The Grocer, the Generals, and the End

Thinking today of Wilmer McLean, a veteran of the Virginia militia who was making a living as a grocer in Manassas in the summer of 1861 when General P. G. T. Beauregard, known as “the Creole,” commandeered his home to use as a headquarters. This occupation attracted the attentions of General Irvin McDowell and his enthusiastic, yet green Union volunteers, who were eager to make quick work of the rebels and get back their homes. The reach of Gen. McDowell and his men unfortunately exceeded their grasp, and the Creole handed the Union its first decisive defeat in the first major battle of the new war. Legend holds that a Union cannonball came down Mr. McLean’s kitchen chimney in the course of the shelling. After the battle, Mr. McLean moved his family south to both improve his business prospects, and to avoid being quite so much in the middle of a conflict that few believed would still be active almost four years later.

Mr. McLean could not help but appreciate the irony, then, when, on the afternoon of 9 April 1865, Colonel Charles Marshall, an aide to General Robert E. Lee of the Army of Northern Virginia, knocked upon the door of his family’s new home in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, and asked if the house could be used as the venue for Gen. Lee’s surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant. Mr. McLean reluctantly acceded, saying in his later years that the Civil War "started in my front yard and ended in my front parlor."

The Civil War did not truly end with Gen. Lee’s surrender one hundred fifty years ago today, of course, but once the Army of Northern Virginia was no more, the end of the war was both ordained and in sight.