Stacking Arms “What Ifs?” – Episode IV: “What If” Sheridan Had Gotten His Way & Launched the Final Assault Upon Lee’s Army at Appomattox Court House?

“Damn them. I wish they had held out an hour longer and I would have whipped hell out of them.” Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan, Appomattox Court House, April 9, 1865.[1]

During the Appomattox Campaign, Philip Sheridan was Ulysses S. Grant’s most aggressive field commander. Grant praised Sheridan as “one of the heroes of the campaign, … whose pursuit of Lee was perfect in its generalship and energy.”[2] For his part, Sheridan counseled Grant that Robert E. Lee would never willingly surrender, but would have to be compelled by force to do so. And Sheridan was eager to be the force that pounded Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia into submission.[3]

On the morning of April 9, just outside the small village of Appomattox Court House, it appeared that Sheridan had his opportunity. Sheridan’s cavalry had started this fateful Palm Sunday resisting Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon’s Confederate “corps”—reduced to about 5,000 men—as Gordon, supported by Maj. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry, fought to open a westward escape route for Lee’s army. Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet (with perhaps 3,000 effectives) was trying to hold off the Army of the Potomac, pressing Lee’s rear from the east.[4]

Gordon’s “advance unfolded from approximately 7:00 to 9:00 a.m.,” his men sweeping out from the Court House to force the Union cavalry away from the road they were blocking. Sheridan had his troopers gradually fall back, buying time for infantry to arrive.[5] That reinforcement appeared around 9:30 a.m., two corps that outnumbered Lee’s total remaining organized troops, let alone Gordon’s command.[6]

The Confederates retreated as the federals advanced to hills above the village.[7] Sheridan recalled that “we soon reached some high ground about half a mile from the Court House, and from here I could see in the low valley beyond the village the bivouac undoubtedly of Lee’s army.” The troops there seemed unprepared to receive an attack. Sheridan also saw Lee’s rear guard resisting Maj. Gen. George Meade’s Army of the Potomac.[8]

It was perfect. To the west, Ord was pressing Gordon’s men, who were “furiously fighting in nearly every direction.”[9]To the east, Meade pinned Longstreet. Unprepared rebels lay in between.[10] Sheridan would first crush them, then the separated wings of the remaining Confederates. The utter destruction of Lee’s army beckoned.

That was Sheridan’s goal. He recounted: “I decided to attack at once, and formations were ordered at a trot for a charge by Custer’s and Devin’s divisions down the slope leading to the camps. Custer was soon ready, but Devin’s division being in the rear its formation took longer…” Just as Sheridan was completing his dispositions an aide galloped up with a message: ‘“Lee has surrendered; do not charge; the white flag is up.” The enemy perceiving that Custer was forming for attack, had sent the flag out to his front and stopped the charge just in time.’[11]

Sheridan lamented that, with just one more hour, “I would have whipped hell out of them.”[12] Yet, based on his own words, it seems as if the final charge and consequent slaughter were averted by mere minutes. It took certain critical decisions by key actors in this drama to prevent such a calamity.

Lee bears much responsibility both for the near destruction of his army, as well as its ultimate peaceful salvation. Lee’s responsibility starts with the fact that on April 8 he rebuffed Grant’s call to surrender. Instead, Lee asked for a meeting at 10:00 a.m. on April 9 to discuss an overall peace settlement. Lee would meet Grant between the picket lines on his eastern front, between Longstreet’s corps and the Army of the Potomac.[13] But while planning a peace meeting, Lee ordered Gordon’s breakout attempt to the west. This set up a potentially fatal chain of events.

Around 8:30 a.m. on April 9, Lee set out to keep his appointment with Grant. He already knew that Gordon’s attack was failing, with federal infantry approaching. Lee discussed with Longstreet the probability of surrender. Yet before leaving camp, Lee failed to call off Gordon’s effort, nor direct him to set up flags of truce to halt the fighting while Lee conferred with Grant.[14]

On the road beyond Longstreet’s lines where he expected to meet Grant, instead came a messenger carrying Grant’s note refusing to meet Lee about a general peace. Lee, facing the inevitable, wrote Grant asking for a meeting to surrender.[15]Also, at some point after sending off his note to Grant, Lee finally sent messages to Gordon and Longstreet, directing them to arrange truces along their lines.[16]

But there was a problem. Grant was not around to receive Lee’s note.

After sending his message rejecting Lee’s meeting request, Grant had ordered Meade to launch an attack. Grant then left on a roundabout 22-mile ride to reach Sheridan’s side of the battlefield. It would take time to find the Union commander. Meade told Lee of his attack order. Meade had no discretion to call off the assault, which would commence before Grant could be reached. Colonel Charles Marshall, Lee’s aide, urged Meade to read Lee’s message to Grant, convinced Meade then would agree to stop fighting. Lee also drafted a second note to Grant, asking for a “suspension of hostilities.” But there was no time left.[17]

As Lee waited in the road between the lines for an answer to his plea for a truce, the answer unfolded right in front of him. Meade’s men moved to the attack, skirmishers advancing towards Lee and his party. A messenger asked that Lee withdraw. Lee stubbornly stayed put. Federals came within 100 yards of the Confederate commander. “Then came a preemptory warning that he must withdraw immediately…” Lee rode back within Longstreet’s lines as they prepared to resist the blue wave. At the last minute, Meade consented to a one-hour truce.[18]

Meanwhile, Sheridan also reluctantly agreed to a truce on his front after learning of Lee’s impending surrender. Once Gordon received Lee’s note telling him to seek a truce, Gordon sent a messenger to notify Ord. He could not be located, but the messenger found Custer, who notified Sheridan.[19]

In his Memoirs, Grant observed that both Meade and Sheridan resisted truces from suspicion of Confederate bad faith. Indeed Sheridan, who met Gordon, condemned what he saw as Lee’s trickery, declaring: “I have been constantly informed of the progress of the negotiations, and think it singular that while such discussions are going on, General Lee should have continued his march and attempted to break through my lines this morning.”[20]

In the end, Lee and Grant met in Wilmer McLean’s parlor, and the Army of Northern Virginia peacefully ended its existence. But, as shown by the events described above, it almost did not work out that way. Lee and his army were fortunate that their existence did not end in a bloody final assault by either, or both, wings of the federal forces.

