Between Honor and Glory

The American Spectator ^ | March 2001 | Jay Winik

[Valin]

Excerpted with permission from April 1865: The Month That Saved America.

...To grasp the full horror of the march it is necessary to make it yourself. The landscape constantly changes: open fields are exasperatingly punctuated by high hedges and dense windbreaks that are impossible to see through or over or around. On the other side, they seamlessly merge into swamps, or dense, claustrophobic woods, or undergrowth so thick as to be a second forest; or, conversely, they run into long, muddy tracts, known euphemistically as Virginia quicksand.

Once more, Lee pushed his men to the outer limits of human endurance. "I know that the men and animals are exhausted," he bluntly told one of his generals, "but it is necessary to tax their strength." And remarkably, once more, they complied. Damp from the day's rain, their senses numbed from too little nourishment, they stumbled along with scarcely a word of complaint. But by now they were fighting a second struggle, this one from within. The dreadful consequences were inevitable: without food and deprived of sleep, the body begins to feed on itself, consuming vital muscle, raping invaluable tissue, robbing itself of what little energy is left. Thoughts become woozy; some experience a light-headedness, others even hallucinate. And with each hour, the situation worsens: initiative is deadened, and judgment becomes impaired, giving many the mental capacity of a small child. The elements, too--the sun, the wind, and the rain--become merciless. So does thirst. Limbs struggle to obey the simplest motor commands. Yet somehow, Lee's men inched forward...

To the contemporary mind, it is as difficult to contemplate the westward march of the Army of Northern Virginia as it is to step outside all the history that has come after. To us, an extended troop march appears an anachronism. Today, great military machines race across terrain in high-speed tanks and armored personnel carriers. Unless they are poorly equipped, or the battlefield has collapsed around them, they do not march on foot, and, if they do, they certainly do not expect grand victory. It is no accident that one of the most famous military marches of the twentieth century was neither a strategic retreat nor a tactical feint, both of which were part of Robert E. Lee's stock-in-trade, but a journey into captivity known as the Bataan Death March, made over ten days and seventy-five miles by 36,000 defeated American servicemen in the Philippines. Even now, Bataan, where upward of 10,000 men died of thirst, exhaustion, beatings, torture, or beheadings, is a march that skews the modern military imagination.

But Robert E. Lee was not of a twentieth-century mind. The marches he knew were not Bataan, but heroic efforts by Hannibal, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon, for whom the distinction between genius and insanity was often measured by the razor-thin line of success. People must have thought Hannibal especially crazy, setting out from Spain with 40,000 men and an ungodly number of elephants to traverse two hazardous mountain ranges--the Pyrenees and the Alps--and a deep, rushing river, the Rhône, and to endure landslides, blinding snowstorms, and attacks by hostile mountain tribes; they thought him crazy, that is, until he did it in fifteen days and swept down upon the unsuspecting Romans. Now Lee and his veterans, some 35,000 men, had a roughly 140-mile march to make and a solid twelve- to twenty-four-hour lead. Lee understood the odds, but ever the gambler, hadn't he bested them before? Hadn't he gotten to Cold Harbor first? To leave Grant behind now would enshrine him among history's great commanders and tacticians.

With little sleep and even less respite, the men continued to march under the cover of darkness. On and on, hour after hour, from hilltop to hilltop, for the better part of two solid nights and one continuous day, they struggled to keep their lead. By April 4, they were dirty, unwashed, mud-splattered, exhausted, and, most of all, desperately hungry. Still, after months of languishing in the trenches, their morale and élan were surprisingly strong; and at the thought of food in Amelia, so were their spirits. Once replenished, their lead over Grant solidified, they would complete their dash to safety. So what mattered now was each new stride, each new landmark, bringing them closer to the 350,000 rations they expected at Amelia Court House, and taking them a step farther away from Grant's huge force, eagerly trailing behind.

Lee's plans had called for his vast columns of men and material to cross over three separate bridges; but one of them, Bevil's Bridge, was washed out; at another, Genito Bridge, the materials to shore it up had never arrived. Lee improvised: in the first case, three separate corps--Gordon's, Longstreet's, and Mahone's--were densely wedged onto a single bridge; for the second, the Confederates found a nearby railway pass that they neatly planked over. But these delays, costing the Confederates in manpower, in stamina, and, most precious of all, in ticks of the clock, held up the completion of the crossing until the following evening.

The stoic Lee himself made it across the Appomattox River only on the morning of April 4, at 7:30 a.m. Like his men, he had scarcely slept since leaving Petersburg and Richmond. But this morning, his hopes--and theirs--rose at the stirring thought of the relief waiting for them in Confederate boxcars on the Danville line at Amelia. Several hours later, around midday, Amelia itself came into view--a sleepy village of unpaved streets, with houses neatly tucked behind tumbled roses and weathered fences, and a few small shops converging around a grassy square. Lee raced ahead. Upon locating the boxcars, he ordered them to be opened.

This is what he found: 96 loaded caissons, 200 crates of ammunition, 164 boxes of artillery harnesses. But no bread, no beef, no bacon, no flour, no meal, no hardtack, no pork, no ham, no fruit, no cornmeal. And no milk, no coffee, no tea, no sugar. Not one single ration. Lee was stunned.

His men had left Richmond and Petersburg with only one day of rations. That day had come and gone, and much more hard marching lay ahead of them. Already, weakened men and animals were slowly dropping in their tracks. But to eat now meant halting the march to find food--which meant squandering his priceless lead over Grant. And in either case, there was no guarantee that he would secure food--that day, the next, or the next after that.

The general wasted little time, quickly giving the bad news to his division commanders and then writing out an appeal to "the Citizens of Amelia County" in which he called on their "generosity and charity" and asked them "to supply as far as each is able the wants of the brave soldiers who have battled for your liberty for four years."

Then he waited.

