26

In the latter part of March, 1865, something very significant happened in Richmond, Virginia. Mrs. Jefferson Davis, wife of the President of the Confederacy, disposed of her carriage horses, placed her personal effects on sale at a dry-goods store, packed up the remainder of her belongings, and headed farther south.... Something was about to happen.

Grant had been besieging the Confederate capital now for nine months. Lee's troops were ragged and hungry. Money was scarce, and they were rarely paid; and when they were, it was with the paper script of the Confederacy, which was almost worthless now. It took three dollars of it to buy a cup of coffee, five dollars to buy a stick of firewood, and a thousand dollars was demanded for a barrel of flour.

Secession was a lost cause. And so was slavery. Lee knew it. And his men knew it. A hundred thousand of them had already deserted. Whole regiments were packing up now and walking out together. Those that remained were turning to religion for solace and hope. Prayer-meetings were being held in almost every tent; men were shouting and weeping and seeing visions, and entire regiments were kneeling before going into battle.

But notwithstanding all this piety, Richmond was tottering to its fall.

On Sunday, April 2, Lee's army set fire to the cotton and tobacco warehouses in the town, burned the arsenal, destroyed the half-finished ships at the wharves, and fled from the city at night while towering flames were roaring up into the darkness.

They were no sooner out of town than Grant was in hot pursuit with seventy-two thousand men, banging away at the Confederates from both sides and the rear, while Sheridan's cavalry was heading them off in front, tearing up railway lines, and capturing supply-trains.

Sheridan telegraphed to headquarters, “I think if this thing is pushed, Lee will surrender.”

Lincoln wired back, “Let the thing be pushed.”

It was; and, after a running fight of eighty miles, Grant finally hemmed the Southern troops in on all sides. They were trapped, and Lee realized that further bloodshed would be futile.

In the meantime Grant, half blind with a violent sick headache, had fallen behind his army and halted at a farmhouse on Saturday evening.

“I spent the night,” he records in his Memoirs, “in bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning.”

The next morning, he was cured instantaneously. And the thing that did it was not a mustard plaster, but a horseman galloping down the road with a letter from Lee, saying he wanted to surrender.

“When the officer [bearing the message] reached me,” Grant wrote, “I was still suffering with the sick-headache, but the instant I saw the contents of the note, I was cured.”

The two generals met that afternoon in a small bare parlor of a brick dwelling to arrange terms. Grant as usual was slouchily dressed: his shoes were grimy, he had no sword, and he wore the same uniform that every private in the army wore—except that his had three silver stars on the shoulder to show who he was.

What a contrast he made to the aristocratic Lee, wearing beaded gauntlets and a sword studded with jewels! Lee looked like some royal conqueror who had just stepped out of a steel engraving, while Grant looked more like a Missouri farmer who had come to town to sell a load of hogs and a few hides. For once Grant felt ashamed of his frowzy appearance, and he apologized to Lee for not being better dressed for the occasion.

Twenty years before, Grant and Lee had both been officers in the regular army while the United States was waging a war against Mexico. So they fell to reminiscing now about the days of long ago, about the winter the “regulars” spent on the border of Mexico, about the poker games that used to last all night, about their amateur production of “Othello” when Grant played the sweetly feminine role of Desdemona.

“Our conversation grew so pleasant,” Grant records, “that I almost forgot the object of our meeting.”

Finally, Lee brought the conversation around to the terms of surrender; but Grant replied to that very briefly, and then his mind went rambling on again, back across two decades, to Corpus Christi and the winter in 1845 when the wolves howled on the prairies... and the sunlight danced on the waves... and wild horses could be bought for three dollars apiece.

Grant might have gone on like that all afternoon if Lee had not interrupted and reminded him, for the second time, that he had come there to surrender his army.

So Grant asked for pen and ink, and scrawled out the terms. There were to be no humiliating ceremonies of capitulation such as Washington had exacted from the British at Yorktown in 1781, with the helpless enemy parading without guns, between long lines of their exultant conquerors. And there was to be no vengeance. For four bloody years the radicals of the North had been demanding that Lee and the other West Point officers who had turned traitor to their flag be hanged for treason. But the terms that Grant wrote out had no sting. Lee's officers were permitted to keep their arms, and his men were to be paroled and sent home; and every soldier who claimed a horse or a mule could crawl on it and ride it back to his farm or cotton-patch and start tilling the soil once more.

Why were the terms of surrender so generous and gentle? Because Abraham Lincoln himself had dictated the terms.

And so the war that had killed half a million men came to a close in a tiny Virginia village called Appomattox Court House. The surrender took place on a peaceful spring afternoon when the scent of lilacs filled the air. It was Palm Sunday.

On that very afternoon Lincoln was sailing back to Washington on the good ship River Queen. He spent several hours reading Shakspere aloud to his friends. Presently he came to this passage in “Macbeth:”

Duncan is in his grave;

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;

Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,

Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,

Can touch him further.

These lines made a profound impression on Lincoln. He read them once, then paused, gazing with unseeing eyes through the port-hole of the ship.

Presently he read them aloud again.

Five days later Lincoln himself was dead.

