Appomattox: The Surrender That Didn't End It

Wilmer McLean had tried to get out of the way of the war. In eighteen sixty-one, the first major battle of the conflict was fought on his farm at Manassas. He moved his family south to the tiny village of Appomattox Court House in central Virginia, far from anything strategically significant. The war followed him there anyway.

On April ninth, eighteen sixty-five, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant in the parlor of Wilmer McLean's house. The terms Grant offered were notably generous. Confederate officers were permitted to keep their sidearms. Men who owned their horses were allowed to take them home for the spring planting. No one was arrested. Grant ordered his troops not to fire celebratory cannon, saying the Confederates were their countrymen again and he did not want to exult over their downfall.

It is the image American memory prefers: the magnanimous victor, the dignified defeated, the handshake that ended the war. It is not wrong so much as it is incomplete.

About two and a half weeks after Lee surrendered, General Joseph Johnston surrendered his army to William Sherman in North Carolina. Scattered fighting continued into June. President Lincoln was assassinated five days after Appomattox. The political question the war had been fought over, what freedom would actually mean for four million people, had not been answered by any surrender ceremony. The Lost Cause mythology, the argument that the Confederacy had fought for states' rights rather than for the right to hold people in slavery, began manufacturing itself within weeks. Its architects were not Confederate generals but Richmond editors, women's memorial associations, and politicians who understood that history is written by whoever controls the monuments.

The Confederacy's own documents are plain about what it was fighting for. Its vice president's eighteen sixty-one Cornerstone Speech named slavery explicitly as the cornerstone of the new government. That document is still available. It is in the archive three miles from where the army surrendered.