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 Kurt Hackemer (bio) Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox. Caroline E. Janney. University of North Carolina Press, 2023. ISBN: 978-1-4696-7430-8. 344 pp., paper, $22.00. The current generation of Civil War scholarship has done much to blur the artificial boundary between war and peace that is so often represented by the surrender [End Page 96] of Robert E. Lee’s army at Appomattox Court House. An expanding literature makes it clear that the passions, ideological beliefs, and experiences of soldiers and civilians alike, but especially soldiers, played an important role in defining postwar politics, social constructs, race relations, westward expansion, and economics. For many, the war was omnipresent long after its final shots were fired in anger. Acknowledging the fluidity between war and peace is one thing, but it is quite another to demonstrate in some significant way exactly how the transition happened on a personal level for soldiers who were about to become veterans. Caroline Janney’s important new book uses the Army of Northern Virginia’s experience during and after the surrender at Appomattox Court House to do just that, and the end result interjects welcomed nuance into a conversation that has been more generalized up to this point. The surrender at Appomattox was hardly a complete surrender in two important ways, which immediately created ambiguity. First, in an effort to accelerate the reunion process, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant paroled Confederate soldiers so they could more quickly return to civilian life. Second, in the chaos associated with the pursuit and parole of the Army of Northern Virginia, Janney conservatively estimates that twenty thousand or more Confederate soldiers straggled, escaped, or otherwise avoided capture and therefore were never paroled. Paroled Confederate soldiers were still technically prisoners of war. As those soldiers returned home, or tried to return home—in the case of border states that never left the Union—concerns about their status and potential culpability for wartime actions revealed that “many of the legal, social, and political questions that had plagued the war from the beginning” had not, in fact, been resolved by the cessation of hostilities (3). The lack of a peace treaty, which would have required acknowledging the legitimacy of the Confederate States of America, resulted in the inconsistent treatment of parolees by military and government officials. Local officials who recognized there had been no formal end to the war feared what these parolees might do as they passed through communities or tried to restart their lives after reaching their home. They were even more fearful of those veterans who had never been paroled. The absence of an efficient pardon system kept the parolees in a state of limbo and presented resolution of those fears. As a result, local military and government officials often reacted harshly to maintain order and stability, driven by their immediate homegrown concerns rather than a unified national context that simply did not exist. The ambiguity and inconsistency of the parole and pardon process reinforced an emerging Lost Cause ideology built around the idea that the Confederacy had never truly surrendered and that its ideals remained intact. Acceptance of the Lost Cause was even easier for those Army of Northern Virginia veterans who avoided the parole process entirely. While that historical interpretation of the transition to the Lost Cause is nothing new, Janney’s unique contribution is to [End Page 97] better explain the chaos that catalyzed the transition. There was more to the surrender of Lee’s army than a stacking of arms and furling of the colors. The demo-bilization process took place over a much greater time and space than historians have hitherto appreciated. Because it extended well beyond Appomattox Court House, it also involved more than just Lee’s soldiers. Civilians of all types, including Union sympathizers, Confederate sympathizers, former slaves, and citizens who just wanted to be left alone, all found themselves caught up in the ensuing drama. Janney convincingly argues that “in surrender as in battle, the war proved to be as much about those at home as...