April 1865: The Month That Saved America

By Jay Winik

One month in 1865 witnessed the frenzied fall of Richmond, a daring last-ditch Southern plan for guerrilla warfare, Lee's harrowing retreat, and then, Appomattox. It saw Lincoln's assassination just five days later and a near-successful plot to decapitate the Union government, followed by chaos and coup fears in the North, collapsed negotiations and continued bloodshed in the South, and finally, the start of national reconciliation.

In the end, April 1865 emerged as not just the tale of the war's denouement, but the story of the making of our nation.

Jay Winik offers a brilliant new look at the Civil War's final days that will forever change the way we see the war's end and the nation's new beginning. Uniquely set within the larger sweep of history and filled with rich profiles of outsize figures, fresh iconoclastic scholarship, and a gripping narrative, this is a masterful account of the thirty most pivotal days in the life of the United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 16, 2010
• ISBN: 9780062029201

Jay Winik

The author of the #1 and New York Times bestselling April 1865 and the New York Times bestsellers 1944 and The Great Upheaval, Jay Winik is renowned for his creative approaches to history. The Baltimore Sun called him “one of our nation’s leading public historians.” He is a popular public speaker and a frequent television and radio guest. He has been a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal book review section, as well as to The New York Times. His many national media appearances include the Today show, Good Morning America, World News Tonight, NPR, and FOX News. He is a former board member of the National Endowment for the Humanities and was the historical advisor to National Geographic Networks.

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1

The Dilemma

The bells rang that day in Washington. Wherever there were brick bell towers and whitewashed churches, wherever rows of bells hung in ascending niches, wherever the common people could crowd belfries to take turns pulling the ropes, the bells sang. Bells were part of the American tradition. Cast in iron, bronze, copper, and sometimes silver, they rang with a hundred messages: summoning Americans to Sunday services, marking the harvest and holidays, signaling the prosperity of planting, tolling the sadness of death, chiming the happiness of marriage, clanging warnings of fire or flood, or booming out the celebration of victory. Today, they rang with the hint of promise. It was March 4, 1865. Inauguration Day in the Union.

Abraham Lincoln had been at the Capitol since midmorning, forgoing a traditional celebratory carriage ride up Pennsylvania Avenue to sign a stack of bills passed in the waning hours of the lame-duck Congress. He was determined to make his own mark on them before the vice presidential swearing in, scheduled for noon. Cloistered in the Senate wing, tracing and retracing the letters of his name, Lincoln remained the very picture of exhaustion. His face was heavily lined, his cheeks were sunken, and he had lost thirty pounds in recent months. Though only fifty-six, he could easily pass for a very old man. He was sick, dispirited, and even his hands were routinely cold and clammy. And today, the weather itself seemed to be colluding with his foul and melancholy mood. That morning, heavy clouds moved over Washington, as they had the day before and the day before that, whipping the capital with blasts of rain and wind. Even when the rain let up, the ground didn’t. The streets were a sea of mud at least ten inches deep. Still, the people came.

On the following Monday, the inauguration rush would include a grand ball for 4,000: they would waltz and polka to the beat of a military band; feast on an elegant medley of beef, veal, poultry, game, smoked meats, terrapin, oysters, and salads; finish with an astounding wartime array of ices, tarts, cakes, fruits, and nuts; and then retire for the evening with steaming coffee and good rich chocolate. But that was for official Washington, for Lincoln’s loyalists and Republican Party functionaries. This Saturday was a day for all the Union. And like a great herd, the people were seemingly everywhere.

Their wagons ground to a halt underneath thickets of trees in the distance, and the thud and swish of their feet could be heard along Pierre L’Enfant’s wide, radiating avenues. All along Pennsylvania Avenue, they converged, where the crowd stood at least six and eight deep on the crude sidewalks, around Fifteenth Street past the Treasury, where the stars and stripes hung from second-story windows, past Kirkland House and Tenth Street and the National Hotel, where a clutch of handkerchiefs fluttered and gawkers hung out their balconies, and up the steep slope to the Capitol, past the greening swatch of emerald lawns. At street intersections, military patrols formed a watchful guard. So did the Capitol police. Reporters and photographers crowded the stoops, ready to record the event for posterity. Flags waved; people cheered; and the band played. But mostly, the vast throng jostled for position by the east facade of the Capitol, newly capped by its gleaming dome and the towering bronze statue of Freedom, to be near, even to catch a glimpse of the president himself.

Finally, the presidential party moved from the Senate chamber out onto the platform. A roar of applause rose from the crowd as Lincoln made his way to his seat. It dipped and then mounted again as the sergeant-at-arms beckoned, and Lincoln stood, towering over the other men, and made his way to the podium.

As Lincoln rose and moved forward, a blazing sun broke through the gray haze and flooded the entire gathering with brilliant light. Above and below, the collective pulse quickened. (Did you notice that sunburst? the president later said. It made my heart jump.) But whatever ominous portent that moment may have held, it was overshadowed by the more powerful drama of Lincoln’s speech. Succinct, only 703 words, eloquent, and memorable, it was reminiscent of the Gettysburg Address, and at this crucial stage of the war, every bit as important. Summoning his waning energies, Lincoln began to read.

As he rode into Richmond, Virginia, on that very same March morning, Robert E. Lee was met with none of the same fanfare. Slipping north from the trench lines ringing Petersburg, he must have felt that, on this particular day, Union troops would be loath to undertake any action. But he had a far more specific reason for journeying to the Confederate capital. Today, he harbored a single, daring plan to reignite the waning fortunes of the Confederacy, to somehow push the eleven states toward eventual independence. And he had come to confer with Confederate President Jefferson Davis, the insomniac head of the Southern government, who liked to wage war from his dining room, with maps unfurled and instruments scattered across the table.

Lee’s ultimate calculation was as bold as it was simple: abandon Richmond and take his forces south to meet up with General Joe Johnston in North Carolina. Leave U. S. Grant, snugly ensconced in his City Point camp, holding the bag, minus the string. From there, they could continue the war indefinitely.

