Appomattox and the Generous Surrender Terms That Began to Heal a Nation

Imagine the victor arriving late, mud to the knees, wearing a private's coat with the shoulder straps pinned on, apologizing to the loser for his appearance. Meanwhile the loser, a Virginia aristocrat in a spotless new dress uniform with a ceremonial sword, waits in a borrowed parlor. If a novelist invented the scene, the editor would send it back for being too neat. It happened on April 9, 1865, in the front room of Wilmer McLean's house in the village of Appomattox Court House, and its main lesson is that how you end a war matters almost as much as whether you win it.

Ulysses S. Grant won the war on the battlefield and then did something rarer. He won the peace in a single afternoon, with a sheet of paper and a few sentences of plain English.

Eight Days From Petersburg

The surrender did not come out of nowhere. It was the end of a chase. Through the winter of 1864 and 1865 Grant's armies had held Lee's army in the trenches around Petersburg, Virginia, the railroad hub that fed Richmond. On April 2, 1865 the Union broke the line, and Lee telegraphed that Richmond and Petersburg would both have to be evacuated. The Confederate government fled the capital that night, and Union troops entered Richmond on April 3.

Lee led what remained of the Army of Northern Virginia west, hoping to turn south, join the army in North Carolina and keep the war going. He needed food, and he needed to stay ahead of the Union cavalry under Philip Sheridan. He could do neither. At Sailor's Creek on April 6 a large part of his army, thousands of men including several generals, was cut off and captured. The rest were starving. Rations that Lee had ordered forward to a rail stop were not where they were supposed to be.

On April 7 Grant, wrote Lee a short letter. He pointed out the hopelessness of further resistance and asked Lee to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee answered the same evening, not agreeing but asking what terms Grant would offer. Grant wrote back on the eighth that he had one condition: the men would be disqualified from taking up arms again until properly exchanged. Lee replied the same day, proposing a meeting. The final exchange took place on the morning of the ninth, when Lee's attempt to break through the Union lines at Appomattox Court House found Sheridan's cavalry, with infantry coming up behind, in the way.

So on a Palm Sunday, a day many Christians in the Union and the South would have been in church, the two generals met.

What Was Said in the McLean House

Lee arrived first, with his military secretary, Colonel Charles Marshall. Grant arrived with a handful of staff officers. The room was a parlor. The conversation began with an old memory: the two men had both served in the Mexican War, and Grant said he remembered Lee from it. Then Lee turned the talk to business, and Grant, to his later embarrassment, had to remember to bring it back to the point.

The terms Grant wrote out were brief. The officers and men would give their paroles, meaning a signed promise not to take up arms against the United States until properly exchanged. The arms, artillery and public property would be surrendered, stacked and handed over. The officers would keep their side arms, their private horses and their baggage. Then came the sentence that mattered most. Each officer and man would be allowed to return to his home, and he would not be disturbed by United States authority so long as he observed his parole and the laws in force where he lived.

I want you to read that last provision again, because it is the whole thing. A defeated army was told: go home. Not to a prison. Not to a trial. Not to a gallows, as some in the North wanted. Go home, and so long as you keep the peace the government of the United States will leave you alone.

Lee read the paper and made one request. In the Confederate army, he pointed out, the cavalrymen and artillerymen owned their own horses, and in the Union army they did not. Lee asked whether the terms would let those men keep them. Grant said that the terms as written did not allow it, but that he understood the men would need the animals to put in a crop and to get through the next year. He said he would instruct the officers who handled the paroles to let any man who claimed a horse or a mule take it home. Lee said that would have a very happy effect.

That is the exchange as the surviving accounts give it. (Whoever says Washington never keeps a promise to the little guy has not read about the mules.), and I am telling it in my own words and not claiming to quote them. The generosity was about spring planting. It was the practical kindness of a man who had been a farmer, a failed one, and who knew what a farm needed.

Then Lee mentioned that his men had been on short rations for days. Grant asked how many men were involved, and sent for food. Reported figures put the rations at about 25,000 for the Confederate army. Whatever the exact count, the principle is clear: the victorious army fed the beaten one, from its own supply wagons, within hours of the surrender.

The Cheers That Stopped

Word of the surrender ran through the Union lines. Union artillery began firing salutes. Grant ordered the celebration to stop. The accounts of his reason vary in their wording, and I will not pretend to quote him. The sense was that the Confederates were again fellow countrymen, and that the Union would not exult over their misery.

Here is what I find most instructive. Grant did not have to say it. He had the authority, the army and the moral high ground. The easy road in 1865 was to demand a humiliation. Armies in nearly every other civil conflict of that century, and many since, treated defeat as an invitation to punishment. Grant instead treated defeat as the end of the fighting and the start of reunion.

The formal ceremony of surrender came on April 12. The Confederate infantry marched out to stack arms and furl flags. Union Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain, the Maine professor who had held Little Round Top at Gettysburg, ordered his men to come to the position of "carry arms," a soldier's salute to the men marching by. The Confederate General John B. Gordon, leading the column, responded in kind. It was a small piece of choreography by two soldiers. It spoke more than any proclamation.

The Roots of Magnanimity

Where did the terms come from? Not only from Grant. A month earlier, on March 4, 1865, Lincoln had delivered his Second Inaugural Address, ending with the words: "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." Grant's terms carried the same spirit.

There is also a practical Founding root. Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution defines the crime of treason narrowly: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Technically, every Confederate soldier had levied war against the United States. The Union could have tried a hundred thousand men. The Founders had written the definition narrowly because they remembered how English kings had stretched the offense to hang their enemies, and they remembered that a republic that treats every dispute as treason will soon be a tyranny. Grant's parole terms were the Constitution's temperance in action.

