Lee's Last Retreat by William Marvel

Author:William Marvel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2002-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

[ Peace ]

When word of Lee’s surrender reached the Second Corps lines at New Hope Church, George Meade’s chief of staff prevailed on him to emerge from his ambulance and announce the news to his troops. The general did more than that: he shook off his fever, climbed on a horse, and went barreling back up the stage road, waving his hat and shouting to everyone he saw that the war was over and now they could all go home. His announcement brought pandemonium among his troops, most of whom began their celebration by throwing their hats into the air and stamping on them; the military successes of the past week had worn heavily on this army’s headgear.1

“Of course this ends the war,” thought one of Sheridan’s officers. “I am in hopes that twenty days will see the end of the war,” wrote another. “I think the other rebel armies will capitulate as soon as they get word of Lee’s surrender,” a Massachusetts soldier told his sister; “peace must speedily follow.” “From this epoch dates the downfall of the rebellion,” a cavalryman informed his mother.2

These sentiments flourished in Grant’s army, across the North, and probably throughout most of the South, where much of the populace had come to view General Lee himself as the embodiment of Confederate hopes. To many whose opinion mattered, though, the finality of Lee’s surrender did not seem so obvious. A significant number of Confederates, official and civilian, had remained confident of ultimate victory through the terrible winter of 1865; for them it was merely the Valley Forge of their own war of independence. Even the elimination of their most celebrated army failed to quell that confidence entirely, but the most enthusiastic devotion could not sustain a cause that the majority thought was lost. At the very moment the defeated Robert E. Lee rode toward his last headquarters encampment, a Union army outside Mobile, Alabama, was deploying for an assault that would see 600 more Union soldiers fall; the assault nonetheless succeeded because, apparently, the Confederates in Fort Blakely defended their imposing works with insufficient spirit. On that same day, near Smithfield, North Carolina, General Joseph E. Johnston reorganized the Army of Tennessee into three corps to continue the fight against William T. Sherman, although as soon as official word of Lee’s surrender reached his army his men began drifting away; the moment he agreed to his own truce with Sherman, his little army began to dissolve altogether.3 Eleven days after the meeting at the McLean house, a cavalry officer from South Carolina—where secession was conceived, born, and nurtured—sent his district commander a copy of the Charleston Courier that carried the details of the surrender, commenting upon “this stupendous forgery.” Yet a Charleston woman not only believed the report; she also read into it the doom of the Confederacy, remarking to her aunt “I do not see how Johnston’s army can escape, surrender must be made.”4

Confederate troops roamed freely in Texas, Louisiana, and what would come to be called Oklahoma.

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