Surprise! The Appomattox Courthouse is not the Appomattox Courthouse Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederacy at! (I know. One is not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition, but this is a BLOG, not a grammar textbook or a college English course.) It was at the OLD Appomattox Courthouse a few miles away. And even THAT is not accurate.
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| This is the new courthouse |
Apparently, Lee invited Union General Ulysses S. Grant to meet him at the (then) Courthouse to accept Lee's surrender, but Grant refused because "gentlemen" didn't meet in public places to do business. Lee, in effect, was saying Grant was not a gentleman. Tacky, tacky. Grant suggested the McLean house across the way, and so it was here that the surrender was accepted.
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| The McLean Home |
There's a museum at the old courthouse which is worth a look. Afterward, across the yard, there is a man who poses as a doctor from the Civil War period. He's pretty interesting. If you ask him a question the answer will be as though it was 1865. If he asks you a question, he's expecting the same period answer. He is not a jovial man; quite the opposite. Ultimately, I figured out that he was "holding his temper" because his two sons were Confederates and just came home after a couple of years' fighting. They were skin and bones with rags for clothes. The doctor was angry at the Union army for hounding the soldiers almost to death. I've always heard that an army fights on it's stomach, meaning that if you can't feed 'em they won't fight - they might even desert! Well, Grant's seige of Petersburg and then chasing the Rebels relentlessly prevented Lee from feeding his army. The race to Appomattox was all about the Rebel supply train. Once Grant captured that, well, Lee didn't have much of a choice. Literally, war is no picnic!
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