April 7, 1865---"Not yet."

APRIL 7, 1865:                    

“Not yet.” --- General James Longstreet C.S.A.

 

I

General Ulysses S. Grant U.S.A. is becoming concerned about Phil Sheridan.

Grant expects a little hyperbole from his best cavalry commander --- after all, cavalrymen are the fighter jocks of the Nineteenth Century --- but he has begun to question Sheridan’s honesty. 

Near-hourly reports are flooding in to City Point from central Virginia. In each, Sheridan reports that Lee’s army is on the verge of collapse, that his men are starving, that Confederates are surrendering in droves, and yet The Army of Northern Virginia never seems to stop moving forward. Grant has ordered Sheridan to entrap Lee’s columns, and Sheridan says he has done so, but still the campaign goes on. Grant had estimated that Lee should have surrendered by April fifth, but that day has come and gone. Even allowing for optimism, it is incredible that the fighting continues. Something is wrong.

Very troubling to Grant is a report of the Battle of High Bridge. What should have been a simple skirmish cost the Army of The Potomac almost a thousand men, and Grant is even more disquieted by the report that Confederate losses were in the single digits. Sheridan admits having been sniped at and nearly hit.  Word is that The Army of Northern Virginia is on the move again, after Sailor’s Creek, a battle that should have broken them. None of this makes the A.N.V. sound like an army on the verge of collapse. 

With every westward step, Lee draws nearer to Lynchburg --- and to the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Grant boils every time he imagines another ten month siege. He shudders inwardly when he imagines Lee’s men reaching safety at the line of the Blue Ridge. God damn Sheridan.

Grant confers with Lincoln about conditions in central Virginia. The President, sensing that Grant is impatient to visit the front himself, decides politely to return to Washington, and makes arrangements to leave the next day. Lincoln would really prefer to stay in City Point for what he senses is the imminent end of the war; even more so, he would like to ride with Grant to the front; but even Lincoln knows that is impossible.

As Grant himself is making preparations to leave, a new message is received from Sheridan asking Grant to come to Jetersville. Again Sheridan references Lee’s imminent surrender. “Go,” says the smiling President to his General, “I will see you in Washington.” And he would.

To make better time, Grant sets out with only a few men and a small guard. It is a much more dangerous act than it seems. At this moment in history nobody can say who is control of Virginia. There are armed Confederate “stragglers” everywhere, and gun-happy holdouts who would love to draw a bead on the Union General-in-Chief. At the same time that Grant is racing from City Point to Jetersville, John C. Breckinridge, the Confederate Secretary of War is traveling from the Richmond area down to Danville, with a side trip to confer with Lee. The two men’s trajectories cross, though they never see each other. 

Arriving in Jetersville later at night, Grant is briefed by Sheridan. He interviews a few Confederate prisoners, and his upset at Sheridan recedes.

For Sheridan is right. Lee’s army is on the verge of collapse. The only thing that seems to be holding the Rebel army together is Lee’s own strength of will, which he has somehow managed to imbue into most of his men.  

But Lee is no longer in true control of the field. For the last two days Sheridan and The Army of The Potomac have been corralling Lee and The Army of Northern Virginia like errant cattle, keeping them in line and driving them forward like a herd of swine. Lee cannot go where he wishes anymore; he can only move in a single direction, forward, away from the pincers of Sheridan’s grasping blue claw. April 6^th was indeed a dark day for the South. And April 7^th, as Grant discovers after speaking with Sheridan and with the Confederates he holds captive, was little better. Grant asks for time alone. He needs to think. 

Late at night, Grant writes to Lee the first of what become known as the "Surrender Letters":

APRIL 7, 1865

General R. E. LEE:

The result of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood, by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the C. S. Army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.

U.S. GRANT,

Lieutenant-General

II

The Army of Northern Virginia is on the march again. Lee has, for the moment at least, decided to put off his planned linkage with Joseph E. Johnston. Instead, he is moving due west. Once he reaches Lynchburg he will have time to plan his next moves. 

Lee and his men have barely slept and most have barely eaten. Given the hindsight of so many years it seems impossible that Lee could think that his army would ever reach Lynchburg. The General is counting on his men to demonstrate the same legendary speed and maneuverability they showed during the Overland Campaign when they outraced Grant to Petersburg and Richmond. 

