This Tuesday marked the 159th anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox — the beginning of the end of a bitter and bloody civil war. From the modern American perspective, it’s almost impossible to comprehend the sheer scope of what the Civil War was. Over the course of just four years, the fighting claimed an estimated 620,000 young American soldiers’ lives — the equivalent of more than 6 million as a share of today’s U.S. population. In his farewell message to his troops the day after his surrender, Lee wrote:
I need not tell the survivors of so many hard fought battles who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to this result from no distrust of them. But feeling, that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that would compensate the loss that would attend the continuance of the contest — I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose finest services have endeared them to their countrymen. By the terms of the agreement Officers and men can return to their homes and remain until exchanged. You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed, and I earnestly pray that a merciful God will extend to you His blessing and protection — With unceasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your country, and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous consideration of myself, I bid you an affectionate farewell.
This year, however, the anniversary of this solemn moment was occasion for gleeful crowing from the left-wing corners of the internet. “Happy Traitors Surrendering Day,” one young Virginia Democrat wrote. “F*** Robert E. Lee, f*** the Confederacy, and f*** their cause of treason.” A widely shared video featured a woman chugging “rebel tears” to celebrate the Confederacy “taking a fat f***ing L.” (Gratuitous vulgarity seems to be a feature of this discourse.) The famous left-wing hacker group Anonymous added, “On this day (April 9th, 1865) the Confederacy surrendered after getting it’s [sic] ass kicked.”
The gloating ritual here has become something of an annual affair. On the 2019 anniversary of Lee’s surrender, the American Civil Liberties Union took the opportunity to call for the removal of Lee’s statue from the capital of his home state of Virginia. In 2015, on the 150th anniversary, the New York Times published an op-ed scolding Americans for uncritically celebrating the event — which the author dubbed a “dangerous myth” — in the first place, mourning the fact that, in the memory of Appomattox, “white Americans fashioned a story of prodigal sons returning for a happy family portrait.” That same year, the New Republic used the anniversary as an opening to call for the destruction and renaming of Confederate monuments across the country, writing, “We aren’t being polite to anyone worthy of politeness, or advancing any noble end, by continuing to honor traitors in this way.”
What is notable about all this is its novelty. The Confederate statues and monuments that are now being toppled, desecrated, and melted down were originally established in the spirit of honor — a desire to commemorate and memorialize the sacrifices of the Confederate soldiers, which were woven into the South’s sense of self, even (or perhaps especially) in defeat. This was seen as a necessary feature of the process of national reconciliation and grew out of the mutual respect that Lee and Grant displayed for one another. In the Federalist, John Daniel Davidson writes:
Grant’s terms of surrender were remarkable for their leniency on the Confederate Army…At this crucial moment, it was most important to Grant and Lee that the soldiers return home safely and get on with civilian life as soon as possible. Returning to his men, Lee told them, “I have done the best I could for you. Go home now, and if you make as good citizens as you have soldiers, you will do well, and I shall always be proud of you.” En route back to his headquarters, Grant heard salutes and cheering begin to rise up from nearby Union batteries. He sent orders to have them stopped. “The war is over,” he said. “The rebels are our countrymen again.”
The Civil War itself, of course, was characterized by terrible brutality, and both sides meted out unconditional destruction upon one another at varying junctures. (To this day, some parts of the South still hold grudges regarding the brutality of Sherman’s March to the Sea — which, in Gen. Sherman’s own words, sought to “make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.”) But as the war drew to a conclusion, the Northern victors displayed a kind of martial honor that is utterly foreign to many of those who lay claim to their legacy today. Union Gen. Joshua Chamberlain went so far as to order his men to stand at attention and salute as the conquered Confederate troops marched by, reasoning that “at such a time and under such conditions I thought it eminently fitting to show some token of our feeling.” In a later account of the scene, Chamberlain wrote:
For us they were fellow-soldiers as well, suffering the fate of arms. We could not look into those brave, bronzed faces, and those battered flags we had met on so many fields where glorious manhood lent a glory to the earth that bore it, and think of personal hate and mean revenge. Whoever had misled these men, we had not. We had led them back, home. Whoever had made that quarrel, we had not. It was a remnant of the inherited curse for sin. We had purged it away, with blood-offerings. We were all of us together factors of that high will which, working often through illusions of the human, and following ideals that lead through storms, evolves the enfranchisement of man.
Forgive us, therefore, if from stern, steadfast faces eyes dimmed with tears gazed at each other across that pile of storied relics so dearly there laid down, and brothers’ hands were fain to reach across that rushing tide of memories which divided us, yet made us forever one.
This sort of patriotism, charity, and sense of sacred duty was felt, expressed, and demonstrated by many of the men of that time, on both the Northern and Southern side of the war. But what the Civil War was, as a matter of historical fact, and what it meant to the men who were there — as well as to the generations of Americans whose lives were shaped by its memory — has very little to do with the celebratory spirit that surrounds Appomattox now. Today’s vulgar cheers have very little to do with the Civil War at all. (RELATED: Robert E. Lee, the Man for These Hard Times)
Today’s gleeful celebration of Lee’s surrender is part and parcel of the same fervor that has sought to remove any positive commemoration of the Southern general and his counterparts from public life. It has nothing to do with the Confederacy, except insofar as the soiled memory of the Antebellum South can be mobilized to undermine, attack, and delegitimize Red America. The contemporary Left seeks to recast the white, conservative, Christian lumpenproletariat as the inheritors of slavery, segregation, and the numerous other crimes that have replaced men like Grant and Lee at the center of our new national mythology. Progressives are hardly ambiguous about this particular ambition. In a Salon essay about Appomattox in 2010, Glenn LaFantasie, a Civil War historian, wrote:
The Confederacy, often depicted on maps as Red States (as opposed to Union Blue), may have lost the fighting — forcing Robert E. Lee to surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865 — but the social and political values of those Red States live on, nurtured and sustained in a Republican Party that often sounds more Confederate in its ideology than Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America.
This is the true meaning behind the gratuitous, jeering celebrations of Appomattox. It is not, as the anonymous X user Lunkhead noted, about “hating traitors” so much as it is about a fervent desire to punish contemporary enemies. Given the violent nature of the Confederacy’s demise, it’s reasonable to ask: Just what, exactly, are they giving themselves permission to do?