As dawn broke on April 5, he received his answer.

The citizens of Amelia County had already been cleaned out by Confederate impressment crews and the exigencies of war. Lee's forage wagons came back virtually empty: there were no pigs, no sheep, no hogs, no cattle, no provender. And there would be no breakfast that morning for the men. His only option now was a hard, forced march toward Danville--where a million and a half rations were stored. It was 104 miles by railroad; four grueling days by foot. But this time could be whittled down to only one day if rations were rushed forward by train to Burkeville, a mere eighteen miles down the line. Lee dispatched an order by wire. Would it work? Just as he could no longer wait in Amelia for rations, no longer could he wait for an answer. With the buffer of the Appomattox River gone and crucial hours lost, Grant's men were closing in. There was no time to waste.

Lee hastily mounted his horse, Traveller, and immediately ordered his men to move toward Burkeville. But it was worse than Lee realized.

Just outside Jetersville, itself a ragtag town consisting of little more than a collection of weathered wooden houses scattered alongside the rail line, Union cavalry had beaten the rebels to the punch; earthworks were blocking the retreat path like a dam; battle flags had been raised; and well-fed bluecoats were peering over the lines. Dug in, "thick and high," the Federals were waiting.

Longstreet had already sought to dislodge them; convinced that it was only cavalry in the way, he briskly attacked. But Sheridan's horsemen were now backed by two Federal corps strung out between Lee and North Carolina. The road of escape--through Burkeville--had been cut off.

Riding down the retreat line, Lee cast a sidelong glance, lifted his field glasses, and gazed out at the freshly dug Union fortifications. For several tense moments, he considered one last massive and final assault. But the Union troops were too well entrenched, and his army was in no condition for an all-out battle. Instead, Lee set his men back in motion, again. This time due west, for Lynchburg.

Thus was delivered what many regimental commanders considered to be "the most cruel marching order" that they had ever given.

In every direction, the dead--men, mules, and horses--began to litter the roadside. Dense columns of smoke rose from exploding vehicles, and shells burst after being touched by flames. Following alongside, Lee learned from two captured Federal spies that the Union was gaining ground. He pushed his men that much harder.

Nighttime fell. It didn't matter. Morning now seamlessly intermingled with evening, darkness with sunset, the fifth of April with the sixth, two hours with eight hours, eight hours with sixteen hours, and eventually, twenty-four hours with forty hours. Hungry, with barely one night of rest in three days, many of the men wandered forward in a giddy, phantasmagoric state, slipping in and out of sleep and confusion as they walked. The evening was little better: as the long, black night wore on, more troops fell by the wayside; they would halt for a few moments' rest, and fail to rise, their dazed eyes gazing haplessly at Lee's line, still lumbering west.

Still outwardly calm, Lee's face nonetheless looked "sunken," "haggard." But there was suddenly the prospect of food to spur his men on. That afternoon, he had learned that more than 80,000 rations of meal and bread--and even such delicacies as French soup packaged in tinfoil along with whole hams--were definitively waiting in Farmville. Nineteen miles away.

So it was in that direction that the Confederates picked up their step and began again, in one long, snaking line, to move.

Grant wasted no time. This was the opportunity that he had hoped for. Sheridan's cavalry and three infantry corps continued to race alongside the retreating rebels, bludgeoning them with sledgehammer blows and quick, in-and-out lightning attacks that heightened panic and fatigue. Fueled by the prospect of victory, the Federals had at long last begun to show a fighting spirit that had been sorely lacking since the Grant-Lee slugfest began almost a year before: gone were the shock and dread of another Wilderness or Cold Harbor; no longer did they fear seeing "the elephant" of battle. It showed in their very stamina: Union men, despite their own obvious exhaustion, now seemed incapable of straggling, some handily marching upward of thirty-five miles per day.

"Lee's surely in a bad fix," he announced. "But if I were in his place, I think I could get away with part of the army." Then he added tantalizingly, "I suppose Lee will."

So meeting with Sheridan and Major General George Meade, he reiterated his central plan. He did not want to follow Lee; he wanted to get ahead of him. Playing for keeps, this time Grant refined his stratagem. At dawn the next day, April 6, he dispatched Sheridan on a northwest swing--no longer aimed at Lee's rear but intended to move ahead of him, directly positioning the hot breath of Union armies against Lee's face. For good measure, he ordered another infantry corps to join the push in the rear...

The skirmishing at Sayler's Creek, across three separate battle sites that would eventually merge into one, began early on April 6 and mounted as the sun climbed. The battle itself began in earnest by the first brush of afternoon, when two dangerous gaps appeared in Lee's lines. Deadly Federal horsemen, swinging sabers and led by the dashing, yellow-haired general, George Armstrong Custer, rushed in through the holes. Soon, three Union corps had cut off a quarter of Lee's army; their guns shattering the unearthly silence of the rolling hills. A row of artillery batteries followed, decking Confederates who had been lingering in the dank and muddy swale. "I had seldom seen a fire more accurate nor one that had been more deadly," one rebel noted. Off-balance from lack of food, dazed by lack of sleep, the rebels were at first stunned, then, as one Confederate put it, they "blanched," and finally, they were "awe-struck."

Sheridan wasted no time in capitalizing on their diminished state. "Go through them!" he shouted angrily. "They're demoralized as hell."

