JANUARY 23, 1865: In the aftermath of the loss of Fort Fisher (which provoked such criticism that Secretary of War James Seddon resigned) and aware that confidence in his leadership is waning, President Jefferson Davis bolsters Confederate resolve by signing an act providing for the appointment of a general in chief of all Confederate armies—and on January 31 he will appoint the revered general Robert E. Lee to the post. (Lee will officially assume these responsibilities February 6.) In another command change, Confederate general John Bell Hood, whose Army of Tennessee was defeated at Atlanta and nearly shattered at Nashville, resigns his command. One of his soldiers, Douglas Cater of the Nineteenth Louisiana Volunteers, will write of the general: “I had never had the faith in him that I always desire to have in a general…. I like him for his bravery and untiring energy but he lacked caution and seemed to care nothing for the lives of his men.”¹⁰⁸

JANUARY 29, 1865: The Confederate peace commissioners (see January 11, 1865) arrive under a flag of truce at Petersburg, Virginia, sparking celebrations among both Federals and Confederates hopeful that peace may be in the offing. The commissioners are escorted to General Grant’s headquarters at City Point.¹⁰⁹

JANUARY 31, 1865: After long delay and a tense debate, the U.S. House of Representatives passes the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery (it had been passed by the Senate April 8, 1864). When the 119–56 vote is announced, celebrations erupt in the House, and artillery salvos fired on Capitol Hill to signal the measure’s passage beget joyful demonstrations in Washington’s streets. “I have felt, ever since the vote,” a Republican congressman will write in his diary, “as if I were in a new country.” In Boston, fervent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison will ask a celebrating throng to whom they are most indebted for this great event, and the people will cheer when he gives the answer: “to the humble railsplitter of Illinois—to the Presidential chainbreaker for millions of the oppressed—to Abraham Lincoln.” On February 1, Lincoln’s home state of Illinois will become the first state to ratify the amendment; ratification by the required two-thirds of the states will make the Thirteenth Amendment law on December 18, 1865.¹¹⁰

John S. Rock. Letter to John Jolliffe, December 13, 1864, with Jolliffe’s business cards. A week after President Lincoln nominated Salmon Chase as chief justice of the United States, the multitalented African American lawyer John S. Rock sought to retain Washington attorney John Jolliffe for an unprecedented purpose. “We have now a great and good man for our Chief Justice,” Rock stated, “and with him I have no doubt my color will not be a bar to my admission” to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. Rock was correct. On February 1, he became the first black American granted that honor.

FEBRUARY 1865

FEBRUARY

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The Burning of Columbia, South Carolina, February 17, 1865. Wood engraving based on a drawing by William Waud, published in Harper’s Weekly, April 8, 1865. Fires set by departing Confederate soldiers and those set by some of William T. Sherman’s least disciplined troops combined, with the aid of high winds, to consume much of Columbia.

FEBRUARY 1, 1865: “Why don’t you go over to South Carolina and serve them this way,” Georgians had reportedly asked General Sherman. “They started it.” The idea had already occurred to the general (who had, on January 19, dispatched some troops in that direction) and today, Sherman leads sixty thousand troops away from Savannah. His goal: to move north, through both Carolinas, destroying all war resources in his path, and come up on the rear of the Army of Northern Virginia, which would then be caught between two large Union forces. A much longer and more difficult campaign than Sherman’s march to the sea, this expedition will carve a corridor of destruction through the heart of South Carolina, the leading secessionist state, against which, Sherman reports to Halleck, “the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance.” In Washington, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and his associate justices listen with special attentiveness as Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts stands before them and moves “that John S. Rock, a member of the Supreme Court of the State of Massachusetts, be admitted to practice as a member of this Court.” When Chase grants Sumner’s motion, Rock becomes the first African American admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court—the same court that, in 1857 under Chief Justice Taney, had issued the Dred Scott decision, denying that any black person could be a citizen of the United States.¹¹¹

