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Overview
After his surrender at Appomattox in 1865, Robert E. Lee, commanding general for the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War, lived only five more years. It was the great forgotten chapter of his remarkable life, during which Lee did more to bridge the divide between the North and the South than any other American. The South may have lost, but Lee taught them how to triumph in peace, and showed the entire country how to heal the wounds of war.
Based on previously unseen documents, letters, family papers and exhaustive research into Lee’s complex private life and public crusades, this is a portrait of a true icon of Reconstruction and quiet rebellion. From Lee’s urging of Rebel soldiers to restore their citizenship, to his taking communion with a freedman, to his bold dance with a Yankee belle at a Southern ball, to his outspoken regret of his soldierly past, to withstanding charges of treason, Lee embodied his adage: “True patriotism sometimes requires of men to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another.”
Lee: The Last Years sheds a vital new light on war, politics, hero-worship, human rights, and Robert E. Lee’s “desire to do right.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547525945 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 369,173 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
General Robert E. Lee stood on a hilltop, studying the fog-covered woods ahead. Listening to the artillery fire and musketry, he tried to judge the progress of the crucial attack that his men were making. It was shortly after eight o'clock in the morning on Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, and the shattered remnants of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia were in a column strung along four miles of road near the village of Appomattox Court House.
A few minutes earlier, Lee had ordered Lieutenant Colonel Charles Venable of his staff to ride forward through these woods and find Major General John B. Gordon, the able and aggressive Georgian whose corps was making this assault. When Venable returned through the mist, the report he brought would determine whether this army was to fight on or surrender.
After four years of war, the northern front of the Confederate States of America had collapsed. A week before, unable to hold their overextended lines against the massive Union forces being thrown at them by General Ulysses S. Grant, Lee's battered, worn-out army had evacuated both Petersburg and the Confederate capital, Richmond. Since then they had slogged westward across Virginia through a hundred miles of spring mud, marching and fighting in an effort to break away from pursuing Federal columns. Lee's plan was to move west parallel to the railroad lines, and pick up food that was to await his army at supply depots. Then they would turn south to join the Confederate army under Joseph E. Johnston that was opposing Sherman's march north through the Carolinas from Savannah.
That turn to the south had never come. The march west became a nightmare retreat under incessant attacks that produced terrible losses — three days before this Palm Sunday, in the rout at Sayler's Creek, eight thousand of Lee's men were captured at one stroke. The food had not materialized. Starving horses collapsed and died in the mud. Reeling from hunger, soldiers who had won amazing victories in the past threw away their muskets and lay down in the Helds, waiting to be picked up as prisoners. At its peak, this once-fearsome army had numbered seventy thousand men. A week before, thirty thousand began this withdrawal to the west, with sixty to seventy thousand Union Army soldiers on their heels. On this misty morning, the Army of Northern Virginia was reduced to eleven thousand gaunt, tenacious veterans. During the night, Federal troops had thrown themselves in strength across the Confederate line of march, and Lee's army was at last surrounded. At five this morning Lee had launched this final drive to break out to the west and continue the retreat.
Waiting for Lieutenant Colonel Venable to return with the message that would tell him whether further fighting would be useless, Lee stood silent amidst a few of his staff officers. He was a strikingly handsome man of fifty-eight, nearly six feet tall, with grey hair and a trim silver beard. Years of campaigning had burnt his clear ruddy skin to a deep red-brown; there were crow's-feet at the corners of his luminous brown eyes. He had a broad forehead, prominent nose, short thick neck, big shoulders and deep chest, and stood erect as the West Point cadet he once had been. Because he thought he might end this day as General Grant's prisoner, Lee was not wearing his usual grey sack coat. To represent his thousands of mud-caked scarecrows who were still ready to fight on, this morning Lee was resplendent in a doublebreasted grey dress coat with gilt buttons. Around his waist was a deep red silk sash, and over that was a sword belt of gold braid. At his side hung a dress sword in a leather and gilt scabbard; on the blade was an inscription in French, Aide toi et Dieu t'aidera — Help yourself and God will help you.
Standing on this hillside, Lee knew the consequences of the choice he must soon make. In the past forty-eight hours Ulysses S. Grant had opened a correspondence with him, sending messages under flags of truce, urging him to surrender this army. If he surrendered these men now, the other armies of the Confederacy might stagger on briefly, but his action would mean the end of the war. For Lee, there was a special problem faced by no other Confederate officer. He was not only the field commander of this army, but he was the general in command of all Confederate forces. If the rider coming back through the woods brought him reason to think he could get his men through to Johnston's army in North Carolina and assume direct command of both armies, it might be his duty to continue the bloodshed. He had produced near-miracles before; if he could fashion one more sharp blow, it might ease the terms of the inevitable surrender.
