Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 3:38am

Palm Sunday One Hundred and Forty-Eight Years Ago

I have always thought it appropriate that the national nightmare we call the Civil War ended during Holy Week 1865.  Two remarkably decent men, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, began the process of healing so desperately needed for America on Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865 at Appomattox.  We take their decency for granted, but it is the exception and not the rule for the aftermath of civil wars in history.  The usual course would have been unremitting vengeance by the victors, and sullen rage by the defeated, perhaps eventually breaking out in guerilla war.  The end of the Civil War could so very easily have been the beginning of a cycle of unending war between north and south.  Instead, both Grant and Lee acted to make certain as far as they could that the fratricidal war that had just concluded would not be repeated.  All Americans owe those two men a large debt for their actions at Appomattox.

Here is Grant’s account from his Personal Memoir’s of what happened immediately after the surrender:

When news of the surrender first reached our lines our men commenced firing a salute of a hundred guns in honor of the victory.  I at once sent word, however, to have it stopped.  The Confederates were now our prisoners, and we did not want to exult over their downfall.

I determined to return to Washington at once, with a view to putting a stop to the purchase of supplies, and what I now deemed other useless outlay of money.  Before leaving, however, I thought I would like to see General Lee again; so next morning I rode out beyond our lines towards his headquarters, preceded by a bugler and a staff-officer carrying a white flag.

Lee soon mounted his horse, seeing who it was, and met me.  We had there between the lines, sitting on horseback, a very pleasant conversation of over half an hour, in the course of which Lee said to me that the South was a big country and that we might have to march over it three or four times before the war entirely ended, but that we would now be able to do it as they could no longer resist us.  He expressed it as his earnest hope, however, that we would not be called upon to cause more loss and sacrifice of life; but he could not foretell the result.  I then suggested to General Lee that there was not a man in the Confederacy whose influence with the soldiery and the whole people was as great as his, and that if he would now advise the surrender of all armies I had no doubt his advice would be followed with alacrity.  But Lee said, that he could not do that without consulting the President first.  I knew there was no use to urge him to do anything against his ideas of what was right.

I was accompanied by my staff and other officers, some of whom seemed to have a great desire to go inside the Confederate lines.  They finally asked permission of Lee to do so for the purpose of seeing some of their old army friends, and the permission was granted.  They went over, had a very pleasant time with their old friends, and brought some of them back with them when they returned.

When Lee and I separated he went back to his lines and I returned to the house of Mr. McLean.  Here the officers of both armies came in great numbers, and seemed to enjoy the meeting as much as though they had been friends separated for a long time while fighting battles under the same flag.  For the time being it looked very much as if all thought of the war had escaped their minds.  After an hour pleasantly passed in this way I set out on horseback, accompanied by my staff and a small escort, for Burkesville Junction, up to which point the railroad had by this time been repaired.

Near death as he finished his memoirs, Grant wrote this passage which sums up what he and Lee helped to accomplish:

I feel that we are on the eve of a new era, when there is to be great harmony between the Federal and Confederate. I cannot stay to be a living witness to the correctness of this prophecy; but I feel it within me that it is to be so. The universally kind feeling expressed for me at a time when it was supposed that each day would prove my last, seemed to me the beginning of the answer to “Let us have peace.”  A striking indication that Grant’s words were coming true occurred shortly after he wrote them.  At his funeral his pallbearers were Union generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Phil Sheridan and Confederate generals Joseph Johnston and Simon Bolivar Buckner.  Union and Confederate officers rode together in carriages in Grant’s funeral procession.  The day was August 8, 1885.  What Grant and Lee planted 20 years ago was beginning to bear fruit.

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philip
philip
Sunday, March 24, AD 2013 9:43am

Mr. McClarey. You are doing them justice by trimming the tree that they planted so many years ago. Thank you!

Karl
Karl
Sunday, March 24, AD 2013 4:12pm

Don McClarey: You ain’t so bad yourself!

May God grant you and your family with a Holy, Blessed Easter.

Karl J Wengenroth

anzlyne
anzlyne
Monday, March 25, AD 2013 10:08am

Thank you for this wonderful information.

As we all see things through our own personal lenses, and as a different “civil” contention goes on this current holy weeK, in our Supreme Court, my hope that we could be as great and good as those generals and soldiers.

This statement of U. S. Grant spoke aloud to me: “I knew there was no use to urge him to do anything against his ideas of what was right.”

This week the Supreme Court talks about marriage on a national level. I hope they can be great enough to carefully discern and good enough do what is right.

Shawn McElhinney
Shawn McElhinney
Monday, March 25, AD 2013 5:54pm

The end of the war would quite possibly have even gone better if President Lincoln had not been shot. Lincoln’s overriding agenda with the ceasefire was to be far more magnanimous in victory than President Johnson was to prove to be. Whether that would have worked out in reality (as opposed to theory) better of course we will never know. But even with what we got, it could have gone a lot worse if not for the basic decencies of Lee and Grant in the conclusion of hostilities between the two sides.

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