Since I wasn't speaking anywhere today, before driving to church I decided to make a brief visit to Appomattox Court House on this, the 161st anniversary weekend, of the surrender. April 9, 1865, is arguably one of the most momentous days in our nation's history. It was here, in the McLean House, that Lee rejected guerilla warfare and accepted Union general Ulysses S. Grant's terms of surrender. Grant, with uncommon generosity and foresight, set a tone for postwar America. Today the village is virtually unchanged from the time when Lee said, "I have probably to be Grant's prisoner on this day."
In 1865, Appomattox was little more than a way station for travelers on the Richmond-Lynchburg stage road. It comprised 20 or so simply structures quietly hugging the land, including several small stores, a tavern, and the courthouse itself.
For the site of the surrender, Lee's aide had settled on the home of Wilmer McLean, built in 1848, a neat and tidy brick house with a sweeping covered porch.
Lee was the first to sit down in the parlor at a small wooden table, resplendent in a magnificent crisp gray uniform with an engraved sword at his side.
Half an hour later, Grant entered -- swordless, in a private's muddy shirt, his boots and trousers splattered with mud. For the first time in decades, the two generals would see other in the flesh, face to face.
The war had asked and answered the question: Would the United States prosper and endure, or disintegrate and decline? Today, it's hard for me to imagine a Disunited States of America. But back in the mid-nineteenth century, the only world most people knew was anything but unified. Until the Civil War, America was an artificial series of seemingly sovereign states (the word "nation" appears nowhere in the Constitution). So the question arose: Was America a nation?
But war is a transforming power. In mid-April 1865, the people of both regions knew that the war was ending. After 4 years of bloody conflict, they would all become citizens of the United States. Or would they? The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle could slowly be put into place -- or else the puzzle would disintegrate and fall apart. At war's end, what Americans were asking for was nothing less than a rebirth, a new beginning that was something quite different from what had gone before. Regionalism would, of course, remain a factor in the American way of life. But never again would any serious thought be given to future secession. "The United States are ..." gradually became "The United States is ...." The Civil War, no less than the Revolutionary War, made America what it is today.
For me, April 1865 showcased one of the greatest events in American history. Citizens no longer spoke of two lands, but one, thereby merging the nation together. I was born into a united country. True, Hawaii was not a yet a state in 1952, but merely a territory of the United States. Nevertheless, I never for a moment doubted that I was an American.
I love to visit Appomattox for so many reasons, but one of them is surely the reminder that America is still a work in progress. Therein lies the terrible grandeur of the surrender at Appomattox. As the ex-soldiers from both sides, exhausted and hungry, made their way back to their homes, the nation too limped its way into a new era. That striving to be truly e pluribus unum continues today.