The “what ifs” of this situation are legion. What if Meade had refused even a brief truce? Meade could have decided he had better follow Grant’s attack order. Certainly, a man who had been excoriated for supposedly “letting Lee escape” after Gettysburg might not want to risk being the man who let Lee escape again. Or what if the truce Meade did allow expired before Grant was located and Meade then felt he could attack with a clear conscience?

What if there had been a delay in Sheridan learning of Lee’s plan to surrender? As noted above, Gordon actually directed his courier to present Gordon’s message seeking a truce to Ord, not Sheridan. What if the messenger had spent more time than he did trying to locate Ord (per his orders), or been otherwise delayed in then locating Sheridan, or been shot during his travels, or just lamed his horse? Sheridan clearly was poised to attack. That messenger had a slim margin for error in terms of delivering his crucial message in time.

What if Sheridan did receive word of Lee’s intent to surrender in time to cancel his assault, but nevertheless went ahead with the attack? Clearly, Sheridan believed that Lee had been deceitful; he had just fought off Gordon’s attack while Lee was supposedly ready to talk peace with Grant that same morning. Sheridan already was convinced that Lee never would willingly surrender. Especially considering Sheridan’s temperament, would it have been so surprising if Sheridan had – Lord Nelson-style – “turned a blind eye” to any message that might have stopped him from what he really wanted to do?

Finally, in any of these attack scenarios, Lee presumably would have rushed to the point of crisis to try and rally his overwhelmed troops. Such a desperate effort might have been fatal for him. Or, alternatively, what if one of the Union skirmishers who came within 100 yards of General Lee on that road had recognized the rebel commander, concluded that Lee must have already been warned to retire, and decided he was in his rights to put a bullet through the symbol of the rebellion?

Fortunately, these are all “what ifs,” not history. But they easily could have happened.

Part of a series.

[1] Ron Chernow, Grant (Penguin Press, New York, NY, 2017), p. 505.

[2] John Russell Young, Around The World With General Grant: A Narrative Of The Visit Of General U. S. Grant, Ex-President Of The United States, To Various Countries In Europe, Asia, And Africa, In 1877, 1878, 1879: To Which Are Added Certain Conversations With General Grant On Questions Connected With American Politics And History(Subscription Book Department, American News Co., New York, NY 1879), Vol. 2, p. 456, https://archive.org/details/aroundworldgrant02younuoft/page/302/mode/2up?q=lee.

[3] Burke Davis, To Appomattox: Nine April Days, 1865 (Eastern Acorn Press, reprint by Publishing Center for Cultural Resources, New York, NY, 1992), pp. 298, 333; Elizabeth R. Varon, Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom At The End of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2014), pp. 8, 15-16, 35; Chernow, pp. 497, 504-505.

[4] Davis, p. 342 (numbers in each command); Varon, pp. 37-38, 40-41; Clifford Downey & Louis H. Manarin, Editors, The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee (DaCapo, New York, NY, 1961), pp. 902, 937.

[5] Philip Sheridan, Civil War Memoirs (Bantam Books, New York, NY, 1991), p. 345; Varon, pp. 40-41.

[6] Edward O.C. Ord hustled forward the XXIV Corps of his Army of the James (the corps commanded by John Gibbon), followed by Charles Griffin’s V Corps of the Army of the Potomac, together totaling approximately 25,000 infantry. Varon, p. 40; The Battle of Appomattox Court House, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/apco/learn/historyculture/the-battle-of-appomattox-court-house.htm.

[7] Sheridan, pp. 345-346; Varon, p. 41.

[8] Sheridan, p. 346.

[9] Davis, p. 357 (quoting Gordon).

[10] Davis, p. 345.

[11] Sheridan, p. 346 (emphasis supplied).

[12] Chernow, p. 505.

[13] Downey & Manarin, p. 932 (Document No. 997).

[14] Douglass Southall Freeman, R.E. Lee: A Biography (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, NY, 1940), Vol. IV, pp. 119-124; Varon, pp. 41-43.

[15] Varon, pp. 43-44.

[16] Freeman, pp. 127-128; James Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox:  Memoirs of the Civil War in America(Barnes & Noble, Inc., New York, NY, 2004), pp. 538-539.

[17] Davis, pp. 353-355; Varon, p. 44; Freeman, pp. 127-128.

[18] Freeman, pp. 128-131; Sheridan, pp. 346-349; Davis, pp. 354-355.

[19] Freeman, pp. 130-131; Sheridan, pp. 346, 348-349; Davis, pp. 357-358, 366.

[20] Ulysses S. Grant, John F. Marszalek with David S. Nolen and Louie P. Gallo, Eds., The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant: The Complete Annotated Edition (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017), p. 718; Sheridan, p. 348; see also Young, pp. 456-457.