April of 1865 was a pivotal month in American history. After four years of bloody civil war, the Union cause was on the verge of victory, and a ThirteApril of 1865 was a pivotal month in American history. After four years of bloody civil war, the Union cause was on the verge of victory, and a Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery had been passed by the United States Congress. But no one at that time could be sure that the guns of civil war would truly and permanently fall silent. That the American Civil War ended as completely as it did, without a Civil War II or Civil War III breaking out in this country, is no doubt why Jay Winik has given this study of April 1865 the subtitle The Month That Saved America.
Author Jay Winik has his own reasons for being interested in how the last month of the American Civil War progressed. As a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer, and as an adviser to Les Aspin (Secretary of Defense during the Clinton Administration), Winik writes that “I had the chance to witness up close a number of civil wars around the globe: Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Nicaragua, El Salvador.” Looking at how intractable and long-lasting so many civil wars have been, Winik was interested in learning “how a young and still embryonic America avoided the terrible and tragic fate that has beset so many other countries wracked by civil conflict” (pp. xvii-xviii).
From the beginning, Winik places the reader in an America that is undergoing rapid change under the stresses of war. President Abraham Lincoln, re-elected the year before, had started his second term in March of 1865 with an inaugural address that spoke of the restored Union moving forward "With malice toward none, with charity for all" -- signalling to the crumbling Confederacy, and to the world, that in contrast with the pattern that had obtained in most civil wars, there would be no reprisals against the former adherents of the defeated side. There would be no mass imprisonments, no mass executions. With those noble, forbearant words, Abraham Lincoln, with just six weeks left to live, did much to ensure that in the United States of America, civil war would be a term couched in the singular rather than the plural.
As the actual month of April 1865 began, Union General Ulysses S. Grant had the strategically vital city of Petersburg and the nearby Confederate capital at Richmond under siege. With the rebel defense lines around Richmond and Petersburg breaking, Winik shows a comparable break in the famously aristocratic reserve of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at the time when Lee and his staff were establishing the plans for retreating westward from Richmond, in hopes of linking up with General Joseph E. Johnston's forces in North Carolina.
The one stumbling block seemed to be the Confederate government in Richmond. Late that afternoon, Lee received [Confederate president Jefferson] Davis’s brooding reply, saying that ‘to move tonight will involve the loss of many valuables, both for want of time to pack and of transportation.’ Reading this, the general’s much-vaunted discipline cracked. He abruptly tore the paper to shreds, saying hotly that he was sure he had given Davis ‘sufficient notice,’ and sent a testy response to Richmond: ‘Your telegram received. I think it is absolutely necessary that we would abandon our position tonight.’” (pp. 101-02).
Yet the fall of Richmond could have been only the beginning of a new, and newly horrible, phase of civil war, rather than its end. Jefferson Davis wanted the Confederacy to disperse its armies and take up a guerrilla war. It is dreadful to think what that might have involved: hit-and-run terrorist attacks by rebel insurgents who would then hide among Southern civilians; increasingly severe retribution by Union authorities, motivating more Southerners to join the insurgents; an escalating and endless cycle of violence. As Winik puts it, “[M]ore 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….There would be no real rest, no real respite, no true amity, nor for that matter, any real sense of victory – only an amorphous state of neither war nor peace, raging like a low-level fever” (p. 153).
Lee, to his credit, rejected this horrifying and destructive proposal by Davis; he believed that the issue had been tried by combat, and settled in accordance with the will of God. It is against that background that Lee’s April 9 surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House – an event at which both commanders behaved with noteworthy dignity and moderation – takes on its full significance.
To call the surrender at Appomattox "dramatic" would not be adequate. Lee is in his best full-dress grey uniform; indeed, he has been saving it for just this occasion. Grant, by contrast, is in a mud-spattered blue uniform, with a general officer's shoulder stars hastily sewn on. They make some small talk regarding their shared service in the Mexican-American War. Lee has to remind Grant of the purpose of their meeting, and Grant writes down the surrender terms, under which the ex-Confederate soldiers will be paroled to return home in peace. When Lee reads the surrender terms, his "expression brightened. Now the terms were fixed in writing, and they were as generous as could be expected. His men would not be penned as prisoners of war; they would not be paraded ignominiously through Northern streets; and, most importantly, they would not be prosecuted for treason" (pp. 187-88).
And Grant's generosity in victory extended even further. Informed by Lee that a number of Confederate cavalry and artillery troops owned their own horses, Grant stipulated that any rebel who claimed to own a horse could take it home for spring planting. Grant sent 25,000 rations across the lines to feed the starving rebels. And the officers of the two warring sides courteously doffed their hats to each other as the negotiations concluded.
