After a four-year bloodbath, the guns finally fell silent. Now what?
The Civil War ended with what amounted to a whimper compared with all the bloody bangs during the years preceding the surrender. The principal contestants, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Potomac, concluded their contretemps at a gentlemanly ceremony in the sleepy hamlet of Appomattox Court House, Va., at the home of farmer Wilmer McLean who, ironically, had moved his family there from Manassas, 120 miles to the north, after the war erupted in his backyard in the summer of 1861.
Grant was generous in his terms, allowing the Confederate soldiers to return home on their personal recognizance and to retain any horses or mules that they personally owned. With the collapse of the Virginia front and the fall of Richmond it was a matter of time before the remainder of the Confederacy crumbled. Within a month a majority of the Southern armies had surrendered, although it took until June for outposts in the Far West to get the word.
The war was the most horrid experience this nation has suffered, before or since. The casualties commonly given are 640,000 killed on both sides, and more recent estimates put that figure above 800,000, or 2.5 percent of the populace. That would translate in today’s population to a whopping 6.5 million dead Americans, about evenly distributed, North and South.
At the end, the South was totally and dismally prostrated; its infrastructure of bridges, railroads and communications wrecked, much of its commercial and private property destroyed, its fields fallow, its livestock decimated. With the Southern agricultural economy collapsed, millions of former slaves became wretched, for the system of feeding, clothing and sheltering them was broken. Even if they could have been employed, there was little or no money to pay them since during the four years of war, the great textile mills of England and France had found other sources of cotton or switched to other fibers.
The Southern political system was likewise in tatters. With the disenfranchisement of former Confederate soldiers and officials, a leadership vacuum was created into which stepped a large number of incompetents and malfeasants under the harsh terms of Reconstruction. In many places the rule of martial law was laid down, which severely restricted most productive endeavors or brought them to a halt.
Though their armies had been defeated, their economy lay in ruins and their land was occupied by their enemy, the Southerners remained sullen and defiant. An undercurrent of feeling ran through the populace that the North did not “fight fair” by coming at them with such overwhelming numbers of soldiers. In a “fair fight,” the Southerners somehow reasoned, “we could have whupped them,” and gave as examples their many early victories.
After the defeat of Lee’s army at Gettysburg and the surrender of Vicksburg, Miss., the war was well nigh unwinnable by the Confederacy from a military standpoint, but the Southerners fought on for another two years—the bitterest battles yet to come—until decisively compelled to give in. People like that were unlikely to approach their conquest with a “forgive and forget” attitude.
Four years earlier the South assumed it had created its own “Camelot” and reveled in that notion for a brief shining moment before the war came. By that time a narrative was in circulation in Dixieland to the effect that Yankees were an entirely different race of people from Southerners. Those who settled the North, the story went, were the glum, parsimonious descendants of Oliver Cromwell’s troublemaking “Roundheads” who had overthrown and executed the king of England before moving to Holland where they also disturbed the peace. In the end, the offspring of these dour souls could find no happiness in Europe or England and thus sailed for the New World, landing at Plymouth Rock where they began a colony in Massachusetts. On the other hand, the narrative went, Southerners were descended from the gay cavaliers of the Glorious Revolution and Bonnie Prince Charlie, and had settled at Jamestown, Va., before spreading into the Carolinas and the lands across the Appalachians.
Mere papers of surrender could not erase the contempt and hatred for the North, which had been fueled in these people for decades by defamatory and insulting tracts of abolitionists and other Northern anti-slavery commentators and politicians. That would take another hundred years to abate, and for some very few the ill feelings probably still exist.
For its part, the Radical Republicans were angry with the South for causing so much anguish and heartache. Lincoln had favored a policy of reconciliation, but now there was talk of hanging or imprisoning Rebel leaders such as Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and a long list of others who were said to have been traitors—as well as confiscating their property—but little came of it.
Davis was jailed for nearly two years and Nathan Bedford Forrest was indicted, but no one was ever tried except Henry Wirz, the commandant of the notorious Rebel prison camp at Andersonville, Ga., who was in fact found guilty of cruelty and hanged. Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson granted clemency for the Confederate military leaders, a policy that became a factor in impeachment proceedings against him in 1868, led by members of Congress who thought that Johnson (a Tennessean by birth) was letting the South off too easy.
There was also talk of dismembering the South, most prominently by Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner, who before the war had been viciously caned at his desk in the Capitol by a congressman from the South. Sumner’s idea was to break the seceding states into military districts that would be ruled “indefinitely” by some type of “czar” in Washington, who could do with them as he pleased without opposition, political or otherwise, including resettlement of the population. William Tecumseh Sherman had a similar scheme in which any Southerner—man, woman or child—who did not unhesitatingly sign a loyalty oath to the United States and accept federal authority, should be “banished” from the country to become a “denizen of the land”—whatever that meant. The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln did nothing to improve relations between the two sections, as many Northerners suspected it had been a Confederate plot all along.
