Day 39. April 8, 1862.
39
do not think the emergency has arisen to call for the surrender….
April Tuesday 8 1862
Quite cool this morning and looks very much like winter as the snow is 3 inches deep and mud under the snow. Lieut Weaver came this morning and A. Buttler also Capt S. Bennerfield officer today and he had a very disagreeable day as it rained nearly all day and sleeted too. I was in the Capt Huyetts markee nearly all day as I have been boarding in there for two weeks. I have been looking for a letter but none. Butter is selling from 30 to 45 cents eggs 15 to 20 [illeg. maybe per]. Things are high in this country. Coffee was 1.25 per pound sugar 37 salt 25 cents per pound and other things in proportion
Note: These American speculators stayed behind the lines, in the crossbones of that Confederate flag, the double cross, didn’t fight, & drove up prices as much as 300%. Americans.
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 54
“7a.m. 34; 2p.m. 37; 9p.m. 34. Rained and sleeted, 1.55.”
Shenandoah 1862: Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign Peter Cozzens P. 234
“Today the Confederate Congress will commend Jackson and his force for “gallant and meritorious service in the successful engagement with a greatly superior force of enemy near Kernstown.’”
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 52
“A woman living in Fredericksburg expressed regret in her diary on April 8 over the suffering of Confederate troops marching past: “It has been raining hard all day, and they were wet to the skin; but they all looked bright and cheerful.’”
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) Edmund Wilson P. 298
“On the eve of Lee’s surrender, when Mary Chesnut has taken refuge in North Carolina, her husband comes to see her and tells her that many of their own fellow-Southerners are rejoicing over the ruin of the planter class. “They will have no Negroes now to lord it over!” he says he has heard one of them say. “They can swell and peacock about and tyrannize now over only a small parcel of women and children, those only who are their very own family.”
P. 294-295
“But the staff of the Chesnut household finally begins to crack in an unexpected place. James Chesnut is very much dependent on his Negro valet Lawrence, who is always at his side, always, says Mrs. Chesnut, with “the same bronze mask,” who darns socks and has made Mrs. Chesnut a sacque, who is miraculous in his resourcefulness at producing, despite wartime shortages, whatever is wanted in the way of food– even to that special rarity, ice for mint juleps and sherry cobblers. But in February, 1864, while the Chesnuts are living in Richmond, Lawrence turns up at breakfast drunk. When he is ordered to move a chair, he raises it over his head and smashes the chandelier.”
Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War David Silkenat P. Introduction excerpts (no pg #)
“In no other American war did surrender happen so frequently. Indeed, surrender’s ubiquity during the Civil War seems at odds with a national sensibility that abhors surrender. In recent history, Americans of a variety of backgrounds repudiated surrender. Labeling it as un-American. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, President John F. Kennedy addressed the nation on live television, declaring, “The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, of submission.” Nearly every major (and minor) American political figure since has reiterated this sentiment, including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. At the 2004 Republican National Convention John McCain told a cheering audience, “We’re Americans, and we’ll never surrender.” One would be hard pressed to find a clearer distillation of and mantra for contemporary American identity, one that not only shapes our military and political life but also permeates our culture. In movies, video games, and music lyrics, the heroic figure is the one who fights against overwhelming odds. As Bruce Springsteen noted, “No retreat, baby, no surrender.”
One out of every four Civil War soldiers surrendered at some point during the conflict, making it one of the most common military experiences. Although the statistics are woefully incomplete, more than 673,000 soldiers surrendered during the American Civil War, including at least 211,000 Union and 462,000 Confederate soldiers. Formal surrenders, such as Vicksburg, Appomattox Courthouse, or Bennett Place, account for approximately half of this figure. Battlefield surrenders, when individual soldiers threw down their weapons and raised their hands in surrender, make up the remainder. To put these figures in context, the number of soldiers who surrendered during the Civil War is approximately equal to the number of soldiers killed. If death shaped the Civil War, so too did surrender.
The absence of “surrender” in Scott’s General Regulations reflected an antipathy within the army toward openly discussing surrender. Nowhere was this more true than at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Established in 1802, West Point modeled its curriculum on the French École Polytechnique, stressing professionalism (verging at times on elitism), engineering, and honor. Very little of what cadets learned at West Point touched on strategic questions, including the propriety and mechanics of surrender. With a curriculum overwhelmingly devoted to mathematics and engineering, cadets received only eight class periods of instruction devoted to military strategy during their final semester. Although cadets learned very little that would have prepared them for the strategic reality of surrender, West Point’s culture inculcated a certain formality in its students that would later manifest itself in the larger Civil War surrender ceremonies. West Point’s most influential instructor, Dennis Hart Mahan, believed that that the institution’s primary objective was to “rear soldiers worthy of the Republic.” For the hundreds of cadets who passed through his classroom in the decades prior to the Civil War, Mahan’s insistence that an officer’s dignity and honor reflected upon the national virtue left a lasting impression. Like Winfield Scott, Mahan believed that war ought to be fought according to civilized and orderly principles; modern war was the antithesis of barbarism. Feared and respected by his students (Sherman had nightmares about arriving in his class unprepared), Mahan’s lessons shaped not only the tactics employed on the battlefield but also how soldiers conducted themselves during a surrender.
