April 9th, 1865. Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant meet at the home of Wilmer McLean near
Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, to discuss the surrender of Lee's battered Army of Northern Virginia, which had by then dwindled to about 28,000 men. While Lee's surrender effectively ended the American Civil War, this was not the last nor even the largest Confederate surrender of the conflict. The latter distinction belongs, in fact, to the capitulation later that month of Joseph E. Johnston to William T. Sherman at
Bennett Place just outside Durham, North Carolina. Johnston, in addition to surrendering his ~39,000-man army, saw to it that an additional 50,000 Confederate soldiers operating in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida laid down their arms.
While Appomattox Courthouse is seared into our collective American psyche, Bennett Place--the largest troop surrender of the Civil War--is often overlooked or even forgotten. But why? (Full disclosure: I actually knew nothing about Bennett House myself until a few years ago when my sister and I visited the park. Bennett House belongs to North Carolina's wonderful collection of
State Historic Sites. That same day, we visited
Alamance Battleground, which is another interesting historical episode of which I was completely unaware.) On November 16th,
Durham Technical Community College (DTCC), as part of its Social Sciences/Humanities Speaker Series, invited
Dr. Stephen Cushman to offer an answer to this question.
Cushman, a poet and historian in the Department of English at the University of Virginia, is interested in how literary expression (letters, poems, books, etc.) shapes memories of the Civil War. In other words, how did those who lived through the conflict actually write about it, and how did their writings influence the way they, and others, remember and commemorate the war?
There are several commonly cited reasons why Bennett House plays second fiddle to Appomattox. The first is what Cushman referred to as "Virginia-centrism." There were, of course, several battles fought outside of Virginia, but many of the largest and most well-publicized were fought within that state. That the Appomattox surrender occurred in the Virginia theater, then, and the fact that it involved the war's two most celebrated generals (Grant and Lee) helped ensure its central place in memories of the war. Bennett House also lacked the pomp and circumstance and pathos of the Appomattox performance. Appomattox thus contributed to and exemplified the powerful and appealing idea of a valiant, but defeated, Confederacy. (This so-called "
Lost Cause" myth still permeates contemporary remembrances of the Civil War.) What is more, the events at Bennett House were drawn out over several days (as opposed to the relatively short and sweet event at Appomattox) and were ultimately overshadowed by the assassination of President Lincoln. Cushman acknowledged that all these elements contributed to the primacy of Appomattox. However, his reading of Civil War-era literature suggested a different, and much less-well known, factor: the nature of the personal relationship between Johnston and Sherman.
To grasp Cushman's thesis, we first need to understand the dual meanings of the word "surrender." It can mean "to cease resistance to an enemy" or "give up the fight," which are, of course, what we typically think about in a military context. However, it can also refer to the act of giving up
something, either an object (usually weapons in a military context) or even one's self.
The second key component of Cushman's argument is the way Johnston and Sherman wrote about their relationship with each other. Unlike Grant and Lee, who faced each other on the battlefield only during the last year and a half of the war, Johnston and Sherman squared off several times going back to 1861. In his memoirs, Sherman often refers to Johnston as a friend (Johnston, however, never uses such language when speaking of Sherman) and repeatedly praises Johnston's generalship. While Sherman no doubt respected Johnston, the assessments of Johnston's skill as a commander also served to elevate the impact of his (Sherman's) triumph at Bennett House.
The last issue revolves around how later authors wrote about the relationship between the two men. Johnston served as a pallbearer at Sherman's funeral in 1891 and died himself of pneumonia only ten days later. It was reported afterwards in Oliver Otis Howard's autobiography that Johnston refused to protect himself from the chilly February weather, stating in response to someone's plea that he put his hat on, "If I were in his place and he [Sherman] standing here in mine he would not put on his hat."
While this is unlikely to be a word-for-word quote, this exchange was repeated in slightly modified form by later authors and probably reflects the gist of Johnston's response. Given the way that people wrote about this episode, Cushman argued that it was only after Johnston's death--and the symbolic surrender of his body to his "close friend" Sherman--that the surrender at Bennett House finally reached its conclusion. In doing so, writers essentially created the myth of reconciliation that the country yearned for some twenty-five years after the end of the Civil War.
Cushman's analysis testifies to the power of the written word and its ability to shape memory.
