Grant made several errors of omission while feeling his way through his first surrender. For one thing, he should have appointed an experienced officer as provost marshal to handle the transfer of some 12,000 men. Instead things got so chaotic that Buckner complained to him on February 16, “There seems to be no concert of action between the different departments of your army in reference to these prisoners.” Still, Grant was more comfortable keeping a light hand on the reins.

Another consequence of his command style was that his senior officers, specifically Smith, felt free to hand out paroles to Rebel officers on their own initiative. Even Buckner got in on the act, insisting on issuing passes to his men that would be honored by Union sentries. Amiable as ever, Grant went along, seeing no harm in letting men move back and forth between the lines now that the fighting was over. This was another decision he came to regret. Finally, Grant was lax in regulating the behavior of his own men. In the first 24 hours of the truce, jubilant Union soldiers left their lines to parade through Confederate encampments with U.S. flags flying and bands playing. Only the intervention of Confederate officers prevented ugly confrontations with Rebel soldiers.

On February 17, in the salon of New Uncle Sam, the final terms were nailed down and the necessary documents signed. What would take no more than two hours to accomplish at Appomattox in 1865 took two days of dickering at Donelson before everything was settled.

It did not make Grant’s situation any easier that Buckner was a far tougher negotiator than Robert E. Lee, partly because Buckner was not shy about using his friendship with Grant to wring out every concession he could get, and partly because war-weariness had not set in and both sides still entertained hopes of ultimate victory. However, Grant was no gullible farm boy; his instincts were shrewd. For instance, he insisted on using his own headquarters on the second day instead of returning to Dover Tavern. He thereby forced his enemy to come to him, a valuable trump card in any peace negotiations.

When Buckner, accompanied by a pair of staff officers, came onboard New Uncle Sam, Grant was in conference with his senior officers. He got up immediately to receive the Confederates and make introductions all around. Then, since there were still substantive matters to be settled, they got down to business. Grant and Buckner took seats facing each other across a table in the center of the room while a recording secretary sat down at Grant’s elbow. Staff members arranged themselves behind their respective generals. As on the previous day, Grant was low-key, even affable, and steered the conversation away from politics and military affairs at the beginning. “Dignity and dispatch,” noted one observer, marked the day’s proceedings from beginning to end.

Neither brigadier general wore a dress uniform for the occasion, preferring to stay in campaign clothes — which were more suitable for a cold, wet February day. According to newspaper correspondent Charles C. Coffin, a witness to the affair, the short, round-shouldered, “rather scrubby looking” Union general, whose ill-fitting uniform emphasized his slight stoop, did not look the part of a victorious captain. But it did not matter, as Buckner hardly cut a dashing figure either, with his “meager whiskers” and mud-caked boots, casually attired in a “light-blue kersey overcoat and a checked neckcloth.” Their negotiations looked like the meeting of a couple of farmers across a pasture fence.

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Besides their education and military background, Grant and Buckner shared a fondness for the occasional stogie. Both men lit up during the meeting, filling the small room with pungent smoke. Afterward the Northern newspapers picked up on this detail and recast it as a defining quirk of Grant. Those newspaper reports would result in thousands of admiring citizens sending him boxes of cigars, leading to a 20-cigar-a-day addiction — which eventually led to his death from cancer of the throat in 1885.

The first item on Grant’s agenda was getting detailed intelligence on the size and structure of the Confederate forces. According to Coffin, Buckner freely gave all the information Grant requested about Confederate fortifications, troop dispositions and the intentions of the high command. Grant was not indulging idle curiosity; the fact was, he did not have an intelligence operative on his staff to ferret out such information. As a result, he had only a fuzzy notion of what he had won.

For his part, Buckner was still trying to get all the wiggle room he could under the original “unconditional surrender” dictum. He asked for both military and humanitarian concessions, and as they talked, Grant began to realize just how many perfectly reasonable conditions could attend an unconditional surrender. Step by step, Grant backed off his original demand. Grant the relentless bulldog on the battlefield became Grant the compassionate conqueror at the peace table.

The suffering of Buckner’s cold and hungry men in particular touched the Union general’s heart. Grant had come to negotiate a surrender, not to feed the multitudes. Now he found himself in uncharted waters, where no American commander had ever gone before. It was Buckner who broached the subject, explaining that his men had eaten almost nothing for two days, and now they were facing a delay of at least another two days before reaching their final destination. Could Grant see his way clear to provide food out of the ample Union stores?

This was Grant’s first notification of the chronically poor state of the Confederate commissary supply. It took him a few moments to digest this new information and respond appropriately. At first he demurred that he would like to help but his own commissary staff was not up to speed yet. Buckner did not give up so easily. “My staff is perfectly organized, and I place them at your disposal,” he said. Grant was a thoroughly practical man, and this was a practical albeit unorthodox solution. He accepted Buckner’s offer and issued the special orders for his commissary supply officers to deliver two days’ rations to the Confederates.

Buckner continued to lead the conversation, making additional requests, each of which received a fair hearing from Grant. For example, Grant “readily acceded to” Buckner’s request for “special treatment” for his wounded officers. It was not just their injuries that aroused his sympathy but the fact that these were brother officers, some of whom Grant knew well from West Point and service in the Old Army. That was the same reasoning behind his decision to allow commissioned officers to retain their side arms, although it meant that Rebel officers would be going into captivity carrying pistols and swords. Grant knew that an officer’s sword was more than just a weapon; it was the traditional symbol of his rank and authority. And many revolvers were family heirlooms that had great sentimental value. In the military world of rank and privilege, Grant was cognizant of both.

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