Lee Surrendered, But His Lieutenants Kept Fighting
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
“If the
programme which our people saw set on foot at Appomattox Court-House had
been carried out … we would have no disturbance in the South,”
testified the former Confederate general (and future senator) John Brown
Gordon in 1871. Speaking before a congressional committee investigating
the widespread anti-black violence in the former Confederacy, Gordon
was accusing Radical Republicans of bad faith – specifically, of
breaking the “Appomattox Compact.”
Some Northerners might
have been surprised by the idea that anything resembling a “compact”
came out of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant in April 1865.
But Gordon, along with other prominent veterans of Lee’s army, believed
that the agreement at Appomattox was more two-sided than many in the
North believed.
The notion of the
compact was rooted in two points: that the Union military victory was
illegitimate, a triumph of might over right, and that Lee had negotiated
a deal with Grant at Appomattox containing the promise that “honorable”
Southern men would not be treated dishonorably. This position might
have seemed incongruous, were it not for the fact that Gordon and a
cadre of influential former Confederate officers – including the former
generals Henry A. Wise, Armistead L. Long, William N. Pendleton and
Edward Porter Alexander, along with other senior officers like Charles
Marshall and Walter Taylor — spent decades advocating it, long after the
North grew tired of arguing about the war. And to a large extent, they
won, not only undermining Reconstruction, but distorting its memory.
Gordon’s first point,
the “might over right” argument, was enshrined in Lee’s April 10, 1865,
Farewell Address to his troops. The address, drafted by Marshall, his
aide-de-camp, attributed Confederate defeat to the Yankees’
“overwhelming numbers and resources.” In the context of proslavery
ideology, this was a kind of code, conjuring up images of the heartless
efficiency of Northern society.
Responding to Lee’s
repeated plea that the “bravery and devotion of the Army of Northern
Virginia shall be correctly transmitted to posterity,” Lee’s officers
churned out speeches, articles and memoirs designed to banish the
specter of Confederate failure and to disseminate the idea that Lee had
faced insurmountable odds of five-to-one or worse in the final campaign.
Lee’s “eight thousand starving men” at Appomattox, Taylor explained,
had surrendered to an unworthy foe that “had long despaired to conquer
it by skill or daring, and who had worn it away by weight of numbers and
brutal exchange of many lives for one.”
This doctrine referred
not only to the size but also the social composition of the Union army.
Appomattox veterans lamented that they had been compelled to surrender
to a mercenary army — “German, Irish, negro, and Yankee wretches,” as
Pendleton put it bitterly — of their social and racial inferiors.
Scholars have since
established that Lee faced odds of two-to-one at Appomattox, no worse
than odds he had beaten before. But in its day, the numbers game had a
distinct political purpose. By denying the legitimacy of the North’s
military victory, former Confederates hoped to deny the North the right
to impose its political will on the South. And it worked: As
Reconstruction unfolded, Northern commentators again and again observed
that white Southern recalcitrance was nourished by the sentiments of the
Farewell Address. An exasperated Northerner traveling through the South
in 1866 characterized his encounters with Confederates this way: “‘We
were overpowered by numbers,’ they say. … They’ve said that to me more
than fifty times within the last few weeks. And they say that they are
the gentlemen; we are amalgamationists, mudsills, vandals, and so
forth.” The message was clear: The North had not won a moral victory or
mandate at Appomattox.
The second front in
this war of words concerned the surrender terms themselves. Grant’s
leniency, so Lee’s officers insisted, was a form of homage to Southern
bravery. In Confederate eyes, Lee was not a passive recipient of that
leniency at Appomattox, but instead made a series of propositions, such
as the suggestion that Confederates might retain their horses, to which
Grant assented. More important still, Lee extracted from Grant, during
their brief April 10 meeting on horseback, the promise that each
Confederate soldier would receive a printed parole pass, to prove that
he came under the April terms. In keeping with the language of the
surrender terms, a parole certificate vouched that if a soldier observed
the laws in force where he resided, he was to “remain undisturbed.”
Confederates argued
that these paroles conferred immunity against Yankee reprisals
generally, such as confiscation and treason trials. Edward Porter
Alexander reckoned that the Appomattox terms “practically gave an
amnesty to every surrendered soldier for all political offences.” When
Henry A. Wise, on his way home to Norfolk from Appomattox, was
confronted by a Yankee cavalryman who wanted to confiscate his horse,
Wise brandished his parole certificate, declaring that he had “Gen.
