to blame the George W. Bush administration for these
recent wars without end, the problem lies deep within Americans’
understanding of what wars are. We wish that wars, like sports, had
carefully organized rules that would steer them to a satisfying end. But
wars are often political efforts to remake international or domestic
orders. They create problems of governance that battles alone cannot
resolve.
Years
after the 1865 surrender, the novelist and veteran Albion Tourgée said
that the South “surrendered at Appomattox, and the North has been
surrendering ever since.” In so many wars since, the United States won
the battlefield fighting but lost ground afterward.
With
the benefit of hindsight, we can learn, as Grant did, the dangers of
celebrating too soon. Although a nation has a right to decide what
conflicts are worth fighting, it does not have the right to forget its
history, and in the process to repeat it.
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