April 9, 1865. In the front parlor of a house in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. The meeting lasted roughly 90 minutes. The terms were two handwritten pages. It was the most significant surrender of the Civil War and, effectively, the end of it. The nation had paid for this moment with 620,000 lives. It was time to go home.
The Last March
By the spring of 1865, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had been pinned at Petersburg for nearly ten months. Grant had laid siege to the city in June 1864, cutting supply lines and grinding Lee's forces down through attrition. At its peak, Lee had about 60,000 men opposing more than 100,000 Union troops. By April 1865, desertions had gutted his ranks. His men were hungry, barefoot in many cases, and running out of everything.
On April 1, Union forces delivered the decisive blow at the Battle of Five Forks, collapsing Lee's right flank. The next day, Grant's infantry broke through Confederate defenses at Petersburg entirely. Lee had no choice. He ordered the evacuation of both Petersburg and Richmond on the night of April 2. The Confederate capital fell on April 2-3. Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government fled south. The dominoes were in motion.
Lee's plan was to head southwest, link up with General Joseph Johnston's army in North Carolina, and continue the fight. Grant understood the plan and moved to stop it. He sent Philip Sheridan's cavalry to seal the railways. One Union corps marched 30 miles in 21 hours to get ahead of Lee's retreat. By April 8, Lee's army paused just east of a small village called Appomattox Court House. He had been counting on supply trains waiting at Appomattox Station. Union cavalry under George Armstrong Custer had already captured and burned them.
On the morning of April 9, Lee launched one last attack to break through what he hoped was only cavalry blocking his path. It wasn't. Two full corps of Union infantry were right behind the horsemen. When Confederate General John Gordon sent word that his position was hopeless without infantry support, Lee knew it was over. He said, "There is nothing left for me to do but go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths."
Flags of truce went out. The guns fell quiet.
The House That Bookended a War
Grant had been suffering from a throbbing migraine since the previous night. He later recalled that it disappeared the moment he read Lee's letter requesting a meeting to discuss surrender terms.
Grant let Lee choose the location. Lee's aide, Colonel Charles Marshall, rode into the village of Appomattox Court House — a hamlet of roughly twenty buildings — and knocked on the door of a two-story brick house owned by a man named Wilmer McLean.
The choice was history's small, perfect irony. Four years earlier, in July 1861, McLean had lived on a farm in Manassas, Virginia, along a creek called Bull Run. His house had served as headquarters for Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard during the First Battle of Bull Run, the war's first major land engagement. A Union cannonball crashed through McLean's kitchen fireplace. Shaken, McLean moved his family more than 100 miles south to the quiet village of Appomattox Court House, looking for somewhere the war would never find him.
It found him anyway. McLean later said: "The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor." He was the only man in America who could say it honestly.
The Meeting in the Parlor
Lee arrived at the McLean house around 1 p.m. He was immaculate — full dress gray uniform, polished boots, dress sword. He sat in a tall caned armchair and waited.
Grant arrived about 30 minutes later. He wore what he called a "soldier's blouse" — a plain field uniform with no sword, his pants and boots spattered with the mud of a hard campaign. He had ridden hard all morning, migraine and all, to get there.
Grant's staff officers crowded the room. Among them was Lieutenant Colonel Ely S. Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca who served as Grant's military secretary. Parker would be the one to write out the clean final copy of the surrender terms. When Lee arrived and shook hands with the assembled officers, he reportedly paused when he reached Parker — surprised, by most accounts, to see a Native American among Grant's staff. Lee extended his hand and said, "I am glad to see one real American here." Parker replied: "We are all Americans."
Grant and Lee talked for a while about the Mexican-American War, in which both had served. Then Lee brought up the purpose of the meeting.
Grant drafted the terms himself. They were generous by any measure. Confederate officers could keep their sidearms, private horses, and personal belongings. Enlisted men would stack their arms, sign paroles pledging not to take up arms again, and return home. They would not be imprisoned. They would not be prosecuted for treason. As long as they observed their paroles and the laws in force, they would not be disturbed by U.S. authority.
