Appomattox, The Surrender and What Came After

The farm at Appomattox Court House sits in a gentle hollow in central Virginia, a cluster of brick and clapboard buildings that on the morning of April ninth, eighteen sixty-five, became the most important address in the country. Wilmer McLean had moved his family here from Manassas in eighteen sixty-three, specifically to escape the war. The first major battle of the conflict had damaged his farm there. The war, as the story goes, followed him anyway.

Robert E. Lee arrived at the McLean house that Palm Sunday morning in his finest uniform, prepared to offer his sword in the formal tradition of military surrender. Ulysses Grant arrived in a muddy private's coat with only his rank indicated by the shoulder straps. Grant's terms were generous, far more generous than Lee's officers had expected. Confederate soldiers could go home on parole. Officers could keep their sidearms. Men who owned their horses could keep them too, as Grant noted, for the spring plowing.

What Appomattox did not settle was almost everything that mattered to the people who had been enslaved. The war had ended slavery as a legal institution, the Thirteenth Amendment having been passed by Congress in January of eighteen sixty-five and sent to the states. But the plantation class retained its land, its social authority, and its determination to reconstruct as much of the pre-war order as possible. Virginia's Black population, nearly half a million people, moved from bondage into a contested freedom that the state government would systematically constrain for the next century.

The village at Appomattox is now a National Historical Park. The McLean house has been reconstructed on its original foundation. On most days it is quiet, which seems right for a place carrying that much weight.