THE GENERAL IN DEFEAT
On April 29, 1865, readers of The New York Herald opened their newspapers to find a captivating scoop—an in-depth interview with Confederate commander Robert E. Lee. Speaking in Richmond two weeks to the day after his surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Va., the self-styled “paroled prisoner” offered his thoughts on issues facing the nation as the Civil War ground toward its end. The 58-year-old general attempted to justify his decision to take up arms against the United States and opened up about slavery, the causes of the war, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and what would soon come to be called Reconstruction. Although now largely forgotten, Lee’s Herald interview is a fascinating glimpse into the mindset of a man whom many Americans—both North and South—regarded as the leading spokesman for the former Confederacy.
Thomas M. Cook was the Herald reporter who persuaded Lee to speak. Cook had had a busy war. Assigned to cover controversial Union Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles, the former Congressman who achieved antebellum infamy by murdering his wife’s lover and then lost both a leg and his 3rd Corps at Gettysburg, Cook was present aboard one of Union Rear Admiral David Farragut’s ships at the Battle of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864, and subsequently accompanied Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea. In April 1865, Cook was based in Richmond, where Lee had arrived on April 15.
Cook’s first attempt to see Lee was direct—he simply showed up at the general’s rented house on Franklin Street. Not surprisingly, he was denied admission. Undeterred, Cook promptly sent Lee a note. Assuring Lee that his personal sympathies as well as those of his paper rested with Lee, Cook appealed to the general’s “sense of justice and deference to popular views and the truth of history.” That was undoubtedly a flowery way of urging Lee to: “Whatever may be said at that interview, or whatever may transpire, I assure you on the honor of a gentleman, shall be considered with the utmost confidence, and only used publicly with your fore assent.”