THE WAR BEGAN BECAUSE neither side recognized or understood the military capacity of the other. Most people believed the fighting would be over “before the leaves fall,” if even that long. The North insisted that the Confederate Army was little more than “an armed mob led by lawyers” that would run away at the first taste of battle, while the South believed that once the Union forces invaded they would be badly mauled and come to the bargaining table. After the Fourth of July 1863, however, the strategic situation was clear enough. The Union Army had at last inflicted a decided defeat on the Army of Northern Virginia and would occupy a sizable portion of the critical state of Virginia, growing in manpower by the day, while the Confederates could barely refill their ranks after the failed Gettysburg Campaign. The slave states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware remained for the most part under Union control, while most of Tennessee and northern Mississippi had been lost. New Orleans and Nashville had fallen—the inescapable fact was, the Confederacy was shrinking, and every day brought some new crisis. Then would have been an ideal time for the Confederacy to treat with Lincoln for a peace, even if it meant a return to the Union and the end of slavery. With the war costing approximately $6 billion a year, and the combined value of slaves in the slave states being approximately the same amount, it would have been a bargain at twice the cost for Lincoln to have compensated the South for what it called its “property.” But by then feelings in the Southern mind—or at least among the Southern leadership—had gone far beyond “property;” too much blood had been shed and the issue of whether the South could continue as an independent nation would have to be fought out till the bitter end.
Grant’s relief of the Siege of Chattanooga and his subsequent arrival in the East to assume command of the Union armies boded ill for the Confederacy. His slamming, tenacious attacks against Lee’s army might have earned him a reputation as a “butcher” but in the end achieved the desired result—the reduction of the Confederate forces to a destructive siege that led to the surrender.
There was of course immense relief on both sides when the fighting ended, especially in the South after Sherman’s devastating March to the Sea and Phil Sheridan’s ravaging of the Shenandoah Valley. The United States Treasury was so deeply in debt many wondered if it could ever be recouped, and the Confederate treasury was nonexistent—bankrupt.
The years immediately after the war produced uncertainty and disorder for both sections of the country, but the North recovered far more quickly than the South, generating the great westward expansion as well as a riotous binge of capitalism that culminated, at least for that period, with the age of the robber barons.
The South, meantime, languished under Reconstruction measures for nearly a decade while it tried to return to a cotton economy with free labor and a price-per-pound that was abysmally low. Southerners did their best to rebuild and come to terms with what had happened and where it had gone wrong. This era also marked the brief rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other secret paramilitary groups established for the purpose of reasserting Southern white supremacy. These organizations dispatched companies of nightriders and an outbreak of violence against Republicans and blacks that lasted until the mid-1870s when a majority of whites began turning against them as being the cause for federal authority remaining dominant in the South.
This was also a period that has come to be known as “The War of the Books,” in which the military leaders on both sides wrote their versions of the conflict, frequently—most especially in the case of the vanquished South—pointing accusatory fingers at fellow generals and politicians. These were devoured by a yet unstultifed public, mulled over and rehashed in the newspapers and magazines, which often spawned another round of publications featuring more accusing fingers. The most famous of these were the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant and Jefferson Davis. Grant’s reminiscences, although naturally skewed in his own favor, represent a poignant and valuable account of his life and the war, and why he generaled the way he did. Davis’ larger two-volume report is more in the nature of a screed, but should be read carefully by anyone seriously interested in why the South took to arms and stayed in the fight until the bitter end.
By the time of the Spanish-American War and the turn of the 20th century, the great war of the mid-1800s was for most a dimming memory. Some of the Civil War veterans lived to see the age of automobiles, motion pictures, skyscrapers, airplanes and world war on an almost unimaginable scale, regaling their grandchildren and great-grandchildren with amazing tales. Eventually, like the dinosaurs, they vanished, but during their time, their armies North and South had ruled the earth. Toward the end, probably no armies ever assembled could match them. Of the hundreds of thousands maimed and wounded, many eventually died of complications of their wounds, while others simply hoped for a day when they felt well enough to be wheeled out into the garden to sit in the sun. It did not always go well. In Mississippi, for instance, a lion’s share of the state’s budget in the two years after the surrender went to buy artificial limbs for Confederate veterans. That item was deleted when the Reconstruction government took charge.
It was about this time that old soldiers and others began to recognize that their battlefields needed somehow to be preserved—that what had gone on there was literally monumental in its meaning and scope—Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Atlanta and so on. Men, many former high-ranking officers of both sides, were appointed to acquire the properties and design the parks. Civil War veterans, some in their 70s and 80s, were dragooned to relive the battles and show surveyors and landscape architects exactly where they marched on those fateful days.
Construction continued into the 1920s with monuments of the more prosperous Northern states invariably overshadowing memorials built by the poorer South, which still raised funds by personal subscription. But today these parks and memorials represent an invaluable guide and resource, and a scary reminder of the cataclysm that cleaved this nation between 1861 and 1865, and ultimately put it back together.
The late editor and writer Willie Morris liked to tell the story of the time, when he was a small boy in the 1940s, he was taken to the great Civil War battlefield park at Vicksburg with his two great-aunts and grandmother, whose father had fought there in the war. Standing at the edge of the huge national cemetery with its white marble tombstones, row upon row stretching almost as far as the eye could see, Willie asked his grandmother, “But why did they do it, Bamaw? Why did they die?” to which his grandmother wearily replied, “Oh, I don’t know, son. I guess they’d all be dead by now anyhow.”
Novelist and historian Winston Groom is the author of Forrest Gump and 18 other novels and histories. His current release is The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight (National Geographic, 2013).
Originally published in the May 2015 issue of America’s Civil War. To subscribe, click here.
