This is one of the
most popular posts from 2010. It has garnered about 9,000 "hits" and always nets me several
thank you notes each year, presumably from students doing research into the
Civil War.
Until I moved to North Carolina I had a rather one sided picture of
the Civil War. The reason it is still a contentious issue today is due to the
fact that the war was never officially ended by a treaty between the two sides.
There was simply a proclamation by President Johnson in 1866 that the war was
over. And that lack of a treaty is at the very root of any discord which
remains from the Civil War today.
I cannot think back to a time when I was unaware of the
Civil War. The fact that the wounds of the war were still raw in half of our
country was surely a contributing factor to this. I was about 7 when all the
Centennial Observances began in full swing. To make matters even more
confusing, in school we were taught only part of the story concerning the end
of the Civil War.
Today marks the 149th Anniversary of General Robert E.
Lee's surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in
Virginia. It was there that Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia,
which effectively ended the South's ability to wage war. But there never was a
formal surrender by the Confederate Government. Neither treaty nor truce was
ever called.
When I first moved down South I was very confused at the
attitude that the War Between the States had never ended. So, I did as I
usually do; I headed to the library. I was very surprised at all that I did not
know.
General Grant, writing his memoirs with the aid of Mark
Twain, aka Samuel Clemens, recalled the following conversation just prior to
the signing of Lee's surrender;
"Lee soon mounted his horse, seeing who it was, and
met me. We had there between the lines, sitting on horseback, a very pleasant
conversation of over half an hour, in the course of which Lee said to me that
the South was a big country and that we might have to march over it three or
four times before the war entirely ended, but that we would now be able to do
it as they could no longer resist us. He expressed it as his earnest hope,
however, that we would not be called upon to cause more loss and sacrifice of
life; but he could not foretell the result. I then suggested to General Lee
that there was not a man in the Confederacy whose influence with the soldiery
and the whole people was as great as his, and that if he would now advise the
surrender of all armies I had no doubt his advice would be followed with
alacrity. But Lee said that he could not do that “without consulting the
President first. I knew there was no use to urge him to do anything against his
ideas of what was right."
President Jefferson Davis refused to surrender the
Confederacy, instead seeking to consolidate his forces west of the Mississippi.
He was of the hope that they could establish the Confederacy in Texas. This was
a misguided hope at best. Davis was captured in May enroute to Texas. He was
then imprisoned under unduly harsh conditions and emerged a physically broken
man. But he never signed the Loyalty Oath and never formally surrendered his
government.
As a matter of fact, the last action of the Civil War
took place up around the Arctic Circle on November 6th, 1865. The C.S.S.
Shenandoah, under the Command of James Waddell and out of communication with
land, continued conducting raids and seized 4 Yankee merchant vessels before
being informed that the War was over. In June of 1865 the Shenandoah had
captured two Yankee ships, and while aboard the Susan Abigail, Commander
Waddell saw a San Francisco newspaper that stated the war was over. But it was
not until they heard the news from a British ship that they gave up the cause.
At that point the Captain of the U.S.S. Donegal took the
formal parole of the Shenandoah, and Commander Waddell elected to sail to
England rather than the U.S. to avoid his crew being tried as raiders instead
of being released as former soldiers. Some other Confederate ships had
surrendered only after their crews were reclassified as
"artillerymen", thus avoiding criminal trials for the crime of
piracy.
The last ship of the Confederacy was then sailed over
9,000 miles to Liverpool, by Commander Waddell and presented to a Joint House
of Parliament in 1866. He then simply walked away.
When the "Carpetbaggers" arrived to plunder the
ruined Southern States, in direct opposition to Lincoln's plan of a gentle
reunion, the stage was set for the violence and opposition to what the South
called "the Army of Occupation." When that "Army" finally
left in the 1870's, a backlash of "Jim Crow" laws became the norm and
the Southern States entered upon a century of violence and segregation.
The fact that the War Between the States was never
properly adjudicated, and the subsequent lack of any formal Instrument of
Surrender being tendered, has left a hollowness in the "peace" that
is often cited as an end to hostilities. The Union did, however, have the last
word. In May of 1866, President Andrew Johnson simply proclaimed the War to be
at an end.
Sadly, vestiges of that war remain unresolved to this
very day. And the chief culprit of this "hollowness" in our national
unity is, in my opinion, directly attributable to the lack of a formal ending
of the hostilities.
