Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [42]
This was not good enough for Grant, but it opened the door a crack to peace. He wrote back to Lee the next morning that he would accept Lee’s surrender of his army on “one condition, namely that the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified from taking up arms again against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged,” and proposed that Lee should choose a time and place for a meeting. These were approximately the same terms he had offered Pemberton at Vicksburg, and a lot better than his famous “unconditional surrender” letter to Buckner. But then Buckner was not Lee, for whom Grant felt a great respect.
Both armies were still moving west as the two generals communicated, Lee’s slowly and painfully, Grant’s more quickly, while Grant tried to separate Lee from the South. On the morning of the ninth, the head of Lee’s column reached Appomattox Station, only to find Custer’s troopers already in possession of it, and the supplies waiting there. In the meantime Grant was suffering, as he often did when under stress, from a severe migraine headache. He took refuge in a farmhouse and spent the night of the eighth bathing his feet “in hot water and mustard” and applying “mustard plasters” to his wrists and neck.
The early morning of the ninth brought another, longer letter from Lee, implying that he understood Grant’s terms but still not specifically agreeing to them. It was a step in the right direction, however, and it got Grant out of his sickbed and onto his horse. Severe fighting had resumed, and although Appomattox Court House was only two or three miles away as the crow flies, there was no way for Grant to ride through it. Lee sent messengers under the white flag of truce to Meade and to Sheridan, asking for “a suspension of hostilities” to allow for a meeting between himself and Grant. Meade set a time limit of two hours, and Grant rode south with a modest escort, to get around the area where the fighting had been taking place, then turned north and reached Appomattox Court House by the back roads, his head still pounding. On the way he received yet another note from Lee, borne by a Confederate officer, at last agreeing to Grant’s terms, and Grant’s headache instantly vanished. He quickly scrawled a reply to Lee from horseback, saying that he was “four miles West of Walker’s Church,” and asking for an officer to conduct him to where Lee was, and after a long and confusing ride on muddy country roads was led to the McLean house in the village of Appomattox Court House, where Lee was waiting for him. Reading between the lines, it seems likely that Grant plunged off into the Virginia countryside and got lost, something it is possible to do even today in a car, with a map in hand. What is also worth noting is that it took a high degree of courage for a three-star general to ride through back roads where it was only too likely he would meet angry Confederate soldiers, any one of whom might be only too happy to kill the Union commander—a thought that does not even seem to have occurred to Grant.
He arrived slightly embarrassed by his muddy uniform, particularly since Lee was waiting for him on the porch of the McLean house in a brand-new, beautifully tailored pale gray uniform, gold braid glistening on his sleeves, a scarlet sash and a gold-braided belt around his waist, wearing a gilt presentation sword (probably the one presented to him by the state of Virginia), and carrying his white kidskin riding gloves in one hand, every inch the patrician beau sabreur of legend. He stood erect, nearly six feet tall, with gleaming boots, a perfectly trimmed white beard, and the piercing eyes of a born commander of men, a figure of awesome military dignity, as Grant clumped up the steps in his muddy boots and wrinkled uniform to meet him. As Grant commented with undisguised admiration, “What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible [sic] face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the