Witness to Appomattox - Hardcover

RICHARD WHEELER , an ex-marine, is the author of numerous books of military history, eleven of which deal with different Civil War campaigns and battles, including Voices of the Civil War, winner of the Civil War Round Table of New York's Fletcher Pratt Award. He is also the author of Voices of 1776: The Story of the American Revolution in the Words of Those Who Were There.

As he did so successfully in Witness to Gettysburg (1987), Wheeler links together the words of participants and eyewitnesses in a moving chronological narrative, this time covering the final three months of the Civil War. The accounts of fighting at Five Forks, the breakthrough at Petersburg, the evacuation of Richmond and the final skirmish at Sayler's Creek all point with solemn inexorability to the haunting surrender ceremony at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. Wheeler does not confine hismelf to military operations, but provides a rich continuum of anecdotes conveying the growing sense of victory or defeat on the part of soldiers and civilians, along with homely details of daily life as the war winds down: a Confederate officer arguing with a woman who insists that her husband should desert the Stonewall Brigade; General Grant, trying to open negotiations with General Lee while at the same time trying to rid himself of a sick-headache; President Lincoln, walking the streets of the captured Confederate capital, delivers "a mortal blow to caste," by returning the bow of an elderly black man. Illustrations.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.