Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox by Caroline E. Janney

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox by Caroline E. Janney Cecily Zander Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox. By Caroline E. Janney. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 344. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Historians have expended considerable effort in understanding how and why people go to war. Military mobilization, after all, is a topic that touches on all manner of fields—the history of ideas, politics, economics, diplomacy. What if, as historian Caroline E. Janney asks in Ends of War, historians gave the same care and attention to demobilization and to the myriad ways in which soldiers left the armies that they had once willingly (or forcibly) joined? The answer in the case of the American Civil War is that the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House was not the end of the war for thousands of soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia. The scattered and disorganized dissolution of the most important Confederate army, Janney finds, starkly revealed the devotion Confederates felt to their failed nation even after its downfall, while foreshadowing the energy that the defeated rebels poured into creating the powerful Lost Cause ideology in their telling of the war. [End Page 125] The most immediate effects of the surrender were felt in Virginia, where roads and railways were choked with defeated Confederates seeking passage home. Any soldiers not officially paroled at Appomattox were encouraged to find a provost marshal’s office and acquire a signed parole. Parole papers were especially important because they protected Confederate soldiers from being arrested or tried for treason. These documents did not, however, afford their bearers the option to pass through states that had remained loyal to the Union. This left some former rebels trapped in Virginia until the federal government clarified the conditions on which they could return home—conditions that included swearing a loyalty oath and never again wearing the uniform of the Confederate army. Not all soldiers were willing to lay down their weapons and accept a parole. Many who chose not to remain in the Old Dominion struck out for North Carolina, where they hoped to join with Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee and continue their fight. Johnston’s surrender to William T. Sherman soon sundered their ambition. The final remaining option for those who would not accept a parole would be to wage a guerilla war for the survival of the Confederacy, though this quickly proved untenable; most, including the notorious raider John S. Mosby, turned themselves in to Union authorities by the end of the summer. While large numbers of former Confederates moved across the landscape, thousands of others remained stationary. For rebels who refused paroles and were captured by the United States, the war dragged on through the summer of 1865 as the Union’s best legal and military minds attempted to determine their status. It was not until President Andrew Johnson’s amnesty proclamation that Confederate prisoners of war were afforded the option to swear a loyalty oath and be allowed to return to their homes. Although more books have been written about the Civil War than almost any other subject in American history, Janney is the first to offer an examination of the legal, political, and military mire generated by the disbanding of a major army at war’s end. Not only is Ends of War destined to become a valuable resource for understanding the complex details of the transition from war to peace, but it should also become a foundational work for further study of the weeks and months between Appomattox and the beginning in earnest of Reconstruction. Joining with a chorus of scholars asking us to consider a longer Civil War, Janney’s work offers a simple premise—the war did not end at Appomattox—and with clarity and verve, she explains why the ends of war matter as much as their beginnings. [End Page 126] Cecily Zander Southern Methodist University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association