FEBRUARY 2, 1865: Secretary of State Seward’s negotiations with the Confederate peace commissioners (see January 11 and 29, 1865) are almost aborted when President Lincoln learns that the commissioners have instructions to negotiate as if the Confederate States are a separate country. Lincoln is moved, however, by a wire in which General Grant expresses his conviction that the commissioners’ “intentions are good and their desire sincere to restore peace and union,” and he agrees to meet personally with the Confederate delegation. The following day, aboard the Union steamer River Queen at Hampton Roads, off Fort Monroe, Virginia, Lincoln and Seward confer for several hours with commissioners Alexander Stephens, Robert Hunter, and John A. Campbell. Although an armistice is discussed, Lincoln makes it clear that the United States considers unconditional Confederate surrender the only acceptable means of ending the war. The Hampton Roads Conference ends in an impasse. “The ‘peace commissioners’ returned on Sunday, & with the answer I expected—no terms save Submission will be listened to,” Confederate chief of ordnance Josiah Gorgas will write in his diary a few days later. “It has had a good effect on the country…. The war feeling has blazed out afresh in Richmond, & the spirit will I hope spread thro’ the land.” In the North, Lincoln’s detailed report on the conference and related events will relieve Radical Republicans, who had feared that, to achieve peace, the president would surrender “the political fruits which had been already gathered from the long and exhausting military struggle.”¹¹²

FEBRUARY 5–7, 1865: Grant launches another offensive against the Confederate lines at Petersburg, precipitating the battle of Hatcher’s Run. The Confederates’ spirited response results in what one Union officer describes as “the greatest skedaddle that has taken place yet” among some of the Union troops. But the Federals recover and manage to extend their lines another three miles—thus forcing the already straining Rebels to extend their own. The two sides now face each other along a thirty-seven-mile front.¹¹³

FEBRUARY 9, 1865: Riding a wave of public outrage at the outcome of the Hampton Roads Conference, for the second time in three days Jefferson Davis electrifies a crowd in Richmond with a speech excoriating “His Majesty Abraham [Lincoln] the First,” condemning congressional passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and predicting, despite current circumstances, the ultimate triumph of the Confederate cause. Even Vice President Alexander Stephens, no admirer of Davis, is moved by the president’s fiery rhetoric, although the canny Georgian believes Davis’s prediction of Confederate triumph to be “the emanation of a demented brain.”¹¹⁴

FEBRUARY 12, 1865: Meeting in Washington, the Electoral College confirms Lincoln’s election by a vote of 212 to 21. In South Carolina, Federal troops brush aside Confederate skirmishers at the North Edisto River as Sherman’s army pushes deeper into the state. By February 16, the Federals will almost completely surround the capital city, Columbia, announcing their presence with occasional artillery fire. At the same time, in Charleston, Lieutenant General William J. Hardee, having already been forced to cede Savannah (see December 20, 1864) and leery of being trapped by Sherman’s advancing forces, prepares to evacuate the city where the war began.¹¹⁵

FEBRUARY 17, 1865: As small units of Confederate cavalry withdraw from Columbia, South Carolina (leaving burning bales of cotton behind them), Sherman and his troops enter, escorted by the mayor and other city officials who have surrendered the city. Although the Union occupation begins in an orderly fashion, liberated Federal prisoners, slaves newly transformed to freedmen, and the discovery by Union troops of the city’s liquor stores combine to loosen military discipline. At night, fires break out in several areas of the city and, fanned by high winds, spread until much of Columbia is in flames. In the following few days, Sherman’s troops will add to the city’s misery by destroying railroad facilities, supply depots, and other buildings deemed militarily useful to the enemy. One hundred miles to the southeast: Confederate troops, along with some wealthy civilians, evacuate Charleston, leaving behind them fires started to destroy supplies that might be useful to the enemy.¹¹⁶

Susie King Taylor (1848–1912). Born a slave, Taylor circumvented Georgia law and learned to read before escaping to freedom behind Union lines in 1862. She became a laundress, teacher, and nurse to the First South Carolina Volunteer Infantry (Colored) and was with the Union troops that occupied Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1865.

The final page of the manuscript text of the second inaugural address includes the eloquent concluding passage expressing Lincoln’s intention to preserve the Union “with malice toward none; with charity for all.”

