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“If the programme which our people saw set on foot at Appomattox Court-House had been carried out … we would have no disturbance in the South,” testified the former Confederate general (and future senator) John Brown Gordon in 1871. Speaking before a congressional committee investigating the widespread anti-black violence in the former Confederacy, Gordon was accusing Radical Republicans of bad faith – specifically, of breaking the “Appomattox Compact.”

Some Northerners might have been surprised by the idea that anything resembling a “compact” came out of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant in April 1865. But Gordon, along with other prominent veterans of Lee’s army, believed that the agreement at Appomattox was more two-sided than many in the North believed.

The notion of the compact was rooted in two points: that the Union military victory was illegitimate, a triumph of might over right, and that Lee had negotiated a deal with Grant at Appomattox containing the promise that “honorable” Southern men would not be treated dishonorably. This position might have seemed incongruous, were it not for the fact that Gordon and a cadre of influential former Confederate officers – including the former generals Henry A. Wise, Armistead L. Long, William N. Pendleton and Edward Porter Alexander, along with other senior officers like Charles Marshall and Walter Taylor — spent decades advocating it, long after the North grew tired of arguing about the war. And to a large extent, they won, not only undermining Reconstruction, but distorting its memory.

Gordon’s first point, the “might over right” argument, was enshrined in Lee’s April 10, 1865, Farewell Address to his troops. The address, drafted by Marshall, his aide-de-camp, attributed Confederate defeat to the Yankees’ “overwhelming numbers and resources.” In the context of proslavery ideology, this was a kind of code, conjuring up images of the heartless efficiency of Northern society.

Responding to Lee’s repeated plea that the “bravery and devotion of the Army of Northern Virginia shall be correctly transmitted to posterity,” Lee’s officers churned out speeches, articles and memoirs designed to banish the specter of Confederate failure and to disseminate the idea that Lee had faced insurmountable odds of five-to-one or worse in the final campaign. Lee’s “eight thousand starving men” at Appomattox, Taylor explained, had surrendered to an unworthy foe that “had long despaired to conquer it by skill or daring, and who had worn it away by weight of numbers and brutal exchange of many lives for one.”

This doctrine referred not only to the size but also the social composition of the Union army. Appomattox veterans lamented that they had been compelled to surrender to a mercenary army — “German, Irish, negro, and Yankee wretches,” as Pendleton put it bitterly — of their social and racial inferiors.

Scholars have since established that Lee faced odds of two-to-one at Appomattox, no worse than odds he had beaten before. But in its day, the numbers game had a distinct political purpose. By denying the legitimacy of the North’s military victory, former Confederates hoped to deny the North the right to impose its political will on the South. And it worked: As Reconstruction unfolded, Northern commentators again and again observed that white Southern recalcitrance was nourished by the sentiments of the Farewell Address. An exasperated Northerner traveling through the South in 1866 characterized his encounters with Confederates this way: “‘We were overpowered by numbers,’ they say. … They’ve said that to me more than fifty times within the last few weeks. And they say that they are the gentlemen; we are amalgamationists, mudsills, vandals, and so forth.” The message was clear: The North had not won a moral victory or mandate at Appomattox.

The second front in this war of words concerned the surrender terms themselves. Grant’s leniency, so Lee’s officers insisted, was a form of homage to Southern bravery. In Confederate eyes, Lee was not a passive recipient of that leniency at Appomattox, but instead made a series of propositions, such as the suggestion that Confederates might retain their horses, to which Grant assented. More important still, Lee extracted from Grant, during their brief April 10 meeting on horseback, the promise that each Confederate soldier would receive a printed parole pass, to prove that he came under the April terms. In keeping with the language of the surrender terms, a parole certificate vouched that if a soldier observed the laws in force where he resided, he was to “remain undisturbed.”

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Confederates argued that these paroles conferred immunity against Yankee reprisals generally, such as confiscation and treason trials. Edward Porter Alexander reckoned that the Appomattox terms “practically gave an amnesty to every surrendered soldier for all political offences.” When Henry A. Wise, on his way home to Norfolk from Appomattox, was confronted by a Yankee cavalryman who wanted to confiscate his horse, Wise brandished his parole certificate, declaring that he had “Gen. Grant’s safe-guard” and was “under its protection!” A little more than a year later, in May 1866, Wise gave a pair of defiant speeches in Virginia in which he insisted that securing favorable terms was a kind of victory. “I have the profound satisfaction,” he declaimed, “of saying that I fought until we won the privilege of being paroled.”

