Surrender at Appomattox (1865): Lee Meets Grant to End the War

The surrender at Appomattox took place on 9 April 1865, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. After a week-long retreat, Lee’s starving and surrounded army had no way out. The generous terms Grant offered allowed nearly 28,000 Confederate soldiers to go home, and the meeting became the symbolic end of the American Civil War.

Background: the fall of Petersburg and Richmond

For more than nine months, from June 1864, Grant’s armies had besieged Lee’s forces around Petersburg, the rail hub that supplied the Confederate capital of Richmond. Lee’s lines stretched thinner as desertion and disease weakened his army, while Union forces grew. Elsewhere the Confederacy was collapsing: Sherman’s March to the Sea had cut through Georgia, and Union armies were advancing through the Carolinas.

On 1 April 1865 Union troops under Philip Sheridan won the Battle of Five Forks, and the next day Grant’s general assault broke through the Petersburg lines. Lee told President Jefferson Davis that Richmond must be abandoned. During the night of 2-3 April the Confederate government fled and the army withdrew westward.

Lee’s final retreat

Lee hoped to collect supplies at Amelia Court House, then turn south to join General Joseph E. Johnston’s army in North Carolina. The expected rations were not waiting at Amelia, and the day spent foraging gave Union forces time to block the way south.

On 6 April at Sailor’s Creek, Union troops cut off and overwhelmed a large part of Lee’s army, capturing several generals including Richard Ewell. Estimates suggest Lee lost around 7,700 to 8,000 men, mostly as prisoners, roughly a fifth of his remaining force. On 7 April Grant sent Lee a letter suggesting that further resistance was hopeless and asking for surrender. Lee replied by asking what terms would be offered.

On 8 April cavalry under George Armstrong Custer captured the supply trains waiting for Lee at Appomattox Station. Early on 9 April, Lee’s men under John B. Gordon attacked in a last attempt to break through westward. They pushed back Union cavalry but then found large numbers of Union infantry in front of them. Lee was surrounded, and he decided to ask Grant for a meeting.

The meeting in the McLean House

Lee’s aide, Colonel Charles Marshall, chose the house of Wilmer McLean for the meeting. By a famous coincidence, McLean had earlier owned a farm near Manassas, where the First Battle of Bull Run was fought in 1861, and had moved south partly to escape the war.

Lee arrived first, in a new full-dress uniform with a sword at his side. Grant, who had been riding hard and suffering from a severe headache, arrived around 1.30 pm in a mud-spattered private’s coat with only his shoulder straps showing his rank. The two men, who had both served in the Mexican-American War, talked briefly about that earlier conflict before Lee steered the conversation to the terms.

Grant wrote out the terms in a notebook. When Lee pointed out that many of his cavalrymen and artillerymen owned their own horses, Grant agreed that any man who claimed a horse or mule could take it home to work his farm. Lee also said his men were short of food, and Grant arranged for rations for about 25,000 men. The final copy of the terms was written out by Grant’s military secretary, Lieutenant Colonel Ely S. Parker, a Seneca from New York.

The terms of surrender

The terms were short and lenient:

• Officers and men were to be paroled, signing a promise not to fight against the United States until properly exchanged.
• Weapons, artillery and public property were to be handed over.
• Officers kept their side arms, private horses and baggage.
• Each man could return home and would “not be disturbed by United States authority” as long as he kept his parole and obeyed the laws.

That last clause mattered greatly. It meant that Confederate soldiers, including Lee himself, could not easily be prosecuted for treason. Grant had followed the spirit of President Lincoln’s wish for a peace without vengeance, and when Union soldiers began firing salutes to celebrate, Grant ordered them to stop, saying in his memoirs that the Confederates were now their countrymen again.

The formal surrender ceremony

On 12 April, four years to the day after Confederate guns opened fire on Fort Sumter, the Confederate infantry marched in to stack their arms and furl their flags. Union General Joshua Chamberlain, commanding the troops receiving the surrender, ordered his men to shift to the “carry arms” salute as Gordon’s soldiers passed, and Gordon returned the gesture. The account comes mainly from Chamberlain’s own later writings and may have grown in the retelling, but it became an enduring image of reconciliation.

In all, about 28,000 Confederate soldiers received printed parole passes at Appomattox. Lee issued a farewell order to his army on 10 April, praising their loyalty and devotion.

Key people

Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) had commanded the Army of Northern Virginia since 1862 and was the Confederacy’s most respected general. After the war he became president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia.

Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), general-in-chief of all Union armies from 1864, later served two terms as president from 1869 to 1877.

Ely S. Parker (1828-1895), a Seneca engineer and lawyer, later became the first Native American Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

Consequences

Appomattox did not formally end the war, but it removed the Confederacy’s most important army and its chief hope. Johnston surrendered to William T. Sherman at Bennett Place, North Carolina, on 26 April. Other Confederate commands surrendered in May and June, and Brigadier General Stand Watie, a Cherokee leader, was the last Confederate general to surrender his command, on 23 June 1865.

Five days after Appomattox, on 14 April, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre plunged the North from celebration into mourning and changed the course of the peace.

Myths and facts

Myth: Lee handed his sword to Grant. No sword changed hands. The terms let officers keep their side arms, and Grant wrote that the subject was never mentioned.

Myth: The surrender was signed in the courthouse. Appomattox Court House was the name of the village. The meeting took place in a private home, which was dismantled in the 1890s for a planned exhibition and later rebuilt on its original site by the National Park Service, opening to the public in 1950.

Timeline

• 1865, 2 April: Union forces break the Petersburg lines; Richmond is evacuated that night.
• 1865, 6 April: Lee loses a large part of his army at Sailor’s Creek.
• 1865, 7 April: Grant sends Lee the first letter proposing surrender.
• 1865, 8 April: Custer captures Lee’s supply trains at Appomattox Station.
• 1865, 9 April: Gordon’s final attack fails; Lee surrenders to Grant in the McLean House.
• 1865, 12 April: Confederate infantry formally stack their arms.
• 1865, 26 April: Johnston surrenders to Sherman in North Carolina.

Why it matters

The surrender at Appomattox marked the practical end of the Confederacy’s struggle for independence after four years of war that killed an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers. Grant’s lenient terms set a tone of reconciliation between soldiers, while leaving unresolved the harder questions about the rights of freed people that would dominate the years that followed. Like the Battle of Gettysburg, it became one of the defining moments in American memory of the Civil War.