Lee read the document and appeared visibly relieved. He made one small request: many of his enlisted cavalry and artillery men owned their own horses. Could they keep them? They would need them for spring planting. Grant said he would instruct Union officers to let any Confederate who claimed to own a horse take it home. Lee said: "This will have the best possible effect upon the men."
Both men signed. It was done.
"The war is over. The rebels are our countrymen again."
Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, April 9, 1865, ordering Union troops to cease celebratory cannon fireThe Grant-Lee Terms at a Glance
Surrender Terms: Army of Northern Virginia, April 9, 1865
The Document Itself
The image below is the surrender at Appomattox, as painted by Louis Guillaume in 1892. It now hangs at Appomattox Court House National Historical Park. The original surrender terms document is held at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
April 12: Honor Answering Honor
Grant was not present for the formal surrender ceremony three days later. He had left Appomattox on April 10 to meet with President Lincoln in Washington. Lee had departed on April 11 to return to his family in Richmond. The ceremony would be conducted by the men who had actually done the fighting.
On the morning of April 12, 1865 — nearly four years to the hour after the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter — Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain assembled Union troops along both sides of the Stage Road through Appomattox Court House. Chamberlain had won the Medal of Honor at the Battle of Gettysburg for his bayonet charge at Little Round Top when his regiment ran out of ammunition. He knew something about what soldiers owed each other.
Nearly 28,000 Confederate infantry marched up the road, division by division, to stack their arms and lay down their battle flags. As the column approached, Chamberlain ordered his men to "carry arms" — the marching salute. Bugles sounded. The Union soldiers came to attention.
General John Gordon, commanding the Confederate column, was caught off guard. Then he ordered his own men to return the salute. It was what Chamberlain later called "honor answering honor." Some men on both sides wept. The men who had tried for four years to kill each other stood at attention for each other in the road.
About 28,000 Confederate soldiers stacked their arms that day, folded their battle flags, and received their paroles. They walked home. The war in Virginia was over.
Note: Chamberlain's account of the salute, written decades later in his memoirs, has been questioned by some historians as embellished. However, Confederate General John B. Gordon, in his own separate account, corroborated that a salute occurred and called Chamberlain "one of the knightliest soldiers of the Federal army."
What Came After
Lee's surrender was not the official end of the Civil War. Other Confederate armies remained in the field. General Johnston surrendered to Sherman in North Carolina on April 26 — the largest surrender of the war, nearly 90,000 men. The last significant Confederate land force surrendered in Galveston, Texas, on June 2. The final Confederate naval vessel lowered its flag in Liverpool, England, in November 1865. President Andrew Johnson did not formally declare the war over until August 20, 1866 — sixteen months after Appomattox.
Three days after the McLean parlor surrender, on April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington. He died the following morning.
Reconstruction would follow. The promises of emancipation would be contested, delayed, and in many places actively dismantled in the decades ahead. The wound Appomattox closed was deep, and the country's reckoning with what the war had been fought over was far from finished. That part of the story is long and unresolved.
What Appomattox did do was this: it established that the United States was one nation, indivisible — not a voluntary compact of states that could leave when they disagreed. That question, which had haunted the country since the Articles of Confederation, was settled in blood. The answer was preserved by the men and women who served, suffered, and died on both sides of the line.
America 250: The Moments That Made Us
They Paid for This Country.
We Back Those Still Paying for It.
At Soldier Solutions, every purchase through Operation Companion funds TADSAW service dogs for veterans living with PTSD and TBI. The freedom on this page was paid for by American soldiers. We honor those still serving today.
FAQ
Appomattox Court House Your Questions Answered
Sources: National Archives (archives.gov); Wikipedia: Battle of Appomattox Court House, Wilmer McLean, McLean House; American Battlefield Trust (battlefields.org); Encyclopedia Virginia (encyclopediavirginia.org); Smithsonian Magazine; National Park Service, Appomattox Court House NHP; New-York Historical Society; National Museum of American History. Painting: Louis Guillaume, "Surrender of Lee to Grant" (1892), public domain, Appomattox Court House NHP collection. | Soldier Solutions LLC · ZEROblog-Thirty · Patriot-Owned. Veteran-Operated.
