Remembering Appomattox on its 150th Anniversary: A Beginning and End

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On the evening of April 7, 1865, Union General Ulysses S. Grant dispatched a letter to Confederate General Robert E. Lee asking for the unconditional surrender of his army.[1] Though Lee initially demurred, he recognized any further resistance was futile and accepted Grant’s proposal to meet. On April 9, 1865, and now surrounded by Union forces, Lee formally surrendered his beleaguered army to Grant at McLean House in Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Fellow Confederate General Joseph Johnston surrendered his Army of Tennessee to Union General William T. Sherman sixteen days later in North Carolina. These surrenders effectively ended the major military operations of the American Civil War, although scattered resistance remained, especially for those who had not yet heard news of Lee’s surrender.[2] The prostrate but defiantly honorable demeanor of Lee’s surrender indicated a practical ending to the war as well as a symbolic foundation of postwar memory, particularly in the South. Of course, it was also a moment of long awaited celebration in the North.

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What was the transition from a wartime to peacetime national culture? No single date captures the genesis of postwar memory, but American culture “after” Appomattox is typically the conventional place to start by most (but certainly not all) historians as the end of the Civil War. After Appomattox, the Union Army and the federal government began the complicated deconstruction of the Confederate States of America and a reconstruction of the Union, which in turn created a "New South.” Paralleling these political maneuvers was the social and cultural phenomenon known as the “Lost Cause.” This was the central mythology for “un-reconstructed” Southerners following the war. The Lost Cause refers to a postwar historical, literary, and social movement in the South which argued that the cultural hierarchy in the antebellum South was noble and gallant, only the overwhelming resources of the North ended the war, and an implied conclusion that white supremacy ought to continue to dominate the South. In some ways, this Lost Cause mythology was actually being promulgated during the war.[3]

It was in this atmosphere that the fight for political equality escalated for African Americans across the South. Even if the short-lived Confederacy had been destroyed by the Union armies, southern politicians were not simply going to relinquish the system of white supremacy which had long been the foundation of life in the antebellum South. Federal reconstruction of the South coincided with the rise of terrorist white supremacists organizations aimed at neutering the political power of African Americans and their white Republican allies.

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And this is why the events of Appomattox, of which we remember on its 150th anniversary, presents us with a question: was Appomattox an end to the Civil War, or perhaps a beginning of the longer process of a integrating a multiracial polity in the South (and North)? And if that more difficult social process, which in many ways started during the war with the Emancipation Proclamation, signifies a beginning, then Appomattox would signify much more than General Robert E. Lee’s honorable surrender. It would act as a new political beginning, a second American Revolution, which in many ways is still being fought 150 years later.

[1] The letter read: “The result of last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood, by asking you the surrender of the portion of the Confederate army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.” Harry Hansen, The Civil War: A History (New York: Penguin Books USA, 1961), 628.

[2] John Wesley designates the last day of official Confederate resistance as June 23, 1865, when Cherokee leader and Confederate General, Stand Waite, surrendered his forces following the Battle of Doaksville in Indian Territory, Oklahoma. John Wesley, Ghost towns of Oklahoma (University of Oklahoma Press: 1977), 68-69.

[3] See William C. Davis’ The Lost Cause: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), Gaines M. Foster’s Ghosts of the Confederacy (Oxford University Press, 1988), and Edward Pollard’s contemporary account, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (New York: E. B. Treat and Co., 1866).