Lee doesn’t seem to understand, or perhaps want to understand, that The Army of Northern Virginia is not the same army it was a year ago. Ten months in the trenches have worn it down, and a week with no food at all has condemned it. Lee is no longer engaged in a contest of thrust-and-parry with “Those People”; he has become a quarry, whose only task now is to evade, dodge, and escape the tightening ring in which his men find themselves. 

Still, he presses on. 

The Gray army crosses the Appomattox River over High Bridge. High Bridge has two decks, an upper for trains and a lower for wagons, horses, and pedestrians. The river, swollen by the Spring rains, is cresting, and its broad floodplain is filled to the brim. Although the bridge is 160 feet high water is lapping at the bottom of the wagon deck. After the army is safely across, Lee orders the bridge destroyed. 

Six miles down the road, the army reaches Farmville. Both the bridge and the town have been held for the last 24 hours by forces under the command of James Longstreet C.S.A., and Longstreet has the only news Lee really wants to hear.

A commissary wagon train is in Farmville. 

The ecstatic men begin to draw rations. Fires are built, water is boiled. Soon enough the first men in line at the wagons are eating for the first time in a week. The welcome smells of frying bacon, perked coffee and toasting bread soon fill the air. 

Soon, men are overcome, laughing and crying with joy, and some few, replete after seven days, light their long-ignored clay pipes or stretch out for well-deserved naps. 

Their idyll ends with shocking suddenness as a rearguard scout comes pounding up to Lee on a lathered horse. “General!” he shouts. “The Yankees are coming up the road behind us! They’re going to cross the bridge!”

Lee is stunned. Hadn’t he ordered High Bridge destroyed?  He quickly calls for the head of the demolition team. The man is frightened at being questioned by Lee:

“General, I swear by God we fired the bridge. It was a-burning like a bonfire when we left it. It cain’t be standing, suh. It cain’t be.”  

“You fired it? You set it afire?”

“Yessuh suh.”

“Why didn’t you use explosives to bring it down?”

The man looks heartsick. “I doan know, suh. I --- we --- I mean, I --- I just didn’t think of explosives, suh. But . . . It was burnin’ like a bonfire, suh . . . I’m . . . Oh, God, Gen’l, forgive me, please!”

Lee forgives the man. Though many a commander might have had the man punished and some even shot, Lee cannot do that. He knows that he is ultimately responsible for this debacle. The lack of rations has made his men’s thinking sluggish and simple, and Lee has not seen it --- not until now.

High Bridge had indeed been set afire, and it had burned spectacularly --- the entire upper superstructure was rendered unusable. But, standing on twenty piers, it hadn’t collapsed into the river. And the fire hadn’t done much to the lower wagon deck soaked as it was with river water. The first Federals to reach the bridge had simply dipped their canteens in the torrent of the river in order to douse the small fires on the lower deck. Once the fires were out, the Union army began to cross the Appomattox. 

The Union column is a bare six miles from Farmville when Lee gives the order to save the commissary wagons at all costs. The teamsters whip their horses into sudden movement. The chuck wagons speed off, still with frying bacon and perking coffee on their burners as the cooks try to douse the glowing coals of their stoves on the go. 

The men who are still in line waiting for food utter a collective heart cry as the wagons move away. A few desperate souls chase them. Men busy unloading provisions as the wagons jerk into motion toss cracker boxes, and whatever else they can quickly grab, from the tailgates of their rolling wagons, hoping that the soldiers on the ground can gather them up. 

Lee orders the men into formation for march, but before the Rebel column can even begin to move out of Farmville the Yankees arrive in force. It is just after 2:00 P.M. on Friday afternoon. 

The Battle of Cumberland Church:

 A running battle developed in the streets of Farmville as the Confederates withdrew from the town. Pressed by the Yankees, enraged at having their food snatched away from them, the Southerners put up a tremendous struggle as they moved down the road away from Farmville. The Federals were amazed at the unexpected force of the resistance --- from where were these rebels drawing their strength?  It was a small battle as things were reckoned in the Civil War, but Lee’s column inflicted a relatively staggering 700 casualties on the Union --- nearly ten percent of the 7,500-plus Federals engaged --- while suffering only 250 themselves. Among the Union dead was Brigadier General Thomas A. Smyth, the last Union general officer killed in the war. 

Although Cumberland Church is often referred to today as “the last Confederate victory of the war” it wasn’t, no matter the calculation. Nor did it deserve the tiresome title it sometimes gets of “the last battle of the Civil War.”  

