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 Yael Sternhell (bio) Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox. By Caroline E. Janney. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Pp. 344. Cloth, $30.00.) In some ways Caroline Janney’s new contribution is a significant departure from her previous book, the influential Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (2013), a synthetic and wide-ranging tome, which ambitiously argues that America’s reunification was a far more qualified and contentious process than most scholars have come to believe. This time around she has chosen to work on a different scale, training her eye on one body of men, Lee’s army, at a particular moment, the first few weeks following their surrender at Appomattox Court House. She takes a long and close look at this episode, seeking, in her words, to “slow down the pace” and take in the story “frame by frame” (3). The result is highly revealing. Janney’s research lays bare the confusion, inconsistencies, and uncertainty that pervaded the process of bringing the Civil War to an end. She begins with the very act of surrendering and shows the extent to which soldiers and officers in the Army of Northern Virginia actually refused to surrender and fled Appomattox in hopes of continuing the fight farther south. While this in and of itself is not a new insight, Janney’s careful reconstruction of the effort by men of all ranks to avoid making peace almost at any cost adds materially to existing knowledge. Janney also pays much attention to the mechanisms of surrender, in particular to the paroling of Confederates, which created as many problems as it solved. Were paroled soldiers free to come and go as they pleased? Did they enjoy protection from indictment for treason? If they hailed from loyal states like Maryland or West Virginia, could they simply go home? Each U.S. officer dealing with ex-Confederates seems to have interpreted the meaning of the term differently based on personal preferences and practical exigencies. Janney also zeroes in on the deceptively simple question of how Confederate soldiers actually got home. There was nothing simple, in fact, about hundreds of thousands of hungry and penniless men needing to travel from Virginia to points as remote as New Orleans and East Texas. Many expected that the government against which they had fought for four years would feed them and provide free transportation across the South. Federal officials from Ulysses S. Grant down to local provost marshals were exasperated by the boldness of rebels, who were behaving, as Janney puts it, “as if the rebellion had never happened” (120). And yet getting men home was a critical step in ensuring the war was truly over and preventing a new insurgency of guerrilla warfare. As with other aspects [End Page 580] of Federal leadership during those crucial weeks, the ambiguity regarding ex-Confederates’ legal status as American citizens, combined with the enormous challenges of dismantling the Confederacy, resulted in “policies that defied both logic and law” along with a fair amount of administrative chaos on every level (190). Ends of War also offers important conclusions about the origins of the Lost Cause myth, showing the prevalence of its core tenets among the men of Lee’s army and its explanatory power for soldiers trying to make sense of defeat. In Janney’s reading, Lee’s farewell address is a defiant document, both reflecting and enhancing a sentiment shared by privates and generals alike. “The immediate aftermath of Appomattox,” she writes, “confirmed that a deep and abiding commitment to the Confederacy had not ended with the surrender. In some ways, it had only begun” (6). Another focus of the book is Grant, who comes across as a perplexingly vacillating and irresolute leader. At times he acts as conciliator in chief, offering surrender terms that allow the culture of unrepentance to flourish and instill in ex-Confederates a sense of entitlement toward the federal government. At other times he appears as a pragmatic general, attempting to prevent additional loss of life and...