FEBRUARY 18, 1865: Union troops commanded by Brigadier General Alexander Schimmelfennig—and including, near the van, the Twenty-first U.S. Colored Troops and two companies of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts—enter Charleston, South Carolina. In a reversal of events in Columbia, the Federal troops work to extinguish the fires the Confederates set as they left. Susie King Taylor, an African American nurse and laundress, will arrive in the city within a few days with elements of the First South Carolina Volunteers. “When we landed… our regiment went to work assisting the citizens in subduing the flames,” she will write in a postwar memoir. “For three or four days the men fought the fire, saving the property and effects of the people, yet these white men and women could not tolerate our black Union soldiers, for many of them had formerly been their slaves; and although these brave men risked life and limb to assist them in their distress, men and even women would sneer and molest them whenever they met them.” Charleston, the “fire-eater” stronghold where the first salvos of the war were fired, has become a city of resentments and despair, described by one Northern reporter as “silent, mournful, in deepest humiliation.”¹¹⁷

FEBRUARY 22, 1865: Tennessee voters approve an amendment to the state constitution abolishing slavery.¹¹⁸

MARCH 1865

MARCH

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Abraham Lincoln delivering his second inaugural address as president of the United States at the U.S. Capitol. Photograph by Alexander Gardner, March 4, 1865.

MARCH 3, 1865: The U.S. Congress enacts legislation establishing a Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, the first national social welfare agency. Assigned supervisory and management responsibilities for all abandoned lands in former Confederate territory, the Freedmen’s Bureau is to have “control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen from rebel States.” Related acts passed this day establish the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company and finally extend equal pay to all U.S. Colored Troops (see June 15, 1864), while a “Resolution to encourage Enlistments and to promote the Efficiency of the military Forces of the United States” declares that the wives and children of black soldiers will henceforth “be forever free.” Approving a bill introduced March 1 by Senator Henry Wilson and inspired by the work of philanthropist Delphine Baker, Congress also incorporates the National Asylum of Disabled Volunteer Soldiers (NADVS). The beginning of a system of shelters for totally disabled veterans that will become known collectively as the National Home, the effort will suffer from organizational flaws and will not start to become effective for more than a year.¹¹⁹

MARCH 4, 1865: Some fifty thousand people converge on the United States Capitol on this rainy morning to witness the second inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. Preliminary ceremonies include a graceful farewell address by retiring vice president Hannibal Hamlin in the Senate Chamber, where new vice president Andrew Johnson also takes his oath of office. Johnson’s inaugural address is far from graceful. Tired after his journey from Nashville and not feeling well, he fortified himself with three glasses of whiskey before the ceremony; and his rambling, nearly incoherent speech (which Lincoln will characterize later as nothing other than a “bad slip”) moves the recently appointed attorney general, James Speed, to whisper to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, “The man is certainly deranged.” Things become both literally and figuratively brighter when the dignitaries move outside for the presidential oath-taking and speech. The sun breaks through the dissipating cloud cover and Lincoln’s second inaugural address, much shorter than his first, proves to be a conciliatory speech of surpassing eloquence, most notably in its concluding paragraph:

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 him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

In the evening, at a huge post-inaugural White House reception during which the president shakes the hands of more than five thousand people, Lincoln warmly greets Frederick Douglass—the first time an African American is a guest at a social event in the Executive Mansion. “Taking me by the hand, he said ‘… I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my inaugural address; how did you like it?’ ” Douglass will later report. His answer: “Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.”¹²⁰

MARCH 7, 1865: Crossing from South Carolina into North Carolina, Sherman’s troops undergo an attitude change: resentments and the urge to punish fade. “Not a house was burned,” a Union officer will later report, “and the army gave to the people more than it took from them.” Sherman and his men concentrate on finding and defeating the remaining Confederate forces in the state before moving on toward Richmond. All Rebel troops in the Carolinas and south of Petersburg, Virginia, are now under the command of General Joseph E. Johnston, who is preparing his limited forces to meet Sherman as well as Federal units advancing from Union-held New Bern, North Carolina.¹²¹