26

一八六五年三月末，弗吉尼亚州的里士满发生了一件大事。南方联盟主席杰佛逊·戴维斯的妻子处理掉了她的拉车马，将自己的个人财产放在一家绸缎店寄卖，然后将剩余的财物打包，朝更南的地方去了……看来有事情要发生了。

格兰特已包围了南方联盟的首都九个月。李的军队衣衫褴褛，缺乏食物。钱已变成了稀有物品，士兵们几乎拿不到薪水，即便发钱，也是早已一文不值的联盟发行的纸币。物价疯涨，一杯咖啡要三美金，木柴五美金一根，而一桶面粉则要卖到上千美金。

分裂联邦注定要失败，奴隶制也是一样。李很清楚这一点，他手下的士兵也清楚这一点。逃兵数量达到了十万之巨，甚至还出现了整团的士兵集体逃走的事。剩下的士兵转而从宗教中得到安慰和希望。每个营帐里都举行祷告会。人们尖叫着，哭喊着，眼前出现了幻觉。每次奔赴战场前，所有的人都会先跪着祈祷一番。

虽然他们很虔诚，但里士满政权仍旧摇摇欲坠。

四月二日，正好是星期天，李的军队一把火烧了镇上的棉花、烟草仓库和军械厂，摧毁了停在码头的造了一半的船只，在滔天烈焰和黑夜的掩护下逃离了里士满。

然而李的军队一出城，格兰特便带着七万两千大军穷追不舍，并从两翼和后方持续地发动猛烈的攻击。与此同时，谢里丹的骑兵撕毁了铁路，截获了南方军的供给列车，从而在前方拦截住了南方军。

谢里丹向总部发电报：“我认为如果继续这样下去，李一定会投降的。”

林肯回复说：“让战争尽快结束。”

事实确实如此。经过了八十英里的夺命追击，格兰特最终将南方军团团包围了起来。南方军已如困兽，李也意识到，多余的流血已毫无意义。

而此时的格兰特却落在大军后面。他的头痛病犯了，痛得视线模糊，全身麻木，因此不得不在周六晚上停在途中的一个农庄休息。

“我在那儿住了一夜，”他在回忆录中写道，“我将脚泡在加了芥末粉的热水中，然后在手腕和脖子后面抹上芥末膏药，希望第二天早上能恢复健康。”

第二天早晨，他的病完全好了。然而治愈他的不是芥末膏药，而是一位骑马而来的信使送来的李的一封信。李在信上说愿意投降。

“送信的军官来找我的时候，”格兰特写道，“我仍旧头痛欲裂。但是一看到信上的内容，我便立刻好了。”

那天下午，两位将军在一间空荡荡的客厅里商谈投降条款。格兰特和往常一样，穿得十分邋遢，鞋子脏兮兮的，没有佩剑，穿着一件普通二等兵制服——唯一能表明他身份的便是肩头那三颗银星。

具有贵族气派的李将军与格兰特形成了鲜明的对比。李戴着镶了珠串的金属护手，佩剑上也镶了珠宝，活像从钢版画中走出来的高贵的征服者。而格兰特则像是一个从密苏里州来到镇上卖猪肉和兽皮的农民。面对李，格兰特第一次为自己邋遢的外表感到羞愧，并向李道歉自己没有为这个场合准备得体的衣服。

二十年前，美国和墨西哥打仗的时候，李和格兰特一同在美国正规军中服役。现在，他们陷入了对往昔的回忆，谈起了他们那支“正规军”在墨西哥边界度过的那个冬天，谈起了他们曾通宵畅玩的扑克游戏，还谈起了曾演出过的《奥赛罗》，格兰特还反串了美丽的女主角苔丝狄蒙娜。

“我们聊得非常愉快。”格兰特回忆道，“我差点儿忘记了会谈的主要目的。”

终于，李将话题带回了投降条款上，可是格兰特回答得十分简略，接着便又神游到了二十年前的事情上。他想到了基督圣体节，想到了一八四五年冬天，狼群在草原上咆哮，想到了波浪在阳光下熠熠生辉，想到了只要三美金便能买到的野马。

若不是李再一次打断格兰特并提醒他自己是来投降的，格兰特大概能说上一个下午。

于是格兰特要来笔和墨水，潦草地写下了条款。这一次不会像一七八一年华盛顿在约克镇接受英军投降那样，让手无寸铁的敌人在狂喜的胜利者们面前列队游行，并举行侮辱性的投降协议签约仪式。这一次没有任何复仇行为。四年来，北方的激进派一直要求以叛国罪处死李和其他西点军校毕业的背叛联邦的南方军官，但是格兰特的条款却一点儿也不苛刻。李的军官可以保留武器，他的士兵将会获得假释，然后重返家园。每个要求得到一匹马或骡子的士兵都可以爬上它将它骑回自己的农场或棉花田，继续耕种土地。

为什么投降条款如此温和大方？因为这是亚伯拉罕·林肯亲口说的。

于是，这场牺牲了五十万人的浩大战争在弗吉尼亚州一个名叫阿波马托克斯的小村庄结束了。在一个平和的飘着紫丁香芬芳的春日下午，李投降了。那一天正好是圣枝主日(6)。

那天下午，林肯乘坐“河中女王号”轮船赶回华盛顿。他大声地向朋友们朗读莎士比亚的作品，一读便是好几个小时。他读到了《麦克白》中的这一段：

邓肯是在他的坟墓里睡着了，

生命经过了一场场热病，

现在的他睡得很安稳。

叛国已经对他施过最狠毒的伤害，

再没有刀剑、毒药、内乱、外患，

可以加害于他了。

这几句台词在林肯心中留下了深刻的印象。他又读了一遍，然后停了下来，双目出神地凝视着窗外。

然后他又大声地将这一段读了一遍。

五天后，林肯逝世了。