Negotiations at Appomattox, Part One
Robert Menard
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Editor’s Note: This is the first part of a three part series on the battle that ended the American Civil War (although not the final battle as the war dragged on) and the negotiations between Confederate General Robert E. Lee and Union General Ulysses S. Grant . On a personal note, I was privileged to have visited Appomattox this past summer, soon after touring the Volvo New River Truck Plant in the rural idylls of western Virginia. These posts are not about history or the military. There are hundreds of thousands of scholarly works running into the tens of millions of pages written on these two men and the Civil War. Rather, these posts are the result of research prompted by the great professional work of two actors on the Appomattox site who provided a wealth of information on the negotiations that saved the greatest nation ever to grace the face of the Earth. A principal source of my research is U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York, 1885).
Upon first sight, the Appomattox Courthouse and National Monument struck me much as my impression of the first time I saw the Alamo. These two icons of Americana are so much larger than life in our culture that seeing them in person can be nothing but disappointing. At the Alamo, the most visited tourist site in Texas, my initial reaction mimicked that of Timon, the meerkat, in the Lion King who stated incredulously, “We are going to fight your uncle over this?” If you have never seen this movie, rent it as a study in negotiation.
As to the Alamo, if you were raised on oaters , as was I, you will no doubt be or have been stunned by the incredibly small scale of the Alamo. Upon realizing that my reaction was one drawn of my own expectation, I resorted to a silly observation to assuage my naiveté. I wondered, without reason, why the Alamo was located in downtown San Antonio. Perhaps Mexican General Santa Ana and the Texans Davy Crockett and Col. Travis did not realize just how important March 6, 1836, and the Alamo site would become as monuments to history.
Negotiation Lesson One Negotiation occurs constantly, anywhere and everywhere
I never could have imagined that the history lesson before me in the rustic buildings and preserved pastures of Appomattox would become such an indelible lesson in negotiation. The actors in Appomattox that summer day of 2013 did a great job in portraying the events of the final days of the Civil War. We will leave the many historic military details to the experts as our focus is on the negotiations.
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To set the negotiation table, the Union forces had the Confederacy on the run, cut off from the east, toward Richmond, the south, toward Atlanta, and the west toward Tennessee. The blistering campaigns of General William Tecumseh Sherman and others had forced the Confederate Army into virtual submission. After four tortuous years of war, brother against brother, the Confederacy’s only path of retreat was to the north, into the volleys of Union infantry. The Union forces had captured the replenishments of food and armaments intended for the Confederate Army at a rail station east of Appomattox. Both sides had endured the starvation and fatigue of forced marches just days before as the misery of the Civil War seemed close to denouement in early April of 1865, mere days before the assignation of President Abraham Lincoln.
For a visual presentation, Grant’s personal memoirs are memorialized in this YouTube interview, called Chapter 67, Negotiations at Appomattox. On April 09, 1865, General Grant responded to General Lee that he was not authorized to negotiate on the matter of peace between the two warring parties. This is the skillful application of the “Higher Authority” tactic. To the skilled negotiator, this crack in Lee’s armor signaled the beginning of the end for the Confederacy. The Union forces had long been winning this destructive Civil War, savaging and burning much of the South’s crops, cities, and infrastructure. War is certainly not pretty and both generals recognized that the Civil war had become too ugly.