History & Significance
Appomattox Court House was never a large place. It was a county seat in name only, a cluster of buildings centered on a brick courthouse at a crossroads in the Virginia Piedmont: a tavern, a few private homes, a law office, and the two-story house that Wilmer McLean had bought after the fighting around Bull Run had destroyed his previous home. By the spring of 1865 it was exactly the kind of anonymous rural Virginia village that the war had passed over without particular consequence. Then the Army of Northern Virginia, retreating west from Petersburg, ran out of road.
Robert E. Lee's army, roughly 28,000 men who remained from the force that had once numbered more than 75,000, had been moving west for a week after the fall of Petersburg and Richmond. Grant's armies were parallel and ahead of them, blocking every route south or west. On the morning of April 9, a final Confederate attack confirmed that Union infantry, not just cavalry, held the road ahead. Lee sent a flag of truce.
The surrender took place in the parlor of Wilmer McLean's house that afternoon. Lee arrived in full dress uniform. Grant arrived dusty from the road in a private's blouse with his rank's stars sewn on. Grant's terms were generous: officers could keep their sidearms, men could keep their horses, and all were paroled to go home. The formal surrender of arms happened three days later, when Confederate soldiers stacked their rifles and furled their flags in a ceremony conducted with deliberate dignity.
Appomattox County had been carved out of Campbell County in 1845, and the courthouse village that gave it its name was a creation of that county organization. The Virginia land grant system traced ownership of every parcel in the county back through the state's records. McLean sold his house and left Appomattox not long after the surrender. The house was disassembled in 1893 by a speculator who planned to rebuild it in Washington as a museum; when the project failed the structure sat in ruins until the National Park Service reconstructed it on the original foundation.
The last week of the Army of Northern Virginia
The fall of Petersburg on April 2, 1865 forced Lee to abandon Richmond and begin a westward retreat along the Appomattox River toward the rail junction at Danville, where he hoped to link up with Joseph Johnston's army in North Carolina and continue the war. Grant's forces pursued along parallel routes, cutting off Confederate foraging parties and supply trains while wearing down the retreating column.
On April 6, at a stream called Sailor's Creek, Union forces cut off roughly a quarter of Lee's army and captured or destroyed it. Nearly 8,000 Confederate soldiers were taken prisoner in a single afternoon, including several generals. Lee, watching the collapse from a hillside, is reported to have said: "My God, has the army dissolved?" It had not yet, but it was dissolving.
The army reached Appomattox Station on the evening of April 8 to find that a Union cavalry force had arrived ahead of it and captured the supply trains waiting there. Confederate infantry attacked the following morning and initially drove the cavalry back, only to find Union infantry forming behind it. There was no road left. Lee ordered the white flag.
The terms and what they meant
The terms Grant offered at Appomattox set a precedent for how the Union would treat the defeated Confederacy. Officers kept their sidearms. Men who owned their own horses could take them home for the spring plowing. No one would be prosecuted for treason as long as they observed their paroles and obeyed the laws. Grant later argued that his terms at Appomattox, which Lincoln had approved, represented a pledge of good faith toward the South that the federal government was obligated to honor.
The formal stacking of arms took place on April 12. Union General Joshua Chamberlain, who had held Little Round Top at Gettysburg nearly two years earlier, commanded the Union troops receiving the surrender. As the Confederate infantry came forward to lay down their arms, Chamberlain ordered his men to come to the carry, the marching salute, in acknowledgment of the Confederate soldiers as fellow Americans. Confederate General John B. Gordon, at the head of the column, returned the salute.
The paroled Confederate soldiers scattered across Virginia and the South in the days that followed. The Army of Northern Virginia, which had held the Union army at bay for nearly four years, ceased to exist as a military organization on the road outside a county courthouse village that most of its men had never heard of before that week.
The village, the county, and the land records
Appomattox County was created from three existing Virginia counties in 1845 to give a more central location for county government in this part of the Piedmont. The courthouse village that became the county seat was laid out on land that had previously been part of several larger farms, and the Virginia land records document those original holdings and the subdivisions that created the village lots.
Wilmer McLean had moved to Appomattox Court House specifically to escape the war. His previous farm at Manassas in northern Virginia was on the Bull Run battlefield, and the first major battle of the war in July 1861 had been fought partly in his yard. He sold that property and moved south to what he assumed was a backwater far from the fighting. In an irony that was not lost on contemporaries, the war that had come to his front yard in 1861 ended in his parlor in 1865.
The preservation of the village is more complete than almost any other Civil War site. The National Park Service reconstruction of McLean's house, the courthouse, and several other structures was based on detailed archaeological and documentary research, including the original Virginia land records and deed books that trace ownership of each parcel. The village as it stands today is, within the limits of the reconstruction, the place where the Civil War effectively ended.