Not completely. At the sight of the Yankees, they rallied. Rebel batteries swung into position, anchored their lines, and trained their barrels on the advancing Federals, while infantry crouched and pointed muskets at the enemy. It was only a prelude to fighting that would outdo much of the rest of the war in its savagery. After the methodical rebel order of "Fire!" the line of advancing bluecoats wavered and broke. The first crisis was apparently over. But then, without warning, the conflict degenerated, and the insensate killing began. The hollow-eyed Confederates sprang to their feet with empty muskets, starting after the retreating Yankees. Catching up to the Federals, they became entangled in vicious hand-to-hand combat. Men struck one another with bayonets, flogged one another with the butts of guns, and flailed at one another with their feet. "I well remember the yell of demonic triumph with which that simple country lad clubbed his musket and whirled savagely upon another victim," observed one commander. Grabbing one another with dirt-sodden fingers, callused, sweaty hands, and sharp fingernails, they rolled on the ground like wild beasts, biting one another's throats and ears and noses with their teeth. Officers dispensed with their guns, fighting with swords and, when they no longer worked, with fists. Astoundingly, in this jumble of conflict, they were no longer battling one another over territory or vital military advantage or even tactical gain, but out of sheer impulse: they were killing one another over battalion colors.

The Yankees kept coming, and the battered rebels, their assaults increasingly uncoordinated and disjointed, could not keep up the ferocity. By day's end, they were overwhelmed; the dead lay so close and dense that bodies had to be dragged away to let a single horse pass. It was the South's worst defeat of the entire campaign. All told, Grant's army had captured an astonishing 6,000 rebels--Lee's son Custis and the one-legged General Richard Ewell among them--and destroyed much of their wagon train. Adding up the killed and wounded, Lee had lost up to 8,000. Lee himself felt the sting of defeat sharply. Late in the afternoon, he rode out to a high ridge overlooking the battlefield. Sitting on Traveller, on this small rise, the general found the sight astonishing. Lee was a badly shaken man.

"My God!" he cried out. "Has the army been dissolved?"

Bill Mahone, the tall, bearded general, was there, riding at his side. Deeply touched, he took a moment to steady his voice, then quickly offered words of encouragement. "No general, here are troops ready to do their duty."

As Mahone and his men drew into a line to hold back the Federals, Lee's temper again flared; he, too, was drawn to the fight. Leaning forward in his saddle, he snatched a single battle flag, to rally fresh troops as well as retreating men. On this day, it was no idle gesture. Earlier in the fighting, one flag bearer had been brought down by an artillery shell, only to have his brother grab the standard and promptly be shot through the head. Another Confederate quickly reached for the colors and also fell. So did a fourth. And so did a fifth, until the flag was firmly planted by a sixth in a low bush. Now it was Lee who sought to cheat fate. Riding past Mahone's assembled troops, he held the flag staff high in one hand. At the top of the rise, he stopped and waited. The wind caught the flag, and it snapped and curled around his silver mane, flapping about him and draping his body in Confederate red. Mahone's men fell deathly silent, and then this collective hush was punctuated by a scattered, spontaneous cry emanating from the frenzied survivors stumbling back: "Where's the man who won't follow Uncle Robert!"...

After Sayler's Creek, Phil Sheridan tersely wired Grant: "If the thing is pressed, I think that Lee will surrender." When Lincoln read this, his melancholy spirits soared.

Lincoln bluntly telegraphed to Grant: "Let the thing be pressed."

It was now April 7.

Lee's remaining forces had again crossed the Appomattox to arrive in Farmville, where the first rations of the march awaited them. While the food was dispensed, campfires were hastily built; bacon sizzled; and corn bread was devoured. His troops, at last able to eat and rest, still had two options: try again to turn south toward Danville, or set out for Lynchburg and the sheltering protection of the Blue Ridge mountains. But inexplicably, one of Lee's generals had neglected to blast High Bridge--a massive steel and brick structure spanning a floodplain half a mile wide, at a spectacular height of 126 feet. Frantically riding back, an officer finally torched it, but the delay was fatal; a hard-marching Federal column reached the accompanying wagon bridge in time to stomp out the flames. Now there was no river between Lee and Grant's lead troops; indeed, the distance separating them was barely four miles. With Union soldiers approaching, Lee's army stood nearly naked to assault.

Lee was forced to quickly withdraw his men from Farmville and recross the Appomattox to escape the threat, even as Union cavalry drew so close that fighting broke out in the town's streets. The priceless supply train quickly rolled away, while thousands of starving soldiers, who had not yet drawn their rations, watched in agony. Bedlam followed; haversacks still open, muskets in hand, men turned and raced across bridges that were already burning.

Once more, Federal and Confederate soldiers clashed. But now, the shards of Lee's army successfully fended off the Union, smashing the bluecoats along both their front and their flank, even taking some 300 prisoners, including a Union general--all under the direct eye of Lee himself. This time, the rebels inflicted more casualties than they suffered--in fact, the Union had lost some 8,000 men in just the last week alone--and by moonlight, the road west to Lynchburg now beckoned.

"Keep your command together and in good spirits," Lee reassured his son Rooney. "Don't let them think of surrender."

And he concluded: "I will get you out of this."

Shortly before dusk on April 8, as he dismounted to make camp for the night, Lee received a letter from Grant offering generous terms for the surrender of Lee's army and the only condition that he demanded was that the officers and men "be disqualified from taking up arms" until exchanged. Unknown to Lee, Grant had labored more than six hours to compose this letter. In a tactful combination of diplomacy and insight, he suggested that Lee could be spared the humiliation of surrendering in person.

Lee responded. Of all the sentiments it reflects, despair and surrender are not among them:

Genl

I received at a late hour your note of today. In mine of yesterday I did not intend to propose the surrender of the Army of N. Va.--but to ask the terms of your proposition. To be frank, I do not think the emergency has arisen to call for the surrender of this Army, but as the restoration of peace should be the sole object of all, I desire to know whether your proposals would lead to that and I cannot therefore meet you with a view to surrender...but as far as your proposal may affect the C.S. forces under my command & tend to the restoration of peace, I shall be pleased to meet you at 10 a.m. tomorrow on the old state road to Richmond between the picket lines of the two armies.

