 Richmond, Virginia April 15, 1865 He parted the tent-flap and emerged into the damp pre-dawn darkness: a broad-shouldered man in the uniform of a general officer. Handsome – the most handsome in the old Army, it was said – his hair white and his dark eyes heavy-laden with grief. It was raining again, a cold, aching rain: the same rain that tormented he and his men throughout the terrible March just past, when the doom he had long foretold fell upon them. With April came the sun. Plum, cherry and peach blossomed across the carnage of Northern Virginia, and indeed, some would remember Palm Sunday, April 9, as a particular exemplar of bliss. And mockingly so, maybe: the gentle breezes of Arcadia sweeping a land that was no longer and would never again be Arcadia. On April 10, the rains came down again: Virginia weeping for her sons. He pulled on his gauntlets and gave orders to strike the tent. His last night under canvas. He would never issue that order again. Colonel Taylor and Colonel Marshall, his aides, were waiting beside the Gilliam farmhouse, mounted on their thin horses. The teamsters stood beside the motley collection of wagons: the headquarters wagon, the ambulance and a motley collection bearing their personal effects. A quilt covered the contents of one, a faded “U.S.” stenciled on the sides of several others: a gift of the conquerors, equally if not more relieved that the killing was over. General Gibbon – brave and decent Gibbon, his division of 1861 volunteers virtually destroyed in the bloodbaths of Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor; their ranks filled by terrified conscripts, bounty jumpers and ninety-day men – offered an honor guard of twenty-five troopers. Conscripts too, but immaculately uniformed, well-mounted on those fat Union horses, armed with those fearsome seven-shot Spencers. A generous gesture graciously declined. Still, the troopers insisted on accompanying him at least part of the way toward Richmond. They would tell their children, who would tell their children how their forefathers had the supreme honor of riding alongside the old lion on the day he departed his army forever. He patted his horse’s neck; the grey stallion nickered softly. He mounted. And as the day dawned pale and comfortless and as the rain’s intensity increased, he led the column east on the River Road toward what was once the capital of his nation.  Virginia, 1865 The little column moved slowly narrow tracks through dripping woods, past barren fields tilled by the heavy guns of the Federal artillery, green shoots of bitter weeds emerging from the broken sod. The crumbling chimneys of once-sturdy farmsteads, manors. Places he knew, names he knew: those of the old men who fighting alongside his father in Continental Army had “turned the world upside down.” The road itself was a glutinous morass, churned by Southern soldiers in their thousands and Union troops in their tens and hundreds of thousands; the ironbound wheels of guns carriages and caissons, the ironshod hooves of the horses and mules. Their bloated carcasses, often still harnessed to the wrecks of wagons and guns, lined the road to Richmond like so many mile markers. The dark-eyed man carried himself, a former opponent would say, with “all the air of the oldest blood in the world.” A Baptist minister who saw him that day said his face was “ridged with self-respecting grief.” He was mud-spattered and travel-stained yet the preacher remained “awed by his incomparable dignity. His majestic composure, his rectitude and his sorrow were so wrought and blended into his visage and so beautiful and impressive to me that I fell into violent weeping.” The dark-eyed man left no record of his thoughts on that day, and few indications of his private feelings on any other day. His self-control, particularly in the face of crisis or potential disaster, was legendary. But there were hints. After the surrender he had returned to the Southern camp and paced alone in an orchard beside the road. “One of his savage moods,” an observer remembered. “It was safer to keep out of his way.” But people came. Former enemies, acquaintances from the old Army, and Federal officers curious to see the old lion, the commander of those ragged, sunburned men, those wolves who would erupt from the forests and fields with that hellish, bloodcurdling shriek. What manner of man can command such man? What manner of man will those wolves die for? They removed their hats and approached cautiously with all signs of humility and respect. The dark-eyed man fixed them with a glare and at most touch the brim of his hat. “The interviews were all brief and manifestly not to his liking,” a chronicler of those days would write. “In the hours of the supreme tragedy of his career as a soldier, he did not wish to see strangers or be stared at, it mattered not with what deference.” He would soon regain that legendary self-control. But it is not improper to speculate what were in his thoughts on that final ride to Richmond, his last in the uniform of the first nation to be conquered, crushed and plundered by the United States of America. Or, rather, it not improper for us: the descendants of those wolves, of those terrible men, those who swore they would charge hell for him, and who did, again and again. We, the sons of the men who stood with him, are the guardians of those memories. Not the chattering classes: academics, intellectuals, journalists, think-tank grifters, algo-pushers, “influencers,” and all of them for whom the great tragedy that befell the South from 1861 to 1875 is no more than an abstraction, a cudgel used to belabor putative ideological foes or whoever else their paymasters bid them malign. But their sophistries ring increasingly hollow, as well they should. Winners write history, they say, and if we have learned nothing else from the first twenty-five years of the new millennium, it’s that the Americans lie, lie and lie again, with outrageous and amazing abandon. Tired of “winning”? I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of the lies. The story of the War for Southern Independence is ours; it is the property of the Southern people. It does not long to the Americans, or whatever the Americans have become. This piece is an excerpt from a forthcoming book tentatively titled I Will Make Known My Lineage: General Robert E Lee, the Army of Northern Virginia and the Birth of the Southern People. Read the full Author's Note about the project on Cade's SubStack: A Memoir of the Occupation.
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