Elizabeth Varon is a noted Civil War historian at the University of Virginia. Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War is her 2013 book on the surrender at Appomattox and she is considered an expert on the campaign that led to the concluding phase of the war in the East. Today she had an essay published in Time Magazine where she struggles with President Trump’s recent Executive Order on American history. Here are some substantial excerpts:
On March 27, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order, insisting that our history must “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” At the root of Trump’s order was the belief that historians have pushed a “factually baseless ideology aimed at diminishing American achievement.”
Trump’s order included critiques of historians “interrogating institutional racism” and an exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum which suggests that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”
However, modern scholarship asks us to reckon honestly, and unflinchingly, with complex facts and not gloss over painful parts of our history. Trump’s order therefore raises the question: should Americans accept incomplete, or inaccurate, stories of national “greatness” in place of the messy realities of history?
The case of one of the famous moments in American history—Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox—dramatically illustrates the dangers of letting myth substitute for accurate history.
For generations, Americans learned the same basic story about the end of the Civil War. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Va. In a sublime moment of selflessness, the two great leaders nobly transcended their differences and chose the path of peace and reconciliation. Grant paid homage to Confederate courage by setting lenient surrender terms, which let the defeated rebels go home unpunished. In a reciprocal show of respect, Lee handed over his ceremonial sword to Grant, only to have his counterpart return it. The two men effectively ended the war and set the stage for America’s rise as a world power.
This story, however, was never true. Instead, it originated in 19th-century Americans’ yearning for a swift reunion, which could sweep away the unresolved issues of the war. The story served as a resolution to help prove that America was unique and not destined to experience the interminable rivalries and miseries of the Old World.
But politically, Appomattox settled nothing. Rather than a time of reconciliation, Lee’s surrender was a moment in which a wide range of Americans, including both generals, staked rival political claims.
Read More: Civil War History Shows the Danger of Comparing Trump to Jesus
Neither Grant nor Lee arrived at Appomattox expecting to heal, in one grand gesture, the fractured country. Both men were fierce warriors, deeply committed to their respective causes. Far from proposing lenient surrender terms to exonerate the Confederates, Grant did so in an effort to change their hearts and minds. He regarded the Union victory as one of right over wrong and wanted to secure Confederate repentance and compliance. The story that he handed back Lee’s sword was “the purest romance,” as Grant later wrote in his memoirs.
Grant and his army believed that their victory vindicated the superiority of a free labor society over a slave labor society. African American Union regiments, which consisted mostly of men who had escaped slavery, felt their patriotic sacrifices had earned them the full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote. As William McCoslin of the 29th Regiment USCT put it in a May 1865 letter, “We the colored soldiers, have fairly won our rights by loyalty and bravery. …shall we obtain them? If they are refused now, we shall demand them!”
Confederates, by contrast, recoiled from both of these ideas and had little interest in repentance. Instead, Lee tried to claim the moral high ground, asserting that the Union victory was one of might over right. The goal was to deny the victors a mandate to govern the vanquished.
His posture reflected the hope among most Confederates that their cause—one of establishing a slaveholding republic—might still somehow be vindicated. Confederate General William Nelson Pendleton decried the need to surrender to an army of “German, Irish, negro, and Yankee wretches,” men he and his fellow Confederates regarded as their social and racial inferiors.
Unsurprisingly, given their lack of remorse, the Confederates also tried to avoid any consequences for their rebellion. At Appomattox, Lee requested that the Union army issue each of his soldiers a printed parole pass to vouch that if they went home and observed the laws in force where they resided, they would “remain undisturbed.” In an interview with the New York Herald a few weeks later, Lee warned that if the Yankee government adopted “arbitrary or vindictive or revengeful policies,” Southerners would consider the surrender terms breached and would renew the fight.
In Lee’s eyes, one goal of this “gentlemen’s agreement” with Grant was to hold the line against Black civil rights. Lee and his allies sought the restoration—not the reimagining—of the South. He wanted to turn back the clock to before abolitionists had challenged slavery and Southern rule. In the aftermath of Appomattox, ex-Confederates moved quickly, using propaganda, fraud, and terrorism, to preempt Black freedom and impose a system akin to slavery.
