A Place Called Appomattox

9. The Parade

9 THE PARADE Rain fell through the night, drenching tents and any who slept without them. Morning met a lowering sky, and periodic cloudbursts emptied upon the helpless multitude throughout the day. Waking sodden, cold, and hungry, soldiers cast about for fuel to warm themselves and dry what was, for most on the Confederate side, the only set of clothing left to them. Gunners from a Norfolk battery found dry wood in the walls of an old and presumably unoccupied log cabin near their camp, and during the course of the day the entire cabin went into their fire, one log at a time. Even that proved insufficient, and some dry fence rails followed the cabin before the day ended.1 Early on the morning after the surrender Sheridan’s cavalry departed Appomattox, where his horses could obtain no forage: the noisy brigades splashed into the village, around the courthouse, and veered south between the Peers house and Jones’s vacant law office. From Pleasant Retreat to the Appomattox, all the ambulances, wagons, artillery pieces, caissons, and mounted troops left in the Army of Northern Virginia pulled onto the muddy stage road and started for Clover Hill, where the overseers of the surrender intended to collect them before the unfed teams starved to death. The artillerymen sought new camps near their doomed guns, from the ravine cut by Rocky Run to Sweeney’s orchard. The army’s ambulances all creaked up near the village, where that night Yankee drivers would take them away and leave the sick to find shelter under the trees.2 Most of those who had surrendered expected now to obtain their paroles after abandoning their weapons. William Mahone’s entire division and at least part of Field’s division marched from their camps and stacked their arms in a nearby field that morning, turning back with the expec- tation that they had met their half of the agreement. Mahone added a touch of formality to the exercise, offering another speech along the lines of Gordon’s.3 It was on this day that the waking citizens of Richmond and Washington learned of the surrender. The news came into Washington by telegraph at 9:00 p.m. on April 9, but the hour did not stop artillery officers in the forts around the capital from firing thunderous salutes as the news reached them, as late as 4:30 a.m. ‘‘Washington is ablaze with excitement,’’ wrote one soldier to a mother who would never have to read that her son had been killed in battle. ‘‘From this epoch dates the downfall of the rebellion. It utterly destroys the last vestige of resistance to the authority of the government.’’4 Such sentiments might have seemed premature, since other Confederate armies survived in North Carolina, the Deep South, and the TransMississippi , but this soldier seemed to recognize what civilians in the North, and many in the South, did not: that Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia had come to symbolize all Southern resistance. Those other armies had all suffered significant and repeated defeats, while Lee had won impressive victories and, until a week previously, had held his ground against the encroaching enemy. Through a trying winter that saw the Army of Tennessee essentially destroyed and its patchwork replacement driven across two states, Lee had maintained his lines before Petersburg and Richmond, his troops serving both literally and figuratively as the bodyguard for the Confederate government. Now Richmond was gone, Lee’s army was gone, and, so far as most Union soldiers thought, so was the Confederacy. ‘‘The war is now over,’’ one soldier wrote his brother this April10, while a captain who described the surrender to his father a few days later added, ‘‘of course, this ends the war.’’ Even many of those last and most loyal Confederates seemed to agree, like the North Carolinian meditating upon the stacked arms the night before. ‘‘The opinion seems to prevail that the war is ended,’’ admitted one second lieutenant—the senior remaining officer in Stapleton Crutchfield’s artillery brigade—‘‘but I can’t think so. There is life in the old land yet.’’ A chaplain who asked his diary if the Confederacy were ruined seemed to answer his own question, although he shared the young lieutenant’s hopeful doubt.5 Union soldiers who managed a visit with or across the picket line found a sense of relief, if not glee...