On the morning of April 8, 1865, Surgeon John H. Claiborne and his companions moved with the shattered remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia. Federal troops had occupied Petersburg and Richmond days earlier, and Claiborne, who had run a military hospital in his native Petersburg, had attached himself to General Robert E. Lee’s army.
What he found nearly broke him. Years later, in his 1904 memoir, Seventy-Five Years in Old Virginia, Claiborne recalled that morning with painful clarity. The signs of collapsing morale and dissolving ranks were everywhere. Men who had faced death in a hundred battles without fear now trudged along with blank faces.
Officers of high rank wandered without commands and without authority. Muskets lay abandoned on the roadside or were thrust muzzle-down into the earth by men who had simply walked away. The soldiers themselves had not lost their edge. When ordered to stop and drive back the enemy, these veterans formed with the old battle light in their eyes, delivered devastating fire, and then resumed their sorrowful march.
But every stand cost them dear companions left dead on the field, and their numbers shrank so steadily that the end, or annihilation, became obvious to everyone. Even then, surrender had never crossed Claiborne’s mind. To him, to the soldiers, and to nearly every man, woman, and child in the Confederacy, the Army of Northern Virginia embodied courage and endurance. The flags of the South, blessed by its women and baptized in the blood of its finest men, seemed impossible to drag through the dirt.
A million prayers of sacrifice and self-denial, he believed, could not go unheard where the fates of nations were decided. Like many heart-heavy veterans marching home after Appomattox, he would later think of Bonaparte’s belief that providence always favored the heaviest artillery. At noon on the eighth, one day before surrender, Claiborne’s small group moved near the front with artillery companies that had largely exhausted their ammunition. They received orders to advance along the Lynchburg road and soon encountered Colonel Peyton, one of Lee’s inspectors general.
Peyton was placing a small body of infantry on a hill overlooking the surrounding countryside. There appeared to be no more than two hundred men in all. Claiborne, a close friend of Peyton’s, rode over and asked about the unit. Slowly and sadly, Peyton answered: this was all that remained of the First Virginia Regiment, and it was the sole guard of the left wing of the Army of Northern Virginia.
Beyond rifle range, Federal cavalry hovered like birds of prey waiting for an opening. Within sight, numerous muskets stood planted in the ground, abandoned by men who, heartbroken and worn down by hunger and exhaustion, had drifted away. No one knew where they had gone. Four years of danger, hardship, and combat had proven their mettle, but the grinding starvation finally overcame them.
They dispersed across the countryside, away from the enemy’s view, heading toward any house or cabin that might promise a piece of bread. Claiborne had seen men whose ration for days consisted of corn stolen from horse feed, roasted and chewed as they marched and fought. He asked Peyton a direct question: did General Lee know how few men remained, or how miserable they had become? Peyton replied that he did not think the general knew.
Then Claiborne pressed: if the inspectors general would not tell him, who would? Peyton said he could not do it. He hesitated and repeated that he could not. For the first time, Claiborne’s strength failed him.
With a voice choked with tears, he told his small group to move on. There was nothing more they could do here. Perhaps they could reach General Johnston’s army in North Carolina, or perhaps some commander west of the Mississippi might still raise the Stars and Stripes and give freedom a gathering point and refuge. Until that hour, Claiborne had held firm faith in the final success of the Confederate cause.
Now, as the sun sank behind the hills of Appomattox, he began to look on life as a trivial game. The only lucky men, he thought, were the brave soldiers already sleeping in soldier’s graves, spared the taste of defeat and the humiliation of marching under a conqueror’s yoke. He rode on with classical memories crowding his mind. He thought of Ulysses wandering after the fall of Troy, a miserable exile, and recalled Homer’s lines blessing those who died in battle on Trojan soil.
The Latin epic came to him too, and the lament of unhappy Aeneas, singing of those fortunate enough to have died before their fathers’ eyes beneath the high walls of Troy. There was no time for sentiment. The group hurried on and reached Appomattox Court House shortly before sunset, passing through the little village and camping perhaps a mile behind it near some artillery pieces whose broken parts were ordered shipped to Lynchburg. Claiborne removed the bridle from his horse, expecting she might enjoy some forage, and lay down with his head on his saddle to sleep, believing they had passed beyond the enemy column known to be pursuing and plundering along a parallel road.
He had barely dozed off when his faithful servant Buckart woke him, shouting that the Federals were attacking. He had only enough time to escape with two companions, Drs. Smith and Field, into a dense thicket of dwarf oak, known in that region as blackjack, too tangled for horsemen to penetrate. The enemy charged with shouts and screams and the clatter of swords, heading toward the artillery several hundred yards behind them.
Immediately, heavy fire broke out from rifles and cannon, rebel yells rose, and the Federal cavalry fell back in haste. Another attack followed, then irregular firing from the field pieces and a general scattering as far as they could see. The three men slipped away from the field, moving and retreating through the woods until they reached a high fence and climbed it, placing the fence and the blackjack thicket between themselves and the enemy cavalry. With darkness falling and no knowledge of the terrain or the relative positions of the opposing forces, they judged it best to lie quietly until daylight.
That ended Surgeon Claiborne’s account of the evening of April 8, 1865. The next day, April 9, the day of surrender, he and his companions fell into enemy hands and eventually received parole papers. The war in the East was over.