Surrender at Appomattox
On 9 April 1865, near the village of Appomattox Court House in Virginia, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the American Civil War. Lee's starving, dwindling army had abandoned Richmond and Petersburg a week earlier and was finally cut off and surrounded during the retreat west. Grant offered generous terms: officers and men were paroled and allowed to return home, officers kept their sidearms and horses, and no one was tried for treason. The deliberate magnanimity — Grant even ordered rations sent to the hungry Confederates and silenced Union celebrations — was meant to bind the wounds of the war and ease reunion rather than humiliate the defeated. Other Confederate armies surrendered over the following weeks. The terms set the tone for a reconciliation among whites that would, however, leave the deeper questions of Reconstruction and the future of four million freed people unresolved.
- Year: 1865 CE
- Category: Military
