This week marks the 160th anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. The final significant turning point of the Civil War may not have occurred without the previously unknown contributions of Sheridan’s Union Scouts.
The story of the Appomattox Campaign begins at the critical Battle of Five Forks, which is chronicled in a previous article: “Fish Fry that Doomed the South”. At the crossroads, Lee’s last supply lines had been cut to the west of Petersburg, followed by Grant’s attack on Confederate fortifications, forcing Lee’s army to retreat from Petersburg and Richmond. A race ensued between Lee’s retreating Confederates and Sheridan’s pursuing Union forces.
In that race south, Sheridan beat Lee to the punch thanks to information provided by his Scouts. “[Commander of the Jessie Scouts Major Henry Young] kept me constantly informed of the movements of the enemy and brought in prisoners from brigadier-generals down. The information gained through him was invaluable,” wrote Sheridan. Riding with the Jessie Scouts (AKA Lincoln’s Special Forces) and an escort of 200 of the 1st US Cavalry, the Union general reached the crucial crossroads town of Jettersville, Virginia, before the Union infantry of V Corps and Lee’s army. Recognizing the significance of the crucial crossroads, Little Phil swiftly arranged his small force to secure the junction until the majority of his troops could arrive. Just then, fate intervened. Sheridan’s men captured a Confederate scout who was riding a mule toward Burkeville. Hidden in the scout’s boot was a telegram: “The army is at Amelia Court House, short of provisions, Send 300,000 rations quickly to Burkeville Junction.”
Sheridan’s Commander of the Jessie Scouts – Major Henry Harrison Young
Sheridan hoped to use the contents of the captured note to his advantage. “My troops were hard up for rations, for in the pursuit, we could not wait for our trains, so I concluded to secure, if possible, these provisions intended for Lee. To this end, I directed Young to send four of his best scouts to Burkeville Junction. There, they were to separate, two taking the railroad toward Lynchburg and two toward Danville and find the crucial supply trains.
When Lee’s famished and exhausted men arrived at Amelia Court House on the morning of April 4 and opened the supply train’s boxcars, they contained scores of loaded caissons, hundreds of crates of ammunition, and boxes of worthless artillery harnesses, but no food. One theory holds the mistake stemmed from an administrative mix-up; another posits that Young’s Scouts redirected the trains. The source of the error remains a mystery to this day. Nevertheless, the lack of supplies, crucial as any in war, threatened to derail the Army of Northern Virginia’s retreat and affect the course of the conflict. Starving men were expected to march for their lives and fight. Lee relayed desperate orders to send provisions and ordered his men to forage the countryside. Precious time was lost. Then Lee ordered his men to march toward Jettersville, only for his advance elements to find that Sheridan had beaten him there. Rather than fight Sheridan, he fatefully decided to move in another direction—west toward Farmville and the promise of rations for his famished army.
The full details of this remarkable story at Appomattox are told for the first time in my bestselling book, The Unvanquished: The Untold Story of Lincoln’s Special Forces, the Manhunt for Mosby’s Rangers, and the Shadow War That Forged America’s Special Operations. The book reveals the drama of the irregular guerrilla warfare that altered the course of the Civil War, including the story of Lincoln’s special forces who donned Confederate gray to hunt Mosby and his Confederate Rangers from 1863 to the war’s end at Appomattox. This previously untold story inspired the creation of U.S. modern special operations in World War II. The book also captures the story of the Confederate Secret Service.
Sheridan also targeted Lee’s horse-drawn supply wagons. On the night of April 4, he sent all available scouts to locate them. At Clemmens Bridge, the scouts discovered a long line of wagons camped and prepared to depart at dawn for Amelia Court House, where Lee’s army was stationed. The scouts, along with attached cavalry, destroyed numerous valuable wagons. Charging across an open field, James Campbell rode alongside the wagons, firing his Colts. In the midst of battling Confederates, he captured a large battle flag.
When Lee discovered that Sheridan had blocked the roads at Jettersville, he urged his troops to push westward to the very limits of their endurance in order to avoid Union infantry and Sheridan’s cavalry. The scouts informed Sheridan of Lee’s new direction, prompting him to order his troops to block Lee’s path.