In the early, predawn hours, Lee had already vetted his options with General John B. Gordon, a shrewd, able warrior and one of his most trusted lieutenants. That meeting had proved to be an eye-opener. A Confederate courier, sent by Lee, had roused Gordon sometime around midnight, and it took the thirty-three-year-old two hours of hard riding in a bitter chill to reach the commanding general at his Edge Hill headquarters, outside Petersburg. There, as Union troops slumbered and Washington celebrated, Gordon found Lee surrounded by a long table strewn with recent reports from every part of the army. One by one, Lee handed Gordon the papers to read. Lee, his face tight, already knew what was in them.

Despite a score of earlier tactical successes, the news was dismal. For nine months now, Lee’s men had been living in a thirty-seven-mile labyrinth of trenches, stretching east of Richmond and southwest of Petersburg. Three times, in July, in September, and again in October, Grant had hurled his troops at Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, only to have them repulsed. In one instance, the battle of the Crater, it was an outright disaster for the Federals. What Grant had hoped in the early spring of 1864 would become a quick war of maneuver, open battle, and offense had instead become a prolonged siege. One surreal month after another, the two exhausted armies shadowboxed from their trenches. Throughout the summer and fall, the earthworks reverberated with abrupt, all-out attempts to break Lee’s lines, sudden unexpected death, and round-the-clock sharpshooting. This pendulum of harassment was punctuated only by the tedium of the siege, which was hardly any more palatable. As winter set in, the coldest in memory, Lee feared that unless his thinly stretched lines could be reinforced, a great calamity will befall us. Actually, the first great calamity was the plight of the men themselves. Despite Lee’s efforts to secure food and clothing for his army, little was available. Scurvy, dysentery, and night blindness invaded the Confederate trenches. Simple cuts and small wounds refused to heal. The men lived with rats and lice, amid the stench of urine, feces, and even decaying flesh, staring up at the sky by day and often venturing out only by night. Morale plummeted. Eventually, driven by extreme hunger, assaulted by the biting cold, torn by letters from wives that movingly spoke of starvation and loss at home, deserters mushroomed, reaching a hundred a day during the severe freeze of February. His hands tied, at one point Lee exploded to his son Custis, I have been up to see the Congress and they don’t seem to be able to do anything except to eat peanuts and chew tobacco while my army is starving.

When the long, low fever of the Virginia winter finally abated, the situation for Lee’s men was no less desperate. Day after day, silence was punctured by the sporadic signs of war: billowing clouds of dense, roiling smoke, stabbing spurts of gunfire, the steady roar of bursting shells, scattered debris that heaved and shifted with each hit, and disemboweled corpses flying upward and out of the trenches. This Lee could live with. But, as he shuffled field report after report in his headquarters at Edge Hill in early March, what now struck Lee was the destitution of his beloved army: there were no shoes, no overcoats, no blankets, and little food; men scrambled between the legs of horses for dung to sift for undigested corn. There was insanity, exhaustion, wounds gone gangrenous. And of course, there was Grant. At the most, Lee now had 57,000 men in his army; fewer than 35,000 were present for duty. Grant had, he believed, 150,000. Once reinforced by Sherman from the south and Sheridan from the west, Lee feared the Union commander would have 280,000. His calculations were not far off the mark; the Union had near endless resources—although not always the will to use them.

As the minutes had ticked by that night at Edge Hill, and after Gordon had read the reports, Lee asked him for his options. Gordon reluctantly concluded that there were three: make peace between the two sides on the best possible terms; retreat and join General Joe Johnston’s forces in North Carolina; or stand and fight where they were. Of the three, retreat and peace were the most promising ones. Lee agreed. But as he set out for Richmond after that largely sleepless night, the peace option had already been foreclosed. Peace feelers had been tried twice that year, the first culminating in a full-fledged conference on U. S. Grant’s steamer, the River Queen, anchored off Hampton Roads. There, Lincoln and his secretary of state, William Seward, had met with the diminutive Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens and two other Confederate representatives. Ironically, it was the Northerners who would offer the South drastic concessions on slavery and immediate emancipation, but, to the Confederates, their remaining terms smacked of unconditional surrender. Stephens, who had served with Lincoln in Congress and appeared as small and misshapen as Lincoln did large and gangly, said, Mr. President, if we understand you correctly, you think that we of the Confederacy have committed treason; that we are traitors to your government; that we have forfeited our rights, and are proper subjects for the hangman. Lincoln in turn responded, Yes … That is about the size of it.

The second feeler had come from Confederate General James Longstreet and Union General Edward Ord. They had proposed a meeting of generals, led by Grant and Lee, to come together as former comrades and friends and talk a little. Lee had conferred with Davis and subsequently sent a note to Grant offering to meet. Grant had wired Lincoln regarding the plan on March 3, exactly one month to the day after the failed Hampton Roads conference, and Lincoln had wasted no time in killing this new one. No meeting, he chided, unless it be for the capitulation of Gen. Lee’s army. So, on that March Saturday, as an exhausted and careworn Lincoln took the podium in Washington and a baggy-eyed Lee trotted through the streets of Richmond, peace looked quite dead indeed.

The Abraham Lincoln who gazed out at the inaugural crowd stretching before him was a distinctively complex and often deeply conflicted man. Complex because the man who had pledged the previous summer in Philadelphia that the war would not end until its worthy object was attained, and Under God, I hope it will never end until that time, had returned from Hampton Roads in February and suggested to his cabinet that the United States pay the insurgent Southern states $400 million—as compensation for their lost slaves—if they surrendered by April 1. The Union cabinet was unanimous in its rejection. And conflicted because the man who had affixed his name to the unequivocal words of the Emancipation Proclamation had also offered the Southerners the carrot of compensated and even delayed emancipation at that meeting, if they would only return to the Union. Now, on this newly minted afternoon, Lincoln seemed to need the power and the firmness of his chosen words as much as did the anxious audience standing before him, or as did the larger, expectant Union nation.

When he started to read from a single sheet of paper printed in two broad columns, the crowd pressed forward slightly, to catch every word; when he spoke, they nodded in silent affirmation; when he addressed his larger themes, they listened with deference, even awe; when he truly touched them, they burst into applause and even tears. Notably lacking from his speech, however, was any stinging attribution of blame for the war. All dreaded it, his voice rang out—and all sought to avert it. But one of the parties to the conflict "would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came."

