Lee sent a note through the lines offering to surrender. Grant's headache and Meade's illness vanished. The bleeding and dying were over; they had won. [...]

The terms were generous: officers and men could go home "not to be disturbed by U.S. authority as long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside." This clause had great significance. Serving as a model for the subsequent surrender of other Confederate armies, it guaranteed southern soldiers immunity from prosecution for treason. Lee asked another favor. In the Confederate army, he explained, enlisted men in the calvary and artillery owned their horses, could they keep them? Yes, said Grant; privates as well as officers who claimed to own horsers could take them home "to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter." "This will have the best possible effect upon the men," said Lee, and "will do much toward conciliating our people." After signing the papers, Grant introduced Lee to his staff. As he shook hands with Grant's military secretary Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian, Lee stared a moment at Parker's dark features and said, "I am glad to see one real American here." Parker responded, "We are all Americans."

The surrender completed, the two generals saluted somberly and parted. "This will live in history," said one of Grant's aides. But the Union commander seemed distracted. Having given birth to a reunited nation, he experience a post-partum melancholy. "I felt ... sad and despressed," Grant wrote, "at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which people ever fought." As news of the surrender spread through the Union camps, batteries began firing joyful salutes until Grant ordered them stopped. "The War is over," he said; "the rebels are our countrymen again, and the best sign of rejoicing after the victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations." To help bring those former rebels back into the Union, Grant sent three days' rations for 25,000 men across the lines. This perhaps did something to ease the psychological as well as physical pain of Lee's soldiers.

So did an important symbolic gesture at a formal ceremony three days later when Confederate troops marches up to stack their arms and surrender their flags. [...] As [Confederate General John B.] Gordon approached [...] with "his chin drooped to his breast, downhearted and dejected in appearance," [Union officer Joshua L.] Chamberlain gave a brief order, and a bugle call rang out. Instantly, the Union soldiers shifted from order arms to carry arms, the salute of honor. Hearing the sound General Gordon looked up in surprise, and with sudden realization turned smartly to Chamberlian, dipped his sword in salute, and ordered his own men to carry arms. These enemies in many a bloody battle ended the war not with shame on one side and exultation on the other but with a soldier's "mutual salutation and farewell."

James M. McPherson
Battle Cry of Freedom (1988)

If these men, who saw their country almost destroyed and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men can behave such, can we do any less when our time comes?

We're probably quite a ways away from that kind of victory, and, when it comes, there won't be such a clear point of demarcation as a formal surrender. Still, I see signs of progress.

I know that people are upset about the fact that Congress hasn't done something more substantial about Iraq other than to vote on the non-binding resolutions, but I'm really not concerned, not yet. The resolutions are simply a first step, a shot fired across the bow, an action necessary in order to legitimize the next steps that need to be taken. If those steps aren't taken, then I'll join in the general angst about the Democratic leadership of Congress, but at least for the moment, it seems to me that everything is going pretty much as one would plan it to.

I understand about the pessimism some folks feel. I keep hoping that The People will wake up, and really see what's going on, how they've been taken and lied to, and cheated and stolen from (in more ways than one), but I've been disappointed so many times now that it's sometimes hard to believe it could happen. I do think we see in the disintegrating support for the Iraq war not just the usual American impatience with anything that takes more than a couple of years to achieve, but a realization that it really won't work no matter how many years we put into it, not only because our leaders don't really understand or appreciate the kind of war we're involved in, but also because our goals are not achievable in the circumstances, even taking the very best of those goals as being the most important to our leadership (which I doubt is actually the case). I see in the disapproval of the war, and in the results of the 2006 election, what I hope is a glint of the possibility of a general rethinking about what we're about, a return to the classic American values that Bush and Cheney and their backers (like Richard Mellon Scaife) are utterly opposed to.

It's certainly possible that I'm deceiving myself. It's much more probable that the election of 2006 was simply an indication that Americans don't like a loser, and that Bush and Cheney have, by the decisions of their Administration, shown themselves to be a big-time losers indeed. Still, that general perception will probably be enough to allow us to reclaim the White House and begin the long, long task of rebuilding this country.

Update: At least some people understand the true situation in Iraq. Of course, others are generally clueless.

[Thanks to Cathy]