General George Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac, ill with indigestion and riding in a wagon, disagreed and believed Lee to still be at Amelia Court House, so he planned to attack the empty town the next morning. The Jessie Scouts furnished Sheridan with superior, real-time intelligence that Lee’s troops were on the move to Farmville. Frustrated, Sheridan sent Jessie Scout James Campbell to find Grant with a note: “I wish you were here yourself. I feel confident of capturing the Army of Northern Virginia if we exert ourselves, I see no escape for Lee.” In such a fluid battlespace, communication between the various elements of Grant’s army and the Jessie Scouts played a vital and indispensable role; at great peril, they could move in and out of the retreating Confederate forces. Campbell brought Grant and a small party of his men through bands of retreating Confederates to Sheridan at Jettersville. Here, Grant countermanded Meade’s orders and decided that instead of shadowing the Confederates, Sheridan would get ahead of them to cut off their routes of escape and means of supply – the Jessie Scouts in their Confederate uniforms led the way. Sheridan’s current orders from Meade would have allowed Lee to escape. Sheridan’s cavalry headed toward Deatonsville and what would become known as the Battle of Little Sailor’s Creek. Sheridan planned to have a corps of infantry bring up the rear in a pincer movement intended to envelop the Army of Northern Virginia.
Map of Appomattox, Lee’s retreat and Grant’s pursuit, April 2–9, 1865. Creative Commons
Several intense battles near Sailor’s Creek around High Bridge led to the capture of one of Sheridan’s cavalry commanders and nearly the destruction of one of the regiments, but with the Federals blocking the way to Danville, Lee’s beleaguered army marched toward Lynchburg. At Prospect Station, Crook’s and Sheridan’s other divisions united. Jessie Scout James White galloped up to Sheridan with dramatic news: McCabe and White had found Lee’s supply trains—four trains, loaded with supplies for Lee’s starving army. With the original dispatch orders from Lee in hand, the Jessie Scouts, dressed as Confederates, persuaded the conductors to move the trains east of Appomattox Station, where they could be seized. Sheridan’s plan a couple of days earlier of sending two teams of Jessie Scouts down the tracks was about to contribute to ending the war. Sheridan immediately dispatched the priceless intelligence about the trains’ location, and cavalry under Custer’s command seized the locomotives and rolling stock and Lee’s best hope of supplying his starving army.
On April 8, Grant sent Lee a letter appealing to the Southern commander’s sense of honor in an effort to avoid further bloodshed. Lee and his officers discussed their options: whether to surrender or to fight to the end. Twenty-nine-year-old Brigadier General Edward Porter Alexander urged Lee to disperse the army and conduct guerrilla warfare, as Jefferson Davis had ordered. Lee listened to Alexander’s passionate arguments. “If there is any hope for the Confederacy it is in delay. For if the Army of Northern Virginia surrenders every other will surrender as fast as the news reaches it. For it is the morale of this army which has supported the whole of the Confederacy.”
When Lee asked Alexander how many would escape, he responded, “Two-thirds of us, I think, would get away. We would scatter like rabbits and partridges in the woods, and they could not scatter to catch us.”
Lee himself had once boasted that if the army escaped to the Blue Ridge Mountains, he could fight for twenty years. Strategically, Davis’ plan for guerrilla war had merit. The stakes, as Lee considered his options near Appomattox, were enormous. Several paths of escape remained open if Lee divided his army.
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A guerrilla war in the South could have been one of the bloodiest in history and taken years to resolve. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are replete with successful insurgencies that prevailed against occupying empires and massive armies—Afghanistan, China, the Middle East, and Vietnam, to name a few. Some conflicts shifted from irregular to conventional war. Ultimately, many insurgencies wore down the occupier. The North would have had to occupy a land mass larger than Western Europe filled with mountains, swamps, and forests ideal for insurgent warfare and a population friendly to guerillas but hostile to the occupiers. Southerners who previously had their homes burned, their industry ravaged, and hundreds of thousands of their sons slain had a rabid hatred for the North. An insurgent force with the population’s support is almost impossible to defeat.
Lee himself had once boasted that if the army escaped to the Blue Ridge Mountains, he could fight for twenty years. Strategically, Davis’ plan for guerrilla war had merit. The stakes, as Lee considered his options near Appomattox, were enormous. Several paths of escape remained open if Lee divided his army.
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At Appomattox, General John Brown Gordon, one of the South’s best generals, made one last attempt to break through Sheridan’s lines. After the unsuccessful attack, Lee listened intently to his subordinates. “Country be damned! There is no country, general, for a year or more. You are the country to these men. They have fought for you,” snapped former Virginia governor Henry Wise. Grant also recognized Lee’s enormous power to determine the South’s path; hence his determination to capture or destroy Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Lee, instead, saw a future drenched in blood. Considering the possibility of ongoing guerilla action, he raised the paramount issue of supply: “The men would be without rations and under no control of officers. . . . They would be compelled to rob and steal to live. They would become . . . bands of marauders.”