Strangely lacking, too, from the speech, after his brief first paragraph, was a reference to anything that he had said and done during the previous four years. His goal today was not to take political credit or to assign blame, but to send a heartfelt message—to the Union and the Confederacy alike. Neither side had expected the war to last as long or grow to such magnitude as it had, he observed philosophically. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. On the matter of slavery, he reproached but absolved the South of the ultimate blame: It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be judged.

What was the war’s cause? Somehow, he suggested, it was slavery. And how long would the war last, the question that was foremost on everyone’s mind? Here Lincoln wearily made no pledge. Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. At the same time, he left no doubt of his intention to fight on—if God wills that it continue—until slavery was crushed and the Union was permanently reunited.

He saved his most soaring and trenchant words for the conclusion, the true heart and the indelible spirit of his speech: With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle … to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

Lincoln then turned to Chief Justice Salmon Chase, soberly took the oath of office, and ended with an emphatic, So help me God! Bowing his head, he kissed an open Bible, and then as he bowed again to the cheering assembly, an artillery salvo exploded in the wind.

The Confederate White House stood several blocks from the state capitol. It was not even designed as a public building, but rather came into being as the private home of a wealthy Richmonder, who had installed in it the mid-nineteenth-century miracles of gas lamps and crude but serviceable plumbing. When the war came, he offered his house for the new Confederate president, replete with its flat front and rear-facing porch, designed to protect the family from the dust and mud and pungent smells of the street. But he was also something of a prudent patriot. In a revealing bit of symbolism, he sold his home to the established City of Richmond and not to the fledgling Confederate nation. Its current occupant, however, harbored no such qualms about the Confederate cause.

Jefferson Davis had used the failure of the Hampton Roads peace conference to rejuvenate Southern pride and nationalistic ardor, and the people had rallied accordingly, from Richmond and Mobile, from Lynchburg and Raleigh, and other cities across the Confederacy. One by one, once passionate critics had also risen up in support of Jeff Davis and the Cause. So, while resources were running scarce, will was, for the moment, growing stronger. New appointments, most notably Robert E. Lee’s recent promotion to commander of all the armies, and administrative changes had also led Southerners to believe again that the war’s tide might yet turn. And everyone knew that the Robert E. Lee who came to Richmond that March morning was not simply the man who commanded an army of men pinned down in their trenches, but was the Southern general who had driven McClellan off the Peninsula, stopped Pope at Second Manassas, hoodwinked Burnside at Fredericksburg, destroyed Hooker at Chancellorsville, and thwarted Grant in the Wilderness—all against overwhelming odds. And while Lee himself understood that the Confederate hegira was at a turning point, perhaps even nearing the end, the Southern general in chief still harbored hopes of staving off disaster.

This was, of course, vintage Lee: ever bold and invariably aggressive. Now, meeting with Jefferson Davis as Lincoln spoke of malice toward none and charity for all, the two discussed the Confederacy’s options. Peace between the two countries was dead. But another option loomed: withdraw from Richmond, retreat south and join Joe Johnston’s army, and strike hard at Union General William Tecumseh Sherman. Lee would have to make the most out of this opportunity. But he also believed that he could rely on the unparalleled endurance of his men, their loyalty, their fight, their overwhelming will in the face of the worst privations. In fact, this was also the opportunity he had long been waiting for; for some time, the commanding general had wanted to be free of Richmond.

In January, Lee had secretly told congressional questioners that the military evacuation of Richmond would actually make him stronger than before. Richmond’s fall, he confided, from a moral and political viewpoint, might be a serious calamity, but once it happened, he could prolong the war for a good two more years on Virginia soil. In truth, since the war began, precisely because Lee had been saddled with vigorously defending the nation’s capital, he had been forced to let the enemy make strategic plans for him, to dictate far too much of the course of battle, and to determine the pace and time of combat. But, he added, striking a more hopeful pose, when Richmond falls I shall be able to make them for myself.

To Lee, one of the most daring and offensive-minded of generals, a war of attrition had always favored the North. As a strategist, Lee chafed under the yoke of defensive tactics. We must strike them, he had lamented. We must never let them pass us again—we MUST strike them a blow! Yet Lee also knew the harsh reality of the arithmetic of war. He no longer had any men to spare. If it becomes a siege, he had gravely told his general, Jubal Early, then it is just a matter of time. At last, the time had come for Lee to make his own plans.

Davis listened and did not flinch. Why not withdraw at once? he countered.

Lee explained that the army’s horses were too weak to pull the guns and wagons through the thick March mud. But in two or three weeks, the roads would be passable. Then he could make his move. In the meantime, he would make the necessary arrangements.

And here the matter lay: with Robert E. Lee, at fifty-eight, an imposing figure with a strikingly dignified face and an honorable pedigree, who could endure disappointment and frustration with stoic reserve, but who would not accept defeat. And with Jefferson Davis, the austere, ascetic, grim-faced, and obdurate Confederate president, the once poignant nationalist and unremitting Unionist, who now lived for Southern independence, that and seemingly little more. They, every bit as much as Richmond, were the polar stars of the Confederacy, its very embodiment. And on this fateful day, their decision was made. With this new strategy in mind, they would continue to fight. With everything they had.

In Lees words, they would fight to the last.

Under the jubilant eyes of Frederick Douglass, who would be ushered into the White House later that evening at the request of Lincoln himself, becoming the first black man to be officially received in the nation’s home, and under the watchful gaze of the dashing young actor John Wilkes Booth, who occupied a prime spot in the balcony above the president, Abraham Lincoln had formally begun his second term. Now he had both a war to win and a nation’s wounds to bind. To some, like his congressional critics, these two elusive goals may have been flagrant contradictions, but to Lincoln, they were nothing less than the bedrock of his policies, the true, indefinable purpose of this war. There were, he knew, some propitious signs that the national bloodbath was at last moving toward its preordained conclusion. In February, Sherman’s army had driven into South Carolina, like a tribe of thundering Mongols—and South Carolina, the queen state of Dixie, where the nightmare of secession and rebellion had begun, quickly fell. Civilians deserted their houses and fled their cities before Sherman’s approaching hordes; then Columbia, the state’s capital, lay in flames, incinerated, a smoking ruin, the victim of Sherman’s men and chaos. Meanwhile, in the breadbasket of the Confederacy, the Shenandoah, Union General Phil Sheridan had cut a channel of destruction, wide and long, straight to the Rapidan River. And Grants mighty Army of the Potomac was hunkered down around Petersburg, ready to drive into the heart of the Confederacy, into Richmond, into Robert E. Lee’s vaunted Army of Northern Virginia itself.