Antebellum Americans had a panoply of associations for surrender that extended beyond its military meanings. Evangelical preachers told the faithful that salvation depended on repentance and the unconditional surrender to God’s will. In the political realm, the idea of surrender was often negatively associated with compromise by those who disparaged political compromise as immoral. Once seen as the epitome of political skill (the Constitutional Compromise, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850), the idea of compromise came increasingly under attack in the decades prior to the Civil War as political radicalization over slavery made compromise untenable. Radical abolitionists rejected any compromise on the grounds that one could not compromise on moral questions. At its inaugural meeting in 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society resolved to reject any form of compensated emancipation because “it would be a surrender of the great fundamental principle that man cannot hold property in man,” The declaration’s primary author, William Lloyd Garrison, consistently rejected surrendering on any element in the national debate over slavery. In 1854 Garrison declared, “The abolitionism which I advocate is as absolute as the law of God, and as unyielding as his throne. It admits of no compromise.” According to Garrison, the slave system was a product of compromise: “How has the slave system grown to its present enormous dimensions? Through compromise. How is it to be exterminated? Only by an uncompromising spirit.” Ralph Waldo Emerson affirmed this connection between antebellum political compromise on slavery and surrender in an April 1862 essay, noting, “We cannot but remember that there have been days in American history, when, if the Free States had done their duty, Slavery had been blocked by an immovable barrier, and our recent calamities forever precluded. The Free States yielded, and every compromise was surrender, and invited new demands.” For Emerson, as for Garrison, no good could come from compromising with a moral evil.
President-elect Abraham Lincoln joined the chorus of Republicans equating compromise with surrender. “We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people,” Lincoln wrote to a political confidant a month after his election. “Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten. . . . If we surrender, it is the end of us.” Historians have traditionally criticized Lincoln’s inaction as president-elect, although recent scholarship has done much to rehabilitate his conduct during the secession winter, recognizing that his behind-the-scenes machinations proved more effective and strategically aware than often assumed. In his correspondence and public address, President-elect Lincoln repeatedly drew upon the language of surrender to express his unwillingness to negotiate away his party’s central tenets. Lincoln argued that it would be a betrayal of the “bond of faith between public and public servant” for him to compromise on fundamental principles, thereby “surrendering to those who tried and failed to defeat him at the polls.” No one, even his political opponents, would “tolerate his own candidate in such surrender” of fundamental principles, as “such surrender would not be merely the ruin of a man, or a party; but, as a precedent, would be the ruin of the government itself.
P. 192
Those who knew Lee best observed a palpable change in his demeanor in February 1865. Summoned to Lee’s headquarters at 2:00 in the morning, Gen. John Brown Gordon found him “entirely alone…standing at the fireplace, his arm on the mantel and his head resting on his arm as he gazed into the coal fire burning in the grate.” Gordon noted that the burdens of command manifested themselves in Lee’s body as he had never seen before. “I had known before I came that our army was in desperate straits,” Gordon recalled, “but when I entered that room I realized at once, from the gravity of the commander’s bearing, that I was to learn of a situation worse than I had anticipated.” Lee had spent the previous hours mulling over “a long table covered with recent reports from every portion of his army” and wanted to know Gordon’s assessment. Together, the two men went through the reports for two hours, Lee highlighting the key passages. “The revelation was startling,” Gordon noted. “Each report was bad enough, and all the distressing facts combined were sufficient, it seemed to me, to destroy all cohesive power and lead to the inevitable disintegration of any other army that was ever marshalled.” Gordon had known that Union forces outnumbered Confederates, but he was “not prepared for the picture presented by these reports of extreme destitution—of the lack of shoes, of hats, of overcoats, and of blankets, as well as of food,” leaving many rebel soldiers unable to shoulder a weapon. In Lee’s calculations, only 35,000 of 50,000 soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia were fit for combat, compared with 150,000 well-supplied Union troops in the region. Asked for his assessment, Gordon provided Lee with three options. Gordon recommended that Lee “make terms with the enemy, the best we can get.” Alternatively, Gordon suggested that Lee “abandon Richmond and Petersburg, unite by rapid marches with General Johnston in North Carolina, and strike Sherman before Grant can join him,” or he could attempt to fight his way out of Petersburg.”
The Most Fearful Ordeal: Original Coverage of the Civil War by Writers and Reporters of the New York Times Introduction and Notes by James McPherson P. 312
“APRIL 8, 1865.
