Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox by Caroline E. Janney University of North Carolina Press (2021)
Have you ever wondered what exactly happened to Robert E. Lee’s men after Appomattox? Most of us know about the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse and a lot of us know at least a little about what happened after the paroled Confederates got home. But how much do you know about what happened in between? This book by historian Caroline Janney tells us the “in between” story.
When Lee got to Appomattox and found his way blocked by Union troops on April 9, 1865 he parlayed with Ulysses S. Grant for his surrender. Lee’s move from Petersburg to Appomattox is often seen as a long retreat, but in fact Lee was trying to break out of the Union army’s grip and move his men south to unite with Joseph Johnston’s army in North Carolina. Lee had started with 60,000 men in the Petersburg and Richmond defenses and by April 9, he had only 28,000 left only a week later. While thousands of Confederates been captured or killed, about 17,000 men from the Army of Northern Virginia were simply not at Appomattox when the surrender took place. Some had deserted and headed home, others joined marauding bands of outlaws that victimized Virginia civilians, and still others had left Lee’s army in the hopes of continuing resistance to the United States army by joining Joe Johnston’s force or by heading west to the Shenandoah Valley. This book tells the story of those who surrendered on April 9 and those who did not.
Ulysses S. Grant offered Lee uniquely generous terms for the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia:
The arms, artillery and public property to be parked and stacked, and turned over to the officer appointed by me to receive them. This will not embrace the side-arms of the officers, nor their private horses or baggage. This done, each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside.
The surrender did not end the war, of course. There were still other large Confederate armies in the field carrying on the armed struggle to prevent the reunification of the United States and Union soldiers would continue dying for weeks. It was not uncommon for captured rebels at the end of a civil conflict to be imprisoned for a time or even for some to be executed. Six years after Appomattox, the suppression of the Paris Commune uprising led to summary executions of scores of Communards, the imprisonment of nearly 16,000 and the exile of more than four thousand. Grant’s terms avoided retribution. Lee’s men would not be killed or sent to camps. Instead they would receive a parole, giving them a legal status similar to that of a prisoner of war but allowing them to “return to their homes.” Given the destitute state of the Confederates, Grant even allowed the Confederates to be fed at Federal expense and to travel for free on Union trains and steam ships.
Grant’s generosity did not meet the expectations of some Confederates. Edward A. Moore of the Rockbridge Artillery wrote, according to Caroline Janney, that Moore believed that:
“after an ordeal of mortifying exposure for the gratification of the military,” they would be “paraded through Northern cities for the benefit of jeering crowds” before being sent to prison camps. [p. 17]
Instead they were to be treated respectfully. Grant saw the treatment of the new prisoners as a path forward towards binding up the wounds of the country, and avoiding the horrors of a prolonged guerilla war. Rather than simply disband the Confederate army and either send the men home as individuals or march them south under Union guard, Grant allowed them to march home unguarded in units under their old officers.
Grant showed forethought in the terms of surrender, but things could have played out differently. Confederate General Thomas Rosser had escaped capture and had announced that he was now in command of the Army of Northern Virginia and he called on the soldiers of that army to join him and continue the fight. Other Confederates showed up at Joe Johnston’s headquarters to join the old Army of Tennessee, only to find that Johnston subjected them to a legal inquiry into whether they were included in Lee’s surrender. If the answer was yes, they were turned away.
To Grant’s surprise, hundreds of Confederates headed north after the surrender. Some were heading home. They were men from the Border States of Maryland and West Virginia who had joined the Confederacy. Others went north hoping to explore opportunities there while the Federal government paid their food and transportation costs. Still others hoped to leave the United States through ports like New York for the last outpost of slavery in Brazil.