But there were also reasons why Abraham Lincoln was the most tired man in the world. For nearly every Union success, he could still count a time when Lee had been within their grasp and yet eluded his generals. McDowell, McClellan, Meade, Pope, Burnside, Hooker; each foiled. And Grant, too, decried as a butcher, sending the boys in blue into rebel range like cattle to a slaughter, mauled in the Wilderness, and now pinned down in Petersburg. Certainly, there were, as Lincoln was well aware, indications that the Southern will to fight was waning, that the Confederacy was slowly coming to pieces. But there were also indications that the war could drag on for at least three more months of murderous fighting, perhaps even for another entire year, and, he bristled, how much more could the country take? And then finally, for Lincoln there was the unthinkable: the specter of Lee and his men slipping into the western mountains to wage a prolonged campaign of harassment. As much as any other scenario, this was now his greatest fear. The glory of a restored Union, he believed, must be built on more than butchery, revenge, and retribution. So in the spring of 1865, this, then, was his dilemma: the exigencies of the total war that he was waging against the requirements of reunification and the peace that he hoped to make. Never were two goals more incompatible.

Lincoln was so exhausted after the inauguration ceremonies that he took to his bed for several days. By March 14, he would feel so ill that he would conduct a cabinet meeting in his bedroom.

In the weeks that followed, Lee refined his audacious plan. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, he would attack Grant’s lines below the Appomattox River, seeking to disrupt and disorient the Union commander. In turn, that would free a portion of his troops to quickly join Johnston and later to strike at Sherman. If his offensive failed, he would then abandon Richmond and Petersburg altogether, joining Johnston with his entire army. After a lightning march, he would hope to smash Sherman and then do what he did best—contest Grant in a prolonged war of maneuver.

As the first hint of spring crept north into Virginia, Lee’s strategy had crystallized. After months of stalemate and tense confrontation, he had settled upon this: shock Grant with a sudden assault on Fort Stedman, a federal strongpoint just east of Petersburg. To be sure, given the tattered state of his troops, it was a daring act, but then again, Lee was always at his best when he was daring; his spirits would brighten, his deep black eyes would glow, his carefully cultivated control would give way to a flicker of emotion. Though federal forces outnumbered the Confederates by more than three to one, Lee had repeatedly demonstrated that his men could overcome far larger numbers. Though his army was ragged and exhausted, he would rally it. And though he was a consummate military realist, he was also possessed by a rare compass, a gambler’s sense that military miracles were not to be mocked or eschewed. History had turned on a dime countless times before. So it could again.

The attack on Fort Stedman, employing deception, secrecy, surprise, would take place on March 25. It would be one of the most intricate and brazen assaults of the war.

If successful, some believed it would open up a corridor all the way to Grant’s headquarters at City Point.

If the capture of Fort Stedman was a hope, the abandonment of Richmond was now a certainty, its fate having been sealed along with Lee’s plans. Yet Lee’s plans, of course, begged the question: what about Richmond? To be sure, if ever there was a capital to be hesitantly relinquished by the Confederates and, at the same time, to be eagerly prized by the Union, it was Richmond.

From its earliest years, Richmond had been a city of opposites: simultaneously genteel and seething. It seemed to be a magnet for uprisings, either igniting them or squelching them. Before there ever was a city named Richmond, it was here, along the banks of the James, that Nathaniel Bacon had settled on a spit of land and in 1676 started the revolt that would carry his name. It was here, in St. John’s Church, that another proud son of Virginia, Patrick Henry, lit an inchoate country on fire, exhorting rebellion in 1775, when he declared give me liberty or give me death—as Thomas Jefferson, in the audience, watched on. It was also here in 1800 that the slave Gabriel Prosser staged—ultimately in vain—a widespread black insurrection. And it was here, in 1832, that the House of Delegates shook a nation, hotly debating a bill to end slavery in Virginia, only to have it lose by seven votes—and, in a tragic twist, to have the state convention end by further tightening the shackles of bondage. But the divided nature of Richmonders also went only so far. For the most part, Richmonders were scions of the legacy of the first settlers in America, the 105 men and boys who landed in 1607 along the broad sweep at Cape Henry on the Virginia coast. Arriving aboard the Sarah Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, they had already braved harsh, howling winds; mighty gales; and turbulent seas. Now they anchored amid the uncertainty of a new land. Cast in a sturdy English empirical mold of fair-mindedness, united by a common desire to better themselves financially and socially, they were largely a moderate people, wedded to the rites of hierarchy and patriarchy, pragmatic, and deeply steeped in tradition.

One of those traditions, of course, was governance. As early as 1619, the first colonists had set up a miniature parliament when they debated the Dale’s code. Within a decade, sweating and stewing and battling flies, they had already developed a highly impressive legislative machinery, establishing the House of Burgesses—the first representative body in the New World. More than a century later, by the time the state capital was moved to Richmond in 1780, Richmonders had been proudly and defiantly rooted in the exercise of popular will and the rancorous give-and-take of democracy. In no small measure, they had helped to invent it.

