Appomattox & Gettysburg

One hundred and fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln delivered the now famous Gettysburg Address. We have never been to Gettysburg, although it’s high on my list to see. However, just about a year ago The Long Suffering Wife and I took a few days to tour around Virginia and we had a chance to visit Appomattox, where the Lee’s Confederate Army surrendered to Grant’s Union Army on April 9, 1865. It is an interesting place.

The view as you climb the small hill from the parking lot. Much of the village of Appomattox Court House has been restored or rebuilt. From right to left are the Appomattox County Courthouse, the Clover Hill Tavern, the tavern kitchen and guesthouse, Woodson Law Office (partially hidden), and Meeks’ Store.

Note that “Appomattox Court House” is the name of the village, the “Appomattox County Courthouse” is the name of the building. They’re fussy about that, apparently.

The Appomattox County Courthouse. The current Visitor’s Center is on the bottom floor. While many visitors believe or assume that this is where the surrender was signed, it was not.

Clover Hill Tavern and kitchen in rear.

Standing in back of the Clover Hill Tavern (at far left), from left to right you can see the Meeks’ Store (light colored, two-story building), Woodson Law Office (one story building), the tavern guesthouse (partially hidden), the tavern kitchen (two-story, brick building), and the tavern slave quarters (white building).

The back of the Clover Hill Tavern, with the Courthouse in the distance on the left. Directly behind these buildings about a hundred yards is McLean House.

McLean House, where the surrender was actually signed.

The master bedroom on the first floor of McLean House.

I believe that this is the actual desk at which the surrender terms were signed by Generals Grant and Lee — but I’m not 100% positive of that, could be wrong.

I believe this is one of the upstairs bedrooms.

If you get a chance to visit any of the Civil War battlefields (or any other historic battlefields), stop for a while and think about the young men, many of them too young to shave yet, who when marching or running across the grass or through the trees, scared to death, but doing what they thought they had to for whatever cause they were fighting for.

If you get a chance to visit Appomattox, stand in that front room and know that it was there, after ending four years of war with over 1.1 million casualties, that Lee asked Grant for permission for his men to keep their horses, because they would need them to plant their fields in the spring. Grant was compassionate and allowed it, wanting the healing process to begin. In addition, when informed that many of the Confederate troops had not eaten in days, he had 25,000 meals sent across the lines.

Today, take a minute to read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It’s only 271 words, but what memorable words they were.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.