To Gen. R.E. Lee, Commanding C.S.A.:
GENERAL: Your note of last evening in reply to mine of same date, asking the conditions on which I will accept the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, is just received.
In reply, I would say that peace being my first desire, there is but one condition that I insist upon, viz.:
That the men surrendered shall be disqualified for taking up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged.
I will meet you, or designate officers to meet any officers you may name, for the same purpose, at any point agreeable to you, for the purpose of arranging definitely the terms upon which the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia will be received.
U.S. GRANT, LIUET.-GENERAL,
COMMANDING ARMIES OF THE UNITED STATES.”
Note: Around midnight, Colonel Whittier, of Humphrey’s staff, walks this note from Lee to Grant’s room:
The Most Fearful Ordeal: Original Coverage of the Civil War by Writers and Reporters of the New York Times Introduction and Notes by James McPherson P. 312
“APRIL 8, 1865.
GENERAL: I received, at a late hour, your note of to-day, in answer to mine of yesterday.
I did not intend to propose the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, but to ask the terms of your proposition. To be frank, I do not think the emergency has arisen to call for the surrender.*
But as the restoration of peace should be the sole object of it all. I desire to know whether your proposals would tend to that end.
I cannot, therefore, meet you with a view to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia, but as far as your proposition may affect the Confederate States forces under my command, and tend to the restoration of peace, I should be pleased to meet you at 10 A.M., to-morrow, on the old stage road to Richmond, between the picket lines of the two armies.
Very respectfully, your obedient servant,
R.E. LEE,
General, C.S.A.
TO LIEUT.-GEN. GRANT, COMMANDING ARMIES OF THE UNITED STATES.”
“April 8, 1865
GENERAL R.E. LEE,
Commanding C.S.A.
Your note of last evening in reply of same date, asking the condition on which I will accept the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia is just received. I would say that, peace being my great desire, there is but one condition I would insist upon, namely: that the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified for taking up arms again against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged. I will meet you, or will designate officers to meet any officers you may name for the same purpose, at any point agreeable to you, for the purpose of arranging definitely the terms upon which the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia will be received.
U.S. GRANT,
LIEUT.-GENERAL”
*They were playing out the line about whether it needed to end & how. Something has adjusted to something. It does not know it yet. But this was not an unexpected turn of events.
Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War David Silkenat P. 198
“That evening, while he awaited Grant’s response, Lee held a final meeting with his officers to assess the situation. According to Gordon, “The last sad Confederate council of war…met in the woods at his headquarters and by a low-burning bivouac fire. There was no tent there, no table, no chairs, and no camp-stools. On blankets spread upon the ground or on saddles at the roots of the trees, we sat around the great commander.” After the disaster at Sailor’s Creek, only Gordon, Pendleton, Longstreet, and Fitzhugh Lee remained of Lee’s corps commanders. Hearing cannon fire from Appomattox Station, they knew that Union forces were not only were pursuing them but blocked their intended route. The only question remaining was if they could somehow break free of the Union stranglehold. The subdued discussion reflected the resignation that had overcome Lee’s army. At daybreak, they would make one final effort to break through the Union cordon to rendezvous with Johnston; if that failed, Lee would meet with Grant to surrender. Few of them, Lee included, expected the plan to succeed. Later that evening, well after midnight, Pendleton visited Lee in his quarters and was surprised to find him “dressed in his neatest style, new uniform, snowy linens.” When asked about his apparel, Lee explained stoically that the day would likely end with him “as General Grant’s prisoner, and thought I must make my best appearance.’”
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things are high in this country….
There were fewer than 8k left at Appomattox.
They’re the kind of hungry that’s been hungry a while.
That’s been hungry too long.
A person gets a look in their eyes when their time is running out.
They up & got him.
It’s there in the letters.
But they played past it, that word surrender, & kept dealing.
They run their lines.
All the King’s horses & all the King’s men couldn’t, could they.
(Game, set match. Depends which stat you decide to trust: 28k, 28,356, 26,300 surrendered, 5k surrendered, no one did. The Civil War: The Final Year Told By Those Who Lived It, edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, P. 704: “On 9th April, ’65, Lee had 7,892 effective infantry.” How many was the final count? How many discrepancies in these final records before it becomes untenable to get at the reality of that last day? It depends on what is counted in which total. There were fewer than 10k left at Appomattox. This is the final number. They were around walking eating raw meat with their hands…. accounts have them with their bare teeth tearing into chickens, biting limbs off, scooping up rats and squirrels if they could catch them, frogs, grasshoppers. I don’t know about the bugs. I’m guessing about the bugs. Since eggs hatch in the spring and early summer, they may not have been large enough to snack on. They’d be nymphs. They don’t have full-grown wings, but they can jump far because their hind legs have strong muscles. If we could jump like a nymph, we could go over 130 feet. From just standing. We could get far away instantaneously.)
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