Debates bond by appomattox debate spawned by appomattox. I will argue lee and grant represented distinct visions of what the honorable peace would look like. They were fundamentally incompatible, contrary to a myth. They represented fundamentally incompatible visions of what the peace would look like and why the war turned out the way it did. I also try to take us beyond lee and grant. As the drama unfolded, countrymen and women would crowd the scene and have their own agenda aspirations, and dreams. Among those dreams was the dream of freedom itself. In the eyes of africanamericans, lees surrender was a freedom day, the day, the moment that the promise of emancipation was fulfilled. Lees vision emphasized confederate righteousness. Grants vision emphasized African Americans would associate appomattox with liberation. Lets start with lee and the confederates. Lee and the men in his inner circle , even as this writer took shape, to turn military deceit into moral victory. In lees view, the Union Victory was a victory of might overwrite, over right. This interpretation was enshrined in the famous farewell address he promulgated through his troops the day of the surrender, april 10. Lee says famously, the army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources. Lee was implying unmistakably in making this reference to numbers and resources both that the confederate men were and the northern victory was illegitimate. The overwhelming numbers and resources argument was about the outcome of the war, a staking of the claim that the yankees had won, not because of their virtue skill, and bravery, but instead because of brute force, numbers, and resources. In lees eyes an honorable peace would obliterate what he considered the grievous effects of the war those are his words and restore to the country what it had lost. The civic virtue that Lee Associated with the halcyon days of an imagined past, the days of the early republic. Those were the days, as lee saw it, when americans had taken it for granted that virginia would lead the nation. Those were the days, as lee saw it, before abolitionists had viewed africanamericans as free. He exchanges letters with grant. This will be calmlys become lees political keyword. For example, six months after the surrender, he wrote to his friend the following lament about what had been and what might yet again be. He wrote, as long as virtue was dominant in the republic so long was the happiness of the people secure. May and ever merciful god save us from destruction and restore us to the bright hopes and prospects of the past. This was a fundamentally nostalgic view of the peace nostalgic for the longgone days. Lee cast the surrender terms in the best possible light. He believed that those that the surrender was a negotiation in which lee extracted concessions from grant and they believed the piece was contingent on the norths good behavior. It are to protect his troops against possible reprisals, he requested a grant at appomattox a day after the surrender that each individual confederate be issued a printed certificate as proof that the soldier came under the april 9 terms. These certificates vouched that if a surrendered soldier went home and observed the laws where he resided, he would remain undisturbed. Now for confederates, these paroles became cherished artifacts of the war. They represented the consciousness of duties faithfully performed by those men who were there until the final days. But those certificates also represented, in the eyes of confederates, the promise that honorable men would not be treated dishonorably by the victorious yankees. Lee intended to hold the union to that promise. A few weeks after the surrender on april 29, 1865, lee gave an interview with the northern reporter. Lee wanrned in this interview that if arbitrary, vindictive, or revengeful policies were adopted by the yankee government, southerners would consider the ease surrender terms breached and would renew the fight. The big take away is this. Lee has a reputation in the modernday for having counseled resignation to defeat among southerners. For confederates in the immediate postwar period, the evidence shows he was not a symbol of submission. He was a symbol of measured affiants. To bear this out defiance. To bear this out i will talk about how soldiers saw the surrender. The emphasis in the farewell address on confederate righteousness blended seamlessly with the religions convictions of confederate soldiers. Many of the rankandfile surrendered at appomattox clung to the idea that god, however he might chastise his chosen people, would someday deliver them. Such a conviction was the most comforting answer to a pervasive question, had all the suffering been in vain . In his april 9 diary entry William Wyatt asked, has god forsaken us only to answer, i, for one, cant believe it. God has rarely humbled us to exalt us. Grant is prosperity and honor. That night, he noted the men in his regiment clung to him. God moves in mysterious ways. As a historian has put it, providential theology was excellent enough to accommodate defeat for the confederates. Many believed god might still furnish victory in his own appointed way and time. A second major theme in confederate soldiers accounts concerns the social composition of the yankee army, the numbers and resources claim was an argument not only about the size of the yankee army, but the composition of the yankee army. In the confederate eyes, the yankees achieved the overwhelming numbers by filling the ranks, as the southern artillery man put it, foreigners of every nationality and regiments of our former slaves. In other words, confederate soldiers believed they had been compelled to surrender to their social inferiors a mercenary army wellsuited to the unions hard war tactics. Confederates did not believe they had relinquished the moral high ground at appomattox. If we look at these reactions of confederate civilians, we see that echoed in the sediments sentiments of soldiers. Civilians imagined the surrender scene as an enactment of lees superiority to grant. One claim circulated through confederate newspapers in late april of 1865. It purported to be accurate, but was not