Everything was converging. Two days before, he had sent a message to his son Major General W. H. Fitzhugh Lee, a young cavalry commander who had served in the United States Army before the war: "Keep your command together and in good spirits, General; don't let it think of surrender. I will get you out of this." Earlier in the war he had written this same son, whose nickname was Rooney, "If victorious, we have every thing to live for in the future. If defeated, nothing will be left for us to live for."
All the hopes were crashing now, in a way that affected his flesh and blood. Rooney was up there in the fighting in those misty trees; so was another Major General Fitzhugh Lee, his nephew. His oldest son, Major General Custis Lee, a West Pointer like himself, had been missing since Sayler's Creek; there were rumors that he was dead. His youngest son, Captain Robert E. Lee, Jr., had been missing in action for a week.
Those were the bonds of family, but this entire army was filled with love for Lee. They were proud of his appearance, proud of his brilliant leadership, but their hearts went out to him because he shared their risks and hardships, constantly showing them how much he admired them and appreciated their sacrifices. Thousands of them referred to him as "Uncle Robert." His soldiers saw their cause embodied in him; one of his generals told him, "You are the country to these men." In the horrendous confusion of the defeat at Sayler's Creek, Lee had cantered into the midst of his scattered troops. Facing the enemy, he grabbed up a red Confederate battle flag and held it high in the dusk, the banner waving against the flames of destroyed supplies. A staff officer told what happened next.
... The sight of him aroused a tumult. Fierce cries resounded on all sides and, with hands clinched violently and raised aloft, the men called on him to lead them against the enemy. "It's General Lee!"
"Uncle Robert!" "Where's the man who won't follow Uncle Robert?" I heard on all sides — the swarthy faces full of dirt and courage, lit up every instant by the glare of the burning wagons.
*
Lieutenant Colonel Venable emerged from the misty woods and rode up the slope to Lee. He had an oral message from Major General Gordon on the front line: "I have fought my corps to a frazzle, and I fear I can do nothing unless I am heavily supported by Longstreet's corps."
Longstreet's corps. Lee knew that Gordon could not have the reinforcements he said he needed to break through; they were committed and fighting as the army's rear guard, holding off twice their numbers. There were no reserves left, and no hope of breaking out.
Lee said in his deep voice, addressing no one, "Then there is nothing left me but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths."
His words broke the respectful silence and dignified bearing of the officers near him. Years of dedication, of comrades killed, had come to naught in an instant. "Convulsed with passionate grief," an artilleryman said, "many were the wild words we spoke as we stood around him."
As the fog began to lift and Lee finally could see his last battlefield, he spoke again, this time in what an officer beside him called a voice "filled with hopeless sadness."
"How easily I could be rid of this," Lee said, again addressing no one, "and be at rest! I have only to ride along the line and all will be over!" He meant that it would be easy to commit suicide by riding in front of his lines, drawing enemy fire. Lee crossed his arms over his chest, his hands gripping his biceps; an inward battle was being fought to a decision. Finally he said with a deep sigh: "But it is our duty to live. What will become of the women and children of the South if we are not here to protect them?"
Amidst arrangements for a temporary cease-fire while he went to confer with Grant, Lee was presented with a dramatic last-ditch suggestion. It came from Brigadier General E. Porter Alexander, the young chief of Longstreet's artillery. Lee had returned from his hilltop vantage point to the simple headquarters of a few tents and wagons where he had spent the night. Alexander came walking through the headquarters area, unaware that Lee had decided to meet with Grant.
As he had done so often with so many officers, Lee reviewed the battlefield situation with Alexander and then said, giving no hint of his decision, "What have we got to do today?" Lee's motives in doing this throughout the war were twofold: he wanted to make sure that no alternate plan escaped him, and it was also a form of Socratic teaching, making younger leaders learn by asking them what they would do if they were in his place.
Instead of surrendering, Alexander replied, let these loyal thousands of excellent soldiers slip away through the woods, singly or in small groups. Most of them could sneak through the Union lines today or tonight. Then they could make their way to their home states — the Army of Northern Virginia had units from places as distant as Florida and Texas — and continue the war as guerrillas.
Lee crushed this idea in a few words. "If I took your advice, the men would be without rations and under no control of officers. They would be compelled to rob and steal in order to live. They would become mere bands of marauders, and the enemy's cavalry would pursue them and overrun many sections they may never have occasion to visit. We would bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from." Although Lee meant "the South" when he said "the country," he was doing something for which the North as well as the South had reason to thank him, even before he went to see Grant.
