Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 9, 1995 TAG: 9504130002
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: G-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE/STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He had come to surrender himself and the men of the Army of Northern Virginia - "Lee's Miserables" they had been called by someone with a knowledge of the then contemporary Victor Hugo classic "Les Miserables"; someone who also knew misery when he saw it.
Union Gen. U.S. Grant, the man he surrendered to, would become president of the United States. He is usually thought of as the man who won the Civil War. He had some help overall in that regard, but he was, indeed, the man who beat Robert Edward Lee in a war the South could not have won.
Grant went to the White House - continuing an American tradition of sending big military winners there.
Grant would lie one day in a huge, $600,000 tomb on Riverside Drive in New York City. Lee would be buried in a crypt in the modest Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University in the small college town of Lexington.
On April 9, 1865, Grant was the winner, but the loser stole the show. Forever.
It is Lee - in full gray uniform, bearded, tired and sick with heart trouble - who is best remembered at the surrender in the parlor of Wilmer McLean - the man who had once lived on the ground of First Manassas, the opening battle of the Civil War.
He had moved from Northern Virginia to escape war and now the very thing he fled was ending in his parlor.
It is hard to understand why he offered his parlor that day. There must have been red spring mud on the carpet afterward. And some furniture would be missing.
The battle flags of the Confederacy that were stacked that day - at least those not stuffed under the shirts of surrendering rebels - are now attacked as racist. There has been controversy about the huge statues of Lee and other Confederate leaders on Monument Avenue in Richmond.
The statues and the Stars and Bars are seen as symbols of a war to justify and perpetuate human slavery. Southerners and Northerners have long argued that point, although there certainly there would have been no war without slavery.
In "The Killer Angels," Robert Shaara's magnificent novel about Lee and the Battle of Gettysburg, high-ranking Southern generals try to convince a British observer that the war is not about slavery, but about state's rights.
Almost a century later, the Virginia General Assembly would oppose the racial integration of public schools with essentially the same argument.
It was called the Doctrine of Interposition - which said the state had a right to interpose its sovereignty between itself and the federal government.
The theory worked no better than that it did in the 1860s, although Virginia didn't become a literal battleground in this century.
Gen. Lee has remained largely untouched by these and other confrontations. He is sublimely aloof from such modern strife. He is the man who turned down command of the Union armies and said, instead, that his loyalty lay with Virginia - right or wrong.
He has had a few debunkers among the historians, but he is largely remembered as the meticulously uniformed figure in gray who became a brilliant underdog and loser; bigger than life, untouchable by time; the very essence of a gentleman.
He has been honored, for almost a century and a half after that Palm Sunday in 1865, by a succession of pleasant jokes. Among them:
The Confederacy really won the war, but Lee was too much of a gentleman to ask for Grant's sword at Appomattox and thus let Grant think the Union won.
In the 1960s, a friend gave me a poster showing a perplexed Southern lady sewing furiously on a Confederate battle flag. The caption beneath says: "Lee did what?"
As a child of the 1930s - in a Great-Depression Virginia that had the automobile, electricity, radio, some paved roads and the telephone, but was still similar in many ways to the Virginia of 1865 - I became an admirer of Lee.
As an 11-year-old I scanned Douglas Southall Freeman's three-volume masterpiece, "Lee Lieutenants" in the Waynesboro Public Library. I still have trouble with phrases like en echelon, or words like enfillade; but I got to know something of the causes of the Civil War. When I was a boy, Freeman's description of the surrender, the final stacking of those flags that draw fire today, gave me a lasting obsession with lost causes.
I don't think I am alone in this.
Some people still living then in the middle Shenandoah Valley remembered what they had been told about that little SOB Phil Sheridan, the Union general who burned the valley to deprive the Confederacy of its crops.
Yankees still were often thought of as snake-oil salesmen.
Phil Sheridan's name was never mentioned around my house. but it was said that my great-grandfather - who has come down to me as "Granpap Tanner" - soldiered, at least for a while, with Confederate Gen. Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson.
Racist or not, we have hung what purports to be his Civil War weapon on the wall.
It is an odd firearm. It was once a smoothbore musket - with a firing pan on the side. It has been cut in half and hinged, so that a shotgun shell can be inserted in the breech and then the gun snapped back in place and made whole again by means of a crude metal clamp.
A firing pin, pulled back manually, has been installed to explode the shell when the original hammer is cocked and the trigger pulled.
It is said that "Grandpap Tanner," after the war, mutilated his gun so that he could feed his family - shooting rabbits and other wildlife with something more certain Minie balls.
"Granpap Tanner" was not a slaveowner. He couldn't have afforded to take care of another human being other than his own.
My father once tied this gun to a tree on the banks of the South River and fired it at a target made of a large, disassembled cardboard box from the corduroy plant. The recoil threw my father down, bruised his shoulder, and there was no buckshot in the target.
At this time, during the Great Depression, rabbits, and other wildlife, made great stews. But nobody hunted with that gun.
"Granpap Tanner" was not Southern aristocracy and would have been confused if anybody said he was.
Lee once lived in mansion on a hill above Washington, D.C., but lost that as well as the war. He married Martha Washington's great-granddaughter; was the son of Revolutionary War hero Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee; was a patrician.
He comes back to us like that in the old pictures. He is like that in the portrait of him in full uniform that hangs in the stairwell of my house.
Patrician, yes, but never giving the impression of elitism that other Confederate leaders - such as Jefferson Davis - have left behind. Nor the bombast of Gen Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard - whose name was enough for satirists to draft him as the unfortunate symbol of what was wrong with the South.
A cartoon rooster has made fun of poor P.G.T. Beauregard for several generations.
There are are plenty of Civil War figures to choose from. To mention a few:
Confederate: Jackson, Ambrose Powell Hill, "Baldy" Ewell, John Bell Hood, "Old Pete" Longstreet, "Beauty" Stuart, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Daniel Harvey Hill, George Pickett. And so on.
Union: George B. McClelland, George G. Meade - who beat Lee the first time at Gettysburg - Ambrose Burnside, George Armstrong Custer, Sheridan, "Fightin' Joe" Hooker, Irving McDowell, John Buford, John Reynolds. And so on.
But most historians agree that none of the above had to choose surrender at Appomattox rather than guerrilla warfare that might have continued destruction and disunion for years. Lee could have decided to do that. Confederates would have followed him into that dismal kind of activity.
He chose to dress up in his best uniform and admit that it was all over.
Later, he would counsel Southerners: "Make your sons Americans."
His followers in guerrilla warfare would have been like the soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia, who said of Lee: "I'd charge hell for that old man."
For all this, Lee remains an enigma. Historians have him lying in bed in prewar days, giggling as his children tickled his bare feet.
They have him at Gettysburg ordering his men to certain, vain death in Pickett's Charge; and killing Union soldiers in wanton numbers - as Longstreet's men did from behind the stone wall at Fredericksburg.
At Gettysburg he said: "The enemy is there and I am going to strike him."
Paradox, yes, but even the man's horse became a symbol of valor and duty.
At Lexington, after Lee turned from war to education, there is a legend that Traveller - the great, gray horse that Lee rode as a warrior, lay dying, and that ladies of the town got out their best feather beds for Traveller's comfort.
My generation was still interested in "last words" spoken from death beds. Lee said, among other things: "Strike the tent." This is not bad as far as death bed declarations go.
In his classic, "John Brown's Body," Stephen Vincent Benet has Lee saying "a curious thing to life/ "I'm always wanting something."
But before there is an answer, Lee rides Traveller back into the mist.
by CNB