On Board River Queen In Potomac River
April 23, 1865
I think I must
write you a letter, though it may get to you not much before the winter, to
tell of the end of our campaign. Monday April 10 is a day worthy of
description, because I saw the remains of our great opponent, the Army of
Northern Virginia. The General proposed to ride through the Rebel lines to
General Grant, who was at Appomattox Court House; and he took George and myself
as aides; a great chance! for the rest were not allowed to go, no communication
being permitted between the armies. At 10.30 we rode off, and, passing along the
stage road, soon got to the picket line, where a row of our men were talking
comfortably with an opposite row of theirs. There the General sent me ahead to
see some general of theirs who might give us a guide through the lines. I rode
a little beyond a wood, and came on several regiments, camped there. The
arms were neatly stacked and the well-known battle-flags were planted by the
arms. The men, looking tired and indifferent, were grouped here and there. I
judged they had nothing to eat, for there was no cooking going on. A mounted
officer was shown me as General Field, and to him I applied. He looked
something like Captain Sleeper, but was extremely moody, though he at once said
he would ride back himself to General Meade, by whom he was courteously
received, which caused him to thaw out considerably. We rode about a mile and
then turned off to General Lee's Headquarters, which consisted in one fly with
a camp-fire in front. I believe he had lost most of his baggage in some of the
trains, though his establishment is at all times modest. He had ridden out,
but, as we turned down the road again, we met him coming up, with three or four
Staff officers. As he rode up General Meade took off his cap and said: “Good-morning,
General.” Lee, however, did not recognize him, and, when he found who it was,
said: “But what are you doing with all that grey in your beard?” To which Meade
promptly replied: “You have to answer for most of it!” Lee is, as all agree, a
stately-looking man; tall, erect and strongly built, with a full chest. His
hair and closely trimmed beard, though thick, are now nearly white. He has a
large and well-shaped head, with a brown, clear eye, of unusual depth. His face
is sunburnt and rather florid. In manner he is exceedingly grave and dignified
— this, I believe, he always has; but there was evidently added an extreme
depression, which gave him the air of a man who kept up his pride to the last,
but who was entirely overwhelmed. From his speech I judge he was inclined to
wander in his thoughts. You would not have recognized a Confederate officer
from his dress, which was a blue military overcoat, a high grey hat, and
well-brushed riding boots.
As General Meade
introduced his two aides, Lee put out his hand and saluted us with all the air
of the oldest blood in the world. I did not think, when I left, in '63, for
Germantown, that I should ever shake the hand of Robert E. Lee, prisoner of
war! He held a long conference with General Meade, while I stood over a fire, with
his officers, in the rain. Colonel Marshall, one of his aides, was a very
sensible and gentlemanly man, and seemed in good spirits. He told me that, at
one time during the retreat, he got no sleep for seventy-two hours, the
consequence of which was that his brain did not work at all, or worked all
wrong. A quartermaster came up to him and asked by what route he should move
his train: to which Marshall replied, in a lucid manner: “Tell the Captain that
I should have sent that cane as a present to his baby; but I could not,
because the baby turned out to be a girl instead of a boy!” We were talking
there together, when there appeared a great oddity — an old man, with an
angular, much-wrinkled face, and long, thick white hair, brushed a la Calhoun;
a pair of silver spectacles and a high felt hat further set off the
countenance, while the legs kept up their claim of eccentricity by encasing
themselves in grey blankets, tied somewhat in a bandit fashion. The whole made
up no less a person than Henry A. Wise, once Governor of the loyal state of
Virginia, now Brigadier-General and prisoner of war. By his first wife he is
Meade's brother-in-law, and had been sent for to see him. I think he is
punished already enough: old, sick, impoverished, a prisoner, with nothing to
live for, not even his son, who was killed at Roanoke Island, he stood there in
his old, wet, grey blanket, glad to accept at our hands a pittance of biscuit
and coffee, to save him and his Staff from starvation! While they too talked, I
asked General Lee after his son “Roonie,”1 who was about there
somewhere. It was the “Last Ditch” indeed! He too is punished enough: living at
this moment at Richmond, on the food doled out to him by our government, he
gets his ration just like the poorest negro in the place! We left Lee, and kept
on through the sad remnants of an army that has its place in history. It would
have looked a mighty host, if the ghosts of all its soldiers that now sleep
between Gettysburg and Lynchburg could have stood there in the lines, beside
the living.
_______________
1 He was at Harvard with Lyman.
SOURCE: George R. Agassiz, Editor, Meade’s
Headquarters, 1863-1865: Letters of Colonel Theodore Lyman from the Wilderness
to Appomattox, p. 359-62
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