MARCH 13, 1865: “It is now becoming daily more evident to all reflecting persons that we are reduced to choosing whether the negroes shall fight for us or against us,” President Davis had written a friend in February. Today, despite continuing opposition, the Confederate Congress passes and Davis signs a bill authorizing the enlistment of slaves as soldiers. The law does not guarantee emancipation for slaves who serve in the Confederate army; their freedom remains subject to the consent of their owners and the states in which the slave soldiers live. As events will prove, this long-debated measure is enacted too late to have any significant impact on the Confederate war effort.¹²²

Robert Todd Lincoln (1843–1926). A student for much of the war, the Lincolns’ eldest son pressed his parents to allow him to join the army, and the president finally asked General in Chief Grant if “without embarrassment to you, or detriment to the service” Robert might “go into your Military family with some nominal rank.” Captain Lincoln subsequently served on Grant’s staff.

The Peacemakers. Photographic print of an 1868 painting by G. P. A. (George Peter Alexander) Healy (1813–1894). From left: William T. Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, President Lincoln, and David Dixon Porter. At this meeting aboard River Queen on March 27, 1865, Lincoln directed that defeated Rebels be treated with consideration. “I want no one punished…. We want those people to return to their allegiance to the Union.”

MARCH 14, 1865: Duncan F. Kenner’s special mission, a final attempt to secure European recognition for the Confederacy, predicated on the South’s embracing its own policy of emancipation (see January 18, 1865), collapses when Britain’s Lord Palmerston informs Confederate envoy James Mason that Britain cannot recognize the Confederate States as an independent nation “when the events of a few weeks might prove [the South’s attempt at independence] a failure.”¹²³

MARCH 19–21, 1865: Three days after the Union defeat of Confederates under Joe Johnston at Averasboro, North Carolina, thirty thousand Federals of Sherman’s army, on their way to resupply and regroup at Goldsboro, North Carolina, before a final thrust into Virginia, fight twenty thousand Rebels in the three-day battle of Bentonville. By this time, there are nearly one hundred thousand Federal troops in the state, and there is virtually no chance of any success for Johnston’s force. Although the Confederate commander does manage to maintain his position during the battle, he will later fall back. Bentonville will prove to be the last significant effort made to halt Sherman’s progress.¹²⁴

Major General James H. Wilson (1837–1925), USA. A second lieutenant when the war began, Wilson became one of Grant’s staff officers during the campaign for Vicksburg and led the cavalry that pursued John Bell Hood’s troops after their defeat at Nashville before leading the largest cavalry operation of the war in 1865. He was promoted to major general on May 6, 1865.

MARCH 22, 1865: In Alabama, the largest Union mounted force assembled during the war embarks on a raid aimed at the important munitions and manufacturing center of Selma. Led by twenty-seven-year-old Brigadier General James H. Wilson, this 13,480-man force comprises three columns led by Wilson’s division commanders: Brigadier General Edward M. McCook, Major General Eli Long, and Major General Emory Upton. Opposing them are scattered Confederate forces, some eight thousand to nine thousand strong, under Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest.¹²⁵

MARCH 23, 1865: On this blustery day, President Lincoln, accompanied by his wife, Mary, and their son Tad, departs Washington by boat. Aware that the war is almost certainly nearing its end, Lincoln is in fine humor, despite the rough voyage. “He was almost boyish, in his mirth,” Mrs. Lincoln will later recall, “& reminded me, of his original nature, what I had always remembered of him, in our own home—free from care, surrounded by those he loved so well.” The presidential party will arrive at General Grant’s City Point, Virginia, headquarters the next morning. Meeting them at the boat, the general will be escorted by a new member of his staff, Captain Robert T. Lincoln, the president’s eldest son.¹²⁶

