Smoke drifted over Farmville as the sun set in sullen red over the Appomattox River. General James Longstreet’s Confederate corps—ragged, footsore, but unbroken—watched the darkening riverbank with wary eyes.
All day they had fought a desperate delaying action. Federal infantry had pressed them hard, their blue lines rolling forward like surf crashing on rock. But Longstreet’s veterans, men who had followed him from the blood-soaked fields of Antietam and Chickamauga, held their ground with bitter determination.
Cannon roared across fields of stubble and young spring grass. Musket volleys cracked in ragged unison. But as twilight deepened, the firing slackened. The battered gray columns slowly began to disengage, the men falling back through woods and farm lanes to the bridges across the Appomattox River.
Lanterns glimmered along the riverbank. Engineers barked orders in the gloom. Wagons rattled, mules brayed, and the wounded moaned as they were ferried north to temporary safety.
On the north side of the river, Lee’s army was exhausted. Horses drooped their heads. Men fell asleep on their muskets or shivered in the cold with empty stomachs. Lee himself sat silent by the glow of a single candle in a commandeered farmhouse.
Outside, staff officers waited in uneasy quiet, the only sounds the night frogs in the marsh and the distant mutter of artillery fire dying away to the east.
Inside, Lee read the letter in his hand over and over:
“General, the result of last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle….”
It was from Ulysses S. Grant.
Grant was camped just a few miles away at Farmville, warm in his headquarters tent, his staff pouring coffee over flickering lamps. And he was offering terms of surrender.
Lee’s eyes narrowed. His army was starving. Hundreds had already fallen out, unable to march. Ammunition was low. Desertions were rising. But there was one hope left.
The railroad station at Appomattox.
If he could get there before Sheridan’s cavalry or the Federal infantry, there might be supplies waiting. He could slip past, angle southwest, and join Johnston in North Carolina. There might still be a chance, however slim, to fight on.
Lee dipped his pen slowly. He would not surrender—not yet.
He wrote back, measured and cautious, asking Grant what terms he would offer. It was not a refusal. It was a delaying move. A hope to buy time for his weary columns to keep moving, trudging west into the darkness.
When his courier galloped off into the night toward the Union lines, Lee gathered his staff. In the candlelight they studied maps and traced the thin red lines of retreat with trembling fingers.
“Appomattox,” he said quietly.
And that night, while fires smoldered along the river, the Army of Northern Virginia lurched to its feet once more, and began the long, desperate march toward its destiny.
