…they just walked away…

Book review:

Ends of War:

The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army

after Appomattox

by Caroline E. Janney

Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021

331 pp.

I thought I know a lot about the American Civil War. Janney’s book, Ends of War, is a good reminder that there’s lots more to learn.

Lee surrendered his army to Grant on April 9, 1865. Of course it’s pretty well known that other Confederate Army units were still fighting for several months after that event.

Janney confirms this stark point: for tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers, the war didn’t end then. They just stopped actively fighting the Union forces.

Close to half of Lee’s men never actually surrendered at Appomattox, and this unappreciated reality was part of the foundation of the dangerous Southern mythology of the “Lost Cause.”

Lee had a bit less than 50,000 men under his command when he signed the surrender document in Wilmer McLean’s house. Less than 30,000 of Lee’s men were officially but very haphazardly “paroled” in the days following the surrender.

At least 20,000 men in dirty gray uniforms walked or rode away from Appomattox without officially surrendering, most of them hoping to head for home. Many of them remained devoted to “the cause.”

It seems that Grant and Lincoln and the Union forces desperately wanted to end the fighting, but there was no real Northern plan to deal with the peace that was the presumptive goal, and to end the Southern insurrection, and to realistically bring the people of the rebel states back into the Union.

For my taste, the book is too long. Janney could have established her argument, made her case, and proved her point in fewer pages.

* * * * * *

Book review: The Cradle Place

by Thomas Lux

poems wrapped in a wet rag…

click here

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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”