MARCH 24–25, 1865: With his beleaguered 55,000-man army facing Grant’s 120,000, and expecting Sherman’s 60,000 to arrive at his rear very soon, Robert E. Lee determines to break out of the siege at Petersburg and combine forces with Joseph Johnston—thus losing Petersburg and Richmond but preserving the Confederate army. In a plan suggested by General John B. Gordon, the attempted breakout begins with an attack on Fort Stedman, east of Petersburg, that completely surprises and overruns the Federal defenders. Gordon then attempts to enlarge this break in the Union lines, but his men are stopped by stubborn Union resistance spearheaded by Pennsylvania regiments, including band members who drop their instruments and pick up available weapons. After four hours of fierce fighting, Union troops charge Fort Stedman from three directions and force the Confederates to retreat. Lee pays a heavy price for this battlefield gamble: he loses part of his own forward line, and nearly 10 percent of his already depleted army are killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. “I am here within five miles of the scene of this morning’s action,” President Lincoln wires Secretary of War Stanton on March 25. “I have seen the [Confederate] prisoners myself and they look like there might be the number Meade states—1,600.” Though the commander in chief’s proximity to combat unsettles Stanton, it bolsters the morale of Grant’s troops, demonstrating that “he was not afraid to show himself among them,” as the New York Herald will report, “and willing to share their dangers here, as often, far away, he had shared the joy of their triumphs.” On the Gulf of Mexico, thirty-two thousand Federals besiege the twenty-eight hundred Confederates defending Mobile, Alabama. The Rebels will soon be forced to abandon Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely, two key defensive positions, and on April 12, they will surrender the city.¹²⁷

The Last Night Bombardment of Petersburg, Va., April 1, 1865 Preparatory to a General Assault. Wood engraving published in American Soldier in the Civil War, 1895. “[A]ll the [Union] batteries were opened and kept at work throughout the night,” the illustration’s caption notes. Mortar shells could be distinguished “by the thread of white light trailing behind them, and as answering shots were sent back by the Confederate batteries, two shells would occasionally strike each other… and, bursting, send down fiery fragments over both lines.”

MARCH 27, 1865: Having driven Jubal Early from the Shenandoah Valley, as ordered, Major General Phil Sheridan rejoins the Army of the Potomac at Petersburg, bringing with him two cavalry divisions led by George Custer and Wesley Merritt. General Sherman also arrives at City Point, Virginia, today to consult with Grant and President Lincoln. After a brief meeting aboard the president’s boat, River Queen, the three men will reconvene the following day, joined by Admiral David D. Porter. To Sherman’s question “What was to be done with the rebel armies,” Lincoln replies that all he wants, after Federal troops defeat the Rebels, is “to… get the men composing the Confederate armies back to their homes…. Let them have their horses to plow with, and, if you like, their guns to shoot crows with. I want no one punished; treat them liberally all round. We want those people to return to their allegiance to the Union and submit to the laws.” Sherman will then leave to return to his troops in North Carolina, taking with him an impression of Lincoln that he will describe after the war: “Of all the men I ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other.”¹²⁸

MARCH 30, 1865: “I begin to feel I ought to be at home,” President Lincoln wires Secretary of War Stanton, “and yet I dislike to leave without seeing nearer to the end of General Grant’s present movement.” Stanton agrees. “I hope you will stay to see it out,” he replies. “I have strong faith that your presence will have great influence in inducing exertions that will bring Richmond [into Union hands].”¹²⁹

APRIL 1865

APRIL

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The Fall of Richmond, Va., on the Night of April 2d. 1865. Hand-colored lithograph published by Currier & Ives, 1865.

APRIL 1, 1865: “No doubt a few days more will settle the fate of Petersburg,” a Union soldier declared at the end of March. Today, his prediction begins to come true when Union forces led by Major General Phil Sheridan and Major General Gouverneur Warren attack Five Forks, Virginia, a key position on what was to be Robert E. Lee’s route of retreat from Petersburg. Though Lee had ordered Major General George Pickett to “hold Five Forks at all hazards,” this proves to be impossible. The left flank of the outnumbered Confederates crumbles, and a division of Union cavalry, charging the Confederate rear, captures over a thousand prisoners. Also today, Mary Lincoln returns to Washington; the president remains at City Point, pacing River Queen’s deck, awaiting news from the battlefront. In Alabama, moving toward Selma, James Wilson’s Union cavalrymen (see March 22, 1865) defeat Confederates in a clash at Ebenezer Church.¹³⁰

