Lee's Dark Option
One option Lee did have, that day — to the lasting good fortune of his countrymen — he did not exercise. Instead of surrendering he might simply have told his troops to disband, to take to the hills, and to carry on guerrilla warfare as long as there was a Yankee south of the Mason and Dixon Line. There were generals in his army who hoped he would do this, and Washington unquestionably would have immense difficultly stamping out a rebellion of that nature. But the results of such a course would have been tragic beyond comprehension — tragic for Northerners and Southerners of that day and for their descendants forever after.
There would have been a sharing in repeated atrocities, a mutual descent into brutality and bitterness and enduring hatred, which would have created a wound beyond healing. Neither as one nation nor as two could the people of America have gone on to any lofty destiny after that. All of this Lee realized, and he set his face against it. He and the men who followed him had been fighting for an accepted place in the family of nations. When the fight was finally lost, they would try to make the best of what remained to them.
A Good Peace
In Grant, Lee met a man who was as anxious as himself to see this hardest of wars followed by a good peace. Grant believed that the whole point of the war had been the effort to prove that Northerners and Southerners were and always would be fellow citizens, and the moment the fighting stopped he believed that they ought to begin behaving that way. In effect, he told Lee to have his men lay down their arms and go home; and into the terms of surrender he wrote the binding pledge that if they did this, signing and then living up to the formal articles of parole, they would not at any time be disturbed by the Federal authority.
The Union Preserved
This pledge had far-reaching importance, because there were in the North many men who wanted to see leading Confederates hanged; but what Grant had written and signed made it impossible to hang Lee, and if Lee could not be hanged no lesser Confederate could be. If Lee's decision spared the country the horror of continued guerrilla warfare, Grant's decision ruled out the infamy that would have come with proscription lists and hangings. Between them, these rival soldiers served their country fairly well on April 9, 1865.
(This article can also be found on National Review Online.)
