Appomattox:
Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War
Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War
Elizabeth H. Varon
Oxford University Press, 2013, 305 pp., $27.95
Review by Gordon Berg
The day Robert E. Lee surrendered to
Ulysses S. Grant in the parlor of Wilmer McLean's house in Appomattox Court
House, Virginia, the two generals fired the first shots of a second, albeit different
war: a war for the meaning of that iconic event and how it would be
remembered. Grant opened the battle with
the magnanimous surrender terms he offered to the Army of Northern
Virginia. Lee countered with General
Order No. 9, his melancholy farewell to the men he led for four agonizing
years. Each man understood his document
in ways consistent with the ideology for which he had fought. The political, social, and cultural debates
these documents spawned in the months after the surrender are the subject of
Elizabeth Varon's provocative and insightful study of an event most students of
the Civil War thought they understood.
Varon also delves into the letters, diaries,
and memoirs left by the men of the two armies who fought each other during
those last desperate days. "The
Union and Confederate soldiers who fought the Appomattox campaign were keenly
aware," she concludes, "of the political nature of the surrender and
of the high stakes involved in interpreting it." While the opinions of individual soldiers
varied, most of them adhered closely to the interpretations enunciated by their
leaders. These feelings traveled with
the soldiers as they returned home, forming the basis of Lost Cause mythology
in the South and Reconciliationist vindication in the North. Varon gives appropriate credit for the
important, but often unreported, role played by United States Colored Troops
(USCT) during the Appomattox campaign. "In the eyes of black troops," she
maintains, "the fate of the Union was still uncertain on April 9, 1865,
and their own agency tipped the scales."
Varon emphasizes that, for them, the end of the war was much more than a
military victory that preserved the Union.
They viewed their participation as an integral part of a victorious
crusade that "incorporated the themes of not only racial pride and
liberation but also of clemency: they attempted to inscribe a civil rights
message into the magnanimous terms of the surrender."
From the armies in the field, Varon
gracefully moves to the two home fronts.
In the North, the mood of the populace quickly shifted from joy and
relief to shock and anger in the wake of Lincoln's assassination, occurring
less than a week after Appomattox.
Analyzing Radical, moderate Republican and Democrat, and Copperhead
newspapers, Varon follows the panoply of public opinion toward the South in
general and the Confederate government in particular. It ranged from mercy grounded in moral
righteousness to retribution fired by grief and all the various shades of each
in between. But through the cacophony of
voices, the conciliatory words of Lincoln's last public speech and the
magnanimous words of Grant's surrender terms reverberated throughout the
North. Varon also recognizes that these
sentiments were mirrored in the restraint shown by African American troops
toward the homeward bound Confederate soldiers they encountered. Rather than responding with anger and
violence in the wake of the president's assassination, she notes that
"They paid tribute to Lincoln, as most white soldiers did, by upholding
the fragile peace."
Except for an almost universal reverence
of Lee, feelings in the South were also divided about what the end of the war
meant. The theme of General Order No. 9 -- that the South succumbed only to the North's crushing numerical superiority and
massive material advantages -- helped many salve feelings of shock, disbelief,
and humiliation that the vaunted Army of Northern Virginia could be
surrendered. Again, Varon uses
newspapers to take the pulse of public opinion.
It ranged from resignation and a wish for "peace and
brotherhood" to angry defiance, urging "more determined and united
action." Southern Unionists felt
vindicated in their loyalty to the old flag and Southern blacks
"celebrated Lee's surrender as a day of jubilee." The battle over the meaning of Appomattox,
Varon astutely concludes, "did not simply pit South against North or even
Confederacy against Union. Instead it
pitted those who opposed a thoroughgoing transformation of the South…against
those who demanded such a transformation."
The ideological battles of a
second Civil War, less bloody, to be sure, but just as determined, had begun.
In an earlier book, Varon expertly
chronicled the turbulent decades leading to national disunion. She now reveals an equal affinity for
documenting the dramatic ending of that disunion. Her scholarship provides readers with
excellent bookends for the many volumes devoted to the Civil War. At its root, Appomattox is a study of
the power and subtlety of language. In
her clear, confident, yet elegant, prose, Varon gives renewed life to many of
the players in the last act of America's greatest tragedy. We can hear and understand their
points-of-view, even if we don't agree with them.
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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org). His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.
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