Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House evokes a highly
gratifying image in the popular mind--it was, many believe, a moment
that transcended politics, a moment of healing, a moment of patriotism
untainted by ideology. But as Elizabeth Varon reveals in this vividly
narrated history, this rosy image conceals a seething debate over
precisely what the surrender meant and what kind of nation would emerge
from war. The combatants in that debate included the iconic Lee and
Grant, but they also included a cast of characters previously
overlooked, who brought their own understanding of the war's causes,
consequences, and meaning. In Appomattox, Varon deftly captures the
events swirling around that well remembered--but not well
understood--moment when the Civil War ended. She expertly depicts the
final battles in Virginia, when Grant's troops surrounded Lee's
half-starved army, the meeting of the generals at the McLean House, and
the shocked reaction as news of the surrender spread like an electric
charge throughout the nation.
But as Varon shows, the ink had hardly dried before both sides launched
a bitter debate over the meaning of the war. For Grant, and for most in
the North, the Union victory was one of right over wrong, a vindication
of free society; for many African Americans, the surrender marked the
dawn of freedom itself. Lee, in contrast, believed that the Union
victory was one of might over right: The vast impersonal Northern war
machine had worn down a valorous and unbowed South. Lee was committed to
peace, but committed, too, to the restoration of the South's political
power within the Union and the perpetuation of white supremacy. Lee's
vision of the war resonated broadly among Confederates and conservative
northerners, and inspired Southern resistance to reconstruction. Did
America's best days lie in the past or in the future? For Lee, it was
the past, the era of the founding generation. For Grant, it was the
future, represented by Northern moral and material progress. They held,
in the end, two opposite views of the direction of the country--and of
the meaning of the war that had changed that country forever.