As the capital of Virginia, Richmond also had a heritage of leadership unmatched on either side of the Potomac. It rightly laid claim to being the seat of the great Virginia dynasty, to being the capital of the Mother of states and Statesmen, and to being the cradle of democracy; it proudly boasted the authors of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution; and it justly claimed America’s first president. No one cherished the tenets of republican liberty more than Richmonders. To the extent that Richmonders were inclined to view Virginia first and foremost as their country, and they did, it was also true that no one was more fervent in the defense of Union in the first years of the new American republic. Indeed, in 1812, when New England Federalists were threatening secession, it was Thomas Ritchie of the Richmond Enquirer who alone unleashed the most stinging criticisms, denouncing the disloyal elements who would dash to pieces the holy ark of the Union of our country.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, Richmonders built a stunning city, a thriving hybrid of old-fashioned Southern gentility and newfangled urban enterprise. Day to day, Richmond was undergirded by a sharply drawn social structure: an overlay of the old Virginia gentry; an assortment of newcomers, working-class immigrants, Germans, Irishmen, and Jews; and a foundation of free blacks and black slavery. But cast among its seven picturesque hills, this urban enterprise hummed with remarkable vibrancy. Richmond and its suburbs were studded with handsome parks, grassy residential squares, tree-lined avenues, and imposing statues. Red brick town houses ranged in long rows on Marshall, Cary, and Franklin streets, their russet facades displaying a pleasing symmetry. Above, atop the hills, were mansions, belonging not just to genuine aristocrats but also to much of the new wealth, the prosperous bankers, the merchants, and the industrialists, who were vying with the planters for supremacy in the city. Down by the waterfront, the James River teemed with coastal and oceangoing vessels, ships that traded not only with the countryside and the North, but halfway across the world, with Britain and even the far corners of continental Europe. Meanwhile, day in and day out, the Tredegar iron works spewed black smoke; Richmond had the largest iron industry in all of Dixie. And looming over it all was the classical splendor of the capitol building, designed by Jefferson; the elegant governor’s mansion; the beautiful city hall; and the intricate landscaping of Capitol Square.

By 1859, with its population of almost 40,000, Richmond was not the largest city in the South. Slightly smaller than Charleston, it had less than a quarter of New Orleans’s population and even ranked behind Louisville, Kentucky. But it was surely unique. Unlike the Deep South, it was distinctly more diverse: with its commitment to public education, it had six public schools as well as a college for women; with its commitment to religious pluralism, it had thirty-three Protestant churches that were complemented by three Jewish synagogues, three Roman Catholic churches, a Quaker meeting house, and a Universalist church. With its four newspapers jockeying for attention, its political voice was often broad and remarkably lively. Not surprisingly, as the war came, few doubted that the city was anything but an impressive blend of rural provincialism and urban potential; its atmosphere of high breeding and noblesse oblige made it distinctly Southern, but its diverse economy, heterogeneous population, and moderate outlook gave it a lusty, cosmopolitan air that solidly fastened it in the mold of the larger United States—unusual in the antebellum South. And, in a young country still very much struggling with its national identity, Richmond and Richmond alone among the great cities could bask in the golden age of Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, and Madison, making it a trenchant portrait of the young American republic.

But when the guns of Fort Sumter sounded on April 12, 1861, and the North-South divide could no longer be papered over, the city was immediately transformed, siding with its longer Southern roots. Having helped create the United States, it would now look to dissolve them. With flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths, and jubilant demonstrations, Richmonders chose the Confederacy. And in turn, the Confederate States of America soon made Richmond the capital of their new nation.

It was a fateful decision. With the benefit of more than a century of hindsight, it is easy to doubt the wisdom of locating the Confederacy’s capital in Richmond; for one thing, it was a strategic gamble, boldly putting the capital within ready striking distance of the Union. Accessible by water and only a hundred miles from Washington, it was especially vulnerable. And on the fringe of the new nation rather than at its center, it would have great difficulty extending its power over the vast hinterland of the huge, eleven-state Confederacy. But in the end, when the war came, the Southern politicians rapidly tired of Montgomery, Alabama, the site of the first Confederate capital, with its clouds of mosquitoes and its pitiful facilities. After some to-and-fro, Richmond was the logical, if not the only, choice.

The significance of this decision was not lost on the North. As quickly as July 21, 1861, Union soldiers under General Irvin McDowell marched southward to the cry, On to Richmond. This was but the first of six massive offenses waged against the rebel capital. And from then on, Richmond would live under the menacing scythe of Union attack. Sixty percent of the war would be fought on Virginia soil.

After the guns sounded, Richmonders’ pride in their heritage was a goad to forbearance. Still, the city could not escape the transforming burdens of being a capital in the eye of a war. In every corner, life was quickly punctuated by the residue of strife. Groaning under the weight of refugees and the new Confederate bureaucracy, the city was often blighted with soot, noise, and darkness. Its once peaceful streets became centers of a garish nightlife; thus came a rash of burlesque houses and saloons, all-night prostitution parlors, pawnshops, thieves, and fences. The streets themselves overflowed with trash, empty liquor bottles, squalor, and vagrants. And of course, there was the more tangible specter of war itself, the gnawing realization that Richmond was now on the frontier of the conflict, an inexorable dividing line between North and South. With a hostile force always at its back, each day, each month, each year, its residents faced the awesome prospect of being overrun by federal armies.

But socially conscious Richmonders refused to be cowed. Amid the ever-increasing stress of total war, they danced, laughed, and somehow thrived. There is life in the old land yet, Mary Chesnut observed in 1864. Go on good people, wrote the Whig, it is better to be merry than sad. For three precarious years, Richmond survived on savvy and sacrifice, indomitable will and sheer tenacity. In the face of hardship, hunger, and disease, its women stoically visited the hospitals and darned socks. As scarcity, impressment, and inflation ravaged the city, crowds still cheerily frequented the theaters, threw merry shindigs, and entertained one another in private gatherings and with intimate games of charades. When the roll of cannons and drum of musket fire could be heard in the distance, they stubbornly maintained their faith in Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and the Cause. And as the noose tightened, and mothers, wives, and children became pinched by hunger or were dying from broken hearts, Richmonders somehow pressed on.

