The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (178 page)

Next morning’s dispatch from the general-in-chief revived his genial spirits. “Let the
thing
be pressed,” he replied, echoing Sheridan, and looked forward to the brightest news of all, which would be that Lee had at last been run to earth. Once that happened, he believed, commanders of other gray armies were likely to see the folly of further resistance on their part — if, indeed, they managed to survive that long. Developments elsewhere finally seemed to be moving at a pace that matched the stepped-up progress of events here in Virginia: particularly in South and Central Alabama. Canby had a close-up grip on Mobile’s outer defenses, Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely, whose fall would mean the fall of the city in their rear, and he was preparing to assault, with results that were practically foregone, considering his better than four-to-one numerical advantage. Similarly — and incredibly, in the light of what had happened to those who tried it in the past — James Wilson, after crossing the Black Warrior, then the Cahaba, had driven Bedford Forrest headlong in the course of a two-day running skirmish, fifty miles in length, to descend on Selma, April 2, the day Richmond itself was abandoned. By now the all-important manufactories there were a
mass of smoking rubble, and Wilson had his troopers hard on the go for Montgomery, where the Confederacy began. Neither Canby nor Wilson had started in time to be of much help to each other, as originally intended; nor had Stoneman crossed the Smokies in time to strike in Johnston’s rear for Sherman’s benefit. But now, in accordance with Grant’s revised instructions, he turned his raiders north for Lynchburg, where Lee was apparently headed too.

No wonder, then, that Harlan found Lincoln “transfigured” as he stood on the dock at City Point to welcome his wife and her guests back from Richmond, or that he took increased encouragement from what he saw on the trip to Petersburg that afternoon. “Animosity in the town is abating,” he told Chambrun; “the inhabitants now accept accomplished facts, the final downfall of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery. There still remains much for us to do, but every day brings new reason for confidence in the future.”

Aboard the
River Queen
that night — April 7; Good Friday was a week away — Elihu Washburne, en route to the front for another visit with Grant, whose rise he had done so much to promote through the first three years of a war that now had stretched to nearly four, called on Lincoln and found him “in perfect health and exuberant spirits,” voluble in recounting for his guests the events of the past week, including his walk through the streets of Richmond. “He never flagged during the whole evening,” the Illinois congressman would recall. Chambrun, however — a liberal despite his privileged heritage and the conservative domination of his homeland under the Second Empire — observed in his host contrasting traits often remarked by others in the past: Crook for one, just the night before, and Sherman at the conference held on this same vessel, ten days back. “He willingly laughed either at what was being said to him, or at what he said himself,” the Frenchman later wrote. “But all of a sudden he would retire within himself; then he would close his eyes, and all his features would bespeak a kind of sadness as indescribable as it was deep. After a while, as though it were by an effort of his will, he would shake off this mysterious weight under which he seemed bowed; his generous and open disposition would again reappear. In one evening I happened to count over twenty of these alternations and contrasts.”

Part of this intermittent sadness no doubt came from realization that he was approaching the end of the only real vacation he had taken in the past four years. All day Saturday preparations went forward for departure of the
Queen
that night, including a thorough check on the records of her crew, ordered by Porter in reaction to the belated fright he felt at the risk he had run in taking the President to and through the rebel capital, all but unescorted. That evening a military band came on board for a farewell concert. After several numbers, Lincoln requested the “Marseillaise,” which he liked so well that he had it repeated. “You
must, however, come over to America to hear it,” he said wryly to the young marquis, knowing the Emperor had banned the piece in France. Then he called for “Dixie,” much to the surprise of his guests and the musicians, as well as to listeners in the outer darkness on the docks and blufftop. “That tune is now Federal property,” he told Chambrun. An hour before midnight, the
Queen
cast off and began to steam down the winding moonlit river, escorted by the
Bat
. Reaching Hampton Roads before dawn, she stopped long enough to board a pilot at Fort Monroe and was off again by sunrise, up Chesapeake Bay toward the mouth of the Potomac.

It was April 9; Palm Sunday. Eastward the sky was a glory of red, but the rising sun was presently dimmed by clouds rolling in from the sea with a promise of rain. The President and his guests rose early, and after breakfast went on deck to watch the gliding tableau of the Coreline. Soon after they entered the Potomac, paddle wheels churning against the current, they passed Stratford Hall, the birthplace of Robert Lee — presumably still in flight for his life, a hundred-odd miles to the southwest — and within the hour, on that same bank, saw the birth-sites too of Washington and James Monroe. Almost in view of the capital, as they steamed past Mount Vernon just at sundown, someone remarked that Springfield would someday be equally honored. Lincoln, who had been musing at the rail, came out of himself on hearing his home town mentioned. “Springfield!” he exclaimed. He smiled and said he would be happy to return there, “four years hence,” and live in peace and tranquillity. Mainly though, according to Chambrun, “the conversation dwelt upon literary subjects.” Lincoln read to the assembled group from what Sumner called “a beautiful quarto Shakespeare,” mainly from
Macbeth
, perhaps his favorite, with emphasis on the scenes that followed the king’s assassination.

