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Harriet Beecher Stowe 121 Charles Bracelen Flood from Lee: The Last Years Charles Bracelen Flood, a naturalized Kentucky citizen who has lived in Richmond for some thirty years, has written popular and acclaimed fiction and nonfiction about numerous wars, from the American Revolution to World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. His biography Lee: The Last Years (1981) includes this moving portrait of General Robert E. Lee at his finest hour, when he chose to surrender to Grant and end the war, thereby helping the South to pick up the pieces and survive. h General Robert E. Lee stood on a hilltop, studying the fog-covered woods ahead. Listening to the artillery fire and musketry, he tried to judge the progress of the crucial attack that his men were making. It was shortly after eight o’clock in the morning on Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, and the shattered remnants of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia were in a column strung along four miles of road near the village of Appomattox Court House. A few minutes earlier, Lee had ordered Lieutenant Colonel Charles Venable of his staff to ride forward through these woods and find Major General John B. Gordon, the able and aggressive Georgian whose corps was making this assault. When Venable returned through the mist, the report he brought would determine whether this army was to fight on or surrender. After four years of war, the northern front of the Confederate States of America had collapsed. A week before, unable to hold their overextended lines against the massive Union forces being thrown at them by General Ulysses S. Grant, Lee’s battered, worn-out army had evacuated both Petersburg and the Confederate capital, Richmond. Since then they had slogged westward across Virginia through a hundred miles of spring mud, marching and fighting in an effort to break away from pursuing Federal columns. Lee’s plan was to move west parallel to the railroad lines, and pick up food that was to await his army at supply depots. Then they would turn south to join the Confederate army under Joseph E. Johnston that was opposing Sherman’s march north through the Carolinas from Savannah. That turn to the south had never come. The march west became a nightmare retreat under incessant attacks that produced terrible losses—three days before this Palm Sunday, in the rout at Sayler’s Creek, eight thousand of Lee’s 121 122 The Kentucky Anthology men were captured at one stroke. The food had not materialized. Starving horses collapsed and died in the mud. Reeling from hunger, soldiers who had won amazing victories in the past threw away their muskets and lay down in the fields, waiting to be picked up as prisoners. At its peak, this once-fearsome army had numbered seventy thousand men. A week before, thirty thousand began this withdrawal to the west, with sixty to seventy thousand Union Army soldiers on their heels. On this misty morning, the Army of Northern Virginia was reduced to eleven thousand gaunt, tenacious veterans . During the night, Federal troops had thrown themselves in strength across the Confederate line of march, and Lee’s army was at last surrounded. At five this morning Lee had launched this final drive to break out to the west and continue the retreat. Waiting for Lieutenant Colonel Venable to return with the message that would tell him whether further fighting would be useless, Lee stood silent amidst a few of his staff officers. He was a strikingly handsome man of fiftyeight , nearly six feet tall, with grey hair and a trim silver beard. Years of campaigning had burnt his clear ruddy skin to a deep red-brown; there were crow’s-feet at the corners of his luminous brown eyes. He had a broad forehead , prominent nose, short thick neck, big shoulders and deep chest, and stood erect as the West Point cadet he once had been. Because he thought he might end this day as General Grant’s prisoner, Lee was not wearing his usual grey sack coat. To represent his thousands of mud-caked scarecrows who were still ready to fight on, this morning Lee was resplendent in a doublebreasted grey dress coat with gilt buttons. Around his waist was a deep red silk sash, and over that was a sword belt of gold braid. At his side hung a dress sword in a leather and gilt scabbard; on the blade was an inscription in French, Aide toi...

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