The shooting stopped all around the defensive positions into which Lee's men had moved and along the Union lines encircling them. Some of the Confederates knew what was happening, others guessed, and thousands expected to go on fighting later in the day. They had seen flags of truce before.
From the Union lines, the hopeless position of Lee's army was apparent to every Federal soldier. Like the men opposing them, they kept their weapons at their sides. It was too soon to celebrate, but they had no doubt that the end was at hand. A soldier from New Hampshire sat on a slope with his comrades, looking over at the surrounded and greatly outnumbered Confederates, and later remembered how they "pitied and sympathized with these courageous Southern men who had fought for four long and dreary years, all so stubbornly, so bravely and so well, and now, whipped, beaten, completely used up, were fully at our mercy — it was pitiful, sad, hard, and seemed to us altogether too bad."
Among the mounted messengers cantering around the wooded countryside carrying white flags, one came to Lee's headquarters with an entirely personal message. His son Major General Custis Lee was safe and unharmed, a prisoner in Union hands.
The Federal officer who sent this news through the lines was Brigadier General Lawrence Williams; his mother and Lee's wife were first cousins. His name summoned memories of the way this war had ripped the fabric of relationships. Lawrence's father and Lee had been fellow officers of the Engineers during the Mexican War, and he had been killed at Monterrey. A West Pointer, Lawrence had at the outset of this war chosen to fight for the North; his brother Orton, also an officer, had resigned from the United States Army to fight for the Confederacy. Orton was in love with Lee's daughter Agnes, his childhood playmate; at Christmas of 1862 he proposed marriage and was tearfully rejected by her, although she loved him, because twenty months of war had turned him into a drinker and an unpredictably violent man. Later Orton was apprehended within Union lines, dressed as a Federal officer, and was hanged as a spy.
II
By one o'clock in the afternoon of this Palm Sunday, Lee was sitting in the corner of a parlor in the village of Appomattox Court House, inside enemy lines. Grant was riding to this meeting place from a point sixteen miles away, and there was nothing to do but wait.
The silence in the room was painful. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Marshall of Lee's staff sat next to Brevet Brigadier General Orville E. Babcock of Grant's staff, who had escorted them here under a white flag of truce. Both officers occasionally ventured a few pleasant words, but each time fell silent, wishing they could get this behind them.
Lee sat motionless in the corner, his broad-brimmed military hat and riding gauntlets on the small table beside him. It was a moment of supreme irony. When the war began, Robert Edward Lee, who had served in the United States Army as cadet and officer for a total of thirty-five years, was offered command of the army to which he must now surrender. Although he was opposed to secession, he had replied that "I could take no part in an invasion of the Southern States," had resigned his commission, and had gone on to fight superbly in defense of his native Virginia.
It was irony enough that Lee could on this day have been the victor instead of the vanquished, but the contrast between his own impeccable prewar career and Grant's added another dimension. In 1854, when Lee was superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, Captain Ulysses S. Grant resigned from the army — a decision reputedly forced on him by his superiors because of habitual drunkenness. By 1860, when Colonel Robert E. Lee was commander of all United States Army forces in the Department of Texas, Grant had in six civilian years failed as a farmer and as a real estate salesman, and was a clerk in his father's harness and leather-goods shop in Galena, Illinois. Scraping for a living, he wept on a street in Galena when no one bought a load of firewood he was peddling.
The war had given Grant the opportunity to re-enter his profession and to demonstrate a courage and resolve that strengthened with every crisis. Like Lee, he never lost sight of his objectives; unlike Lee, he had the resources to attain them. Now Grant was at the head of the most powerful army the world had seen. Two nights before, his endless columns had come pouring through Farmville, exhausted but moving fast, sensing that victory was near. When the men in the leading ranks saw Grant quietly watching them from the darkened porch of a hotel beside the road, a forced march by night turned into something else.
Bonfires were lighted on both sides of the street, the men seized straw and pine knots, and improvised torches. Cheers arose from throats already hoarse with shouts of victory, bands played, banners waved, arms were tossed high and caught again. The night march had become a grand review, with Grant as the reviewing officer.
Here at Appomattox these two careers were to intersect. Eleven months before this meeting, after his first day fighting Lee, Grant had thrown himself on the cot in his tent in a near-hysterical condition that an aide described by saying, "I never saw a man so agitated in my life." The next day Grant went right on fighting.
As Lee waited in this room in a little Virginia village, the question hanging over his army involved the terms of surrender. If Grant wished, every one of Lee's surrounded men, and the thousands of stragglers wandering the countryside, could be marched off to confinement as prisoners of war.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Lee"
by .
Copyright © 1981 Charles Bracelen Flood.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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