Was it all an element of self-delusion? Or stubborn patriotism toward their young country? Surely, it was a bit of both. In 1864, Richmonders could console themselves with this sobering fact: the Confederacy’s mighty Army of Northern Virginia had frustrated the designs and military careers of five separate commanders of the Union’s Army of the Potomac. Indeed, most citizens saw their capital as an impregnable Gibraltar. And by 1865, if that winter had been particularly cruel, so had each previous winter. If morale was low, they knew that this was when Lee had always fought most brilliantly. In truth, each year and each spring, the war brought changes in Richmond’s spirit, harboring rousing news of dangers and triumphs, from Fort Sumter, to Seven Days, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and Cold Harbor. But their bemused views of the privations of war were underpinned by a quiet confidence in a Southern victory. Grant had jabbed, bruised, and stretched Lee’s lines. He had fought all summer and all winter, yet still Richmond had evaded him. Spring meant a renewed campaign for war, yet one more campaign in which Robert E. Lee might eventually prevail.

Ironically, the more Richmond’s fortunes declined, the more indignities it suffered at the hard hand of war, the more it found salvation in its new Confederate identity. By the time the Petersburg siege began, Richmonders had endured martial law, quelled a seditious bread riot, and survived conscription; they had withstood impressment of property and servants, bureaucratic ignorance, and urban overcrowding; and they had survived star-ding underfeeding and horrendous casualties. And by this point, virtually every family, both the well-to-do and the humble, lived side by side with the shadow of death, as the graves of husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons littered the hillsides of the capital. In the spring of 1865, food was so scarce that many citizens were reportedly forced to eat dogs and even rats. Even this did not deter them. We are all good scavengers now, quipped the redoubtable diarist J. B. Jones. As long as we can hear a dog bark or a cat meow, roared preacher Ezra Stiles, know that we will not surrender!

Against all, Richmonders still rallied. In countless ways, this period represented some of the city’s most stirring hours. Once more, said one stoic Virginia maid, we hugged to our bosoms the phantom of hope. In fact, the residents did more than that. While their comrades in Petersburg wandered through streets, ducking and dodging federal missiles, balls and social events in Richmond flourished as perhaps never before. It was an amazing sight. Starvation balls became the rage. So did weddings. Church attendance rose. Buoyed by an evangelical fervor, believers flocked to St. Paul’s for daily services and searched to understand why God had chosen to punish them with such severity. They prayed for guidance and wrapped themselves in Scriptures telling of a wandering Israel, seeing the Jews as a prototype for their own nascent Confederate heritage. And more than ever, the first families held on to their Revolutionary War moorings as a way of bracing themselves for the trial now thrust upon them. Some also hoped that they were living through a second, Southern revolution.

One noted scholar, John Murrin, has remarked that the Confederate national identity in 1861 was actually far stronger than any collective American national identity alive at the time of the Constitution; there is more than an element of truth to this. And from then on, a new sense of nationality, at once Southern and Confederate, had gathered in volume and strength as Richmonders confronted one of the most daunting armies the world had ever known. The rejoicing, the partying, the riding high on a cloud of euphoria and wishful thinking, the atavistic remembrances of the Revolution, the mystical examination of the Jews, all were merely part of a swelling belief that they were indeed forming a new nation. Their unanimity may be overstated, but there was little doubt that they were now a people united by a sense of common culture and a flickering, but nonetheless real, national spirit.

Thus, Richmond was not, in the spring of 1865, what it was in 1861, or for that matter, in 1776. And like Richmond, much of the Confederate South had also changed. Hardened and toughened by the privations of war, the South now had a very different conception of itself, its identity, and its purpose and reason. Nothing so captured the extent of that change as a debate that had raged for months in the capital city and beyond, from the port of Charleston and the trenches of Petersburg, to the Tennessee backwoods and Louisiana bayous.

The question was simply this: should the Confederacy emancipate slaves and muster them into the ranks of Southern soldiers? Before the guns had sounded over Fort Sumter, it would have been an unthinkable suggestion, a heresy of the highest order. But now, four years later, the South was asking precisely this. Driven in no small measure by the Confederacy’s own desperation; by its dwindling resources, deaths, and desertions; and by an enemy who seemed to have inexhaustible supplies of material and men, this debate would culminate in one of the most momentous decisions of the Confederacy’s life and one of the most fascinating discussions in all of America’s span. It would say much of what the South was and what it had become. The final debate would come to a head in March, shortly after Lincoln’s second inauguration.

And for Union and Confederacy alike, its implications were astonishing.

About the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars, John Rolfe, a Virginia colonist and soon-to-be husband of the Indian princess Pocahontas, recorded laconically in 1619. The first blacks to enter an English settlement in the New World—as indentured servants who could theoretically be freed in five years—their arrival marked the start of American slavery.

The Negars were landed at Old Point Comfort, a sandy wedge that divides the James River from the broad stretch of the Chesapeake Bay. In ensuing years, American slave ships from the Yankee ports of New England—the birthplace of the abolitionist movement—would become a common sight on the Atlantic Ocean. Slaves, bought in Africa for five pounds sterling, brought from thirty to ninety pounds in the West Indies, a sum that laid the footings for many a New England fortune. The colonies of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and Britain similarly became strongholds of slavery, and the institution flourished in the American North until 1780, when, beginning with Massachusetts and ending with New Jersey in 1804, the Northern states one by one abolished bondage. It was hoped that the Southern states would do likewise, especially in the Cotton Kingdom of the lower South, but there it stubbornly persisted. After Eli Whitney patented his famous cotton gin in 1794, plantations began to proliferate throughout the Cotton Kingdom—as did the corresponding rise in the demand for slaves. Over the course of 250 years, then, at first unwittingly, even reluctantly, slavery became so intertwined and intermixed with the fabric of the South—even though only one-third of Southerners owned slaves—that any assault on slavery was seen as an assault on Southern institutions, Southern values, and the very Southern way of life.

