Winner of the Dan and Marilyn Laney Prize of the Austin Civil War
Round Table Finalist, Jefferson Davis Award of the Museum of the
Confederacy Finalist, Library of Virginia Literary Award for
Nonfiction 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.
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