accurate at all. In its, grant refuses to take it. According to the account, grant says, keep that. You have won it by your gallantry. You have been overpowered and i cannot receive it as a token of surrender from so brave a man. Of course, rants never said any such thing to robert e. Lee. The report seemed credible to confederates because it confirmed the right over might. It would be written that Union Officers cheered for lee as he left the mclean house. A yankees dared not utter a single insulting word to the defeated rebels. Why were the yankees so reticent, even submissive, in victory . It is explained, they feared the lion even in chains. Lee, the lion, still commanding the deference and respect of northerners, and fear. In the year after the war confederates not only again and again invokes the overwhelming numbers interpretation of their defeat. They also invoked the appomattox terms, and particularly the remainundisturbed clause. They invoked in the clause as a shield against social change and a weapon in a looming battle over black civil rights. Republican efforts to give the free people a measure of inequality and opportunity and protection were met by confederate protests that such a radical agenda was a betrayal of the appomattox terms, the prospect of black citizenship as one virginia newspaper put it , molests and disturbs us. The North Carolina poet clark put it most physically. Urging southerners to model their behavior on that of lee she wrote in 1866 that lee had not stooped his grandly proud head one hairs breath as he surrendered to grant. She said, an honorable enemy should not desire. It is idle to attempt or force them to say they were wrong, for they were right. It will surprise you to know that from the start, this view of things, this emphasis on confederate righteousness and the illegitimacy of the yankee victory, this was resoundingly rejected by grant and his inner circle, and the vast majority of Union Soldiers and civilians. It was precisely an admission of wrongdoing and a change of heart that grant sought from his foes. Appomattox was not designed to exonerate confederates, but to assess repentance. He believed he could be versatile precisely because he rendered lee powerless and his cause discredited. It was right over wrong. Lees rhetoric of restoration held no charm for the union general. Restoration connoted a turning back of the clock. Grants eyes were fixed firmly on the future. He would not consider the rolling back. Repudiation of states rights emancipation of the slaves, and lets meant of black troops. Grant and list meant enlistment of black troops. Appomattox, in grants view, he held all the cards on april 9. He issued the parole passes to confederates not to patron view to courage, but to remind them of the obligations attendant upon their status of prisoners of war. Technically, that is what they were. Grant had released them on the promise of their good behavior. Grant felt a meaning of the surrender terms to be unmistakable. I will allude to what ron told us about his mandate for lincoln and the orders he was under to address military surrender, but not political issues. Grant would write, i never claimed the parole gave the prisoners any Political Rights whatever. I knew that was a matter entirely with congress, over which i had no control. In other words, the fraught political question of when and if the concord confederates would be permitted to vote or hold office these were questions to be settled in the civil round by politicians and elected officials. Grants convention of surrender by parole rested on military calculations. Grant felt certain on april 9 that his lenience to lee would forestall the possibility of guerrilla warfare and affect the swift surrender of the remaining Confederate Army in the field. This calculation was sound. The dominoes fell, and you will hear about other dominoes later today. More than anything, the surrender in grants eyes was a vindication, and that is his keyword, if you will. The triumphal of the just cause the cause of the union. In the eyes of grant and union it vindicated the founders belief in a perpetual union. It vindicated the capacity of citizen soldiers, representing democracy. Tout fight the conscripts and dupes of an autocratic society. Thats how Union Soldiers saw confederates. The downfall of the confederacy unburdened the south and the nation of slavery, and institution of orange to all civilized abhorrent to all civilized people. The way was open for the unions moral progress, and white southerners could be distant trawled from their subservience to the slaveholding class. Granted not believe lee is meant to be blameless. For every sin there must be a chance at atonement. Grants magnanimity was designed to affect that atonement. Union soldiers come up for their fall for their part, a their victory both to their superhuman effort and to divine providence. Thanks and praise to almighty god for the great thing he has done for us in saving our country, wrote a major of the 20th maine. He was expressing the widely shared conviction amid union troops that in the end providence and favor the righteous. Two Union Soldiers at appomattox, there seemed to be a satisfaction, in the moment of victory, they had lee nearly surrounded. How fitting it seemed that the defeated confederates world on the low ground well triumphant Union Soldiers lined they amphitheater sweeping around the town at appomattox. Strange providence was surely a work in the fact that the surrender terms were signed in the home of a man who had owned the house on the battleground of manassas. The first great victory of the confederates. The most during sign of divine favor with to be found in the providential timing of the surrender on palm sunday. It was the universal expression among the Union Soldiers that the surrender was a blessed sabbath work. Union soldiers embraced grants policy of magnanimity in their hour vindication because they believed that in so thoroughly defeating the rebels, the federal army had meted out sufficient punishment to the confederacy. Many Union Soldiers felt the confederates were so desperately beaten that they actually welcome to the surrender. There