NOTE: THIS IS A RE-POST. THE BLOGSITE WENT KERFLOOEY A WHILE BACK AND NEEDED TO BE SMACKED AROUND. HOPEFULLY THIS ISSUE WILL NOT ARISE AGAIN…. (The original was posted in late April while we were on our way north to New Jersey.) Thanks!
The captain of the River Queen, a sidewheeler steamship built just one year prior, moored his vessel at the dock In City Point, Virginia and waited for his guests to arrive. They really weren’t passengers that day in late March of 1865 as the boat never left the dock. It wasn’t long before Captain Nathan B. Saunders spied a tall, lanky figure approaching the quay accompanied by a small entourage. The other two important attendees were already aboard as his vessel was part of General Ulysses S. Grant’s Headquarters, so on board was General Grant and another large figure in the North’s wartime cadre, General William T. Sherman. This would be the first, and last, time that these three would all meet each other . Captain Saunders welcomed the President aboard and escorted him to the Main Parlor where the Meeting was to take place. The date…. March 27, 1865….. just two weeks before the yet unknown meeting of Grant and General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, Virginia and only eighteen days before President Lincoln would be assassinated. What took place on the River Queen that day would be unequivocally later be viewed as a highly significant aspect of the way that the South would be treated after the War was over.
This meeting was to discuss that aspect and to plan out the rest of the War as it was quite obvious that it was only a matter of time before the South capitulated to the North. The supply lines were being stressed to the maximum by Grant’s successful campaign of thwarting any re-supply efforts and if he could keep the South’s two main armies from joining forces in the next few days and weeks, victory was assured.
Why is all of this important?
Because as fate (and good intel) would have it, this is exactly what transpired in those few days and weeks after the Meeting and this was President Lincoln’s best chance to outline his plan for the South to Sherman and Grant, the two people who would oversee much of it.
Lincoln’s sentiments towards the South were no strangers to the populace as it was in his Second Inaugural Address only two months before this, that he used one of his most famous phrases, “with malice towards none, with charity for all” and he wanted to make sure that his General’s understood exactly what he had in mind. General Grant’s eventual surrender terms reiterated President Lincoln’s wishes and went along way in starting the healing process.
We are down here in Virginia visiting Brian and April, Paula’s son and daughter-in-law and they happen to live in one of the places on this planet that is known by a one-word moniker that conjures up a plethora of historical emotions….. Appomattox.
Virginia was one of the stalwarts of the Confederacy, it is General Lee’s home state and States were held in a much higher degree of respect back then as State’s Rights were some of the kingpins to the arguments for the Civil War in the first place.
So, it is not that surprising that Virginia (and the rest of the South) did not hold the site of their eventual defeat in the highest esteem. The tiny village of Appomattox Court House was in ruins, heavily decayed from years of neglect, when someone realized that this site needed to be preserved for all the right reasons.
But it took almost sixty years for this to take place.
It wasn’t until the 1930’s that the National Park Service got involved and started the recovery process. The Courthouse was burned out and the McLean House, where the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia took place, was actually taken apart for some unsuccessful plans to be taken to Washington D.C. for display. The de-constructed building never left the area and was successfully re-constructed in the 1940’s by the NPS and finally opened to the public in 1949. The rest of the little village’s rehabilitation followed suit.
A visit to Appomattox is an exercise in retrospection. Retrospection on how we all treat each other, both in victory and defeat. President Lincoln wanted the Nation to heal as quickly as possible and he knew that if the North were to try and extract it’s “pound of flesh” and try and punish all, then peace would be difficult at best. As it was, obviously not everyone agreed with Lincoln, and with him not available to execute and oversee his leniency towards the South, some ‘Retributionists’ (my term) were allowed to flourish.
Race, economy, ‘war wounds’, and politics were all affected in the years, decades, and now centuries that followed. The National Park Service does an admirable job of presenting all these aspects with regards to the Surrender Site and the significance of it all in remembrance. You cannot come here, take part in the exhibits, and not be affected by the experience. The American Civil War was uniquely American. It’s not that here haven’t been other civil wars throughout the years around the world, there obviously have.
But as Colonel Joshua Chamberlain of the 20th Maine put it to his troops right before the Battle of Gettysburg, Nowhere is it recorded that men fought for the rights of other men to be free.
For some, this struggle is still ongoing and it’s here at Appomattox that this unfortunate aspect is addressed. There were close to 700,000 casualties during this Civil War. That is more than all of our other conflicts put together,,,,, Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, WWII, and WWI combined can total.
Visit here and come to realize that those almost 1.5 million combined casualties (hopefully) did not die in vain. That reconciliation on any scale is something that we should all participate in. In the now immortal words of John Lennon…..
Give peace a chance.