General Edward Porter Alexander appealed to Lee to continue the struggle. Known for priding himself on following the civilian chain of command, Lee would take the extraordinary step of shattering it. Lee responded to Alexander, “As Christian men, General Alexander, you and I have no right to think for one moment of our personal feelings or affairs. We must consider only the effect our action will have upon our country at large.” Generally never a proponent of guerilla warfare because it typically got dirty and undisciplined, Lee proclaimed, “And as for myself, you young fellows might go bushwhacking, but the only dignified course for me would be to go to General Grant and surrender myself and take the consequences of my acts. . . . I would rather die a thousand deaths.” “How easily I could get rid of all of this and be at rest. I have only to ride along the lines and all will be over.” Tears flowed from his generals’ eyes as Lee profoundly ended the discussion with a deep sigh: “But it is our duty to live. What will become of the women and children of the South, if we are not here to protect them.”
Refusing to act on Jefferson Davis’ direct orders to conduct guerrilla warfare, one man, through his personal agency, would change history. Lee sent out bearers with white flags requesting a ceasefire and a meeting with Grant.
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Lee and Grant met at the McLean House in the early afternoon of April 9. Ironically, in 1861, the owner, Wilmer McLean, had a home situated in the heart of the Manassas Battlefield but moved to Appomattox to escape the war. During the surrender negotiations, Lee brought up the issue of supplies for his starving men: “[My men] have been living for the last few days principally upon parched corn, and we are badly in need of rations and forage. I telegraphed to Lynchburg, directing several train loads of rations to be sent on rails from there, and when they arrive, I should be glad to have the present wants of my men supplied from them.”
“All eyes turned to Sheridan,” whose Jessie Scouts had located and detained the all-important supply trains, impairing the ability of the Army of Northern Virginia to continue the fight in a conventional or unconventional manner. Nothing about Lee’s retreat or surrender was preordained, and Sheridan’s Jessie Scouts played a crucial role in bringing it to a conclusion.
Grant provided rations for Lee’s troops. Demonstrating the qualities of a true statesman, his terms at Appomattox were both generous and far-sighted. Instead of treating the Confederates like traitors and sending them to prisoner-of-war camps, he offered them parole. Officers were allowed to keep their swords and sidearms, and the men were permitted to keep their horses. While some might choose to continue fighting, Grant considered this a risk worth taking. Most soldiers returned home. Setting aside pettiness and hatred, the Confederates were treated with dignity and welcomed back into the Union with honor.
The reunification of America started at Appomattox.
Grant ordered a formal surrender ceremony that included a grand review of the stacked arms and the relinquishing of the Confederate colors. General Gordon was tasked with leading the parade of Confederate divisions on the outskirts of the rolling farmland of Appomattox. He guided around 28,000 members of Lee’s army in a simple yet profound ceremony that lasted seven hours. Grant appointed Brigadier General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a hero from Little Round Top at Gettysburg and a Medal of Honor recipient, to oversee the event. Chamberlain later described the sight of their former foes as they marched before his Federal troops.“In proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood . . . thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond.”
Chamberlain spontaneously ordered “carry arms” to the Union soldiers as a sign of deep respect for their vanquished foes marching before them. Gordon, “with heavy spirit,” faced
the Union general and wheeled his horse, “the rider made one motion, the horse’s head swung down with a graceful bow, and General Gordon dropped his sword point to his toe in salutation,” recalled the Maine officer.
Stillness and silence pervaded the field. “Honor answering honor,” wrote Chamberlain.
Patrick K. O’Donnell is a bestselling, critically-acclaimed military historian and an expert on special operations units. He is the author of thirteen books, including his new bestselling book on the Civil War The Unvanquished: The Untold Story of Lincoln’s Special Forces, the Manhunt for Mosby’s Rangers, and the Shadow War That Forged America’s Special Operations, which makes a great Christmas gift and currently in the front display of Barnes & Noble stores nationwide. O’Donnell’s other bestsellers include: The Indispensables, The Unknowns, and Washington’s Immortals. He served as a volunteer combat historian in a Marine rifle platoon during the Battle of Fallujah and often speaks on espionage, special operations, and counterinsurgency. He has provided historical consulting for DreamWorks’ award-winning miniseries Band of Brothers and documentaries produced by Fox, the History Channel, and Discovery. PatrickKODonnell.com @combathistorian
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