A Place Called Appomattox

Preface

PREFACE For the majority of Americans, including the preponderance of those who witnessed the historic events there, the name ‘‘Appomattox’’ has signified only the place where our Civil War came to an end. It consisted, so far as most moderns know, of nothing more than a brick home and a courthouse that some manage to confuse with each other, all labeled with a name few can spell correctly on the first attempt. The greater part of the American people live and die without ever having seen this spot, although it represents the coupling between the two great halves of American history. Until recently the average adult citizen had been at least marginally familiar with the nature of Appomattox as a watershed in the flow of national affairs , and might have been able to locate it somewhere in central Virginia, but lately the mention of the name seems to produce more puzzlement than recognition. Representative as it was of the average Confederate community, Appomattox assumed the typical postwar reputation of having sacrificed everything in a valiant effort to preserve an innocent and idyllic past. While the village certainly did typify the slaveholding South, that Lost Cause image did not apply in any of its details: for all the recollections of a South stripped of men to fill the army, rich and influential residents usually managed to avoid the front if they preferred, remaining at home or nearby while their poorer, older, and sometimes disabled neighbors bore the battle for those who had begun it. Among the lower classes total sacrifice had been common; among the gentry it was far more rare. Appomattox also formed the scene of its own particular myth. Thanks to the romantic imaginations of men like Joshua Chamberlain and John B. Gordon, it became the place where enemies who had battled each other for four years suddenly laid down their weapons and welcomed each other as brothers, setting aside political and philosophical differences that had fermented into hatred. Neither was that image especially accurate. This book will examine the lesser-known aspects of Appomattox Court House. There will be little inquiry, for instance, into the details of the meeting of two great men in the McLean house: that brief incident has been done to death, and all the sources appear to have been mined; even if new information surfaced, it could offer little of historical significance. Instead, the focus will remain upon the citizens who peopled Appomattox, the soldiers who sojourned there, and the community they knew. Go to Appomattox Court House today and you will find a scene that all but transports the visitor in time. Approaching the village at dawn from the west, in the old bed of the Lynchburg Stage Road, the pedestrian might just as easily be making his way to town during a quiet moment of the war that ended there. At considerable but justifiable expense the federal government has restored Appomattox Court House to a reasonable semblance of its pastoral former appearance, rebuilding important structures that had disappeared and rehabilitating the relics that survived. In acknowledgment of the most important event that ever happened there, park stewards have striven (with the controversial recent exception of an anachronistic stockade fence at the Peers house) to maintain the atmosphere of 1865 in the old village. Yet Appomattox Court House existed before and after the two armies collided there. For those who lived in or near the village, the scenes of that famous April were merely incidental. The settlement served as a home and as a rural village center for thousands of Virginians black and white, poor and planter alike. The town sprang into existence the same year that Texas became a state, and it survived—albeit in gradual decay—until the reunited states had become a world power. During those years, Appomattox citizens watched as slavery consumed the national consciousness, dividing the nation and bringing on cataclysm of a magnitude none had ever imagined . That catastrophe ended, or began to end, in their dooryards. Then they witnessed the trials of Reconstruction and reunion, and they felt the pinch of industrial growth and demographic consolidation as their community was left behind by the bold new era the conflict had spawned. To tell the story of Appomattox Court House is to tell the South’s story of the Civil War—a struggle that lasted not four years, but many, encompassing more than a lifetime between the...