Straight to the Point
American Documents: Surrender at Appomattox
2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. So far I have covered The Mayflower Compact, Patrick Henry’s Speech, The Lee Resolution, The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Treaty of Paris, the Virginia Plan, The Northwest Ordinance, The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Louisiana Purchase, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Monroe Doctrine, the Indian Removal Act, the Knickerbocker Baseball Club rules. and Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ Speech, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address.
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The End of the Civil War
Most people know where the war officially ended (Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia). Few have read the documents that made it so. The “treaty,” such as it was, came from a pair of letters between the Union commander (Grant) and the Confederate (Lee.)
The letters are, themselves, rather short and direct, especially Lee’s reply. Both men did eventually meet and Grant made overtures of respect toward the man as he accepted Southern surrender, but accounts from that meeting agree that Lee had little to say and was eager enough to see it done.
You can read the terms of the South’s surrender in the National Archives. All told, the Union dealt with the Confederacy very generously, even charitably, and Grant’s diplomacy toward Lee (and the South) would continue when he was President. If Lee wanted it overwith, Grant wanted it done in a spirt of unity. The war was over. They weren’t blues and grays any longer, they were Americans.
Grant’s attitude about that was reflected in the seizure of public property from the CSA (cannons, artillery, etc), which makes sense, as those things belonged to the legally sanctioned American military, but he didn’t go beyond his warrant by stealing anything that privately belonged to members of the Confederate army. They got to individually retain their small arms and, if they had them, horses and carriages.
This site here, from the NPS, has facsimiles and transcriptions of the original letters between Grant and Lee, in their own hand.
Whenever I think of the end of the Civil War, and the officers who brought it to its conclusion, I think of this moment and the attitudes that Grant and Lee had for each other: civility, charity, and respect. 160+ years later there are still people who want to litigate the Civil War and want the South punished in perpetuity for ill-perceived wrongdoings.
Yet the men who actually fought that war—and the commander who led it—decided that it was done, that the officers need not be rounded up and executed, and that the enlisted men ought to return to their lives as part of a re-unifying nation.
If you’ve got a problem with that, take it up with Grant, because he didn’t. What an underrated leader he was.
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