was evidence of this confederate desperation scrawled on the canvas covers of army wagons that were abandoned by the confederates along the line of retreat. One piece of confederate graffiti had read that we cant with you all without something to eat. Moreover, Union Soldiers reckoned that magnanimity was the best means to secure redemption and construction of the south, change hearts and minds. In the series of letters written in the immediate wake of the surrender, and other Army Chaplain took the measure of confederate defeat. He wrote the war rental rendered the south a charnel house. The south had suffered enough always left all that was left was to forgive and forget. He shared a few common among northern soldiers, a view that you lead slaveholders likely and the officer class had led astray the nonslaveholding common folk of the south. And they believed that the unions mission was to distant trawled these men, and that victorious northerners if animated by the spirit of forgiveness could lift up the south, ignorant and degraded poor whites and open up for them a Brighter Future for themselves and their children. As armstrong put it. General of the 67th ohio agreed, he wrote in his diary on april 15 that a show of kindness by the union would demonstrate that right not my to rules, and it was a superior moral character of the north and the commitment to Free Institution and personal enterprise that had won the war. In other words most northerners favored magnanimity, and believed it had important political work to do, if you will. And civilians joined in this embrace of grants policy of magnanimity. Among those northern civilians who embraced magnanimity were abolitionists and radical republicans, those who most wanted to see the south change. It was charged at the time here in the immediate aftermath of the surrender my confederates and buy some copperhead democrats in the north that abolitionists and radical republicans were aimed on vengeance. In the eyes of abolitionists such as Horace Greeley magnanimity was the means to an end, and means to achieve a sacred purpose, to secure the assent of the south to emancipation. Northerners, including many abolitionists saw grants magnanimity as an emblem of their own moral authority. The moral superiority even. That magnanimity approved that a civilization based on free labor is of a higher and more humane type than that based on slavery. Really favored grants magnanimous terms because come as he put it, i want as many rebels as possible to live to see the south rejuvenated and transformed by the influence of free labor. What fitter fate for the likes of Jefferson Davis and robert ely then to have to live in this brave new world and bear witness to a social revolution. In essence, northerners who embraced grants terms of said to the south, we dont want to inflict further punishments. We want you to change. And confederates responded that the demand for change with a form of punishment. Then any demand for change was inherently punitive and a breaking of a compact that had been made at appomattox. This contest over the surrenders meaning and simply pets the south against the north or even the confederacy against the union, it pitted those who favored a social transformation of the south against those who rejected social transformation. We have northerners and southerners on both sides of the question. Here is a theme of divisions within each side. Lincolns opponent in the north political opponents, the democrats that seemed to favor coming to the confederates, these democrats were loath for the party of lincoln to treat the surrender as a mandate. These nor the democrats rallied behind a confederate interpretation of appomattox. As the copperhead newspaper put it, southerners were equal to the north in valor and skills. The confederacy was subdued by overwhelming numbers, not by lincolns skill as a leader. But the south, too, was divided. White southern unions, a beleaguered minority who oppose confederacy during the war rallied behind grants interpretation, and reveled in the fat that in the fact that grant had brought lees army to heal. In the seed of a loyalist legislature pursuing reconstruction under lincolns percent plan, the announcement of lees surrender touched off days of hilarious rejoicing among the towns unionist. In union occupied nashville, tennessee, newly elected governor long the voice of the tennessee unionists, had marked the surrender by issuing a proclamation, setting aside may 4 as a day of thanksgiving prayer to almighty god. For the surrender at appomattox. In his capacity of editor of the unions paper in nashville, he rejoiced that the greatest army and general of the socalled confederacy had been defeated and scattered, made to surrender to grant upon grants own terms. But in the year after the surrender, this dominant union interpretation, with its emphasis on vindication of the norths way of war, vindication of free society, vindication of grants leadership, this dominant interpretation would come to interpretation the betrayal of the true spirit of grants magnanimity. We will see in the postwar period that political partisans will accuse their opponents of betraying the spirit of appomattox. In this case, for granted his followers, the arch betrayer of the truce in upham the true spirit of appomattox was andy johnson, lincoln successor. He comes to power after lincoln is assassinated, johnson very liberally pardons members of the x confederate elites, thousands of pardons to prominent confederates. Under johnsons reconstruction plan, state governments are handed back over to former confederates. They enact black codes, laws very close to the old laws of slavery. Designed to enforce white supremacy. These codes make it a crime for free blacks, free people to act insolence, quote unquote, to whites. They permit white judges to seize children of black families who might be politically active. They levy taxes on black property instituted vagrancy statutes that forced africanamericans to sign annual labor contracts with white employers, typically therefore masters. And this regime of surveillance and regulation passed under the johnson reconstruction was enforced in the so