Within weeks, the principle was tested. A federal grand jury in Norfolk indicted Lee for treason in June 1865. Grant took the matter personally. He insisted that his parole terms protected Lee and the other paroled officers from prosecution as long as they obeyed the conditions, and in the accounts that survive he threatened to resign over it, though the wording of those accounts varies. The Attorney General ordered the prosecution dropped within weeks. That is a fact about Grant's character that gets less attention than his battlefield record: he understood that a promise made to a defeated enemy is a promise nonetheless.

The Strongest Objection

Let me state the skeptic's case as fairly as I can. It has four parts, and it is made by serious people on both sides.

First, some say, the terms were too soft. The leaders of the rebellion had started a war that killed some 600,000 Americans, and a republic that does not punish treason invites more of it. The answer from the Founders' narrow definition is that the war had been a political and military contest, not a crime to be avenged, and that the main purposes of the war, preserving the Union and ending slavery, had been achieved by victory and the Thirteenth Amendment, not by hangings.

Second, others say the terms were too soft in another sense. Lenient treatment of the former Confederates led, in the years that followed, to the Black codes, to the vigilante violence that cut Reconstruction short and to the long, bitter story of redemption by the very men the Union had spared. That is a serious charge and a true observation of history. You can read the details of the first stage of that story in Reconstruction's Promise and the Freedmen Who Built Schools, Churches and Towns.

Third, from the other side: Grant's terms were not generous enough, since the nation's wounds could not heal until the cause of the war was addressed.

Fourth, the revisionist version, which holds that the soft peace allowed a "Lost Cause" mythology to flourish.

What Magnanimity Achieved

I would answer all four by distinguishing what a surrender can do from what a political settlement must do. Grant's terms did exactly what they were meant to do, and they did it well.

1. They ended the fighting quickly. Other Confederate armies surrendered in the following weeks, Johnston's on April 26 in North Carolina, with others through May. The pattern of the Appomattox terms made it easy for them to lay down their arms. A harsher precedent would have encouraged the guerrilla war that some Confederates had urged.
2. They fed and sent home a defeated army. Roughly 28,000 men were paroled at Appomattox. They carried their horses back to their farms, and a region that had been drained of men and money got some of them back in time to plant.
3. They avoided a cycle of vengeance. The history of many civil wars is a history of reprisals. The Appomattox terms contained none. That reflects a Judeo-Christian instinct, the idea that a victor has duties as well as rights, and it recalls the Lincoln line about malice and charity.
4. They kept the Constitution's narrow definition of treason intact. No American president since has been able to cite the precedent of mass treason trials, and that is a gift to every future dissenter.

What the terms could not do was the work of protecting the freed people. That was the job of the law, of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and of the troops and officials who were supposed to enforce them. Lee's men were allowed to go home in peace. The question was whether the freed people would be allowed to live in peace there too, and on that question the nation, within a decade, failed. Magnanimity toward the vanquished must never be allowed to become indifference toward the vulnerable. A good peace has to be generous to the defeated and firm in defense of those the war was fought to free.

It would be a mistake to blame Appomattox for what came after. A surrender cannot guarantee the future. It can only clear the ground, and what is built on it depends on what later generations decide to do.

What Grant Understood

Consider what Grant's example teaches about leadership and about the American character. A president can be forgiving and firm in the same breath. A general can win without gloating. A country that has just survived a war can still hold on to its own best principles. This is a very different spirit from the one that guides modern politics, where every victory is treated as an invitation to settle scores, and every election as the beginning of a purge. I would suggest that the habit of magnanimity is an old conservative virtue. Burke taught that statesmen should treat the inherited order of a country with care, and that a reform which destroys more than it mends is no reform. Grant grasped the point without needing Burke.

The Union soldiers who watched the Confederates stack arms, and the Confederates who rode home on their own horses, both knew what had just happened. It was not a feud. It was an ending. Within a generation, the veterans of both armies would stand on the same fields at Gettysburg to shake hands, and the reunion would be possible in part because of what Grant had done in the McLean parlor.

For the battle whose dead Lincoln consecrated, see The Gettysburg Address Read Closely Sentence by Sentence and Gettysburg in Three Days and the Charge That Failed on July 3, 1863. For the soldiers whose service helped win the war, The 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner and the Soldiers Who Proved Doubters Wrong tells the story. And for the larger question of how a republic should remember a war, What Caused the Civil War, Who Won It and Why, Answered From the Record sets the causes out from the record. The Founding principle of a limited government that does not treat every dispute as treason is also the thread in George Washington Gave Up Power Twice and Changed What Leaders Could Be.

Five days after Appomattox, on April 14, Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre, and he died the next morning. The man who most wanted a generous peace never saw it. That is the cruelest irony of the story, and it should make us ask how much of what followed might have gone differently under his hand. We cannot know. What we can do is read the terms, honor them and ask whether we would have the grace to write them.

The Case in Brief

1. Grant's terms at Appomattox on April 9, 1865 let a defeated army go home on parole, keep side arms, and keep its horses for spring planting, and they sent rations to the men who had been starving.
2. The generosity followed Lincoln's call of "malice toward none" and the Constitution's narrow definition of treason, and Grant defended it against a treason indictment of Lee.
3. The terms ended the fighting quickly and avoided a cycle of reprisal, which is what a good surrender is for.
4. They could not protect the freed people. That task belonged to the Reconstruction amendments and the nation's will to enforce them, and the nation's will failed.
5. The lesson is that magnanimity to the defeated is a virtue only when paired with firmness for the vulnerable, and a republic needs both.

What you can do: read Article III, Section 3 on the Constitution page, then read the Second Inaugural and Grant's terms side by side and ask what a modern victor owes the loser.