On April 9, 1865, the Army of Northern Virginia was surrendered by General Robert E. Lee to Union forces at Appomattox Courthouse. Among the troops stacked that day were the 22 officers and 398 men of the 7th South Carolina Cavalry, a regiment that had spent the final week of the war performing the grim work of protecting the retreat of the Confederate government and army. Just days earlier, on April 2nd and 3rd, it had served as part of the rear guard during the evacuation of Richmond, the capital the Confederacy was abandoning forever.
Now the regiment, like the army it belonged to, was finished. Major Edward Mortimer Boykin, a senior commander of the 7th who had served the Confederacy throughout the war, later recorded his memories of that final period in a set of recollections titled The Fallen Flag, published in 1874. He wrote nine years after the events, with the benefit of time to reflect on what he had witnessed. His account offers a close look at the immediate aftermath of the surrender and the unexpected reactions of men on both sides.
Boykin was a keen observer, and his words reveal both the pride of defeated Southern soldiers and the surprising generosity that marked their first encounters with the victorious Union army. Boykin’s account describes the powerful moment when Lee rode through the Confederate lines after the surrender. Dressed in his full Confederate uniform, with his sword at his side, Lee moved on his gray charger, accompanied by General John B. Gordon.
He passed directly in front of the position where the 7th South Carolina had been lying. Earlier, as he had ridden toward the village, he had not been particularly noticed; Boykin did not even recall seeing him pass. But as soon as the men spotted him on his return, the effect was electric. They sprang to their feet, rushed to the roadside, and broke into wild cheering.
The sound roused the rest of the troops, and as far as the eye could see, men came running down the hillsides to join in. The roaring tribute swept through the woods and into the sky, a salute rarely paid to any mortal man. They cheered their general even though everything was lost. The conduct of the Federal officers and men toward the defeated Southerners impressed Boykin deeply.
He noted that within his personal observation, he did not recall a single discourteous act, nor did he hear of one. Instead, there was much kindness and consideration. Some of this grew from previous acquaintance, common among officers who had once served together in the old army, or from the return of kindness shown when Union prisoners had been in Confederate hands. The treatment was practical as well as courteous.
Regular rations were issued to both men and horses. On one occasion, a Federal quartermaster actually apologized for being unable to serve the Confederates’ horse feed, because General Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry division, still out toward the James River, had cut off the wagon train carrying their provender. The Confederates were forced to send out a forage detail into the nearby countryside, carrying a pass from General Sheridan to move through the Federal troops that filled the woods for miles around. Their name, Boykin wrote, was legion.
The scale of the surrender was overwhelming. Boykin recorded that roughly eight thousand stands of arms were stacked, gathered from artillerymen, cavalrymen, infantrymen, stragglers, and all the rest who had gathered around the army. Between twelve and fifteen thousand men were present to surrender. The United States troops, by their own estimate, numbered 150,000.
Behind them stretched a railroad connecting them with Washington, New York, and beyond that the ports of Europe and the wider world. Boykin observed, with a touch of bitterness, that Federal recruiting stations were scattered all over the globe. He compared the crusade against the South, driven by the pressure of the almighty American dollar, to the old crusades of Peter the Hermit, driven by religious zeal upon Jerusalem. Yet he also granted that success had made the victors good-natured.
The men he encountered among the Union troops were soldiers, fighting men. In Boykin’s view, such men understood their position and were too proud to behave in any petty way. The good nature of their success made them more willing to give than the defeated Confederates, still sore from their loss, were ready to receive. And yet the effect of their conduct was excellent.
The unexpected consideration shown by Federal officers and men did much to soften the bitterness of defeat. Boykin remembered the heartiness with which a Yankee soldier would approach a Confederate officer and ask for a five-dollar Confederate bill as a memento, saying they had been fighting each other for four years. There was nothing offensive in it. They were proud of their success, and Boykin insisted that the Confederates were not ashamed of their defeat.
He believed that not a single man among that great army of 150,000 would deny that on purely personal grounds, the few worn-out, half-starved men gathered around Lee and his falling flag held the prouder position. Boykin’s recollections then turn to the political meaning of the defeat. He believed that had the politicians left matters alone, the mutual respect between the soldiers would have led to a very different state of affairs. But for those who took serious consideration of the situation, the defeat meant the absolute loss of their country.
He compared the position of the South to that of a people conquered and reduced to a colony by France or Russia. The right of the strongest, he wrote, was as absolute at Appomattox that day as it had been in ancient times when Brennus the Gaul threw his sword into the scales at the ransom of Rome. Standing on the bare hills, the defeated men felt themselves to be men without a country. According to what was said at the time, Grant offered the surrendered Confederates rations and transportation either to their home states, now conquered provinces, or to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
But for men whose distant Southern homes held only old men, helpless women, and children whose cries for help were impossible to ignore, the choice was no choice at all. In good faith, they accepted their fate and took allegiance to their new country, the United States, as they would have done had they been conquered by France or Russia. Boykin’s account ends there, with the once-proud soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia binding themselves to a nation that, only days before, they had fought to leave.