We Can Whip Again General Lee Appomatox
Opinionator | Lee Surrendered, Just His Lieutenants Kept Fighting
Lee Surrendered, But His Lieutenants Kept Fighting
Disunion follows the Ceremonious War as it unfolded.
"If the plan 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 Amalgamated full general (and future senator) John Brownish 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 religion – specifically, of breaking the "Appomattox Compact."
Some Northerners might have been surprised past the idea that anything resembling a "compact" came out of Robert E. Lee's give up to Ulysses Due south. Grant in April 1865. But Gordon, along with other prominent veterans of Lee'due south army, believed that the understanding at Appomattox was more than two-sided than many in the Northward 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 Amalgamated 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 later the Northward grew tired of arguing about the war. And to a big extent, they won, not only undermining Reconstruction, simply distorting its retentiveness.
Gordon's commencement point, the "might over right" statement, was enshrined in Lee'due south April 10, 1865, Goodbye Address to his troops. The address, drafted by Marshall, his aide-de-camp, attributed Amalgamated 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 thought that Lee had faced insurmountable odds of v-to-one or worse in the terminal entrada. 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 commutation of many lives for 1."
This doctrine referred not simply to the size but also the social composition of the Marriage army. Appomattox veterans lamented that they had been compelled to surrender to a mercenary ground forces — "German, Irish gaelic, 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-ane at Appomattox, no worse than odds he had beaten before. Just in its day, the numbers game had a distinct political purpose. Past denying the legitimacy of the Due north's armed forces victory, erstwhile Confederates hoped to deny the North the right to impose its political will on the S. 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 Southward in 1866 characterized his encounters with Confederates this way: "'Nosotros were overpowered by numbers,' they say. … They've said that to me more than than fifty times within the concluding few weeks. And they say that they are the gentlemen; nosotros are amalgamationists, mudsills, vandals, and then forth." The message was clear: The North had non won a moral victory or mandate at Appomattox.
The 2nd front in this state of war of words concerned the surrender terms themselves. Grant's leniency, so Lee'south officers insisted, was a grade 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 equally the suggestion that Confederates might retain their horses, to which Grant assented. More important still, Lee extracted from Grant, during their cursory 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 linguistic communication of the give up 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 amnesty confronting Yankee reprisals mostly, 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 abode to Norfolk from Appomattox, was confronted past a Yankee cavalryman who wanted to confiscate his equus caballus, Wise brandished his parole certificate, declaring that he had "Gen. Grant'due south prophylactic-baby-sit" and was "nether its protection!" A little more than than a year afterward, 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 proverb that I fought until we won the privilege of being paroled."
But Confederates went further still, emphasizing that the peace was provisional — dependent on the N'south good behavior. In a late April 1865 interview with The New York Herald, Lee himself issued a warning. If "capricious or vindictive or revengeful policies" were enacted by the Yankee authorities, Southerners would renew the fight, and "give their lives as dearly as possible." In the aforementioned spirit, Pendleton asserted that the hope that Southerners would remain unmolested by federal authorities was no "mere armed services arrangement" but instead a "solemn compact, rigidly bounden on both sides." The Confederates would non have laid downward their artillery without this "pledge of accolade for their protection."
Equally Reconstruction got underway, former Confederates once more and once again invoked their estimation of the Appomattox terms, and especially the "remain undisturbed" clause, equally 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 calendar was a expose of the Appomattox agreement — that the prospect of black citizenship, every bit one Virginia newspaper put information technology, "molests and disturbs us."
None of Lee'south lieutenants did more than to annals 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 give up. "We should not exist disturbed, so long every bit nosotros obeyed the laws": this was the pledge, Gordon said, that Grant had made to the Confederates. Peace would have come swiftly and surely, Gordon connected, if Radicals had not betrayed the spirit of Appomattox by telling Confederates "your former slaves are ameliorate fitted to administer the laws than y'all are."
Trafficking in the toxic myth that congressional Reconstruction was a time of white Southern prostration and vindictive "black dominion," Gordon claimed, "our people feel that the organized religion 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 united states as citizens of the country." If they had known what indignities and disabilities awaited them, Gordon surmised, Confederates would not have surrendered on Apr 9, 1865.
Gordon's message was articulate: The only way to restore peace was to leave the white South alone to manage its own affairs.
This Confederate campaign did non go unchallenged. Northern Republicans and Southern Unionists, white and black, offered their own interpretation of Appomattox, in which the Wedlock 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 securely disappointed in Lee's demeanor since the surrender — Lee was "setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects every bit to exist hardly realized."
Grant hoped more white Southerners would make the choice that Gen. James Longstreet — who became a catechumen to the Republican Party later on the war — had made. In Longstreet's optics, the North'due south victory at artillery 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."
Only Longstreet was an anomaly. Gordon's views proved ascendant in the late 19th century, leaving those who favored social modify and social justice to sing their own laments over the lost promise of Appomattox. In 1912, with the Lost Cause cult at a superlative of popularity, an commodity in The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, observed somberly, "Southern thought is conquering the unabridged land on the race question." The article quoted a poem chosen "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 s volition whip the due north some twenty-four hour period
With ink and pen.
Lee's prophecy, the article noted, had come up to pass: The unrepentant S had struck downwardly the doctrine of social equality, and "revolutionized the sentiment, doctrines and practices of the northward." Gordon's war of words would continue.
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Sources: Edward Porter Alexander, "Fighting for the Confederacy"; Army and Navy Journal (New York), May 19, 1866; Chicago Tribune, Sept. fourteen, 1866; John Richard Dennett, "The S As It Is, 1865-1866"; John Gibbon, "Personal Recollections of the Ceremonious War"; John Chocolate-brown Gordon, "Reminiscences of the Civil War"; Susan P. Lee, "Memoirs of William Nelson Pendleton"; Alexander L. Long, "Memoirs of Robert East. Lee: His Military and Personal History"; James Longstreet, "From Manassas to Appomattox"; Charles Marshall, "Appomattox: An Accost Delivered earlier the Society of the Army and Navy of the Confederate States" and "Lee'southward Adjutant-De-Camp"; Pittsburgh Courier, April 27, 1912; Walter H. Taylor, "Four Years with Full general Lee" and "General Lee: His Campaigns in Virginia, 1861-1865"; United States Congress, "Report of the Articulation Select Committee to Enquire into the Status of Diplomacy in the Tardily Insurrectionary States"; Valley Virginian (Augusta Co.), Feb. 27, 1867.
Elizabeth R. Varon teaches history at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book is "Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Liberty at the Terminate of the Civil War."
Source: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/lee-surrendered-but-his-lieutenants-kept-fighting/