Battle of Appomattox Court House

• 1. Introduction

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  On the morning of the 9th of April, 1865, Robert E. Lee rode out to meet Ulysses S. Grant. He wore his ceremonial uniform. In his own words, he explained why: "I may be taken prisoner today. I must look my best." Grant arrived at the meeting place in a mud-spattered sack coat, his trousers tucked into muddy boots, no sidearms visible, rank shown only by tarnished shoulder straps. One man was preparing to surrender an army. The other, suffering from a migraine headache that morning, would later say the pain vanished the moment he read Lee's letter agreeing to meet.

  The place was Appomattox Court House, a small Virginia village of roughly twenty buildings that served travelers along the Richmond-Lynchburg Stage Road. The house belonged to a farmer named Wilmer McLean, who had moved there specifically to escape the war. He had once lived near Manassas Junction, where one of the Civil War's earliest major battles had torn through his land. He retreated to this quiet waystation to find peace. Instead, the war followed him.

  What unfolded in McLean's parlor that afternoon did not simply end a battle. It ended the Army of Northern Virginia, triggered a cascade of surrenders across the South, and set the terms on which a broken nation would try to put itself back together. How Lee's army arrived at that doorstep, what was said inside, and what happened to a continent of soldiers in the weeks that followed are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Last March

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  Philip Sheridan's cavalry turned Lee's flank at the Battle of Five Forks on the 1st of April, 1865. The next day, Grant's army broke through the Petersburg lines, and Lee's men abandoned trenches they had held for ten months, evacuating on the night of April 2-3.

  Lee's plan was to reassemble at Amelia Courthouse, link up with General Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Tennessee in North Carolina, and establish defenses along the Roanoke River. When his troops arrived at Amelia on the 4th of April, they found no provisions. Lee sent wagons out to forage from the surrounding countryside, losing a full day of marching time in the process.

  The army turned toward Appomattox Station, where another supply train waited. On the 6th of April, at a place called Sailor's Creek, nearly one fourth of Lee's entire retreating force was cut off by Sheridan's cavalry and elements of two Union corps. Most of the roughly 7,700 Confederates present were captured or surrendered, including Lieutenant General Richard S. Ewell and eight other general officers. The losses at Sailor's Creek prevented Lee from reaching Appomattox Station until late afternoon on the 8th of April, by which point Sheridan had arrived ahead of him, captured his supplies, and blocked the road forward.

  Already on the 7th of April, Grant had sent Lee a note suggesting the time had come to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee declined, but asked what terms Grant had in mind. On the 8th of April, Union cavalry under Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer captured and burned three additional supply trains waiting for Lee at Appomattox Station. With both the Army of the Potomac and the Army of the James now converging, Lee's army was running out of road.

• 3. The Final Attack

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  At dawn on the 9th of April, 1865, Major General John B. Gordon launched the Confederate Second Corps against Sheridan's cavalry along a low ridge southwest of Appomattox Court House. Gordon's men forced back the first Union line, charged through, and reached the crest. What they saw stopped them. The entire Union XXIV Corps stood in line of battle, with the V Corps positioned to their right.

  Major General Edward O. C. Ord had marched the XXIV Corps 30 miles in 21 hours to reach the cavalry before dawn. Lee's cavalry, seeing the massed infantry, pulled back toward Lynchburg. Gordon's position was now untenable. When Colonel Charles Venable of Lee's staff rode up and asked for an assessment, Gordon sent back a message he knew Lee did not want to receive: "Tell General Lee I have fought my corps to a frazzle, and I fear I can do nothing unless I am heavily supported by Longstreet's corps."

  Lee's reply, upon hearing Gordon's words, became one of the most quoted sentences of the war: "Then there is nothing left for me to do but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths."

  Not all of Lee's officers accepted surrender without resistance. Brigadier General Edward Porter Alexander, Longstreet's chief of artillery, advocated that the troops scatter into the woods and continue the war as guerrillas. Historian Michael Korda argues that Lee's rejection of this option was among the most consequential decisions he made: it may have prevented years of additional conflict. Lee chose instead to request a cease-fire while he sought Grant's terms, sending a white linen dish towel as a flag of truce.

• 4. McLean's Parlor

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  Lee arrived at the 1848 brick home of Wilmer McLean before Grant. His aide, Charles Marshall, had been dispatched to find a suitable location in the small village. Marshall rejected the first house he encountered as too dilapidated before settling on McLean's home. It was the first time Lee and Grant had seen each other face to face in nearly two decades.

  Grant, whose migraine had lifted when he received Lee's letter agreeing to meet, was overcome with sadness when he entered the parlor. He found it difficult to begin the conversation, and the two men instead briefly recalled their one previous encounter, during the Mexican-American War. Lee eventually redirected them to the matter at hand.

