Lincoln, the unknown

LINCOLN THE UNKNOWN• 195in the regular army while the United States was waging a waragainst Mexico. So they fell to reminiscing now about the daysof long ago, about the winter the "regulars" spent on the borderof Mexico, about the poker games that used to last all night,about their amateur production of "Othello" when Grant playedthe sweetly feminine role of Desdemona."Our conversation grew so pleasant," Grant records, "thatI almost forgot the object of our meeting."Finally, Lee brought the conversation around to the terms ofsurrender; but Grant replied to that very briefly, and then hismind went rambling on again, back across two decades, toCorpus Christi and the winter in 1845 when the wolves howledon 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 hadnot interrupted and reminded him, for the second time, thathe 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 capitulationsuch as Washington had exacted from the British at Yorktownin 1781, with the helpless enemy parading without guns, betweenlong lines of their exultant conquerors. And there was tobe no vengeance. For four bloody years the radicals of theNorth had been demanding that Lee and the other West Pointofficers who had turned traitor to their flag be hanged for treason.But the terms that Grant wrote out had no sting. Lee'sofficers were permitted to keep their arms, and his men wereto be paroled and sent home; and every soldier who claimed ahorse or a mule could crawl on it and ride it back to his farm orcotton-patch and start tilling the soil once more.Why were the terms of surrender so generous and gentle? BecauseAbraham Lincoln himself had dictated the terms.And so the war that had killed half a million men came toa close in a tiny Virginia village called Appomattox CourtHouse. The surrender took place on a peaceful spring afternoonwhen the scent of lilacs filled the air. It was Palm Sunday.On that very afternoon Lincoln was sailing back to Washingtonon the good ship River Queen. He spent several hoursreading Shakspere aloud to his friends. Presently he came tothis passage in "Macbeth":