The letter was sealed, and the courier dispatched. Under a soft midnight sky, with a bright, nearly full moon overhead, Grant scanned Lee's letter, then handed it to his chief of staff to read aloud. The aide was furious at Lee's brash response, but Grant just coolly shook his head. "It looks as if Lee still means to fight."

With enemy artillery roaring in the background, that night Lee and his weary lieutenants gathered around a campfire in the woods near Appomattox Court House. The Confederates were almost entirely surrounded, outnumbered nearly six to one, with little food, little hope of resupply, little prospect for immediate reinforcement. But there was still the distinct prospect of escape. And before the opportunity slipped away, Lee hoped to turn the momentary lull to his advantage. Six straight days of Lee's relentless march westward had not dimmed his audacity, or his desire to avoid surrender and somehow salvage victory. He devised another plan for breaking through the enemy lines: his men would attack as soon as possible, attempting to slice a hole through Grant's slumbering army, and if successful, they would resume the march southward. General John Gordon, one of Lee's most daring officers, was chosen to lead the breakout. And, if necessary, there remained a fallback position: they could make their way to the Blue Ridge mountains, where, Lee had once said, he could hold out "for twenty years."

Before dawn on April 9, in the pitch black, the advance was to begin. It was Palm Sunday, the day that marked the start of the Holy Week and Jesus' arrival in Jerusalem. Neither the day nor its significance would have been lost on Lee or his men.

At 5 a.m., just beyond Appomattox Court House, a fog hovered over the landscape like a thick, sprawling ghost; the rolling hills soon echoed with the staccato rattle of artillery; and the Sunday stillness was again shattered by the piercing cry of the rebel yell. Gordon's men fought with a special fury. They drove Federal cavalry from their positions, captured several guns, duly cleared the road of bluecoats, and then swept forward to the crest of a hill. Suddenly, below them, concealed in the woodlands, lay the inexorable logic of the mathematics of war: a solid wall of blue, some two miles wide, was advancing--two Yankee infantry corps, with two other Union corps closing in on Lee's rear. Quipped one soldier at glimpsing this awesome sight: "Lee couldn't go forward, he couldn't go backward, and he couldn't go sideways."

Three hours later, around 8 a.m., a courier from Gordon hastily carried the apocalyptic message to Lee. "I have fought my corps to a frazzle," he wrote. "And I fear I can do nothing ..."

Thus the ominous choice was finally set before Lee: surrender or throw his life on one last murderous fight--Lincoln's feared Armageddon. Lee summoned General Longstreet, who brought Mahone and Lee's chief of artillery, the twenty-nine-year-old brigadier general, E. Porter Alexander. All were expecting a council of war. Instead, the discussion turned to surrender. When a moment of vacillation came and an opening occurred, Alexander, one of the most talented and innovative men in Lee's command, took it. Pleading with his chief not to give up, Alexander saw another recourse: a third option.

"You don't care for military glory or fame," he protested, "but we are proud of your name and the record of this army. We want to leave it to our children...a little more blood more or less now makes no difference." Instead, Alexander suggested a Confederate trump card, in fact, the specter most dreaded by Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman: that the men take to the woods, evaporate into the hills, and become guerrillas. "Two thirds" would get away, Alexander contended. "We would be like rabbits or partridges in the bushes," he said, "and they could not scatter to follow us."

A veteran of Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, Cold Harbor and Petersburg, Alexander was so valued by Lee that Jefferson Davis once noted, he is "one of a very few whom Gen Lee would not give to anybody." And Alexander was already prepared to take to the bush rather than surrender--and so, he later indicated, were countless other men. There were no more miracles to be performed, but there were indeed certainly still options. And this option--guerrilla warfare--was not one to be lightly ignored. During the Revolutionary War, Lee's own father had fought the British as a partisan. Moreover, on April 4, a fleeing President Jefferson Davis had issued his own call for a guerrilla struggle. Yet it was Lee's judgment--and not Davis's--that would be most decisive. ("Country be damned," roared former Virginia Governor Henry Wise to Lee. "There is no country. You are the country to these men!")

Lee paused, weighing his answer. No less than for Davis, surrender was anathema to him. Here, surely, was seduction. And in this fateful moment the aging general would affect the course of the nation's history for all time.

Throughout the years variously referred to as "guerrillaism," or "guerrilleros," or "partisans," or "Partheyganger," or "bushwhackers," guerrilla warfare is and always has been the very essence of how the weak make war against the strong. Insurrectionist, subversive, chaotic, its methods are often chosen instinctively, but throughout time, they have worked with astonishing regularity. Its application is classic and surprisingly simple: shock the enemy by concentrating strength against weakness. Countering numerical superiority, guerrillas have always employed secrecy, deception, and terror as their ultimate tools. They move quickly, attack fast, and just as quickly scatter. They strike at night--or in the day; they hit hard in the rain, or just as hard in the sunshine; they rain terror when troops are eating or when they have just concluded an exhausting march; they assault military targets, or, just as often, hunt down random civilians. They may hit at the rear of the enemy, or at its infrastructure, or, most devastating of all, at its psyche; the only constant is that they move when least expected, and invariably in a way to maximize impact.

And as military men have often learned the hard way, guerrilla warfare does the job. By luring their adversaries into endless, futile pursuit, guerrillas erode not just the enemy's strength, but, far more importantly, the enemy's morale.

Before the coming of Christ the lightning strikes of the nomadic Scythians blunted the efforts of Darius I to subdue them; Judas Maccabeus waged successful guerrilla operations against the Syrians; the Romans in Spain required several long centuries to subdue the Lusitanians and Celtiberians. The actual word "guerrilla" came from the Spanish insurgency against France in the early 1800s, a conflict Jefferson Davis frequently referred to and which at one point was largely responsible for containing three of Napoleon's armies. Equally familiar to nineteenth-century Americans were the Thirty Years War and the French Religious Wars; the experience of Frederick the Great in Bohemia; of Wellington in Portugal; the partisan war against Revolutionary France; the Netherlands against Philip II; Switzerland against the Hapsburg Empire. And then there were the most honorable examples of all: The Swamp Fox, Francis Marion, Sumter, Pickens, Green, the Liberty Boys in Georgia... West Point graduate and former U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis knew all this.