But Confederates went further still, emphasizing that the peace was conditional — dependent on the North’s good behavior. In a late April 1865 interview with The New York Herald, Lee himself issued a warning. If “arbitrary or vindictive or revengeful policies” were enacted by the Yankee government, Southerners would renew the fight, and “give their lives as dearly as possible.” In the same spirit, Pendleton asserted that the promise that Southerners would remain unmolested by federal authorities was no “mere military arrangement” but instead a “solemn compact, rigidly binding on both sides.” The Confederates would not have laid down their arms without this “pledge of honor for their protection.”

As Reconstruction got underway, former Confederates again and again invoked their interpretation of the Appomattox terms, and particularly the “remain undisturbed” clause, as a shield against social change. Republican efforts to give freedpeople a measure of equality and opportunity and protection were met by white Southern protests that such a radical agenda was a betrayal of the Appomattox agreement — that the prospect of black citizenship, as one Virginia newspaper put it, “molests and disturbs us.”

None of Lee’s lieutenants did more to register such protests than John Brown Gordon, a leader of Georgia’s Ku Klux Klan and future senator and governor. In his 1871 congressional testimony, he gave a stalwart defense of his region against charges of brutality and lawlessness, repeatedly invoking the Appomattox terms. Back in April 1865, Gordon argued, Confederates had been gratified by the “deferential” treatment they received at the surrender. “We should not be disturbed, so long as we obeyed the laws”: this was the pledge, Gordon said, that Grant had made to the Confederates. Peace would have come swiftly and surely, Gordon continued, if Radicals had not betrayed the spirit of Appomattox by telling Confederates “your former slaves are better fitted to administer the laws than you are.”

Trafficking in the toxic myth that congressional Reconstruction was a time of white Southern prostration and vindictive “black rule,” Gordon claimed, “our people feel that the faith which was pledged to them has been violated.” Southerners were “disturbed” by the congressional program, “deprived of rights which we had inherited — which belonged to us as citizens of the country.” If they had known what indignities and disabilities awaited them, Gordon surmised, Confederates would not have surrendered on April 9, 1865.

Gordon’s message was clear: The only way to restore peace was to leave the white South alone to manage its own affairs.

This Confederate campaign did not go unchallenged. Northern Republicans and Southern Unionists, white and black, offered their own interpretation of Appomattox, in which the Union victory was the product of skill and bravery, Grant’s magnanimity was the emblem of Northern moral superiority and the paroles protected the lives of the surrendered rebels but also commanded their political atonement and obedience. Grant spoke for all these groups when he told a Northern reporter in May 1866 that he was deeply disappointed in Lee’s demeanor since the surrender — Lee was “setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized.”

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Grant hoped more white Southerners would make the choice that Gen. James Longstreet — who became a convert to the Republican Party after the war — had made. In Longstreet’s eyes, the North’s victory at arms was a victory for its principles, and Southerners must yield, in keeping, Longstreet wrote, with “the obligations under which we were placed by the terms of our paroles.”

But Longstreet was an anomaly. Gordon’s views proved ascendant in the late 19th century, leaving those who favored social change and social justice to sing their own laments over the lost promise of Appomattox. In 1912, with the Lost Cause cult at a peak of popularity, an article in The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, observed somberly, “Southern thought is conquering the entire country on the race question.” The article quoted a poem called “Appomattox,” by the black poet Charles R. Dinkins, in which Lee addresses his defeated army with the following charge:

When fails the sword, the better way

Becomes the soldier’s part to play;

The south will whip the north some day

With ink and pen.

Lee’s prophecy, the article noted, had come to pass: The unrepentant South had struck down the doctrine of social equality, and “revolutionized the sentiment, doctrines and practices of the north.” Gordon’s war of words would continue.

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Sources: Edward Porter Alexander, “Fighting for the Confederacy”; Army and Navy Journal (New York), May 19, 1866; Chicago Tribune, Sept. 14, 1866; John Richard Dennett, “The South As It Is, 1865-1866”; John Gibbon, “Personal Recollections of the Civil War”; John Brown Gordon, “Reminiscences of the Civil War”; Susan P. Lee, “Memoirs of William Nelson Pendleton”; Alexander L. Long, “Memoirs of Robert E. Lee: His Military and Personal History”; James Longstreet, “From Manassas to Appomattox”; Charles Marshall, “Appomattox: An Address Delivered before the Society of the Army and Navy of the Confederate States” and “Lee’s Aide-De-Camp”; Pittsburgh Courier, April 27, 1912; Walter H. Taylor, “Four Years with General Lee” and “General Lee: His Campaigns in Virginia, 1861-1865”; United States Congress, “Report of the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States”; Valley Virginian (Augusta Co.), Feb. 27, 1867.



Elizabeth R. Varon teaches history at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book is “Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War.”