  The terms Grant offered were generous. Confederate soldiers would not be imprisoned or prosecuted for treason. Officers could keep their sidearms, horses, and personal baggage. Beyond the stated terms, Grant also permitted the defeated men to take home their horses and mules to use in the spring planting, and he provided Lee's starving army with food rations. Lee said the gesture would have a very happy effect among the men and do much toward reconciling the country.

  The surrender document was handwritten by Grant's adjutant, Ely S. Parker, a Native American of the Seneca tribe. When Lee noticed Parker's appearance and realized he was Native American, he remarked, "It is good to have one real American here." Parker replied simply: "Sir, we are all Americans." The document was completed around 4 p.m. As Lee mounted his horse and rode away, Grant's men began to cheer. Grant immediately ordered them to stop. "The Confederates were now our countrymen," he said, "and we did not want to exult over their downfall."

• 5. The Ceremony of Arms

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  On the 10th of April, Lee gave his farewell address to the remnants of his army. A six-man commission gathered the same day to arrange a formal ceremony of surrender, though no Confederate officer wished to participate in such an event.

  Brigadier General Joshua L. Chamberlain was the Union officer selected to lead the ceremony. On the 12th of April, 1865, the Army of Northern Virginia marched in to surrender their weapons and their battle flags. Chamberlain recorded what he saw in his memoirs, published decades later under the title The Passing of the Armies. He described the Confederate soldiers as "thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours." He ordered his men to give the marching salute as each Confederate division passed.

  General Gordon, riding at the head of the column with what Chamberlain described as "heavy spirit and downcast face," heard the shift of arms and understood the gesture. He wheeled his horse, dropped the point of his sword to his boot toe in formal salute, and then ordered his successive brigades to pass with the same honor. Gordon later called Chamberlain "one of the knightliest soldiers of the Federal army."

  Historian William Marvel has disputed details of Chamberlain's account, noting that Chamberlain did not command the full federal surrender detail but only one brigade in General Joseph J. Bartlett's division, and that he made no mention of any salute in his letters written at the time, only in memoirs composed many decades later when most other eyewitnesses had died. Gordon's own account, however, affirms that a salute did occur, which contradicts Marvel's skepticism. About 28,000 Confederate soldiers passed through the ceremony, stacking their arms. General Longstreet's account tallied 28,356 officers and men surrendered and paroled.

• 6. A Nation of Surrenders

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  When General George Meade heard the surrender had been signed, he reportedly shouted that "it's all over." But roughly 175,000 Confederates remained in the field across the South, most of them starving and without realistic hope of reinforcement.

  General Joseph E. Johnston's army in North Carolina, the most threatening remaining Confederate force, surrendered to Major General William T. Sherman at Bennett Place in Durham, North Carolina, on the 26th of April, 1865. The 89,270 Confederate troops who laid down their weapons there represented the largest single surrender of the war. General Richard Taylor surrendered the Departments of Alabama, Mississippi and East Louisiana at Citronelle, Alabama, on the 4th of May. President Jefferson Davis met with his Confederate Cabinet for the last time on the 5th of May in Washington, Georgia, officially dissolving the Confederate government. He and his wife Varina were captured by Union forces at Irwinville, Georgia, on the 10th of May.

  General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who would later become a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, surrendered at Gainesville, Alabama, on the 9th of May. General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department on the 2nd of June in Galveston, Texas. The last sizeable organized Confederate force was surrendered on the 23rd of June, 1865, by Cherokee Chief and General Stand Watie, who commanded the 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles, in Doaksville, Choctaw Nation.

  The last man to lower the Confederate flag was not a general on a battlefield. Commander James Iredell Waddell, in command of a Confederate Navy commerce raider, surrendered his vessel to the British government in Liverpool on the 6th of November, 1865. He had been halfway around the world in the Pacific when he learned the war had ended.

• 7. What Appomattox Left Behind

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  Lee never forgot Grant's conduct at the McLean house. For the rest of his life, he would not permit an unkind word about Grant in his presence. Confederate General Longstreet, who had been one of Grant's close friends before the war, recalled being grateful for a cheerful greeting and a cigar at Appomattox. After Grant became president, he worked to secure Longstreet a pardon and appointed him to a federal position in New Orleans.

  The McLean house itself became a relic almost immediately. Custer and other Union officers purchased the room's furnishings as souvenirs, emptying it of furniture. The house that farmer McLean had retreated to after the First Battle of Bull Run was now an artifact of the war's end.

  During the Civil War Centennial, the United States Post Office issued commemorative stamps marking the hundredth anniversaries of major battles. The Appomattox Centennial stamp was issued in 1965, the last in a five-stamp series that began with the Battle of Fort Sumter stamp in 1961. The American Battlefield Trust and its preservation partners have since acquired and preserved 512 acres of the Appomattox battlefield. What remains preserved is not just terrain but the precise ground where a retreating army ran out of road, and where the decision not to scatter into the woods may have determined how long the wounds of that war would take to close.