Speed the glad tidings! Give us, give us Peace.[17]
The end came quickly. After a winter of preparation, determined among the Union forces, despairing among Lee’s men, the attack on Petersburg was resumed and carried on April second, of ’65. The next day, Richmond fell. Lee found escape impossible, and on the twelfth the little white farmhouse at Appomattox Court House, in the meeting of Lee and Grant, witnessed at once the death of a young nation and the rebirth of an older one.
Lyric as had always been the poetic genius of the South, it was but natural that her anguished cry of despair and defeat should be put into the mouths of her poets. For the most part, the poems on this theme are of beautiful quality, and those still extant form the largest single class in the war poetry of the four years.[18] Correspondingly, they constitute a glass wherein one may see how defeat came to the South, and how she met the challenge of the issue. There were, of course, some spirits which cried out beneath the unendurable prick that death itself had been preferable to defeat. There is not emotion more appalling than despair for which one sees no relieving element of comfort. Such poems as “Stack Arms,” by Joseph Blythe Alston, “Doffing the Gray,” by Lieutenant Falligant, “The Price of Peace” by “Luola” or “Peace” by Alethea Burroughs of Savannah are terrible expressions of this attitude. At the same time, there were those who like Mrs. Preston, in “Acceptation,” met the issue more bravely and gently:
We do accept thee, heavenly Peace!
Albeit thou comest in a guise
Unlooked for—undesired, our eyes
Welcome, thro’ tears, the kind release
From war and woe and want—surcease
For which we bless thee, holy Peace!
We lift our foreheads from the dust;