On 9 April 1865, after a failed dawn breakout at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant in Wilmer McLean's parlor. Grant's terms paroled the men and let them go home; the formal laying down of arms followed on 12 April.
By the spring of 1865 the siege of Petersburg had lasted more than nine months, and Robert E. Lee's army was thin, hungry and stretched across miles of trenches. In one week of April it was broken, pursued and cornered in a small Virginia county seat whose name became shorthand for the end of the Civil War.
This page follows Lee's last campaign from the fall of Petersburg to the stacking of arms. It closed a duel that had begun eleven months earlier in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania; for the two generals side by side, see Grant vs Lee.
Part of The greatest battles of the Civil War · Before: Sherman's March to the Sea
The retreat from Petersburg and the race west
Lee's last campaign opened with his own attack on Fort Stedman on 25 March 1865. A week later, on 1 April, Union troops under Philip Sheridan won at Five Forks, and on 2 April Grant's assaults broke the Petersburg lines. Lee had to abandon both Petersburg and Richmond, the Confederate capital.
His plan was to march west, feed his men and join Joseph E. Johnston's army in North Carolina. At Amelia Court House he found ammunition but no food. On 6 April, at Sailor's Creek, Union cavalry and infantry cut off a large part of the column, and roughly a quarter of Lee's army was captured.
Union troops seized the supplies at Farmville on 7 April, and that day Grant sent Lee his first letter asking for surrender. Lee asked about terms but kept marching toward the supply trains at Appomattox Station. On the evening of 8 April, George Armstrong Custer's cavalry got there first and captured and burned three trains.
The last morning at Appomattox Court House
That night Lee, Longstreet, Gordon and Fitzhugh Lee decided to attack west at dawn, hoping that only cavalry stood in the way. In the fog of 9 April about 9,000 men under Gordon and Fitzhugh Lee attacked before 8 a.m., drove the Union cavalry back and briefly opened the road.
Then nearly 25,000 Union infantry, Charles Griffin's Fifth Corps and Edward Ord's Army of the James, arrived after a forced march of more than 30 miles. Among them were some 5,000 soldiers of the United States Colored Troops. Behind Lee, Andrew Humphreys' Second Corps of the Army of the Potomac, commanded by George Meade, pressed Longstreet's rearguard. Lee was surrounded. Flags of truce went out between 10 and 11 a.m.1
The fighting cost fewer than 1,000 casualties. The American Battlefield Trust estimates about 152 Union and about 500 Confederate losses and counts about 63,285 Union and 26,000 Confederate troops engaged2; the National Park Service puts Lee's remaining army at roughly 33,0001. Estimates vary because desertion and capture had been thinning Lee's ranks all week.
The McLean House meeting and the terms
Lee's aide Charles Marshall asked a villager, Wilmer McLean, for a building, and McLean offered his parlor. Lee reached the McLean House around 1 p.m.3; Grant arrived half an hour later. They talked about the Mexican War until Lee brought the conversation back to business.
Grant wrote the terms himself. Officers and men would be paroled and sent home, "not to be disturbed by the United States authority" as long as they kept their paroles and obeyed the laws where they lived. Arms, artillery and public property would be stacked and handed over, but officers could keep their side arms, private horses and baggage4. Grant later wrote that demanding the officers' side arms struck him as an unnecessary humiliation.
Lee pointed out that his cavalrymen and artillerists owned their horses. Grant would not rewrite the terms but promised that any man who claimed a horse or mule could take it home to put in a crop. Lee said this would have a happy effect on his army. He added that his men were starving, and Grant agreed to send 25,000 rations for three days3 from the trains captured at Appomattox Station.
Grant's military secretary, Lieutenant Colonel Ely S. Parker, a Seneca, wrote out the formal copy. There was no formal surrender document, only an exchange of two letters, and by 3 p.m. Lee was riding away. When Union guns began a victory salute, Grant had it stopped, because, as he wrote, "we did not want to exult over their downfall5."
12 April: the stacking of arms and Chamberlain's salute
On 10 April Grant and Lee met again and agreed that every Confederate should carry a printed parole. About 30,000 blank passes were printed at the Clover Hill Tavern, with the printers working around the clock, and 28,231 paroles were signed at Appomattox6 before 15 April. The passes also let the men draw Federal rations and ride government trains home.
The formal surrender of the infantry came on 12 April. Brigade after brigade marched up the road through the village, stacked rifles, laid down cartridge boxes and folded their flags. The Union troops receiving them were under Joshua Chamberlain, the defender of Little Round Top at Gettysburg.
What happened next is known mainly from Chamberlain's own account, published in 1915 in The Passing of the Armies, half a century later. He wrote that as each Confederate division came level with his line a bugle sounded and his men shifted to the "carry", the marching salute. John B. Gordon, riding at the head of the column, wheeled his horse, lowered his sword and had his brigades answer in kind, "honor answering honor7", in Chamberlain's words. Much of the vivid detail rests on his account alone.
The Union view
For the North, Appomattox meant that the Confederacy's main army in the East no longer existed. Grant wrote in his memoirs that at the meeting he felt sad and depressed at the downfall of a foe who had fought long and valiantly, for a cause he called "one of the worst for which a people ever fought." His lenient terms matched President Lincoln's wish to let the defeated up easy. For the roughly 5,000 United States Colored Troops on the field, many of them men who had escaped slavery, the victory was bound up with emancipation.
The Confederate view
For Lee's soldiers the surrender came after a week of hunger and night marches, and many met the news with tears. In General Order No. 9, issued on 10 April, Lee told them they had been "compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources4" and that he had surrendered to avoid "the useless sacrifice" of their lives. The historian Elizabeth Varon argues that Grant's generosity helped Lee shape an explanation of defeat8 that later fed Southern resistance to Reconstruction. The same order is therefore read today both as a soldier's farewell and as the start of a long argument over memory.
What Appomattox ended, and what it did not
Lee surrendered an army, not the Confederacy, and no treaty ended the war. Joseph E. Johnston kept the Army of Tennessee in the field until 26 April, when he surrendered to William T. Sherman at Bennett Place in North Carolina; at almost 90,000 men it was the largest surrender2 of the war. Richard Taylor surrendered in Alabama on 4 May, the last battle was fought at Palmito Ranch in Texas on 12 to 13 May, and Edmund Kirby Smith gave up the last large Confederate force on 2 June.
Stand Watie surrendered on 23 June, and President Andrew Johnson proclaimed the insurrection over only on 20 August 1866. Still, Grant's terms became the model for the surrenders that followed.
If you visit
Appomattox Court House National Historical Park preserves the village where the surrender took place. It is open daily from 9:00 to 5:009, except Thanksgiving, 25 December and 1 January. Start at the visitor center in the reconstructed courthouse: the original burned in 1892 and was rebuilt in 1964, and it shows a 17-minute film, With Malice Toward None.
The McLean House is a reconstruction: the original was dismantled in 1893 for a move that never happened and rebuilt from 1948; by then only about 5,500 of its bricks were left. Signs at the east end of the village mark the Confederate stacking of arms.
Why Appomattox still matters
Appomattox is remembered for restraint as much as for victory: a battle of a few hours, a meeting over by mid-afternoon, and terms that sent tens of thousands of men home instead of to prison camps. Grant believed he was closing a war over a bad cause with as little humiliation as possible; Lee's farewell gave his soldiers a different story to carry home. Both belong to the record. For the wider war, see the greatest battles of the Civil War, and find more anniversaries in On This Day in Military History.