The day after Richmond fell, Davis had called on the Confederacy to shift from a static conventional war in defense of territory and population centers to a dynamic guerrilla war of attrition, designed to wear down the North and force it to conclude that keeping the South in the Union would not be worth the interminable pain and ongoing sacrifice. "We have now entered upon a new phase of a struggle the memory of which is to endure for all ages," he declared. "...Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defense, with an army free to move from point to point and strike in detail detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating on the interior of our own country, where supplies are more accessible, and where the foe will be far removed from his own base and cut off from all succor in case of reverse, nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve." He concluded thus: "Let us but will it, and we are free."

In effect, Davis was proposing that Lee disperse his army before it was finally cornered. From a military point of view, the plan had considerable merit. The Confederacy was well supplied with long mountain ranges, endless swamps, and dark forests to offer sanctuary for a host of determined partisans. Its people knew the countryside intimately and instinctively and had all the talents necessary for adroit bushwhacking, everything from the shooting and the riding, the tracking and the foraging, the versatility and the cunning, right down to the sort of dash necessary for this way of life. Moreover, given that most of them would be battle-hardened and well-trained veterans, arguably an organized Confederate guerrilla army could be among the most effective partisan groups in all of history. The Union army would then be forced to undertake the onerous task of occupying the entire Confederacy--an unwieldy occupation at best, which would entail Federal forces having to subdue and patrol and police an area as large as all of today's France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Poland combined. Even in early April 1865, the Union had actually conquered only a relatively small part of the South--to be sure, crucial areas for a conventional conflict, like Nashville, New Orleans, Memphis, and, of course, the crown jewel of Richmond--but that would be largely meaningless in a bitter, protracted guerrilla war. As the Romans had found out 2,000 years earlier, cities could become useless baggage weighing down the military forces, what the ancient commanders memorably called "impedimenta."

In moving to occupy vast stretches of land defended only by small, dispersed forces, Grant's strategy of exhaustion would be turned on its head. Consider the nearly insuperable difficulties that he would face: up to that point, no more than roughly a million Union men had been in arms at any one given time. But confronted with a guerrilla phase, the Union would not be able to demobilize its armies, always problematic for a democracy. Wartime conscription would have to continue, with all its attendant political difficulties and war-weariness. Even granting the North's theoretical ability to put more than 2 million men under arms, it would be unlikely that the Federals could ever pacify, let alone manage and oversee, more than fragmented sections of the South against a willful guerrilla onslaught. Rather than having a restored United States, the country could come to resemble a Swiss cheese, with Union cities here, pockets of Confederate resistance lurking there, ambiguous areas of no-man's-land in between. Even the North would not be safe. In 1864, a ragtag group of twelve Confederates, without horses, plus ten lookouts, and financed by a mere $400 in cash from the Confederate secretary of war, had crossed the Canadian border, plundered three Vermont banks, stolen $210,000, and turned the entire state into chaos. From New York to Philadelphia, and Washington to Boston, targets would abound: banks, businesses, local army outposts, and even newspapers and statehouses. All were vulnerable. Month after grinding month, year after year, who would be under siege: the victorious Union or the hardened guerrillas?

Across most of the South, the situation would be even more daunting. In Charles Adams's famous warning, "The Confederacy would have been reduced to smoldering wilderness." As in guerrilla wars throughout history, the Union would have to station outposts in every county and every sizable town; they would be forced to put a blockhouse on every railroad bridge and at every major communications center; they would be reduced to combing every sizable valley and every significant mountain range with frequent patrols. With Lee's army and other loyal Confederates--by some historians' estimates, there were still up to 175,000 men under arms who could be called upon--dispersed into smaller, more mobile units, they could make lightning hit-and-run attacks on the invading forces from safe havens in the rugged countryside and then invisibly slip back into the population. Their molestations need not be constant, or even kill many people; they need only be incessant.

The military balance would be almost meaningless. In truth, more frightening to the Union than the actual casualties it might suffer would be the psychological toll as prolonged occupiers, the profound exhaustion, the constant demoralization. Where would the stamina come from? There would be no real rest, no real respite, no true amity, nor any real sense of victory. Prospects for Northern victory had seemed dim as recently as August 1864, largely because Northerners had grown weary of the war. The Northern home front had nearly crumbled first--and was saved only by the captures of Mobile and, more importantly, of Atlanta, which paved the way for a presidential reelection victory that Lincoln himself had, just weeks earlier, judged to be an impossibility. Only the heartening prospects of sure and relatively sudden victory had sustained the Federals to this time. In a guerrilla war, all bets would be off. How much longer would the country countenance sending its men into war? How long could it tolerate the necessary mass executions, the sweeping confiscations, the collective expulsions, and all the other agonies and cruelties of a full-scale guerrilla war, which would inevitably pervert its identity as a republic? We know what the French once said of a comparable experience. As its columns sought to put down the guerrilla resistance of Abdelkader in North Africa in 1833, one urgent dispatch to King Louis-Philippe stated sadly: "We have surpassed in barbarity the barbarians we came to civilize." It is hard to imagine Americans willing to pay this price for Union.

Could the South carry it out? Grant and Sherman certainly had no doubt about the Confederacy's ability to wage protracted guerrilla war--it was their greatest fear. At one point, Grant himself ruminated, "To overcome a truly popular, national resistance in a vast territory without the employment of truly overwhelming force is probably impossible." The Union never had any systematic plans to cope with such an eventuality--all of Grant's efforts were principally designed to break up the Confederacy's main armies and to occupy the main cities. The army had failed dismally even in the more limited guerrilla war in Missouri. As General John D. Sanborn, who served under Grant's command, would later admit: "No policy worked; every effort poured fuel on the fire."

