Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [43]
Despite the best efforts of Lee’s staff, and of Grant’s, things were not quite ready for the two commanders in the small, cramped house, and they stood making small talk for a few minutes, mostly about the Mexican War. Grant remembered Lee well, and Lee at any rate pretended to remember Grant, despite the fact that they had been separated by a great distance of age and rank, and they chatted together so pleasantly about old campaigns and old army friends that Lee finally had to remind Grant what they were there for.
Once they were inside—Lee raised a well-bred eyebrow at Col. Ely Parker, Grant’s full-blooded Indian staff officer—they sat down together at a small table, and Lee suggested that Grant put the terms he was suggesting in writing. Parker hunted up paper, an inkwell, and a pen, and Grant scratched away while Lee politely stared at the walls. On his own it occurred to Grant to put in a sentence allowing Confederate officers to retain their sidearms, private horses, and baggage, to “avoid unnecessary humiliation.”
No conversation took place until Grant passed the letter to Lee, who put on his reading glasses and perused it carefully. When he came to the part about officers retaining their sidearms, horses, and baggage, he remarked, “with some feeling,” Grant thought, that this would have “a happy effect” upon his army.
Lee raised only one point, which was that in the Confederate army cavalrymen and “artillerists” owned their own horses, and asked if they would be permitted to retain them. Grant pointed out that the exemption was for officers only, and that he could not or would not rewrite his letter, but since most of the men were small farmers, and would need to plant their crops, his officers would be instructed to allow any Confederate soldier who claimed a horse or a mule to take the animal to his home. Lee remarked again that this would have “a most happy effect,” and, taking a piece of paper, wrote out his acceptance of the terms in five brief lines.
While the exchange of letters was being copied, Lee and Grant chatted quietly, filling in time. Lee, in the end, did not offer Grant his sword, nor would Grant, in view of the line he had written into the surrender terms, have accepted it. Lee did point out, with some embarrassment, that his troops were starving, and Grant agreed to provide him rations for 25,000 men. With that they parted, perhaps the most famous scene in American history having been completed in less than an hour, and Grant wrote out a few lines to be telegraphed to Stanton with perhaps the least self-congratulatory or exultant message of victory in the history of warfare:
Headquarters Appomattox C. H., Va., April 9th, 1865, 4:30 P. M.
Hon. E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War,
Washington.
General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this afternoon on terms proposed by myself. The accompanying additional correspondence will show the conditions fully.
U. S. Grant,
Lieut.-General.
As the news spread through the Union lines, the Union artillery began to fire a one-hundred-gun salute. Grant, whose headache was returning, sent word to have it stopped. Whether he actually said, “We are all Americans again now,” is doubtful, but that was certainly his thought. “The Confederates,” he later wrote, “were now our prisoners, and we did not want to exult over their downfall.”
What he thought about the story that Custer, the “boy general,” had ridden off from the McLean house with the small table on which the surrender had been signed held upside down on his head, taking it away as a souvenir, we do not know, but it may well have been one of the many reasons for his dislike of Custer, whose death at the Little Big Horn Grant took with something that goes well beyond stoicism, approaching a certain satisfaction. In any event the next day he permitted his officers to visit any friends they might have in the Confederate camp (the professional army was a small world), and he himself rode over to the McLean