“No, sir,” Lee admitted at once. “As I said before, I shall have to submit them to Richmond for my President’s approval. I was speaking informally, in an effort to bring the fighting to a close as quickly as possible. If you could arrange to reconnect the telegraph lines between here and Richmond, you would be able to treat directly with President Davis, without my serving as intermediary.”
Lincoln waved a hand. “Reconnecting the telegraph’d be simple enough.” Lee knew that was so only for a nation with the abundant resources the United States enjoyed, but held his peace. Lincoln continued, “Still and all, I think I’d sooner talk with you. You have sense enough for a whole raft of Presidents, seems to me.” If he noticed he’d included himself there, he gave no sign of it.
“As you wish, Mr. President,” Lee said. “My feeling is, if the bloodshed once stops, we can then sit down across from one another at a table and settle these remaining issues. They may bulk large in your vision now, but they are of small importance when set beside the main question of the war, which is whether the South should be free and independent.”
“They look plenty big from over here, but then, what you rightly call the main question has been answered the wrong way.” Lincoln shook his head. “And now I have to make the best of it for my country. Very well, General Lee, if we cannot bring you back—and it seems we can’t—we shall have to learn to live alongside you. I’d sooner do that talking than shooting.”
“So would I, sir,” Lee said eagerly. “So would every soldier in the Confederate army, and, if I might make so bold as to speak for them, very likely the soldiers in your army as well.”
“You’re very likely right, General. How is it that soldiers are always so much more willing to pack in a war than civilians?”
“Because only soldiers actually fight,” Lee answered. “They understand how much of what is afterwards called glory is but memory trying to put a good face on terror and torment.”
“General Lee, I wish to heaven you’d chosen the Northern side,” Lincoln burst out. “You see clear enough to have won this war for us before the South ever started turning out these cursed repeating rifles that have sent so many of our lads to their graves too young.”
“Too many on both sides have gone to their graves too young,” Lee said. Lincoln nodded; at last the two men had found a point upon which they agreed without reservation. Lee stood to go. Lincoln rose from his chair in sections, like a carpenter’s fancy ruler unfolding. Looking up at him, Lee added, “It is decided, then? You will order an armistice and withdrawal on the terms I outlined?”
“I will.” Lincoln’s mouth twisted on the: words as if they were pickled in vinegar. “Would you be so kind as to put them in writing, to prevent any misunderstanding?”
Lee reached into his waistcoat pocket. “I have pen and paper, at least an order pad. May I trouble you for ink?” Lincoln waved him to a desk against the wall. He bent to use the inkwell, wrote rapidly. When he was done, he handed the pad to the President of the United States.
Lincoln read rapidly through the couple of paragraphs. “They are as you said, General. Will you be kind enough to lend me your pen?” He set his signature beside Lee’s. “Now let me have that second copy, if you please.”
Lee tore off the original, gave Lincoln the sheet below it. The Federal president folded it and put it away without looking at it, as if he had already seen more of the words on it than he cared to. Lee dipped his head to Lincoln. “If you will excuse me—?”
“You don’t need to wait on my leave,” Lincoln said with more than a little bitterness. “Conquerors, after all, do as they please.”
“History has never recorded any man less anxious to be noted as a conqueror than I.”
“Maybe so, but history will also note you are one.” Lee and Lincoln walked together to the door of the reception room. Lincoln opened it, gestured for Lee to precede him through. In the antechamber outside, Lee’s staff officers stood chatting amicably enough with a couple of bright-looking young men in civilian clothes. All heads turned toward the general and the President. No one spoke, but a single question was visible in the eyes of all. Lee answered it: “We shall have peace, gentlemen.”
His aides shouted and clapped their hands. The two men in civilian suits also smiled, but more hesitantly. Their gaze swung to Lincoln. “I see no good prospects remaining for the continuation of this war,” he said. Where to Lee that was a matter for rejoicing, Lincoln sounded funereal. Lee imagined what he would have felt, presenting his sword to General Grant in a conquered Richmond. In deliberately lighter tones, Lincoln continued, “General Lee, let me present my secretaries, Mr. John Hay and Mr. John Nicolay: They’re good lads; they should enjoy the privilege of meeting the latest hero.”
“Hardly that,” Lee protested. He shook each secretary’s hand. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, gentlemen.”
“Pleased to meet you, too, General Lee, but I’d sooner have done it under different circumstances,” Hay said boldly.
“Now see here, sir—” Walter Taylor began.
Lee held up a hand to head off his aide’s anger. “Let him speak as he will, Major. Would you wish otherwise, were your cause overthrown?”
“I suppose not,” Taylor said grudgingly.
“There you are, then.” Lee turned back to Lincoln. “Mr. President, if you will excuse me, I should like to give the good news of our”—he searched for the least wounding way to put it—”our agreement that there should be an armistice to the brave men who have borne so much these past three years.”
“I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind,” Lincoln said. “If this thing must be, we ought to put the best face we can on it and let them see us in accord.” Surprised but pleased, Lee nodded.
The crowd of ragged Confederates on the White House lawn had doubled and more since he went in to confer with Lincoln. The trees were full of men who had climbed up so they could see over their comrades. Off in the distance, cannon still occasionally thundered; rifles popped like firecrackers. Lee quietly said to Lincoln, “Will you send out your sentries under flag of truce to bring word of the armistice to those Federal positions still firing upon my men?”
“I’ll see to it,” Lincoln promised. He pointed to the soldiers in gray, who had quieted expectantly when Lee came out. “Looks like you’ve given me sentries enough, even if their coats are the wrong color.”
Few men could have joked so with their cause in ruins around them. Respecting the Federal President for his composure, Lee raised his voice: “Soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia, after three years of arduous service, we have achieved that for which we took up arms—”
He got no farther. With one voice, the men before him screamed out their joy and relief. The unending waves of noise beat at him like surf from a stormy sea. Battered forage caps and slouch hats flew through the air. Soldiers jumped up and down, pounded on one another’s shoulders, danced in clumsy rings, kissed each other’s bearded, filthy faces. Lee felt his own eyes grow moist. At last the magnitude of what he had won began to sink in.
Abraham Lincoln turned away from the celebrating rebels. Lee saw that his hollow cheeks were also wet. He set a hand on Lincoln’s arm. “I’m sorry, Mr. President. Perhaps you should not have come out after all.”
“You don’t suppose I’d’ve heard them in there?” Lincoln asked.
Lee sought a reply, found none. He looked to the bottom of the steps, where Traveller remained calm in the midst of chaos. With a last nod to Lincoln, he went down the stairway to his horse. As he’d told the U.S. President, he had another call to make in Washington.
Neither the Stars and Stripes nor the Confederacy’s Stainless Banner flew over the building up to which Lee rode. No soldiers crowded in front of it to gape and point save the few who had followed him through the streets of the city, and they were gaping and pointing at him rather than his destination. Nevertheless, after the White House, this nondescript, two-story structure with the Union Jack on the roof was the most important place in the city for the South.