Lincoln, too, was equally concerned, and he, as much as anyone else, understood the toll guerrilla war could take on the country. On the Missouri guerrilla conflict he lamented, "Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbors, lest he first be killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow. And all this among honest men. But this is not all. Every foul bird comes along, and every dirty reptile rises up." Some of Lincoln's aides put it even more fearfully. Said one, guerrilla warfare is "the external visitation of evil."

Before the Civil War even began, guerrilla activity had already made its mark on the North-South conflict. On May 24, 1856, John Brown and five other abolitionists brutally murdered and mutilated five Southern settlers at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas. Day after day for over two years, dueling bands of Free-Soil abolitionists and pro-slavery marauders burned, robbed, and killed in an effort to drive the other from "Bleeding Kansas," a grim dress rehearsal for the Civil War to follow. By the time war erupted in 1861, many on the bloodstained Kansas-Missouri border were already veterans of irregular warfare.

And once the war started, across the Confederacy, Southerners quickly took to guerrilla tactics. Sam Hildebrand roamed the woods of southern Missouri slaying scores of Unionists; Champ Ferguson tormented the Cumberland in Tennessee, knifing, mangling, and bludgeoning luckless Federals whenever he encountered them. Before he was eventually captured--and summarily hanged--Ferguson personally extinguished over a hundred lives. In the swamps of Florida, John Jackson Dickison outmaneuvered, outfought, and outfoxed the bluecoats; and anarchy reigned in Unionist Kentucky, where brutal guerrilla bands led by Ike Berry, Marcellus Clark, and scores of others sprang up across the state. At one point, Jesse McNeill and his partisans slipped into Cumberland, Maryland, and in a daring raid captured two Union generals. Whatever draconian measures the Union instituted, including confiscation of property and executions of five guerrillas for every loyalist killed, accomplished little.

Some of the Confederate's guerrillas became legendary, feared not simply in the North, but known internationally on both sides of the Atlantic. Of these, John Mosby was among the most dashing and prominent. Pint-sized, plucky, and daring, he was a bit of a Renaissance man. He read Shakespeare, Plutarch, Washington Irving, and Hazlitt's Life of Napoleon, and his words and writings were frequently sprinkled with passages from the classics. The twenty-nine-year-old had been expelled from the University of Virginia--he shot a fellow student--yet he later finagled a pardon from the governor, and then, of all things, took up the law. At the outset of the war, he was actually opposed to secession and was an "indifferent soldier" at best; though after joining Jeb Stuart's cavalry, he proved himself to be a fearless courier and cavalry scout and, when he raised a company of his own under the Partisan Ranger Act of April 1862, a remarkable guerrilla leader. His fame rapidly spread with such exploits as the capture of a Northern general, Edwin H. Stoughton, in bed with a hangover--a mere ten miles from Washington, D.C., in March 1863. "Do you know who I am?" bellowed the general, upon being so indiscreetly interrupted. Mosby shot back: "Do you know Mosby, General?" Stoughton harrumphed: "Yes! Have you got the rascal?" Mosby: "No, but he has got you!" (Mosby completed the humiliation by brazenly retreating with his prisoner in full view of Federal fortifications.) Operating on horseback at night, with stealth, surprise, and swiftness, he soon earned the sobriquet of the "Grey Ghost," and the romance surrounding his exploits brought recruit after recruit to his doorstep. In turn, he was sheltered and fed by a large and sympathetic population in northern Virginia, which served as his early warning network--and his refuge. Never amounting to more than a thousand men, Mosby's partisans were confined to small platoons of several dozen. But they mauled Union outposts with such effectiveness and a whirlwind fury that the regions stretching from the Blue Ridge to the Bull Run mountains were quickly dubbed, by friends and foes alike, "Mosby's confederacy." Union supplies could not move through his territory unless well protected, and even then they were likely prey.

The destruction Mosby inflicted upon Union lines was considerable, and he was detested accordingly. Various strategies were employed--without success--to subdue him. One plan called for an elite team of sharpshooters to shadow Mosby until he was either caught or destroyed. It failed. Another promised massive arrests of local civilians in Mosby's confederacy and a wholesale destruction of their mills, barns, and crops. This also failed. While Mosby still roamed freely, a frustrated General Sheridan, whom Mosby relentlessly foiled in the Shenandoah Valley, once thundered about the restless guerrilla: "Let [him] know there is a God in Israel!" Finally, Grant ordered that any of Mosby's men who were captured should be promptly shot. And in autumn of 1864, General George Custer obliged, capturing six men and executing them all. Three were shot, two were hanged, and a seventeen-year-old boy was dragged bleeding and dying through the streets by two men on horses until a pistol was finally emptied into his face--while his grief-stricken mother hysterically begged for his life. But the Union's hard-line tactics collapsed when Mosby began (albeit reluctantly) hanging prisoners in retaliation. Yet fearsome as he was, Mosby, like his spiritual predecessors Marion, Pickens, and Sumter, represented the civilized face of "little war." And then there was Missouri.

Missouri produced the most bloodthirsty guerrillas of the war. Topping the list was William Clarke Quantrill, a handsome, blue-eyed, twenty-four-year-old former Ohio schoolteacher. A close second was Bloody Bill Anderson, whose father was murdered by Unionists and whose sister was killed in a Kansas City Union prison disaster. Among their disciples were young men destined for later notoriety: Frank and Jesse James, and Coleman Younger.

