This month marks the 160th anniversary of two major events in American history: the end of the Civil War following the surrender of the Confederate Army at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865. The nation mourned Lincoln’s death as no other American had ever been mourned, a testament to his courageous effort to abolish the institution of slavery in the United States, and his untiring effort to preserve the Union. The end of the Civil War put a stop to the horrific loss of life experienced during the war years, but as we know, it did not necessarily put a stop to the underlying tensions that led to war in the first place. Racism in America continued for the next hundred years, just in different forms. Enslaved persons became free, but they were still subjected to discrimination in countless ways. One has to wonder what our society might have been like had Lincoln not been assassinated. Would his presidency have led to a more tolerant attitude from the former Confederate states? Would he have been able to mend fences in ways that would have avoided the ugly period of “Jim Crow” laws in the South, which perpetuated discrimination against African-Americans? These questions are unanswerable, of course, much as one can only speculate on what America would have looked like if John Kennedy had not been assassinated in 1963.
The interesting backstory on Lincoln is that he was not an abolitionist by any stretch, and as a Presidential candidate in 1860 he walked a careful line—never expressly declaring that slavery should be abolished, but rather that the institution of slavery should not be permitted to expand into the newly created states and territories of the West. Lincoln was not alone in this line of thinking, and in fact the preceding decade saw several legislative efforts to accomplish just that sort of compromise (the “Compromise of 1850” being one of them). As we’ve written before, his Emancipation Proclamation announced in January 1863 was his first and most overt declaration that slavery must end. Not coincidentally, the Proclamation was also a vehicle for Lincoln to now recruit freed slaves to fight for the Union at a time when the Union Army was being defeated on the battlefield (Antietam and Fredericksburg being prime examples) with massive losses of life. Of course, we know that the war continued for another 2 ½ years, during which time Lincoln authorized General Sherman’s infamous “March to the Sea,” which involved the wholesale destruction of much of the South’s factories, towns, railroads, and sources of food & clothing. By 1865, the South was in tatters.
The culmination of Lincoln’s war strategy was the surrender at Appomattox (which occurred in a private home, not at the courthouse). The meeting of Generals Grant and Lee was in many respects inevitable, as General Lee had come to realize that his Army was unable to match the resources of the Union Army much longer, and that further warfare would be futile. Lee was a reluctant party to the negotiations that led to the Articles of Surrender, while General Grant was, if anything, gracious in allowing Lee to surrender on generous terms— to the point that Grant’s concessions were heavily criticized by various political leaders when the terms of surrender became known back in Washington. However, Lincoln’s appointment of Grant to serve as Commanding General of the Union Army was, in retrospect, a move that saved the Union: Grant was a warrior of the highest order, and took the battle to General Lee in unrelenting fashion. He was also willing to sacrifice thousands of soldiers’ lives in the process, sometimes shockingly so. His brilliant battlefield tactics leading up to the final surrender at Appomattox have been lauded by military historians, and his victories against the Confederate armies made him one of the most revered figures in America for the rest of the century. As for General Lee, he effectively retired from public life, never apologetic about his decision to serve as the commander-in-chief of a Confederate army determined to fight to the bitter end. He was a hero to his former Confederate soldiers, and revered for many decades following his death in 1870. Both men fought for causes they believed in, and both men will be remembered this month for finding a way to end the tragedy that was our Civil War. But it is Abraham Lincoln who left the most lasting legacy of all— the United States of America, and in his own words, “a more perfect union.”
