On June 5, 1864, during a pause in the Civil War battle of Cold Harbor on the James River in Virginia, Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant sent a message to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Grant proposed a temporary halt to the hostilities so the armies could bury their dead and retrieve hundreds of their wounded that lay between the battle lines without being fired upon.
Lee, the aristocratic southern gentleman quibbled and delayed. Grant sent more messages. By the time Lee finally agreed to Grant’s humanitarian request, 48 hours had passed and all but two of the wounded had died.
Grant never forgot it.
It can never be known for sure what was in Lee’s mind or heart over that two-day period, but after the two losses of Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863 it was the strategy of the Confederacy to create as much death and carnage on the battlefield as possible. It was an effort to arouse the northern public to pressure their political leaders into a negotiated settlement or, failing that, to defeat Lincoln in the November 1864 election.
By 1864, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was no longer the sharp, agile force it once was. Desertion, malnutrition, disease and death had taken its toll. It had become an army of defensive tactics in service to a strategy of attrition. One of Lee’s tactics in the final year of the war was trench warfare, foreshadowing the epic human slaughterhouse on the western front in World War I 50 years later.
Confederate tactics and strategy certainly did not go unnoticed by Grant and other Union officers. Union Quartermaster Gen. Montgomery Meigs, himself a southerner and a superb quartermaster general, at one time served in the U.S. Army under Lee and admired him, but now reviled him as a traitor.
In 1864 Meigs had to find more cemetery space for Union soldiers. Lee’s home and plantation in Virginia had been captured by Union soldiers and Meigs determined it didn’t flood and would be a fitting resting place for northern dead.
At first soldiers were buried far away on the plantation from Lee’s house, but after Meigs’ own son was killed by the rebels he ordered Union officers to be buried close to the house, surrounding Mrs. Lee’s cherished garden. The ground thus consecrated, Lee could never live there again. He didn’t.
Meigs was unforgiving toward the rebels. “Justice seems not satisfied if they escape judicial trial and execution by the government, which they have betrayed and attacked and whose people, loyal and disloyal they have slaughtered.”
Gen. Grant was more lenient. He personally intervened to prevent Lee being tried for treason, but Lee’s renewed post-war loyalty to the United States was half-hearted at best.
When white southerners tried to overturn the outcome of the war by terrorizing freed slaves in the 1870s, President Grant’s generosity faded.
“Mississippi,” he said, “is being ruled by terrorism.” After Grant left office in 1877, federal troops left the south and the era of Jim Crow terror began.
Montgomery Meigs’ original “monument” to the Confederacy, Lee’s home and plantation, is known to us today as Arlington National Cemetery.
Marty Ansley
Cinebar