This development alarmed the military commanders in the areas the Confederates were arriving in. The war was still going on and they worried that Confederates infiltrating into the North could initiate a terror campaign in the Union heartland. When a Confederate spy cell carried out attacks on Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward on April 14, their worst fears were realized. The presence of scores of Confederates in Washington on the night of the Lincoln assassination led to rumors that more terrorism was afoot. Grant had given Confederates paroles to return to their homes, not to travel freely about the North. After the shooting at Ford’s Theater, military commanders began expelling Confederates from Maryland and Washington.
Even those Confederates heading southward experienced troubles after Lincoln’s death. Union officers who had received them respectfully and fed them now regarded them with suspicion and resentment. The assassination was a reminder that the war was not over. Janney writes that the actions of some Confederates compounded the mistrust. While most moved south as inoffensively as possible, some split off from their officers to rape and pillage. The men of one unit recorded killing three black Federal soldiers as part of their trip home. Janney writes:
The refusal to accept defeat was more than just the rhetoric of defiance. Those who escaped the surrender and rode south to join Johnston or west to the Shenandoah Valley clung to the cause. Individuals and groups who murdered soldiers of the USCT or forced newly freed men and women to assist them refused to concede that slavery had ended or that the Confederate war to protect slavery had resulted in emancipation. Those who eventually sought out paroles in Virginia and beyond continued to insist that their cause had been legally and morally just. …The disbanding of the Army of Northern Virginia had not marked the end of the nation’s division. It was only the beginning, foreshadowing much of what would play out in the decades to come: retaliation against African Americans, defiance of meddlesome federal agents, and the election of Confederate leaders to state and national offices, all couched in the Lost Cause veneration of Lee… [p. 256-257]
The Ends of War explores a moment between the Civil War and Reconstruction that few students of the period really know well. Janney pays a lot of attention to details of the surrender, the journeys home, and the resistance to surrender using the stories of individual Confederate soldiers to illustrate broader trends. Even those familiar with recent scholarship on the end of the war by historians like Elizabeth Varon and Greg Downs will find something new here. I think most of my readers will enjoy this new book.
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It would have been absolutely impossible in human terms for literally all, either armed forces or civilian, domestic or abroad, to ‘switch off’ the militancy that had been unleashed on a scale unknown to human history, with the surrender of Lee at Appomattox.
Those who were not able to at least attempt to ‘reclasp the olive branch’ on the Confederate side were not living the example that Lee had set for them, personally, and which such figures as James Longstreet and William Mahone were personally inspired by.
It is true that large bodies of Confederates were yet to surrender by 9 April 1865, (the last large scale offensive campaign was at the same time underway in Alabama). However, upon news of Lee’s surrender, the ending of further hostilities was essentially only a matter of time and information dissemination. For Virginia was the key to the war’s end; if not, the war would have essentially ceased with the capture of the Miss. River at Vicksburg, at Atlanta, etc. The East was the area where the war would be decided.
Janney ought to have acknowledged that the Confederate war effort had already become a war for emancipation, as demonstrated by the near-clinched 1862 Emancipation Treaty with Britain and France and the 1864 Duncan F. Kenner Mission.
This ties into one of the main elements that the Civil War/War Between the States wrought: ‘Change’. This is also evidenced by such features as Lincoln decrying that America would have “a new birth of freedom”, by virtue of the conflict having happened at all, and that USCT were either some of, or the very first, Union troops to enter conquered Charleston, S.C., or that Robert E. Lee had stated that he would personally lead would-be national Black Confederate troops into battle.
What in large amount the Lost Cause school of studies would obscure, (by deliberate design by such as Pollard and Early), was that in its deification of Lee, it would forego the peace he made possible, and that which Mifflin W. Gibbs, (a colleague of Frederick Douglass and like him, Martin Delany, Thomas Morris Chester and his brother, Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs, a significant figure of 19th Ce. Black American history), gave credit to both Generals of Appomattox-
“…General Grant’s campaign ended in the surrender of General Lee, and Peace, with its golden pinions, alighted on our national staff.” ‘Shadow & Light: An Autobiography’, Washington, 1902, 79.