War & Peace

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. Earlier this month, the Town of Appomattox, Virginia, was inundated by soldiers. Not actual soldiers, but by men and women in costume. They were there to reenact the momentous event that took place 150 years ago, the signing of the surrender that effectively ended the Civil War. A small team of us from BackStory went– me to give a speech, and our producers to get a sense of what it would have actually been like on that historic day.

KELLY JONES: Can you tell me what you had for breakfast this morning?

ED: In case you missed it, that was our producer Kelly Jones asking a couple of reenactors the standard public radio mic check question– what did you have for breakfast?

MALE SPEAKER: This morning, I had corn mush for breakfast.

MALE SPEAKER: I didn’t have anything for breakfast. They had us make our fires, boil our coffee, and we started to cook ourselves food. And then we heard the sound of the guns coming from this way. And, well, we poured our coffee out on top of the fires, and off we went.

ED: April 9, 1865, dawn– chilly and foggy. At 7 AM, a battle broke out. The Confederates were surrounded and outnumbered six to one. Confederate General Robert E. Lee and the United States General Ulysses S. Grant exchanged letters. And at around 10 o’clock, ceasefire flags went up. Here’s how one union reenactor, up on a hill, described what happened next.

CHARLES JOHNSON: Well, General Grant just came through our lines. First time I’ve really seen General Grant that close, but he just wrote down the hill and into that brick building down there. Seems to be going inside at this point, from what we can tell.

ED: At 1:30, the generals met in the parlor of the McLean house. Grant had to come to some distance, and arrived muddy from the ride. Lee was the picture of military dignity in his new uniform.

CHARLES JOHNSON: Well, my guess is they’re trying to figure out whether or not we’re going to pitch back into them or not. But I guess the question really is, are the southern boys going to surrender, or are we going to fight it out and see who’s left standing at the end of the day?

ED: The generals bantered a bit about their tours in the Mexican War, and then they drafted and signed surrender letters. At half past three, Lee left the house to a deafening silence outside. Grant followed at 4:15.

PETER: 150 years later, this was exactly the script that unfolded. And there were plenty of people not in costume who were there to observe. Alex Yergin was among them.

ALEX YERGIN: Yes, it’s actually my 30th birthday. So I had planned for years to come down here, and I’m very excited to be here.

PETER: None of Alex’s ancestors fought in the Civil War. And yet, for him, Appomattox is an incredibly meaningful place.

ALEX YERGIN: It sounds like soldiers, even who’d fought against each other for four years, sort of embraced each other, and tried to move forward as a nation.

PETER: Charles Johnson agrees. He’s the reenactor we heard from a minute ago, now out of character. And he says the promise of unification was infused in the very materials of surrender.

CHARLES JOHNSON: The beautiful aspect about– in the McLean parlor, a document is written. The paper is federal, and the ink is Confederate ink. And in that moment, even the surrender documents were a togetherness project.

FEMALE SPEAKER: This is a story to which there’s more than meets the eye.

BRIAN: This is Elizabeth Varon, a Civil War historian who’s written about Appomattox, and who was also at the commemoration. She has a very different understanding of what happened in the McLean parlor.

ELIZABETH VARON: Appomattox was not a meeting of the minds and a serene, healing moment, but a moment fraught with a lot of tension and uncertainty.

BRIAN: Yes, says Varon, Grant did allow the Confederate to go home. They did get to keep their horses, and in some cases, their side arms. But that didn’t mean that Grant intended to let bygones be bygones.

ELIZABETH VARON: His magnanimity, Grant reckons, is an inducement to Southerners to repent of, atone for, their sins– the sins of secession and slavery, and of the war itself. Lee believes he has extracted from Grant honorable terms, terms that pay homage to Confederate bravery, that confer immunity– political immunity– on the Confederates.

So from the start, you have quite different understanding of what Grant’s magnanimity means. The dominant, northern view was that this was a victory of right over wrong, and that Northerners had won the moral high ground at Appomattox. But the Confederate answer was that this was a victory of might over right, and again, overwhelming numbers and resources, and that Confederates had not relinquished the moral high ground at Appomattox. And this is a very, very fundamental dispute.

PETER: Fundamental, because if you play those two scenarios out, you arrive at very different futures. Confederates looked ahead to a time when they would regain their social clout communities back home, and also their political clout in Washington, D.C.

ED: Many Northerners, on the other hand, saw their victory discrediting the entire Southern way of life– the economy that had grown up there, and the race based system that supported it. About the only thing the two sides saw eye to eye on was that the shooting war was over.

ELIZABETH VARON: But the political questions that remained– would these ex-Confederate again be permitted to vote or hold office? Would they have property restored to them? What would the former Confederate States once again be states of the Union? All of these questions were open.

ED: For generations, Appomattox has represented an ending– the final chapter of the story Americans tell each other about the Civil War. That’s understandable. As an ending to four years of unimaginable carnage and suffering, we could hardly do much better than the peaceful scene that played out, hour by hour, on the 9th of April.

And yet, if we stand in that moment, everything changes. If we think of Appomattox not as ending, but as a beginning, suddenly there are multiple competing story lines. And how the story lines play out is something no one at the time could really be sure of at all.