APRIL 2, 1865: General in Chief Grant launches an all-out assault by the Army of the Potomac on the Confederate lines around Petersburg. Preceded by several hours of Union artillery fire, the attack begins at 4:40 am, and, within an hour, the Federals, fighting “like Lions,” as one soldier will write, effect a breakthrough at one part of the line against Confederates of A. P. Hill’s corps, who are fighting “like Tigers.” (Riding forward to rally his troops, Hill is killed by a bullet through his heart.) Throughout a day of costly combat, the Confederate lines surrounding Petersburg are breached in several places, their Rebel defenders retreating to the north and west—while, before retreating from the city, Lee sends word to President Davis that “all preparation be made for leaving Richmond to-night.” By 11:00 PM Davis and most of his cabinet have heeded Lee and abandoned Richmond, and behind them the city is descending into chaos. Fires started to destroy important papers and supplies or set by looters soon burn out of control; the center of the city becomes an inferno rocked by the explosions of shells in the arsenal and gunboats being scuttled on the river. Richmond’s proud role as the capital of a hopeful Confederacy has come to a fiery end. In Alabama, employing a three-pronged assault, James Wilson’s raiders overcome extensive fortifications, heavy guns, and an estimated five thousand Confederate troops (augmented by civilians impressed into service) to capture Selma, taking twenty-seven hundred prisoners, 102 cannon, and an immense store of supplies. Over the next five weeks, as Wilson’s men range through middle Georgia, continuing to demonstrate the intense vulnerability of the Southern interior, they will capture five cities, hundreds of artillery pieces, and nearly seven thousand prisoners (including five generals), and either capture or destroy a host of other valuable Confederate resources (see May 10, 1865).¹³¹

President Lincoln Riding Through Richmond, April 4, Amid the Enthusiastic Cheers of the Inhabitants. Wood engraving based on a sketch by J. Becker, published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 22, 1865. Many of Richmond’s white inhabitants were far from enthusiastic about Lincoln’s visit, but African Americans in the city crowded around him.

APRIL 3, 1865: On his way to meet General Grant in Petersburg, President Lincoln, his face a mask of sorrow, rides across ground strewn with the bodies of Rebels and Yankees who died deciding the city’s fate. When he joins Grant, his spirits rise; the grateful president shakes his leading general’s hand for a long time. Back at City Point, Lincoln learns that Richmond is now occupied by Union forces, among them U.S. Colored Troops. Turning to Admiral Porter, he says, “Thank God that I have lived to see this. It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is over.” As the news spreads, igniting huge celebrations in Washington and throughout the North, Lincoln determines to visit Richmond. He reaches the city on April 4 through a harbor clogged with the detritus of war. As he walks through the streets of what had been, just two days before, the enemy capital, accompanied by a nervous Admiral Porter, who fears for the president’s safety, Lincoln is surrounded by black people reaching out to touch him to make certain he is really in their midst. Some of them kneel. “Don’t kneel to me,” he tells them, “that is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.” The only black correspondent to write for a major Northern newspaper during the war, Thomas Morris Chester, witnesses the scene. He will write: “What a wonderful change has come over the spirit of Southern dreams.”¹³²

APRIL 4, 1865: Stopping in Danville, Virginia, Jefferson Davis, still determined that the Confederacy will prevail, issues a proclamation to the Confederate people. “It is my purpose to maintain your cause with my whole heart and soul,” he declares, before setting the seceded states’ current dilemma in the best of all possible lights: “Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities… with our army free to move from point to point… and where the foe will be far removed from his own base… nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain, but… our own unquenchable resolve.”¹³³

APRIL 6, 1865: Heading west through Virginia, Lee’s faltering Army of Northern Virginia has been closely pursued by Union troops. Today, in the valley of Sayler’s Creek, a tributary of the Appomattox River, Federal forces led by Phil Sheridan and George G. Meade hit the Confederates in three separate engagements, turning the day into what the Rebels will term “Black Thursday.” Some eight thousand men, at least one-fourth of Lee’s remaining force, are overwhelmed and captured by the Federals (Lee’s eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, is among the prisoners). Now outnumbered nearly three to one, Lee has few options left.¹³⁴

The Room in the McLean House, at Appomattox C.H., in Which Gen. Lee Surrendered to Gen. Grant. Lithograph published by the Major & Knapp Eng. Mfg. & Litho. Co., circa 1867. Among the officers surrounding the two generals in chief (seated at center) discussing the terms of Lee’s surrender are Phil Sheridan (between Lee and Grant) and George Gordon Meade (standing beside Grant, on the right).