From the late eighteenth century onward, the ferment over slavery only grew. The North was increasingly stung by the contradictions of its own struggle against Britain and the Souths enslavement of others (the execrable sum of all villainies, in the defiant words of Reverend John Wesley), and slavery soon became a matter of deep conscience, particularly as the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening swept the country. By the early to mid-nineteenth century, reform was in the air. Year after year, with evangelic fervor, antislavery advocates kept scratching away with their pens and opening their mouths for freedom for people of all colors. And year after year, Southern politicians and Southern leaders bitterly fought back. Here, of course, was a classic formula for eventual conflict. Where many in the North, notably the abolitionists, clamored for the eradication of slavery (Shall not our Lord, in due time, have these Heathens also for his inheritance), Southerners clung ever more tightly to what they saw as the most treasured creed of republican liberty—property rights, including slaves. Where the abolitionists, heirs of the Puritan notion of collective accountability, viewed slavery as the most heinous of all social sins, slaveholders stonily saw only economic ruin, social chaos, and racial war. Where abolitionists regarded slavery as evil against God’s children, pure and simple, Southerners increasingly saw it as nature’s positive good: the foundation for peace, prosperity, and racial comity. And where abolitionists preached slavery as a violation against the higher law, Southerners angrily countered with their own version of the deity, that it was sanctioned by the

Reviews for April 1865

[jbgusa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read April 1865 by Jay Winik during June 2102. The book was excellent, and summed up quite well why the Union had to win the Civil War. The story builds to the April 1865 climax, which embraced by the triumph of Appomattox and the despair of Lincoln' assassination. Winik is a great historian, who focuses on bite-sized portions of history rather than broad sweeps. I also read 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History by Jay Winik. Similar "bite-sized" history.

No less satisfying was The Proud Tower, by Barbara Tuchman. This is the "broad sweep"approach, which chronicled the deterioration of Europe during "La Belle Epoque", the period from 1890-1914.

[marklacy-355086 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Most people know that Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, and that Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox that same month. What most people don't know (but I learned from Winik's excellent book) is that the military and political leadership of both the Union and the Confederacy were involved in momentous decisions in April that helped bring the war to an end, and bring the country back together. These were decisions that, had they been made differently, could've resulted in catastrophe for our nation. Even if the Union had won the war, and the South readmitted, our identity as a unified country might have been in jeopardy. As Winik points out, using contemporary examples, some countries and regions never fully recover from civil wars. To increase the probability of long-lasting peace, Lincoln and Grant chose to disregard the railings of those who would bring shame and severe punishment on the heads of their conquered enemy. Though Jefferson Davis was all for a last-ditch attempt at preserving the Confederacy by sending the army into the hills for prolonged guerrilla warfare, Lee chose the high road, knowing the impact of a sustained war would only make matters far worse than they already were. Winik covers both the strengths and faults of Lincoln, Grant, Lee, Sherman, Johnson, Davis, and Forrest, and shows that despite these faults, they made the decisions at the end of the war that enabled the U.S. to come back together.

The only thing I wish Winik had not omitted was a discussion of Lincoln's presidential pardons for high-ranking Confederate officers and officials, and how that played out with Andrew Johnson once he assumed the presidency. I believe Lincoln's policies in this regard played an important role in achieving peace, and Johnson's policies almost aborted this.

For a different but equally engaging account of events in April and May 1865, I highly recommend James L. Swanson's Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse.

[wb4ever1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One thing we history buffs love is a big, thick book on a subject we love, the kind of deep dive that requires us to plow through hundreds upon hundreds of pages. APRIL 1865, THE MONTH THAT SAVED AMERICA by Jay Winik, is not that kind of history book, and that is just fine. Coming in at just under 400 pages, this is the kind of read that people who can’t manage detailed descriptions of troop movements, battlefield strategy, and lots of exposition will enjoy, while at the same time, satisfy those who have exhausted Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote, but still can’t resist going back to the American Civil War one more time. As per the title, Winik’s book deals with the last month of the war, which saw the fall of Richmond, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln’s assassination, the capitulation of the last major Confederate forces in North Carolina, and the first halting steps toward a national reconciliation after four years of endless bloodshed, and furious rancor. In the popular imagination, the Civil War ended with the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant in the parlor of the McLean house in Appomattox, Virginia on April 9th, 1865; the rest of the Confederate armies followed Lee’s example, disbanding, with everyone going home, resolving to be one nation again, one filled with good Americans. But Winik sets out to prove this a gross simplification, and that if things had gone just a little different, if revenge and retribution had triumphed in the hearts of the North, or resistance and defiance had steeled the backs of the South, then American history would have been much different. The book makes the case that by April of 1865, the Confederacy was on its knees, with Grant’s army at the gates of Richmond, and Sherman’s forces marching into North Carolina, but that it was far from beaten, and years of guerrilla warfare, and a bitter resistance to Federal occupation, was a very real option for the Confederate forces still in the field. This kind of war, which would have resulted in unimaginable destruction and loss of life, did hold the possibility of victory for the South, if the North could ultimately be convinced that the price was too great to keep on fighting year after year. Whether this would happen or not, rested not only in the hands of Lee and Grant, but also Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, William T. Sherman and Joseph E. Johnston, and even disreputable characters like Nathan Bedford Forrest, and downright evil ones, like John Wilkes Booth. Winik labors hard to tell us who they were, what brought them to be where they were, and to hold such responsibility at that place and that time, and why what they did matters so much, even after more than a century and a half. I think Winik makes his points well, giving us not only the who and the where, but very much the why, specifically why the reconciliation that occurred, bitter and grudging on behalf of some, in the final month of the war came about. That these men who fought each other so hard, so long, both Confederate and Union, were sick and tired of war, Winik makes plain, that in their hearts, their fondest desire was to go home to their families, and never again hear a gun fired in anger. And upon this desire to be done with the bloody business of slavery and secession, a new sense of nationhood took root in the United States. That is far from an original conclusion, but I have not seen it better asserted than in Winik’s book. This book is as much a civics lesson as it is a recounting of history. One can easily quarrel with Winik’s conclusions, as some reviewers have over his handling of slavery, and the challenges of Reconstruction are given only a quick pass, as others have also pointed out, many feeling that this is the real story. These are contentious subjects, and button pushers for many, proving yet again, as William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead, it’s not even past.”Jay Winik wrote APRIL 1865 twenty years ago now, when America was still enjoying the aftermath of the Cold War; and for me, the cheery conclusion of the book reads like something written before 9/11, the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Great Recession, before the ferocious tribalism of 21st Century politics. These days we live in virtuous times, where the compromises and hard fought decisions of the past are disdained and dismissed. The complexities and paradoxes of the Civil War have no place in the public square or popular culture. Men who lived and died, and gave their last full measure for a country they loved as much as anyone alive today are found wanting by a modern morality, and judged harshly. APRIL 1865, whatever its faults, is a book that tries to make us understand a very difficult piece of American history, the kind of understanding that leads to common ground, something earlier generations of Americans knew and shared with one another; something forgotten, but perhaps yet remembered.