Grant’s safe-guard” and was “under its protection!” A little more than a
year later, in May 1866, Wise gave a pair of defiant speeches in
Virginia in which he insisted that securing favorable terms was a kind
of victory. “I have the profound satisfaction,” he declaimed, “of saying
that I fought until we won the privilege of being paroled.”
But Confederates went
further still, emphasizing that the peace was conditional — dependent on
the North’s good behavior. In a late April 1865 interview with The New
York Herald, Lee himself issued a warning. If “arbitrary or vindictive
or revengeful policies” were enacted by the Yankee government,
Southerners would renew the fight, and “give their lives as dearly as
possible.” In the same spirit, Pendleton asserted that the promise that
Southerners would remain unmolested by federal authorities was no “mere
military arrangement” but instead a “solemn compact, rigidly binding on
both sides.” The Confederates would not have laid down their arms
without this “pledge of honor for their protection.”
As Reconstruction got
underway, former Confederates again and again invoked their
interpretation of the Appomattox terms, and particularly the “remain
undisturbed” clause, as a shield against social change. Republican
efforts to give freedpeople a measure of equality and opportunity and
protection were met by white Southern protests that such a radical
agenda was a betrayal of the Appomattox agreement — that the prospect of
black citizenship, as one Virginia newspaper put it, “molests and
disturbs us.”
None of Lee’s
lieutenants did more to register such protests than John Brown Gordon, a
leader of Georgia’s Ku Klux Klan and future senator and governor. In
his 1871 congressional testimony, he gave a stalwart defense of his
region against charges of brutality and lawlessness, repeatedly invoking
the Appomattox terms. Back in April 1865, Gordon argued, Confederates
had been gratified by the “deferential” treatment they received at the
surrender. “We should not be disturbed, so long as we obeyed the laws”:
this was the pledge, Gordon said, that Grant had made to the
Confederates. Peace would have come swiftly and surely, Gordon
continued, if Radicals had not betrayed the spirit of Appomattox by
telling Confederates “your former slaves are better fitted to administer
the laws than you are.”
Trafficking in the
toxic myth that congressional Reconstruction was a time of white
Southern prostration and vindictive “black rule,” Gordon claimed, “our
people feel that the faith which was pledged to them has been violated.”
Southerners were “disturbed” by the congressional program, “deprived of
rights which we had inherited — which belonged to us as citizens of the
country.” If they had known what indignities and disabilities awaited
them, Gordon surmised, Confederates would not have surrendered on April
9, 1865.
Gordon’s message was clear: The only way to restore peace was to leave the white South alone to manage its own affairs.
This Confederate
campaign did not go unchallenged. Northern Republicans and Southern
Unionists, white and black, offered their own interpretation of
Appomattox, in which the Union victory was the product of skill and
bravery, Grant’s magnanimity was the emblem of Northern moral
superiority and the paroles protected the lives of the surrendered
rebels but also commanded their political atonement and obedience. Grant
spoke for all these groups when he told a Northern reporter in May 1866
that he was deeply disappointed in Lee’s demeanor since the surrender —
Lee was “setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and
pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized.”
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Grant hoped more white
Southerners would make the choice that Gen. James Longstreet — who
became a convert to the Republican Party after the war — had made. In
Longstreet’s eyes, the North’s victory at arms was a victory for its
principles, and Southerners must yield, in keeping, Longstreet wrote,
with “the obligations under which we were placed by the terms of our
paroles.”
But Longstreet was an
anomaly. Gordon’s views proved ascendant in the late 19th century,
leaving those who favored social change and social justice to sing their
own laments over the lost promise of Appomattox. In 1912, with the Lost
Cause cult at a peak of popularity, an article in The Pittsburgh
Courier, a black newspaper, observed somberly, “Southern thought is
conquering the entire country on the race question.” The article quoted a
poem called “Appomattox,” by the black poet Charles R. Dinkins, in
which Lee addresses his defeated army with the following charge:
When fails the sword, the better way
Becomes the soldier’s part to play;
The south will whip the north some day
With ink and pen.
Lee’s prophecy, the
article noted, had come to pass: The unrepentant South had struck down
the doctrine of social equality, and “revolutionized the sentiment,
doctrines and practices of the north.” Gordon’s war of words would
continue.
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