In early 1862, Quantrill and his band of bushwhackers launched a series of strikes into Kansas that all but paralyzed the state. Then, in 1863, the revenge-minded Quantrill set his sights on a new target: Lawrence, Kansas. One would be hard-pressed to find a place more thoroughly despised by Quantrill and his comrades than Lawrence. It functioned as a Free-Soil citadel during the 1850s, then as a haven for runaway slaves, and, during the war, as a headquarters to the Redlegs, a band of hated Unionist guerrillas. Early in the morning of August 21, Quantrill and his 400 bushwhackers--including Frank James and Coleman Younger--struck. At 5 a.m., Quantrill and his men silently made their way into town. Then the killing began. With a triumphant yell, Quantrill began shouting, "Kill! Kill! Lawrence must be thoroughly cleansed ... Kill! Kill!" For the next few hours, his fierce and sweaty long-haired men, unshaven and unwashed, rumbled up and down the streets of Lawrence, looting stores, shops, saloons, and houses. They systematically rounded up every man they encountered and then torched the town. By day's end, the deed was done. The city lay in ashes; 200 homes were burned to the ground. Over 150 innocent civilians, all men and young boys, had been murdered in cold blood.

The event shocked the entire country and captured the attention of the world. Thousands of Federal troopers and Kansas militiamen quickly pursued the bushwhackers, but by the next day, they were safely nestled in the woodlands of Missouri. The Federals swiftly retaliated, issuing the harshest order of the war by either side against civilians, known as General Orders Number 11. Almost as ruthless as the Lawrence raid itself, it was designed to strike at the heart of the guerrillas' power--the support given them by the civilian population. As one officer put it, the order was carried out "to the letter." Four whole counties were quickly depopulated; virtually every citizen was deported; their crops and their forage were destroyed. So were their homes, which were burned. There is no final list of how many innocent people died in the process--although some estimates suggest it surpassed the carnage in Lawrence. Nor is the list of total refugees in this mass exodus fully complete. In one town, the population dwindled from 10,000 to a mere 600. Few of these refugees returned before the war's end. Many never did. When it was all over, these Midwestern counties lay like a silent wasteland, dotted by chimneys rising above the charred debris of blackened farmhouses.

Thus escalated the vicious cycle of retaliation and revenge. For the next six weeks, Quantrill and the partisans skirmished. Yet despite a massive sweep through the woodlands of western Missouri by Federal cavalrymen, Quantrill escaped. He and his men knew the countryside personally, and friends and relatives provided them with shelter, fresh horses, and timely warning in case of pursuit. In a telling instance of the relative ease with which guerrillas operated, Quantrill himself spent much of the time in comfort, neatly residing at a house near Blue Springs with his mistress, Kate King. On October 6, his gang again struck with considerable fury, overcoming a Federal wagon train at Baxter Springs. They mauled and killed eighty-five men, including the band musicians and James O'Neal, an artist for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. So great was the wave of disgust over this bloodletting that news of the guerrilla war in the West actually supplanted--temporarily at least--the clash of armies in the East. Even Confederate generals were dismayed at the wanton carnage. Noted one high-ranking military man in Richmond, "they recognize the life of a man less than you would that of a dog killing a sheep."

The Union soldiers hunted the guerrillas like animals, and in return, eventually degenerated into little more than savage beasts, driven by a viciousness unimaginable just two years earlier. By 1864, the guerrilla war had reached new peaks of savagery. Now it was no longer enough to ambush and gun down the enemy. They had to be mutilated and, just as often, scalped. When that was no longer enough, the dead were stripped and castrated. Soon, Quantrill and his men were riding about wearing scalps dangling from their bridles, as well as an assortment of other body parts--ears, noses, teeth, even fingers--vivid trophies of their latest victims.

All order broke down. Groups of revenge-minded Federals, militia and even soldiers became guerrillas themselves, stalking tormenting, torturing, and slaying Southern sympathizers. Ruthless reprisals and random terror became the norm; Missouri was dragged into a whirlpool of vengeance. New and no less bloodthirsty gangs of bushwhackers rose up, led by George Todd, John Thrailkill, and others who roved virtually unchecked, baiting and murdering Federal patrols, and bringing all affairs in Missouri to a halt. Trains were attacked. So were stage lines. Steamboats were not safe, coming under repeated sniper fire. To run the gauntlet on the Missouri, pilots started to request--and received--a thousand dollars for a single trip to Kansas. Petrified, Unionists ran, abandoning their houses and their farms, and converging on fortified towns--actually, by now they were garrisoned--which were reduced to nothing more than isolated enclaves in a sea of death. Soldiers were pinned down at their posts in a countryside dominated by guerrillas, their men as much hunted as hunters.

Missouri was something that had never been witnessed before on American soil. And the Union was utterly unable to cope with the ongoing terror. Federal policies were at once muddled, incoherent, and ineffective. A collective sociopathy reigned in Missouri, civil society was torn apart; all morals disintegrated. Both sides snapped. In a war without fronts, boundaries, and formal organization, the distinction between civilians and soldiers/partisans almost totally evaporated. Both those who sheltered the guerrillas and those who collaborated with the Unionists placed their lives in peril.

A favorite torture tactic was repetitive hanging. One father, as his family watched helplessly, was strung up three times--and only on the last try was the deed done. Another's son was walked to the noose some seven times before he met his fate. Toenails would be pulled off, one by one. Knives would be thrust into bellies--but only partially. To survive, people cheated, lied, and bore false witness against their neighbors--anything to appease the other side. Neutrality became impossible. In the words of historian Michael Fellman, life in Missouri became a "life of secret impeachments, divided loyalties, and whispered confidences."

Townsfolk couldn't trust their own neighbors, not even those they had known for years. The smallest tic in speech came to mean something ominous; the slightest arched eyebrow would be feared. Union troops fared little better. In most instances their deaths came at the hands of some unseen sniper. So all civilians were seen as enemies.

