Sesquicentennial

 

The ninth of April 1865 was a seasonably cool, yet mostly sunny Palm Sunday and, for the first time in four years, guns were silent and cannons stilled. The armies’ movements were halted, and all was quiet in the tiny hamlet of Appomattox, Virginia. Accompanied by his personal secretary, his orderly and another cavalry soldier bearing a white flag of truce, General Robert E. Lee, commanding officer of the Army of Northern Virginia rode his white horse, “Traveler” slowly toward a recently-relocated house owned by Wilbur McLean. The house which, ironically, once stood near Manassas, Virginia, when the War Between the States had begun four years earlier, was offered by its owner as a meeting place for Union General Ulysses Grant to receive General Lee, in order to discuss the terms of surrender of the armies under Lee’s command.

Lee really had no choice but to approach Grant that Sunday morning. His armies-starved, ill-equipped, decimated and vastly outnumbered, were virtually surrounded by the armies under Grant’s command- better equipped, fed, uniformed and vastly superior in numbers. The day before, saw the last skirmishes between the two sides and, facing certain annihilation, Robert E. Lee was quoted as saying, “There’s nothing now left for me to do, but go and speak with General Grant”.

Dressed in his finest uniform, General Lee climbed the steps of McLean’s house and entered the parlor, along with his personal secretary, and the two generals began reminiscing about their shared service during the Mexican War, twenty years before. Lee, the one-time stellar lieutenant under General Winfield Scott, was well known during the Mexican War, while Grant was virtually unknown at that time. Grant remembered Lee quite well from that conflict, but Lee regrettably did not remember Grant, at all.

After some awkward moments, the two generals stumbled into the conversations that would effectively end the American Civil War. Magnanimous in victory, Grant offered his vanquished foe generous terms in the proposed surrender. Confederate officers would be allowed to retain their side-arms, provided they sign an oath to never again take up arms against the North. Any man who claimed to own a horse, would be allowed to retain the horse so that they could “plow their little farms” for spring planting, to which Lee responded, “that will have great effect” upon the morale of his decimated soldiers. All of the Confederate army would be “paroled until exchanged” which, effectively meant that they could return the states that they called home, present themselves at their respective courthouses, sign a loyalty oath to the United States, and return to their families, in due course.

Amongst these tattered remnants was our great, great grandfather, Private Edward James Nickell, a man in his late thirties who had black hair and stood all of five feet, seven inches. His father, Andrew, had been a captain serving his country in the War of 1812, and his grandfather, Thomas, had fought in the French and Indian Wars, under British General Braddock, then at the Battle of Point Pleasant under Colonel Andrew Lewis in Dunmore’s War, and finally, under General Washington in the American Revolutionary War. His grandson, and our great, great grandfather, Edward, spent much of the Civil War, stationed at a railroad depot in nearby Lynchburg, Virginia, and performed courier services on horseback, far away from his remote homestead, located in Monroe County, in what was to become West Virginia. He would return to Charleston, sign his loyalty oath, return whence he come, and live for the next thirty-six years on the small farm near Pickaway, where he died in 1901.

Something else happened in Appomattox on that particular morning, though nobody present would realize it until many years later. Prior to this war, far and away America’s costliest (civil wars tend to be the bloodiest), the United States were referred to in the plural (i.e. “they”), placing emphasis on the states which comprised the union. Following the war, the United States would be referred to in the singular (i.e. “it”), placing emphasis on the union, itself. This lays credence to the fact that the Civil War was primarily fought to settle a constitutional crisis and ultimately determine whether any state, or group of states, could secede from the union.  It wasn’t until January of 1863, when Abraham Lincoln signed the “Emancipation Proclamation” that the war took on the secondary cause of freeing the slaves in the Confederate states (the border states of Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, which had not seceded, were exempted from this emancipation order).

My great, great grandfather, whose family was dirt poor, and owned no slaves, threw his lot in with the Confederacy because he felt more loyalty to his home state (then, Virginia) than he did towards the nation of which it was a part- just as most of his fellow soldiers had done. Following Lee’s surrender, he went home to live his life as an American, beaten in war yet not defeated in spirit, which should be the important lesson of that which took place 150 years ago when two generals sat down and settled a conflict- one which politicians, left to their own devices, could not settle, and one which took the lives of some 600,000 men.

Historical revisionism, left to the wiles of contemporary political correctness, has done a remarkable job in re-defining both the cause and the meaning of America’s Civil War, and in demonizing the confederacy and those who fought for the South (someone once said that history is written by the victors, after all). Yet, in the stillness of Appomattox, the truth remains that it was there where a divided nation became one nation- an inclusive, forgiving and united nation, where all could claim to be American, at long last. Lee knew it when, returning to his army, told his men to “go home and be good citizens”. Grant knew it, and dissuaded his army from exacting revenge and engaging in raucous celebrations of victory. It’s just too bad that, 150 years later, people today tend not to realize what all of this means- really means, in the grand scheme of things.

-Drew Nickell, 8 April 2015

© 2015, by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved