The Last Days Of The US Confederacy | The American Civil War

January 1864. The American Civil War was now nearly three years old. Those who had believed that the fight between the North and the South would be settled in one set-piece battle at Bull Run in 1861 had been proved cruelly wrong. For the North, there was frustration, for the tide of the breakthrough could be achieved. But for the South, there was desperation. A muster showed that only 278,000 of its 465,000 enlisted soldiers were actually available to fight. The rest were sick or wounded. In an attempt to shore up its dwindling manpower, the South extended the draft to include 17 to 50-year-olds, a move that increased the opposition to the already unpopular government of Jefferson Davis. Hyperinflation and shortages bit deep as the South grew ever more dependent on the blockade runners at sea. For all this, the war seemed to be at a stalemate and still dragged on. The South could no longer go on the offensive, on the strategic offensive. The foray into Pennsylvania that culminated with the Battle of Gettysburg is the last time that any Confederate Army is going to be able to strike into Northern Territory. It had lost too many men during 1863. The strategy now is to defend as much Confederate territory as possible and hopefully break the will of the Northern people to continue the war. The best thing for the Confederacy would have been a brisk defeat in the summer of 1864. They could not have done any better than they already had. They were a lost cause. Why fight a total war? Why allow the South to be ravaged by two armies when it would have been so much simpler to just give it up? The early weeks of 1864 did little to convince anyone that there were quick military solutions or that any general, Confederate or Federal, was about to put forward a new strategy to speed the end of the war. Ever since the exhausting campaign had begun, Abraham Lincoln had struggled to find the right man to command the premier Eastern Army. McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, all had come and gone. George Meade still commanded the Army of the Potomac, but his failure to aggressively pursue the Army of Northern Virginia after the Battle of Gettysburg had left a bad impression on the President. But now Lincoln believed he had at last found the man he was looking for. Politically, 1864 would be an election year and Lincoln was fighting a rearguard action against some members of his own party. The Radical Wing had issued a private circular which actually made it into the newspapers. It was called the Pomeroy Circular. And in this published argument, their belief was that Lincoln could not be re-elected. He was unelectable again and they'd have to search for another candidate. History Hit is an award-winning streaming platform built by history fans for history fans. Our goal is to bring you award-winning documentaries that cover the events and figures that have shaped our world all in one place. Travel with us to the fascinating world of prehistoric Scotland or uncover the lives of the people who called Pompeii home. We also aim to bring you the stories and legends that shaped our world through our award-winning podcast network. Sign up now for a free trial and Timeline fans get 50% off their first three months. Just be sure to use the code TIMELINE at checkout. Lincoln had been saddled with overconfident commanders, incompetent commanders, officers who were not willing to fight, people who were too cautious. And he was promoting generals to general-in-chief or generals in charge of the army of the Potomac who are facing a very crafty adversary, General Robert E. Lee. What he needed was someone who was just as much of a gambler, a risk taker as Robert E. Lee, someone who was just as determined and crafty as Robert E. Lee and he found this in the victor of Vicksburg. Ulysses S. Grant, to this point in the war, had been the most successful field commander that the North had. His victories early on at Fort Henry and Donaldson, his victory at Shiloh, his magnificent victory at Vicksburg, his ability to come into Chattanooga and to counter-attack and break the siege of Chattanooga and send the Confederate Army of Tennessee away in defeat, all of these things were feathers in Ulysses Grant's cap. Lincoln liked him because he said that this man fights. General Ulysses S. Grant was promoted lieutenant general and given overall command of federal forces in March 1864. Meade retained his possession as commander of the Army of the Potomac while Philip H. Sheridan went east with Grant and took over command of its cavalry. Grant's plan for victory when he becomes general-in-chief in 1863 is to pin down the Army of Northern Virginia and destroy it. He believed that the one way to win the war was to seek out and destroy his enemy and that enemy's will to fight. So he was willing to fight an all-out war, a total war. In his strategy, he vows that if Lee decides to split his army and attempt any flanking movements, then he'll follow that army. He's going to seek out and destroy him. The main attack on the Army of Northern Virginia came in May at a place that had already won a gruesome reputation during the fighting that had occurred only one year earlier. This was the dense forest known as the Wilderness near the old battlefield of Chancellorsville. The chaotic nightmare of the battle in the thick woods where the choking smoke made it almost impossible to see can hardly be imagined. Men, sometimes entire units, got lost. Some fired upon their own troops in the confusion. The soldiers of the north and south fired at each other from point-blank range and some men were literally cut in two by the hail of bullets. If this hell on earth were not enough, the dry tinder of the forest was set alight and many wounded men, unable to move in the brush, were burnt alive by the flames. Despite the desperate ferocity of the fighting, neither side was able to gain victory. Lee was not beaten, nor was he outflanked, and after a two-day struggle, 28,000 dead or wounded men lay on the battlefield. This was almost 20 percent of those who had taken part. This time, the Union commander was not prepared to sit back and lick his wounds. I will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer, Grant had told Lincoln, and he was as good as his word. He marched with his army towards Spotsylvania Courthouse, some 12 miles southwest of Fredericksburg, where Lee, who had anticipated the move, was waiting for him. By 1864, after years of enduring aimed rifle fire from the rifled mini musket, and by 1864 you're starting to see magazine-fed rifles as well. First thing everybody does is start digging, and at Spotsylvania Courthouse we see the emergence of trench warfare to make incremental gains rather than breaching the enemy's defense in a single mad rush. At Spotsylvania, the Confederates had constructed an impressive set of earthwork defenses that must have looked impenetrable to the Union troops. From May 10th to the 19th, these earthworks were to be the scene of particularly vicious combat. The names given to parts of them, the Mule Shoe and Bloody Angle, have endured as reminders of the new depths of savagery reached on one grim day, May 12th, 1864. The Battle of Spotsylvania actually lasted almost a month, but that day, the 12th of May, was certainly one of the bloodiest days of the war, and that was when the Army of the Potomac, I mean all 20,000 men, stormed the Confederate defenses and charged into the belly of Lee's army, and from the southern viewpoint it was like this huge wall of blue bearing down on them. It was 20 hours of close fighting, really ugly hand-to-hand combat. There was an oak tree there, two feet thick, which was actually cut down by a hail of bullets coming from two different directions, much the same way as Lee's army was cut in two for a while before they were able to get some reinforcements and push the Federals back. But the stump of that oak tree was put on display later at the World's Fair and sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and it's still on display now. It's a symbol of the ferocity of the Civil War and that battle in particular. The casualty figures from Spotsylvania defy belief. 14,000 men had been killed, 16,000 more were wounded. In just a few hours of grim slaughter, the entire area had been turned into an enormous graveyard, where the bodies of the dead lay together with the wounded and dying in the torrential rain that came to drench the battlefield. They said that the rain seemed to be trying, on nature's behalf, to wash away the bloodstains that the so-called civilized human beings were spilling on the surface of the earth. In that horrible rain at Bloody Angle, the Union was able to just keep on pouring people against the rebel fortifications, and Lee was still able, by dint of being properly dug in, to hold out for a very long time. While this carnage at Spotsylvania was taking place, Sheridan was making progress to the rear of Lee's position, where he began to pose a serious threat to Richmond. Sheridan orchestrated a campaign of destruction that saw railroads ripped up, supplies destroyed, supply lines cut, and telegraph lines torn down. On top of all this, Sheridan claimed a famous scalp at the Battle of Yellow Tavern, where the legendary Confederate cavalryman Jeb Stuart, a southern icon and hero, was killed. Jeb Stuart was the last of the Cavaliers, and he was nothing if not conspicuous. He'd ride around with this huge, billowing, silk-lined cape, and he had this sort of lush, plumed, slouch hat. And, you know, he made a very inviting target. I mean, his uniform was always getting snipped by bullets, and I think at one point he actually had his mustache shot off his or half of it, you know, I mean, you know, straight out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, really. So that day at Yellow Tavern, one of his aides warned him that he was too exposed, and Stuart said, you know, nonsense, there's no danger here. And he rode to the front of his lines and was firing his pistol into the air to encourage his men, and he caught a bullet in the belly from one of George Custer's sharpshooters. James Earl Brown Stuart would die in his home state of Virginia at the Battle of Yellow Tavern, attempting, as he always does, to disrupt the federal lines and to cause havoc amongst federal troops. This time, however, his forces are overwhelmed, and Union cavalry, using quick-firing carbines as well as Union infantry, catch his troopers in the open. He dies as he lived, fighting with pistol in hand. Meanwhile, in the Battle of Wits between Grant and Lee, the scene had moved to a small crossroads near the Chickahominy River, called Cold Harbor. This was to be yet another small, insignificant point on the map that would achieve bloody infamy. For despite the maze of defensive earthworks that confronted Grant and his troops when they arrived on the 31st of May, the Union commander was determined to mount an all-out attack. Grant was in hot pursuit of General Lee, carrying out his strategy of trying to pin down and destroy those southern forces. However, when he catches up with Lee at Cold Harbor, he finds that Lee has his troops entrenched behind strong fortifications. There were a couple of delays in transportation that allowed this to happen. Therefore, Grant has two options. One, he could sit and wait and even possibly attempt to flank. Two, he could attack. Grant, being the risk taker that he is, decides that he would use a large charge, one momentous charge, to try to crack the Confederate lines. He should have learned by Lee's mistake at Gettysburg that this would be disastrous. At 4 30 a.m. on June 2nd, 60,000 men began their fateful march towards the Confederate positions. They get up out of the trenches, they go over the top in the phrase of a later war, and they attack the rebel trench system. The rebels just cut them to pieces. It's a good thing that Sam Grant can outspend Bobby Lee in human material because at Cold Harbor, Grant does exactly that. Men were cut to pieces by the hail of southern shot and shell, and they fell in tangled heaps as they tried to storm the Confederate defenses. Hardened veterans later claimed to have seen nothing like it, even on the killing grounds of Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Spotsylvania. It was not war, wrote one Confederate soldier, it was murder. Nothing was gained by the Union assaults. Although Grant wrote after the war how much he regretted ordering the attack, he seems to have had no doubts at the time, for he certainly entertained the idea of a second assault. Cold Harbor did a great deal of damage to Grant's reputation, and further fueled the northern public's sense of war weariness and anger at the way the war was being prosecuted. But the Union commander was nothing if not determined. He redeemed himself within days of the Cold Harbor debacle with a brilliant tactical maneuver across the James River that convinced Lee that the federal forces were intending to attack Richmond. In fact, Grant's real objective was Petersburg, a town and vital rail junction that lay to the south of Richmond, and the place from where the Confederate capital received many of its supplies. Grant's plan was obvious. Capture Petersburg, cut off supplies to Richmond, and starve it into surrender. Petersburg was almost completely undefended. I think there were like 5,000 of Beauregard's men holding out against a federal assault, you know, three times as large. And Beauregard had actually sent a messenger to Lee pleading for reinforcements, and Lee refused. He said, no, you must be mistaken. Grant hasn't moved any of his forces south of the James River. So Petersburg really was there for the taking, and the north blew it. Perhaps because the recent memory of the failed assaults at Cold Harbor was still on the minds of the commander, the Union commanders, they failed to use their overwhelming numerical superiority to punch through the defenses. And what happened is Lee is able to get his soldiers in to the Petersburg defenses, which were already well-constructed. Trench lines, strong points, abatis, other sorts of obstacles. He was able to get his troops behind those defenses while the rest of the Army of the Potomac comes up. And by the time Lee gets his army in there, the Army of Northern Virginia, combined with Beauregard's forces, will prove to be a formidable force. Grant will realize that I'm going to have to settle down to a siege once again. Petersburg, poorly defended and ripe for the taking, trembled in anticipation of a huge northern attack. But it never came, and a glaring opportunity to shorten the war was lost. If the beleaguered President Lincoln thought that matters could get no worse for the north, he was wrong. Within weeks, Confederate forces under General Jubal A. Early, who was detached from the Army of Northern Virginia, had crossed the Potomac to stand on Washington's very doorstep. Early had come from the Shenandoah Valley, where all attempts to defeat the southern forces had failed. But Early's Confederate army was small, perhaps some 15,000 men, and it had no hope of overwhelming Washington, let alone holding it. So Early took his troops back into Virginia, but not before part of his raiding force burnt down the Pennsylvania town of Chambersburg, an act of retribution for similar acts in many parts of the south. At the siege of Petersburg, there came a new development, the brainchild of one of Ambrose Burnside's officers. A long tunnel was dug under the Confederate positions. It was packed with nearly four tons of gunpowder and intended to blow everything and everyone above it to smithereens. Then northern troops would storm what remained of the southern lines. On July 30th, the enormous explosion tore the Confederate lines apart, spewing earth, debris, and human bodies into the air. There was panic and confusion among the surviving southern troops as they surveyed the huge crater left by the blast. Tragically, phase two of the operation did not proceed so smoothly. In fact, it was to provide the war with another of its great costly disasters. It took a month to dig 500 yards across no man's land and put four tons of dynamite into the mine that went under the rubble line. An entire regiment disappeared into the earth when the Union blew that mine and the Union charges into that breach. And they get to the rim of the crater. They are as stupefied and as in awe as the Confederates. About 300 Confederate soldiers have been blown to smithereens. There's body parts lying all around. There's a 30-foot deep hole in the ground. These soldiers basically just mill around. Some of them are foolish enough to actually go down inside the crater. The hole blasted by the Union miners is just wide enough to pack a whole lot of Union guys into and pack them into a killing ground. And they were massacred by the rebel forces to either flank. They were massacred by rebel artillery in depth. And the result was that they'd blown physically a big hole in the rubble line. But it was a matter of minutes really for rebel soldiers to dig a new line of trenches around the edge of that mine at Petersburg. And there was a physical hole in the rubble line, but the rebel defense was not disrupted. The unremitting bad news for the Union in the first half of 1864 had hardly helped President Lincoln's chances of re-election. Lincoln himself expected to lose, and the election campaign was given an edge when the Democrats announced their nominee. He was none other than George B. McClellan, the man who had once commanded the Army of the Potomac and who had been dismissed by Lincoln. McClellan, it seemed, was back to have his revenge. With the odds stacked against him, only final victory in the field would help Lincoln's campaign. Renewed hope for this came in the formidable shape of William T. Sherman, who was appointed and ordered by Grant to take the prize of Atlanta, Georgia. The rebel army can do the math as well as anybody else. They look at a map and they see that Chattanooga to Atlanta, which was the industrial heartland, if there was one, of the Confederacy, was 100 miles, about the same distance as Washington to Richmond. And they'd spent the whole war bashing their heads against the problem of getting to Richmond because that was the political heart of the Confederacy. Why not just go from Chattanooga to Richmond, the industrial heart of the Confederacy, win the war that way? So while Grant, as General-in-Chief, is personally commanding the Army in the politically sensitive East, Sherman is going for Atlanta from the West. Sherman and his total war strategy did something that many soldiers or many generals at this time were afraid to do. He would cut away from his supply base so that he wouldn't have soldiers stretched out for long distances, so he wouldn't be reliant on supplies so far away that could be possibly cut off by Confederate cavalry. Allow his army to live on the land and move as needed. It gave him a lot of freedom. The rebel's strategy for dealing with Sherman's advance towards Atlanta is essentially to give him enough rope to hang himself. Let him come, let him come, let him come. He'll make a mistake and we'll destroy him. But he never makes the big mistake. And by the time they realized that, there is William Tecumseh Sherman and he's standing outside Atlanta. In the city of Atlanta itself, there was utter panic and its citizens, desperate to escape from the oncoming Union Army, soon crowded the roads that led out of the city. In a last throw of the dice, Jefferson Davis decided on a new commander for the defending Southern Army, replacing General Joe Johnson with the 31-year-old, one-legged John Bell Hood. Despite having lost the use of an arm at Gettysburg, Hood was patently unsuited to high command. His attempts to halt Sherman's advance ended in bloody and very costly defeats. Union shells soon began to fall on Atlanta. A bombardment that was maintained with ruthless efficiency by Sherman, despite Hood's protests that innocent civilians were in harm's On September 1st, 1864, Atlanta fell. Sherman recognizes that in modern industrial war, the idea that a citizen is non-combatant, even though he works in a factory making artillery rounds, or making wagons to haul the artillery round, or dealing in horses to pull the wagons to carry the artillery rounds, the citizens of Atlanta could not be viewed as non-combatants in a modern industrial war, and therefore Sherman had to destroy Atlanta. And when Mayor Calhoun of Atlanta pleaded with Sherman, don't destroy our city, Sherman replied in the famous phrase, war is cruelty and you cannot refine it. It often often translated just as war is hell. Atlanta is ours and fairly won, wrote Sherman to a relieved Lincoln. While the north rejoiced, the federal army put the city to the torch. Only churches and some private residences were spared. Abraham Lincoln's presidential prospects rose phoenix-like from the ashes of Atlanta. The tide was turning. Now it was the south receiving all the bad news. Hard on the heels of the fall of Mobile Bay and Atlanta came word of events in the Shenandoah Valley where Grant had entrusted to Philip Sheridan the task of finally clearing the Valley of Confederates. The pugnacious, ruthless cavalrymen had once again gone about his task with gusto. The whole country from the Blue Ridge to the North Mountains has been made untenable for a rebel army. I have destroyed over 2,000 barns filled with wheat and hay and 70 mills, driven 4,000 head of stock before the army and killed 3,000 sheep. When I am through, the valley will have but little in it from man or beast. At Cedar Creek on October 19th, General Early attacked Sheridan's army as it slept, achieving a significant advantage. But the diminutive Union commander somehow rallied his troops and drove the Confederates from the field. 3,000 southern troops were lost in this final attempt to keep the Shenandoah Valley open to the Confederacy. When you think about it, it's quite remarkable that the presidential election of 1864 ever took place at all. The country's in the midst of a civil war, a bloody civil war, and now you're going to hold a free election in one section of the country. But that was what made the Republic great at that time. The election of 1864 was basically a referendum on two things, the continuation of the war to the final surrender of the Confederacy, and it was a referendum on emancipation. The war lasted longer than a lot of people had expected. You had peace Democrats calling for peace. There was war weariness with that throughout the North. However, it sets a precedence because Americans, though they may have disagreed with Lincoln, were not ready to change horses in the middle of the stream, especially if this horse was victorious. And when Sherman was able to capture Atlanta, which is the gem of the South, it was just one more victory, one more star on Lincoln's shoulder. And so American people thought, if we are going to win the war, and if this president is winning the war, well, maybe we should stay with him. On November 8, 1864, Abraham Lincoln was re-elected as president. It was a remarkable personal triumph for Lincoln and another humiliation for McClellan, who had carried only three states, Kentucky, Delaware, and New Jersey. With 54% of the popular vote, Lincoln had his mandate from the country, and McClellan, who was particularly graceless in defeat, hurried off to Europe, cursing his opponent and the result. Most gratifying for Lincoln must have been the results of the vote from the army. 78% of serving soldiers had voted Republican. Had Lincoln lost and McClellan won, the South may have gained its independence, and the North may have had to go to war again with the Southern Confederacy in an attempt to reunify. Slavery would have lasted a lot longer, or the United States may have just remained split in half, one the U.S., other the C.S.A. But with the re-election of Lincoln, the North pursued reunification and was successful in bringing the Southern states back into the fold. With the political uncertainty behind him, Lincoln was once again able to turn his full attention to military matters. He now had formidable commanders to steer the North to victory. Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan had all proved themselves ready, willing, and able to bring the South to its knees. All had made costly mistakes, but had also won vital victories, and Lincoln knew that these were the men upon whom he must rely to finally defeat the Confederacy. Sherman, like Sheridan, a most ruthless advocate of total war, begged to be allowed to take his army through Georgia, towards Savannah, before turning north through the Carolinas and into Virginia. I intend to make Georgia howl, promised Sherman, not noted for going back on his word. And so, in mid-November, 1864, Sherman's army of 62,000 men, in two vast columns, set off on its 300-mile march towards Savannah and the sea. They burned, destroyed, plundered, and pillaged as they went. We destroyed all we could not eat, burned their cotton and gins, spilled their sorghum, burned and twisted their railroads, and raised hell generally, wrote one Union soldier. One plantation owner who was left with nothing after Sherman's army had moved on remembered, they came on like demons. The end result of Sherman's destructive war that he's waging on the Southern people is that it demonstrates to these people that their governments, their state government and the Confederate government, Richmond, is not upholding one of its important missions, which is to protect them. Women who live in those areas and whose husbands are off fighting the war with the Confederate armies are writing letters saying, you know, the Union vandals have come through and destroyed the farm, have taken our food, you know, we have nothing to eat. And what will happen is that men will begin to desert in large numbers to go home and to defend their families. It makes Jefferson Davis look particularly impotent. He's having a difficult time controlling the governors of some of the Southern states, in particular Georgia and North Carolina. He's going to have a much tougher time after Sherman's march, but by this time the end of the Confederacy is in sight anyway. Meanwhile, John Bell Hood did his best to distract Sherman by invading Tennessee. The Union commander ignored him and in any case only had to wait until November 30th when Hood came to grief at Franklin at the hands of George Thomas's Union force. Here, more than a quarter of Hood's once proud Army of Tennessee was killed or wounded and the remainder was scattered in confused defeat. Six Confederate generals were killed, including Patrick R. Claiborne, known in the Southern Army as the Stonewall of the West. Although there was no doubting Hood's devotion to the cause, better to die a thousand deaths than to submit to live under you, he had told the North. The gamble to place him in command had failed. At the Battle of Nashville on December 15th, the Army of Tennessee was virtually destroyed and within weeks Hood tendered his resignation. Sherman estimated that he'd caused about a hundred million dollars worth of damage on that march, so when the shortages really began to hit the Confederacy, that's when Southern morale went into its final decline. Certainly the Confederate officer of ordinance, the secretary of the chief of ordinance, was saying that there was no money in the treasury, there was no food to feed Lee's army, he couldn't find any troops to chase Sherman anywhere, the money had run out. And meanwhile, Lincoln was telling his Congress that his resources were unexhausted and in fact inexhaustible. As long as Robert Lee could himself oppose anyone trying to get into the heartland of the Confederacy, as long as the Western theater was far away, far from the day-to-day concerns certainly of Richmond, it was possible for the Confederacy as a body politic to pretend that they could be defended and they could be preserved by the military genius of Robert E. Lee. But as Grant came crushing down from the North, through Virginia, and as Sherman came roaring through the South, from the West, through Georgia, marching to the sea, it was demonstrated quite clearly to the Confederacy that as a state they could not survive against the United States. On December 21st, Savannah fell to Sherman's army. I beg to present you as a Christmas gift, he wrote to a delighted Lincoln, the town of Savannah with 100 heavy guns, plentiful ammunition, and 25,000 bales of cotton. The new year of 1865 brought little prospect of relief, let alone victory for the South. Its army was a pitiful sight, down as it was to less than 200,000 ill-fed and badly shod troops. The weather was freezing and soldiers, many of whom were receiving heart-rending letters telling of the hardships at home, were deserting at a higher and higher rate. Soon the Confederate Congress had passed a law that earlier in the war would have been considered unthinkable. It provided for the arming of slaves for the defense of the Confederacy. Although they were promised their freedom in return, few slaves took advantage of an offer made by a dying government whose individual states had seceded four years earlier primarily to protect the right of their citizens to own slaves. Sherman continued to cut a swathe through southern lands. Columbia, South Carolina's capital, all but disappeared in flames, but the Northern General was untroubled by any qualms or doubts about his actions. I never shed any tears over it, he said afterwards. I believe it hastened what we all fought for, the end of the war. In South Carolina, the men take particular glee in destroying the infrastructure of that state. After all, in their minds, South Carolina was the state that started the Civil War. They were the first state to secede from Union. That is where Fort Sumter was located, and Fort Sumter was fired upon by Confederate forces. Consequently, when Union forces entered the state capital of Columbia, South Carolina, it's destroyed particular wantonness. Fires rage for days in that city. A lot of civilian property is intentionally destroyed, and then the Sherman's troops continue their march northward. In February, Charleston joined the growing list of southern cities that had fallen before Sherman's army. Although retreating Confederates burned some cotton stores and military installations, Charleston was spared the wide-scale destruction that Columbia had suffered. And still the politicians in the South, most noticeably Jefferson Davis, declined to give up the fight. Peace deals were talked about, but Davis insisted that the independence of the South and the preservation of slavery were to be part of any settlement. Inauguration Day fell on March 4th, 1864. Lincoln's speech was once again eloquent and elegant in equal. With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for who shall have borne the battle, and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. Listening intently in the audience was a man who would very soon leave his own indelible mark on the nation's history. He was the actor John Wilkes Booth. Meanwhile, Grant, Meade, and the Army of the Potomac were still besieging Petersburg. Lee had been made overall commander-in-chief of the Confederate forces in February 1865, but his was a hopeless task. The ragtag Southern Army that defended Petersburg and Richmond numbered less than 30,000 men. Food and ammunition were running out fast, and Grant had the bit between his teeth. Sheridan was dispatched to cut off Lee's supply lines to the Southwest, and the Confederate leader realized that soon he would be trapped. Somehow, on April 2nd, he managed to withdraw his army and head west. In Petersburg, before the Union troops broke through Confederate lines, Lee was left with a few die-hard soldiers. Desertion and starvation had taken their toll on Lee's army, and so he had approximately 35,000 troops left. Once the Union soldiers had broken through, captured Petersburg, captured Richmond, the various groups of soldiers retreated, and Lee hoped that they could reunite at Amelia Courthouse and then attempt to march to Danville, where they could cross over into North Carolina and hook up with General Joe Johnson. But what happens is he ends up fighting a series of running battles with Union troops, and his path is blocked near Appomattox Courthouse by cavalry troopers under General Phil Sheridan. At this point, he doesn't run. Petersburg was now in Union hands, and the following day, on April 3rd, 1865, Richmond, the Confederate capital, also fell. The government of Jefferson Davis was not there to witness the historic moment, of course. They had fled when the news from Petersburg came through. Fires, intentionally started by fleeing Confederates that were meant to deny Union troops the spoils of war, soon spread. Only the hard work of the advancing Union soldiers, troops of General Godfrey Weitzel's All-African American 25th Corps, saved the city from complete destruction. On April 4th, Lincoln himself was able to walk through the ruined streets of the capital of the Confederacy. For a while, a troop of African American cavalrymen accompanied him, a powerful, if unwitting, symbol of what northern victory meant to the southern slave population. Lee and his army marched west towards the mountains of Virginia with Grant in hot pursuit. There was more bloodshed at Sailor's Creek on the 6th of April, where more than 8,000 Confederates were taken prisoner. By Palm Sunday, April 9th, the tiny southern army was completely surrounded, and Lee realized the end was near. There is nothing for me to do but go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths, said Lee to his subordinates. The two men met in the now famous scene in the home of Wilmer McLean at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. Many Americans believe to this day that when Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at the tiny hamlet of Appomattox Courthouse in Appomattox County, Virginia, that the Civil War was over. It wasn't. It was the surrender of one Confederate army. There were still several Confederate armies still in the field, still in active hostilities against United States forces, but I think it becomes symbolic. This was the premier eastern Confederate army surrendering to the premier eastern Union army, and it was only a matter of time after the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered that the other armies would follow suit. Union soldiers have been instructed not to gloat but to treat their adversaries with the reverence that they deserved. These soldiers had fought the hard fight, fought the hard battle. They had starved and bled for years, and what was left fighting with Lee was a battle-hardened group of men. So when they marched into the courthouse, there weren't many people there. What was left were the slaves who were watching as these Confederate veterans marched up the road preparing to surrender. The terms that General Grant gave to General Lee were very favorable to the Confederates. He basically said that I'm going to parole you all, and you are going to go home to your families and promise not to take arms against the United States again, and as long as you remain lawful citizens that the U.S. government's not going to bother you. Grant asked Lee if he had any requests, and Lee thought about it and said yes, he had one. Most of his men had come to the war with their own farm animals, horses and mules and the like. Could they return to their farms with these animals for the spring plowing? And Grant said yes, and Lee was very grateful, thought that that would do a lot to conciliate his men towards the new situation. What Grant is doing by giving them their horses back is saying we are not going to treat you as the Romans treat Carthage, we will not sow your fields with salt. As part of the nation building that must go along with a Union victory, you will be allowed to have your economy back as well. So the rebels' surrender and the terms which Grant offers are tremendously rich in cultural symbolism. Grant offers the rebels their honor and their economy back in return for surrendering. And so the American Civil War, the Great Rebellion, was finally at an end. Lee was dignified and courteous in defeat, Grant and Sherman magnanimous and reasonable in victory. The South had been decimated. More than a quarter of a million of its men folk lay in graves. Its economy was ruined, its countryside laid waste, and many of its towns and cities razed to the ground. For the entire region, a way of life had been ended. The South had fought hard for what it believed, but eventually it had been dragged kicking and screaming into a Union it despised and now resented. The road to recovery would be long and painful for a once proud nation. The celebrations in the North were long and loud, but they were surely born more of relief than jubilation. Lincoln was determined to begin the process of binding the nation's wounds, but there was still one more act in the tragedy of the war to be played out. On April 14th, the President visited Ford's Theater in Washington to see a production of the play My American Cousin. During the performance, a shot from a Derringer pistol rang out, and amid the screams, the President of the United States lay dying from a wound to the head. The gun had been fired by John Wilkes Booth, a disgruntled actor and self-styled Southern patriot, the man who had only the previous month listened to Lincoln's inauguration speech and who had determined that the architect of the South's defeat must die. Lincoln's name was the most famous of the 620,000 names of those who died during the American Civil War. The nation had seen nothing like it before and has known nothing like it since. Many wars against foreign foes have been fought in places all across the globe. Each has its own place in the pantheon of U.S. history and in the hearts of the American people, but none perhaps has left scars like that conflict in the far-off 19th century when American fought American in a bitter struggle for the soul of the nation.