Surrenders and A Missing Sword

Thursday of this week is the 150^th anniversary of the day that Confederate General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to United States General Grant at Appomattox, Virginia. I expect the national news media will have stories all week about the occasion.

The National Park Service is sponsoring a nationwide ringing of bells at precisely 3:15 PM, Virginia time, to mark the end of the meeting between Lee and Grant, the meeting at which the surrender specifics were agreed upon. I expect more bells will peal for four minutes (one minute for each year of the war) in the north than in the old south.

I vividly remember the opening speech in the 1970 movie Patton in which actor George C Scott tells his troops that Americans hate a loser, will not tolerate losing. I agree, and the likely dearth of church bell ringing across the old Confederate states on Thursday will reflect that national character trait.

Regardless of my American disdain for losing, I’m one of those southern guys who is truly glad the Confederacy lost the Civil War, the effort to secede finally quashed by four bloody, bumbling years of killing and destruction. I’m glad that our continent is not divided into many small nations like Europe is, prickly nations with fenced borders, nations that fought two massive wars in the past hundred years, each of a magnitude to make our Civil War seem piddling. I’m truly glad my home state of Texas is part of the United States of America. That’s my head talking.

Nonetheless, when reading and writing about the Civil War, my heart lies with the Confederacy, with Texas and Virginia, where my particular branch of the McBride family tree resided 150 years ago. And thinking about Patton’s speech again, I hate it that “we” lost the Civil War. I hate losing as much as any American does, and the “what-if’s” that might have changed the outcome of the Civil War come to mind over and over again.

As a Civil War reenactor, I took place in my first-ever mock Confederate soldier surrender program last weekend at a place called Fort Blakely, on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama. On the very same day, April 9, 1865, in northern Virginia, General Lee sat across a table from General Grant in the parlor of the McLean family home, agreeing to the surrender terms. Fifteen hundred miles away, at Fort Blakely, 4,000 still defiant Rebel soldiers were enduring a determined assault on their earthwork defenses by 16,000 still determined Union soldiers.

Some of the Union soldiers were US Colored Troops, including recently freed slaves, some were white men who had been in other battles. Some of the Reb soldiers were old men, too old to campaign, but not too old to shoot from a trench just outside of town. Grandfathers fought next to teenagers, grandsons too young to campaign, but tall enough to shoot from a trench. Among the fresh boys and old men, hardened veterans, gaunt and grim by this time, filled the trenches. 

We reenacted in a state park at one of the redoubts -small forts- along the line of earthwork defenses. On Saturday we did a sham battle for a good sized crowd. On Sunday morning, without spectators around, the Confederate reenactors marched out of the redoubt without their weapons, to be marched away to river boats that would take them to POW camps somewhere upriver. Remember, the real defenders at Fort Blakely didn’t yet know that Lee had surrendered.  The photo at the top is the surrender we reenacted.

It was an odd experience, an uncomfortable experience, to stand in the line of eighty reenactors who were there as Union soldiers, and study the sullen, angry faces of the thirty men who emerged from the earthworks. I didn’t much like it, but I’m glad I was there. Yes, it was a manufactured, sham surrender, play-acting. Yet, it was still a glimpse, a quick taste of the ending of the war from a soldier’s eyes.

A much larger surrender reenactment will occur in Virginia this coming weekend, near Appomattox Courthouse. Thousands of reenactors will do the same sort of thing we did in Virginia, including the “stacking of their arms,” that is, surrendering their muskets and battle flags.

As a curious sidebar to the Confederate soldiers surrendering their weapons, the officers were allowed to keep their swords. Many of those swords, being virtually all metal except for the handgrips, have survived and are much sought relics. I looked online yesterday to see that Confederate officer swords and scabbards, without a known connection to a particular officer, are selling for $10,000 to $15,000. A sword that can be linked to a specific Confederate officer sells for $25,000 and up.

That brings me to my ancestor, Captain John J McBride of the 5^th Texas Infantry Regiment, the man on whom my McBee novels are based. Captain McBride was at his mother’s home near Lexington, Virginia, when Lee surrendered. McBride was still recovering from the leg wounds he received at the Battle of the Wilderness the year before. Even though his active duty had ended, the captain signed an amnesty paper like any other Confederate officer, only he did it in Lexington five months after Appomattox. The photo is a scanned copy of Captain McBride’s parole document, gleaned off the internet.

I want his sword. At the prices Civil War swords are fetching, I couldn’t afford it if I found it for sale from a relic dealer, but I have to think it’s out there somewhere. I doubt his name was engraved in the metal of the blade as some were, but it’s possible. Granted, the sword might have been left on the field where he was wounded, and picked up by a Yank officer as a trophy. Or it might have been left unnoticed in the dirt and leaves.

Or perhaps, a diligent soldier in Captain McBride’s company of Confederates picked up the sword when the wounded captain was removed from the field. Since McBride was never a POW, he was not left to the Yankees as a wounded casualty at the Wilderness, so perhaps the captain himself clutched his sword to his chest as he was carried to the hospital tent. We don’t know.

I do know Captain McBride would have been gripping a sword when he was shot during the battle leading his men forward. The sword could now be in a private collection in Texas or Virginia or anywhere, or displayed in a small town museum in the north or the south, or be among the surplus relics in a large museum storeroom, or forgotten and lost in the back of a closet or attic in a private home. It could even be rusting under the leaves in northern Virginia. But, doggone, I want it.