At Cumberland Church, the A.N.V. was down to perhaps 10,000 to 12,000 men, and though they fought like furies when pressed, there was a brittle glass shard quality to the Confederate army by the end of the first week of April. They had shattered at Sailor’s Creek, and only the small chips of the army remained, painful and injurious to the incautious, but not really dangerous. 

By April 7, 1865, none of Lee’s men could be called “effectives” by any standard used at the height of the war. All of them, except perhaps the officer corps, truly needed to be hospitalized for extreme malnutrition. Even water was becoming harder to find as they moved westward through the empty center of the State. 

Lee didn’t rack up a victory at Cumberland Church. Nor did he make his escape from Grant. Cumberland Church was at best a pyrrhic victory that only delayed the end of the Civil War for perhaps one more day. As the sounds of battle died down, the South’s clock ticked the louder. The Confederacy had just about 48 hours left to live.

III

 John Surratt, a former Seminarian-turned-Confederate spy arrived in Montreal to discuss plans with the local Confederate Commissioner, Edwin Gray Lee --- plans to blow up the Federal White House. After squirreling away some money --- Federal greenbacks --- to buy gunpowder and to pay his explosives expert, Surratt immediately turns back for Washington D.C. 

IV

In North Carolina, a confederate raiding party manages to seize and scuttle the Union supply ship U.S.S. MINQUAS. Quartermaster and Commissary supplies are destroyed but no lives are lost.

V

A few minutes before midnight on April 7th, somewhere in the vicinity of Devereaux Station --- modern day Clifton, VA --- Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet are discussing the day’s events. They are interrupted by a courier under flag of truce bearing General Grant’s letter asking Lee to surrender. Lee reads it silently, and passes it to Longstreet, “my old war horse,” as Lee calls him. 

“Gloomy Pete” scans the message. He looks at Lee. “Not yet,” Longstreet advises his Commander. 

Lee nods imperceptibly. “Please wait for my reply,” Lee tells the courier. 

Lee writes:

April 7th, 1865.

General: 

I have received your note of this date. Though not entertaining the opinion you express of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia, I reciprocate your desire to avoid useless effusion of blood, and therefore, before considering your proposition, ask the terms you will offer on condition of its surrender.

R.E. Lee, General.

At the moment Lee is playing for time. When the courier interrupted them, Lee and Longstreet happened to be discussing plans for refitting the army. For the Fates seem to have smiled on Robert E. Lee at last. Not far off, in the town of Appomattox Station, wait three trains of full consist. Each train is carrying boxcars full of food --- food --- pistols, rifles, bullets, gunpowder, howitzers, shells, cannonballs, medical supplies, uniforms, shoes, boots, underdrawers, belts --- in short, everything the Army needs to carry on the war for months.  Even the Commissary Wagon Train from Farmville is waiting at Appomattox Station. And best of all, this is no pipe dream. Lee not only knows the supplies exist he has pickets guarding them. It seems that at least some of his messages to Danville got through. He even knows of a fourth train coming directly from Lynchburg in the morning. His men have perhaps twelve miles to march, and then another twenty five to Lynchburg where they can rest and recuperate before they join with Johnston?  Or head for the hills?  

Lee is still debating the wisdom of each choice. In the meantime, his exhausted men are resting. There is no rush. They can practically see Appomattox Station from where they are (or practically could if it was daylight anyway), and Lee does not have the heart to force his men to suffer through another night-blind night march. In the morning they can just take a comfortable, if long, walk to the train station. 

Lee has not abandoned all wisdom. He has told his officers the news --- and they have congratulated him warmly --- “You’ve done it, General, you’ve done it! The Yankees are in for it now” --- but he has asked that they say nothing to the men. Just in case. 

How word of the trains at Appomattox Station reaches Grant in Jetersville no one ever knows.

After reading Lee’s response and sensing what is between the lines, Grant tells Sheridan sadly, “It looks like Lee means to fight it out.”  

Grant decides his men have had enough rest. He rouses the army --- the entire field Army of The Potomac --- and orders them to march at the double-quick for Lee’s latest position. Grant is finally going to get ahead of Lee, whatever it takes, because Grant knows that if Lee reaches those trains before him --- and all Lee has to do is decide to go at any moment  --- it will be a whole new war.  

Grant and Sheridan dispatch their fastest cavalry right to Appomattox Station. General George Custer is about to win the Civil War.