If April 1865 was indeed "the month that saved America," much of that has to do with the behavior of Grant and Lee at Appomattox Court House. Winik, with his experience studying the civil wars that have continued for decades and centuries, captures well the significance of this moment:
Appomattox was not preordained. There were no established rules or well-worn script. If anything, retribution had been the larger and longer precedent. So, if these moments teemed with hope -- and they did -- it was largely due to two men, who rose to the occasion, to Grant's and Lee's respective actions; one general, magnanimous in victory, the other, gracious and equally dignified in defeat, the two of them, for their own reasons and in their own ways, fervently interested in beginning the process to bind up the wounds of the last four years. And yes, if, paradoxically, these were among Lee's finest hours, and they were, so, too, were they Grant's greatest moments. (pp. 193-94)
With the news of Lee’s surrender, the city of Washington, D.C., capital of the long-embattled Union, came alive with joy. And yet President Abraham Lincoln, as described in the present tense by Winik, “seems strangely immune to the intoxicating glow of impending military victory” (p. 204). While certainly pleased by the news of the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lincoln “hasn’t been sleeping well, troubled by insomnia and haunted by bizarre and ghoulish dreams. He is afflicted with fierce headaches. He is thirty pounds underweight” (p. 204). And one of those bizarre nightmares, as he described it to his wife, First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln – of finding a corpse, guarded, in the East Room of the White House, and being told that the corpse is that of “The President…killed by an assassin!” (p. 205) – proved to be all too tragically prophetic.
Lincoln, of course, knew of the danger of assassination, long before the fatal night of April 14, 1865. “As to crazy folks, I must take my chances….I long ago made up my mind that if anybody wants to kill me, he will do it….There are a thousand ways of getting at a man if it is desired that he should be killed.” Lincoln rejected the idea of a four-man bodyguard, a military escort, saying that “It is important that the people know I come among them without fear” (p. 251). In the courageous way he willingly exposed himself to danger, as a practical expression of his belief that the U.S.A. must have a government whose leaders are available to their people, Lincoln demonstrated once again his abiding faith in democracy.
Another road that was fortunately not taken related to the immediate aftermath of the tragedy of President Lincoln's assassination at Ford's Theatre in Washington on April 14. By the morning after, as news of the President's death spread throughout Washington,
a strange light began to fall and grow upon the Union: vengeance and sorrow and chaos threatened not the South, but the North....Now it was the voices of revenge that could be heard loudest. Citizens poured into the streets, in the downpour, and soon they were nothing more than muttering mobs, a hostile throng angrily congregating from K Street to Lafayette Square....Talk of streets running red with Confederate blood was everywhere. And with the iron hand of martial law imposed upon the Union capital, the city remained edged with fear. (p. 260)
Yet once again, the better angels of the American nature prevailed. The assassination conspirators were tracked down, put on trial, and punished for their crimes, but there was no mob violence in American streets against real or perceived rebels. Rather, the people of the restored Union generally carried themselves in accordance with the spirit of Lincoln -- "With malice toward none, with charity for all."
It was against the background of the assassination of President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre that Union General William T. Sherman and Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston negotiated the largest single surrender of Confederate troops at Durham Station, North Carolina. Johnston had already received Davis’s orders to fight on: “what Lee had peremptorily rejected at Appomattox, Davis was now ordering Johnston to make come to pass: a guerrilla campaign” (p. 299).
Yet Johnston and his fellow rebel officers did not take the bait that Davis had offered. They followed Lee’s lead and surrendered, and the work of seeking reconciliation began. While acknowledging the existence of much enduring bitterness among defeated Southerners, and the fact that the problems of racism that had led to civil war remained unsolved, Winik concludes by writing that with the events of April 1865, “the nation collectively strode into a new era. It continues still” (p. 388).
Winik's approach to history is relatively traditional, focusing largely on famous men making crucial decisions. If your preference is for what is often called "the new social history," or for work like that of Howard Zinn, it may not be for you. But Winik does pay notice to the fact that it wasn't just the decisions of Lincoln and Grant and Lee that mattered. Millions of ordinary people had to decide, independently, that they wanted peace rather than war. Fortunately for the future of this nation, millions of ordinary people made exactly that decision.
And April 1865: The Month That Saved America has made its way into a number of conversations. For instance, it is well-known as the book that then-President George W. Bush was reading at the time of the September 11, 2001, attacks – another singularly difficult time of violence and mass death, when many wondered how the nation would survive and move forward. Winik’s book provides a powerful look back at a time when the U.S.A. managed to do just that....more
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