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A snapshot of the end of the grand struggle. The maps don't amount to much, but if you're looking for a quick refresher, much tilted towards the south, you will find this book interesting.

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An interesting concept for a book, and one that seemed to be a refreshing take on the end of the Civil War. Does a good job at illustrating the circumstances around the Civil War, and provides good mini-biographies of many of the major players.

However, the author has made some egregious factual errors (two general Longstreets?), which detract from the book as a whole. Some interpretations of events are also suspect.

Not a bad book, but one that could use some revision and improvements.

[addunn3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an excellent review of the status of the Civil War at its very end. Winik covers the political as well as the military aspects of the period and describes the rather unique path America took to uniting the states into a nation.

[cyderry · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

At the end of the Civil War, it is startling that so much occurred in the "final" month. The Confederate Army, led by Robert E. Lee, made one last ditch effort to elude the Union forces of Ulysses Grant but on April 9, 1865 surrendered at Appomattox Court House. Less than a week later, Abraham Lincoln lies dead, assassinated by John Wilkes Booth and Andrew Johnson is the new President. Confederate General Johnston disobeyed Jefferson Davis' orders to fight on and surrendered to Sherman.The end of hostilities came in 1865 and possibly, Lincoln would have agreed with Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate General, when he said "You have been good soldiers, you can be good citizens. Obey the laws, preserve your honor, and the government to which you have surrendered can afford to be and will be magnanimous."This book relates the details of these events as well as the background that brought about these results. However, IMHO, it is not well written. If this book is to be constituted as a book of historical fact, then it needs to be severely edited. There are far too many personal observations and conclusions interspersed throughout as well as a jumpy writing style. The author frequently leaves one thought process hanging moving on to another and then jumps back to where he left off. I have no doubt that Professor Winik has researched his topic diligently, however, I believe that this book of 606 pages with another 101 of footnotes could have been more concise if the author's opinions had been eliminated and the conclusions left to be evaluated by the reader with just the facts stated.

[randyflycaster · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

APRIL 1865 is a one of the best history book I ever read.Through detail and imagery Jay Winik brings events and characters to life; and tells an emotionally moving story, partly because he he able to see things from different perspectives and show that there is not always black or white.In addition, Winik clearly has a take on the forces that drive history. (His book, therefore, has a message. I won't give it away.)

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

 It’s unbelievable how much hangs on the simplest details. An error in a shipping order, an individual’s mood, these things can affect the fate of a nation. In April 1865 we’re given an in-depth look at the final days of the Civil War and the resonating effect they had on the USA. One of the things that stood out to me was how vital the character of the leaders was. If Grant or Lee or some of the others had wanted the war to continue they could have made very different choices. They men on both sides truly wanted peace in the end and their magnanimous actions prevented further bloodshed. Before reading this I had a pretty good grasp of both Lincoln and Lee’s personal histories, but I knew very little about Grant’s background. This book expanded my knowledge on all three men and gave me a much better understanding of the parts they all played. It also taught me just how controversial some of their decisions were. Winik’s voice worked well for me. He balanced the details and the big picture, giving just enough of both. He focused on individual’s motivations, not just outcomes. He delved farther back, into the creation of our nation and Jefferson’s role in that, to set the stage for the Civil War. If you want to learn more about the Civil War and America’s history, this book does a wonderful job.

[nodosaurus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

April 1865 is about the end of the Civil War. It describes the history that lead to the particular events that occurred, starting with the constitution and continuing through the final surrender. At every step, the lecturer discusses what it means to the nation, as a whole. Jay Winik, the author and lecturer, is a professor of history and has served in national security. His work has involved him in numerous civil wars around the globe. I wasn't sure what to make of this, I picked it up at Barnes and Noble during one of their 75%-off sales. My first impression wasn't strong, the lecturer was almost monotonic and the content seemed weak. But that impression was quickly replaced when he provided, not just the historical facts, but full background and motivations; then he made it all sound interesting!Jay Winik builds the story mostly chronologically, discussing each of a large number of major characters. For each, he provides a background, discusses strengths and weaknesses, and his position in the power and political pictures of the period. He made the people come to life, they were no longer names in a book, but real people. He brought the struggles, defined the relationships between the different people, and build their personalities. There is so much information that we never learned, I strongly recommend this lecture series for anyone interested in history. For any US Civil War buffs, it is a must.

[bookchewer · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Overwritten and overwrought.

[jerryl_279255 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent, Excellent, Excellent.If you don't think history can turn on a dime, this book will change your mind. One of the best I've ever read on the subject...and I'm a bit of a buff, so I do not say that lightly.

[schneider_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A fast paced bio-history of the month that altered the course not only of American history, but of world history. In "April 1865: The Month That Saved America", author Jay Winik breaks down the aforementioned month into the events that took places and the central characters that participated in each event during the month. The entire book is not all about what took place during the fourth month of ’65; the author gives the reader history of a particular subject when needed or required. I found Winik's writing style is very readable and unrelenting. He keeps the imagination fully engaged with the what-ifs, what could have beens, and what was. I consider this to be a must for any American Civil War enthusiast, history buff, or those who just enjoy a good book.

[boeflak · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Incredible achievement. Makes one almost wish for a time machine to experience such an extraordinary month. Broadens the spotlight on Lincoln's assassination, showing that it was far more extensive and had other victims. Wilkes' plan was to decapitate the entire U.S. government in a single evening - and he nearly succeeded.

[1967mustangman · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book. Reviews the events of April 1865. Lots of amaizing interesting stories. Possible Gorrila Warfare. Amzaing cirtumstances that if only one had been different could have swing the outcome of the war.