As the clock chimes midnight and the calendar turns to Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, ravaged by almost a year of near daily combat with Ulysses S. Grant's Union armies, rests fitfully around the headwaters of the Appomattox River. Lee, aggressive as always, hopes to escape his pursuers and plans to give battle at first light. Grant, despairing of Lee ever surrendering, fears that either he will have to order an Armageddon, annihilating Lee's outnumbered, outgunned, and famished troops, or that Lee will release his men from command and they will disperse into the woods and hills to fight on in a guerrilla war. The Union Commander in Chief, Abraham Lincoln, is in Virginia sailing down the James River and heading back to Washington. Confederate President Jefferson Davis and the rump of his cabinet, having abandoned their captured capital, Richmond, are a government in exile, temporarily housed in private homes in Danville, Virginia. Around the village of Appomattox Court House the weary soldiers, North and South, have brothers, friends, sons, and fathers on the other side. Many of the generals, Union and Confederate, have known one another since their days together at West Point and in the antebellum U. S. Army. Palm Sunday: April 9, 1865 - Ante Meridian unfolds, hour by hour, from midnight to noon, interweaving the true events of one of the most important days in the history of America with the stories of a small handful of fictional characters, most prominently an African-American Union soldier and his former master in Confederate Gray. Grant, Lee, Lincoln, Davis, and the great generals of both sides, Longstreet, Sheridan, and Custer, all make significant appearances in the first volume of this unforgettable novel of the day the American Civil War affectively ended.