By 1864, most rural Missourians had become refugees, inside or outside the state. "We hear of some outrage every day," blithely confessed one Missourian. Wrote the Kansas City Journal of Commerce in 1864, even before the worst of it: "East of us, west of us, north of us, south of us, comes the same harrowing story. Pandemonium itself seems to have broken loose, and robbery, murder and rapine, and death run riot over the country." One Union general said it perhaps most poignantly: "there was something in the hearts of good and typical Christian[s]...which had exploded."

Early in the war, in an attempt to tap the growing discontent behind enemy lines, the Confederate government had legitimized guerrilla organizations with the Partisan Ranger Act of April 1862. Yet, as time went by, and even as the roaming guerrillas tied down Union troops and Union energy, a number of Confederate authorities found the guerrillas' methods distasteful. To the chivalric Southerners, war was about noble sacrifice; it was to be gentlemanly and Christian, and there was an aristocratic code of honor to be adhered to. Typically, when most rebel generals thought of guerrillas, they thought of Mosby. Missouri was another matter.

By 1864, because of the atrocities committed by bushwhackers in the West, as well as the penchant for plunder that virtually all guerrilla bands displayed, powerful Southern voices eventually called for repeal of the Partisan Ranger Act. Finally, in early 1865, the Confederate Congress did revoke the act and the government ended its sanction of all partisan groups, with two notable exceptions: Mosby's rangers in the north, and Jesse McNeill's partisans in western Virginia. Lee himself was instrumental in the Congress's decision.

Thus on that morning of April 9, 1865, Lee had two very different faces of guerrilla war to consider: the first was the face of a Mosby. Beyond that, there was the shining example of his own Carolina ancestors against the British Lord Cornwallis. Or, alternatively, there was the anarchic, scarlet-stained face of Missouri. In all likelihood, a guerrilla war countrywide would be a combination of the two, and, even at this late date, it could likely have an awesome impact: total conquest could be resisted, until, perhaps, attrition and exhaustion would lead the North to sue the South for peace.

The drum of history rarely beats for the men on the losing side in wars. Few are venerated in civic halls and history lessons. Lee was confronted with one last chance, one last opportunity for vindication. If he were somehow to succeed with guerrilla warfare, his place in history would be assured. The temptation must have been vast; no one should think otherwise.

So a sleep-deprived Robert E. Lee--now unable to move west, or south, or east, only north, the very last direction he wanted to go--listened to one of his most trusted advisers in the cool early morning hours of April 9. Hearing Porter Alexander out, he was doing some quick calculations in his head about the effect that generations of bushwhacking--guerrilla warfare--would have on the country. Lee, however, principled to the bitter end, was thinking not about personal glory, but along quite different lines. What is honorable? What is proper? What is right? Likely recalling Missouri, he quickly reasoned that a guerrilla war would make a wasteland of all that he loved. Brother would be set against brother, not just for four years, but for generations. Such a war would surely destroy Virginia, and just as surely destroy the country as well. Even if it worked, and perhaps especially if it worked. For Lee, that was too high a price to pay. No matter how much he believed in the Cause--his daring attempts over the last nine days were vivid testimony to that--there were limits to Southern independence. As he had once said, "it [is] better to do right, even if we suffer in so doing, than to incur the reproach of our consciences & posterity."

But Lee, more so than most other generals, also shunned making political decisions. He was uncompromising about the unique American ethos of respecting the primacy of civilian leadership to make judgments about affairs of state. Yet this was surely a political decision. If he were to surrender his troops, it would be against the advice of Jefferson Davis, against the advice of his civilian authority. But on that Palm Sunday morning of April 9, he forged ahead.

Suppose, he told Porter Alexander, that "I should take your suggestion. The men would be without rations and under no control of officers...They would be compelled to rob and steal in order to live. They would become...bands of marauders, and the enemy's cavalry would...overrun many sections they may never have occasion to visit...

"We would bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from."

He continued his counsel to Alexander: "Then, General, you and I as Christian men have no right to consider only how this would affect us." We must, he stressed, "consider its effect on the country as a whole." Finally, Lee said, "And as for myself, you young fellows might go bushwhacking, but the only dignified course for me would be to go to General Grant and surrender myself and take the consequences of my acts."

Thus did Robert E. Lee, revered for his leadership in war, make his most historic contribution--to peace. By this one momentous decision, he spared the country the guerrilla war that surely would have followed, a vile and poisonous conflict that would not only have delayed any true national reconciliation for many years to come, but in all probability would have fractured the country for decades into warring military pockets. Nor is it idle to speculate that at such a late date such a mode of warfare might well have accomplished what four years of conventional war had failed to do: cleave North from South.

Just that morning, gloomily staring off into the distance, into the lifting mist, he had cried out, "How easily I could be rid of all this and be at rest! I have only to ride along the line and all will be over." But Lee weighed honor and glory against duty and will. He had already told his immediate staff with a heavy heart: "Then there is nothing left for me to do but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths." Poignantly, while tears and grief enveloped his men, he would add, "it is our duty to live."

Though Lee remained unaware, the fall of Richmond just six days before had already brought a spate of stinging calls for revenge, a grisly, thundering, roaring refrain, chanted and chanted again in an ever-rising crescendo, coming from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and, of course, Washington ("Burn it! Burn it! let her burn!" they cried about Richmond. On treason: "Treason is the highest crime known in the catalogue of crimes, and for him that is guilty of it...I would say death is too easy a punishment!" On Jefferson Davis: "HANG him! Hang him! Yes, I say Hang him twenty times!" On the Confederates who had graduated from West Point: "Those who have been fed, clothed, and taught at the public expense ought to stretch the first rope!" On those who had lifted their hands against the North: "Treason must be made odious; traitors must be punished and impoverished!... I would arrest them, I would try them, I would convict them, and I would hang them!" On pardons: "Never! Never!" And on Lee himself, a chorus cried: "Hang Lee! HANG Lee! Hang Lee!").

Indeed, the Chicago Tribune had recommended just that.

The American Spectator, March 2001

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