Appomattox Court House

On the morning of April 9, 1865, fighting broke out in Appomattox County, Virginia, in what would prove to be among the closing engagements of the Civil War (1861-1865) and, in the end, among its most decisive. This clash marked the last offensive effort by Confederate commander Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, an effort that concluded with their surrender to Grant, who held the position of Commanding General of the United States Army and led the Union Army of the Potomac.

Lee had already given up the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, following a siege of Petersburg and Richmond that had dragged on for nine and a half months. He pushed westward in hopes of linking his forces with the Confederate Army of Tennessee then stationed in North Carolina. General Philip Sheridan, commanding Union cavalry and infantry, chased down the retreating Confederates and blocked their path just southwest of the village of Appomattox Court House. Believing he faced only a thin screen of Union horsemen, Lee ordered a desperate assault meant to punch through the blockade. Once it became clear that two full corps of federal infantry stood behind that cavalry, any hope of continued retreat vanished, leaving Lee with no option but surrender.

The paperwork sealing that surrender was signed inside the parlor of Wilmer McLean's home on the afternoon of the same day. Three days later, on April 12, a ceremony took place in which Confederate soldiers marched past Union troops and laid down their weapons, a moment overseen on the Confederate side by Major General John B. Gordon and received by Union Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain. This dissolved the Army of Northern Virginia altogether, releasing close to 28,000 remaining officers and enlisted men on parole. They were permitted to head home without their principal arms, though soldiers kept their horses and officers were allowed to retain sidearms. With this, organized warfare in Virginia came to a close.

The episode marked the beginning of the end for a conflict that had stretched across four years. Its aftermath set off a chain of further capitulations throughout the former Confederacy, in North Carolina and Alabama, and eventually reaching Shreveport, Louisiana, where by June the Trans-Mississippi Theater in the western regions likewise laid down arms.

Military situation

The struggle to seize Richmond, seat of the Confederate government, entered its final phase in June 1864, when Union forces under the Army of the Potomac pushed across the James River. Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), serving as Lieutenant General and General-in-Chief, directed the effort to encircle Petersburg, just south of the capital, hoping to sever the rail lines feeding both cities and compel a Confederate withdrawal. By the spring of 1865, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) recognized that his position along the Petersburg defenses could not hold indefinitely and bided his time for an escape, yet it was the Federals who acted first. On April 1, cavalry under Philip Sheridan swung around Lee's flank at Five Forks, and the following day Grant's forces broke through in force,

April 9

At first light on April 9, 1865, Gordon's Second Corps struck at Sheridan's mounted troops and rapidly pushed back the front line commanded by Brevet Brigadier General Charles H. Smith. Behind that line, Brigadier Generals Ranald S. Mackenzie and George Crook managed to slow the Confederate push. Gordon's men broke through and seized the high ground, yet once they gained the crest they found the Union XXIV Corps arrayed for battle with the V Corps positioned beside it. Seeing this, Lee's

Civil War commemorative stamps

During the Civil War Centennial, the United States Post Office marked the passage of a hundred years since several noted engagements by releasing five commemorative postage stamps, timed to match the battles' anniversaries across a four-year span. The series opened in 1961 with the Fort Sumter Centennial issue. A stamp honoring Shiloh followed in 1962, and one for Gettysburg appeared in 1963. The Wilderness received its own commemorative issue in 1964, and the set concluded in 1965 with the Appomattox Centennial stamp.

Aftermath

News that the surrender had been signed prompted General George Meade, who had not attended the meeting, to supposedly cry out that the war had reached its end. Yet nearly 175,000 Confederate soldiers still stood in arms, most of them hungry and discouraged. Some were spread across the South in small garrisons or bands of guerrillas, while the bulk belonged to three principal armies still in the field. Once word of Lee's capitulation traveled, other Confederate leaders recognized that their cause no longer had the strength to continue and chose to give up their weapons as well.

Joseph E. Johnston commanded the last truly dangerous Confederate force, stationed in North Carolina. He yielded to Major General William T. Sherman at Bennett Place near Durham on April 26, 1865. The 89,270 men who surrendered there formed the single largest capitulation of the war and effectively brought the fighting to a close. General Richard Taylor gave up his command, covering Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana, at Citronelle, Alabama, on May 4, 1865. Jefferson Davis convened his cabinet for a final session in Washington, Georgia, on May 5, 1865, formally bringing the Confederate government to an end. Union troops seized Davis, his wife Varina, and their party on May 10 at Irwinville, Georgia.

When news of Lee's surrender reached Nathan Bedford Forrest, later a founding figure of the Ku Klux Klan, he too laid down arms, delivering his farewell address at Gainesville, Alabama, on May 9, 1865. Edmund Kirby Smith gave up the Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department on June 2, 1865, at Galveston, Texas. That same period, on May 26, 1865, tribes that had allied with the Confederacy gathered for the Camp Napoleon Council in what is now Oklahoma and agreed to send commissioners to seek peace with the United States. Stand Watie, a Cherokee chief and general leading the 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles, gave up the last substantial organized Confederate unit on June 23, 1865, at Doaksville in the Choctaw Nation.

Fighting continued in scattered skirmishes even after Appomattox. The clash at Palmito Ranch, east of Brownsville, Texas, on May 12 and 13, 1865, is generally counted as the war's final land engagement; oddly enough, the Confederates won it, only to surrender shortly afterward. Command of the CSS Shenandoah, a Confederate raider ship, fell to James Iredell Waddell, who became the last Confederate officer to give up when he struck his flag in Liverpool and handed his vessel over to British authorities on November 6, 1865, having been in the Pacific, far from home, when news of the war's end finally reached him.

Lee never lost his appreciation for the generosity Grant showed him at the surrender, and afterward he would allow no disparaging remark about Grant in his presence. Longstreet, too, spoke fondly of his old friend, recalling with gratitude how Grant had greeted him warmly and offered him a cigar at Appomattox, later working to secure Longstreet's pardon and giving him a federal post in New Orleans once Grant became president. In a similar spirit, General John Brown Gordon treasured the moment when Chamberlain saluted his defeated army, describing him as one of the most chivalrous soldiers in the Federal ranks.