He paused, then read the lines again, something in them responding to something in himself. After the reading he was again withdrawn, although presently when his wife spoke of Jefferson Davis—saying, as the staff officer had said five days ago in Richmond, “He must be hanged”—he replied, as he had then: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Contradiction was risky in that direction, inviting “malice domestic” as it did, but he ventured to repeat it when they came within sight of the roofs of Washington and he heard her tell Chambrun, “That city is filled with our enemies.” Lincoln made a gesture of impatience. “Enemies,”
he said, as if with the taste of something bitter on his tongue. “We must never speak of that.”

Rain was coming down hard in the twilight by the time the steamer reached the wharf at the foot of Sixth Street. The President’s carriage was waiting to take him to the White House, but he let Tad and Mrs Lincoln off there and went on alone to Seward’s house, nearby on Franklin Square, where the Secretary lay recovering from the injuries he had suffered. They were extensive, the right shoulder badly dislocated, the jaw broken on both sides; the pain had been so great that he had been in delirium for three of the four days since his fall. Indeed, he was scarcely recognizable when his friend entered the upstairs bedroom to find him stretched along the far edge of the bed, his arm projected over the side to avoid pressure on the bruised socket, his face swathed in bandages, swollen and discolored, his jaw clamped in an iron frame for healing. “You are back from Richmond?” he said in a hoarse whisper, barely able to speak because of the damage and the pain. “Yes, and I think we are near the end at last,” Lincoln told him. First he sat gingerly on the bed, then sprawled across it, resting on an elbow, his face close to Seward’s while he described much that had happened down near City Point in the course of the past two weeks. He stayed half an hour, by which time the New Yorker had fallen into a feverish sleep. Then he came out, gesturing for silence in the hall, and tiptoed down the stairs to the front door, where his carriage was waiting to take him back to the White House.

Later that evening, undressing for sleep, he felt the familiar weariness all men feel on their first night home from a vacation. Then there came a knock, and he opened the bedroom door to find a War Department messenger in the hall with a telegram that made Lincoln forget that weariness had anything to do with living. It was from Grant and had been sent from a place called Appomattox Courthouse.

4

What had begun as a retreat the previous Sunday night, when Lee abandoned Petersburg and Richmond with the intention of marching
southwest beyond the Roanoke, developed all too soon into a race against Grant and starvation, which in turn became a harassed flight that narrowed the dwindling army’s fate to slow or sudden death. For six days this continued, ever westward. Then on the seventh — April 9, Palm Sunday — Lee made his choice. The agony ended, as his opponent said in the bedtime telegram to Lincoln, “upon terms proposed by myself.”

Few at the start, in the column he accompanied, apparently thought it would turn out so: least of all Lee himself, who told a companion when they took up the march on Monday morning: “I have got my army safely out of its breastworks, and in order to follow me, the enemy must abandon his lines and can derive no further benefit from his railroads or James River.” Others felt a similar elation at their successful withdrawal across the Appomattox, unpursued, and the exchange of their cramped trenches for the spread-out landscape, where sunlight glittered on greening fields and new-fledged trees along the roadside. Whatever the odds, this was Chancellorsville weather, with its reminders of their old skill at maneuver. “A sense of relief seemed to pervade the ranks at their release from the lines where they had watched and worked for more than nine weary months,” a staff brigadier would recall. “Once more in the open field, they were invigorated with hope, and felt better able to cope with their powerful adversary.”

But that applied only to the central column, the 13,000 infantry under Longstreet and Gordon, Pendleton’s 3000 cannoneers, and Mahone’s 4000-man division on its way from Bermuda Hundred via Chesterfield Courthouse. Most of these 20,000 effectives had stood fast the day before, had conducted the nighttime withdrawal in good order, and had sustained their group identity in the process. It was different for the 6000 coming down from beyond the James with Ewell. Less than a third were veterans under Kershaw, while the rest — combined extemporaneously under Custis Lee, who had lately been promoted to major general though he had never led troops in action outside the capital defenses — were reservists, naval personnel, and heavy artillerymen, so unaccustomed to marching that the road in their rear was already littered with stragglers, footsore and blown from a single night on the go. Nor was their outlook improved by the view they had had, back over their shoulders the night before, of Richmond in flames on the far side of the river. Even so, they were in considerably better shape than the 3500 men with Anderson beyond the Appomattox, rattled fragments of the four divisions of Pickett, Johnson, Heth, and Wilcox, working their way west in the wake of Fitz Lee’s 3500 jaded troopers on worse-than-jaded horses. Badly trounced at Five Forks, two days back, and scattered by yesterday’s breakthrough on the right — which had now become the left — they had been whipped, and knew it. “There was an attempt to organize the various commands,” a South
Carolina captain later said of this smallest and worst-off of the three infantry columns; “to no avail. The Confederacy was considered as ‘gone up,’ and every man felt it his duty, as well as his privilege, to save himself. I do not mean to say there was any insubordination whatever, but the whole left of the army was so crushed by the defeats of the past few days that it straggled along without strength and almost without thought. So we moved on in disorder, keeping no regular column, no regular pace. When a soldier became weary he fell out, ate his scanty rations — if, indeed, he had any to eat — rested, rose, and resumed the march when his inclination dictated. There were not many words spoken. An indescribable sadness weighed upon us. The men were very gentle toward each other, very liberal in bestowing the little of food that remained to them.”