Attendees of the sold-out March 8 Springfield Civil War Symposium had gained a full understanding of how busy undertaker and soldier were in the war’s final year by day’s end when they rose in a standing ovation for Curt Fields and Thomas Jessee, veteran portrayers of Grant and Lee.
Fields showed Grant as a man who feared and disdained the politics of Washington City and upon his arrival immediately ran afoul of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln when Secretary of State William Seward lifted the 5-foot-8 general – muddied boots and all -- on a White House couch so the gathered crowd could see him.
Mrs. Lincoln’s husband soon made it clear that Grant’s dreams of a headquarters removed from the political fray of Washington City were just that, insisting that the general lead the entire Union army while in the field with the Army of the Potomac as it tried to destroy Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
Grant’s portrayer said Lincoln knew as well as he did that “the blood was going to be ankle deep before it was over.”
That Lee’s hair was so near a match to his gray uniform seemed no coincidence in Jessee’s portrayal of the man watching the Union Army grow on the other side of Virginia’s Rapidan River as the winter chill lifted in 1864 and the killing season dawned.
“The army I’m working with now is not the army I had, say, a year ago,” Lee says. That army “had the best officers (the Confederacy) could provide us. The problem is they got killed along the way,” most prominently Gen. Stonewall Jackson, whom Lee called “my right arm.” As spring approached A.P. Hill is also increasingly debilitated by a kidney ailment, and the lower-level officers thinned as well.
And in the ranks, he added, “the replacements I’m getting are inexperienced. They’re draftees, so they don’t want to be there.”
What’s more, with desertions the Confederate replacement rate is a fraction of the Union’s.
That means his smaller army can afford fewer casualties, which Lee knows that Grant knows.
And unlike the previous generals he had so successfully fought against, Lee knew grant only as for his reputation for tenacity in battle.
Fighting among the trees
Lee seems to have been the wiser in engaging his enemy in terrain where tangled underbrush would render the horses of the Union cavalry useless and frustrate its artillery for the most elementary of reasons: “You can’t see your targets.”
Echoing Grant, portrayer Fields reasoned, “The disadvantages for me are the same for him” and that he was ready to get on with the fight.
After announcing his intent to enlist the maker of Schuler’s donuts in the Union ranks, Grant expressed his frustration over how a subordinate’s failure to follow orders allowed a vulnerable Confederate force a half a day to build wooden breastworks behind which they repelled a Union attack that might have succeed.
Lee likewise rued over being able to only belatedly overrule a field commander’s failure to attack an exposed Union flank that might have caught the Union forces in a crossfire and won the day.
While Lee was pleased when Longstreet’s confederate forces arrived at a crucial moment, it proved a mixed blessing when the leader Lee called “my left arm” was caught in a crossfire and sidelined for months.
Nature proved an enemy to both sides when intense firing set fire both the thick brush and the timber both sides had used to build protective fortifications.
The flames were “lighting up that part the valley,” Grant said, spreading to the uniforms of wounded and immobilized soldiers and the battlefield became a “hell on earth.”
And — as at many fields — when the sound of battle receded at night, “all you could hear was screams” of the suffering.
After two days of both armies exhausted by the violence and horror and with both armies, Grant said, “there was a leaden sense (announcing) that the fighting was over.” The two armies, narrowly separated, sidled in the same direction toward Spotsylvania Courthouse.
A new attitude
That both did so signaled a turning point in the war, because, unlike his predecessors in the Army of the Potomac, Grant did not sidle back to Washington after a battle which, if judged by casualty figures alone, would have been a Union defeat.
In his view, “I had engaged Bobby Lee, and I knew every (Confederate) man in the field I killed, he can’t replace.”
“We were marching south for the first time in three years, “he added, and when the troops realized it, “there was a palpable shout” from “a fierce fighting machine” that “never were allowed to fight to their full intensity” because of the habit of retreat.
Horrific battles were to follow at Spotsylvania Courthouse, with its “Bloody Angle’”; Cold Harbor, where thousands of Union soldiers perished in minutes (even Grant pause); and then across the James River, where four days of fighting led to a months-long at siege Petersburg from which Lee finally abandoned in the in the run up to the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. (See related story.)
That Fields and Jessee engaged and won over their audience was obvious to veteran symposium attendees who saw and heard fewer sleeping sentries among their ranks than in the previous 14 symposia, particularly after the crucial lunch hour.
And has been the case for the last dozen or so of the Civil War symposia, the grim talk of slaughter was lightened by a lunchtime performance of Civil War era music by husband-and-wife Steve and Lisa Ball of Grove City.
Grant of courtesies helped to make peace at Appomattox
The afternoon sessions of the Springfield Civil War Symposium covered in detail the events leading up to the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at the McClean House at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. This is a condensed account.
After 10 months of watching his 45,000 besieged soldiers thinned by half rations and demoralized by whack-a-mole attacks along miles of fortified trenches at Petersburg, Va., Robert E. Lee abandons his position the night of April 2 on the slim chance the Army of Northern Virginia might escape to unite with Confederate armies in the Carolinas and continue the fight.
That they slip away undetected gives Lee a day’s jump, but one that evaporates the day he sends his men foraging for food in an area in which, during five years of has foraged out, and from which they return empty-handed.
Soon, pickets leading the Union advance are skirmishing with a Confederate rear guard whose enthusiasm at escaping a siege is being eroded by hunger that was to have been addressed by the rail cars that turned out to be filled with munitions rather than nutrition.
“It was not lost on us,” Lee adds, “that all around us at night you could see campfires -- and they weren’t our campfires.”
Still, when a note arrives from Ulysses Grant suggesting Lee’s position is no longer tenable. When his staff advises him not to answer, he says, “It must be answered” and sends a note inquiring about the conditions of the offer.
This displeases Grant, who says Lee “knows as well as I do that the president has told me not to talk to him” at a meeting that would deal with anything except surrender.
At first Lee is stung by Grant’s reply. Wondering whether he might be taken prisoner on the spot if they meet. “I need to know what to expect,” he says.
But he appreciates Grant’s sending the original message with his adjutant Gen. Seth Williams, who had been Lee’s adjutant when he was superintendent at West Point – and that a Union orderly with Williams had been killed in the risky process of its delivery.
As messages go back and forth, Grant worries that the “deadly minuet” in which the two armies are involved, knowing he can’t allow Lee to escape and extend the fighting.
His troops, which began to refuse attacks across open ground at Petersburg are energized because while “nobody wanted to be the last man killed,” after year after years of slaughter and suffering, “We all knew we were in the kill and nobody wanted to miss that.”
Grant’s greatest fear is that, before peace comes (or while forces are so near one another should it be achieved) “somebody could misfire a weapon” and set off a bloodbath that would not stop until all the outnumbered Confederates – and an untold number of his own men – are dead.
Then a note arrives in which Lee uses the “surrender word” and Grant offers to meet him halfway in territorial terms, at a house in Appomattox Courthouse, where the two armies had clashed that morning.
That another general in the same position might instead have issued a curt summons in the safety of his territory “was not lost on me,” Lee says. So, the 90-minute meaning is held, and the war comes to an end.
The mixing of the forces afterwards “wasn’t anything like” he had feared, Grant said, who likened the sharing of food and tobacco to the spirit of “a family that had finally got back together.”