APRIL 7, 1865: Responding to a message from Grant, which calls upon him to surrender because of the “hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle,” Lee states that he is not convinced the situation is hopeless. But he asks for Grant’s terms. “Peace being my great desire, there is but one condition I would insist upon,” Grant replies, “namely That the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified for taking up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged.” There will be a further exchange of messages.¹³⁵

APRIL 9, 1865: Meeting at the home of Wilbur McLean in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, General Robert E. Lee surrenders the remaining thirty thousand men of the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant. Formal surrender ceremonies will take place on April 12—four years to the day from the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter—but at this meeting the two military commanders agree on the terms of surrender, which comport with President Lincoln’s wishes, expressed at City Point (see March 27, 1865). After pledging not to take up arms until exchanged, officers and men will be allowed to return to their homes and officers will be allowed to keep their sidearms, their own personal baggage, and their horses. (Later, aware that many of the surrendering soldiers are farmers and will not be able to put in crops without horses, Grant will instruct his officers to “let any Confederate, officer or not, who claimed to own a horse or mule take the animal to his home.” Grant will also agree to provide food for Lee’s hungry troops.) Many of Lee’s soldiers are bitter about the surrender. Others accept it with magnanimity, cheering their deeply moved general, one man speaking for many when he says, “I love you just as well as ever, General Lee.” Beyond Army of Northern Virginia ranks, news of the surrender devastates the already reeling Confederacy. “Oh, I wish we were all dead!” a young Floridian will write in her diary. “It is as if the very earth had crumbled beneath our feet.” In the North, barely calmed down after the boisterous celebrations following the fall of Richmond, a happy pandemonium ensues. “The nation seems delirious with joy,” Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles notes in his diary. “Guns are firing, bells ringing, flags flying, men laughing, children cheering—all, all jubilant. This surrender of the great Rebel captain and the most formidable and reliable army of the Secessionists virtually terminates the Rebellion.” A crowd converges on the White House, where Lincoln draws cheers when he asks a band to play “Dixie,” saying, “It is good to show the rebels that they will be free to hear it again.”¹³⁶

APRIL 11, 1865: “We meet this evening, not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart,” Lincoln states to a crowd gathered on the White House lawn. In what will be a longer and more sober speech than many in the audience expect, the president addresses what he has termed “the greatest question ever presented to practical statesmanship”: reconstructing the Union. After asking everyone to “join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these [seceded] States and the Union,” he considers the specific case of Louisiana, a state partially occupied by the Union army since 1862, and one that has long had a literate and cosmopolitan free black population. “It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise [the right to vote] is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.” Those words so enrage one man in the crowd that he vows this will be Lincoln’s final speech. The man’s name is John Wilkes Booth (see November 8, 1864).¹³⁷

Cover of The Great Conspiracy, 1866. After shooting President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre (while a fellow conspirator wounded Secretary of State Seward and members of his household), the injured John Wilkes Booth escaped to Virginia on horseback, beginning a manhunt that was to culminate in his death on April 26.

The derringer John Wilkes Booth used to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, from the museum collection of the National Park Service, Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, May 28, 2008.

The ceremony at Fort Sumter, April 14, 1865, during which General Robert Anderson raised the flag he had been forced to take down exactly four years before.

APRIL 14, 1865: Four years to the day after surrendering the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, Robert Anderson, now a general, participates in a happier Fort Sumter ceremony, hoisting over the reclaimed bastion the same flag he was forced to lower in 1861. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, delivers a speech before the gathering of Union officers and dignitaries, and the solemn yet joyful ceremonies continue into the evening. As the Fort Sumter commemoration concludes with fireworks, President Lincoln, in Washington, arrives at Ford’s Theatre to see a performance of the comedy Our American Cousin. Accompanied by Mary Lincoln, Clara Harris, the daughter of one of Mary’s friends, and Clara’s fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone, Lincoln is heartily enjoying the performance when John Wilkes Booth enters the presidential box and shoots the president in the head, fatally wounding him. (At the same time, Booth’s fellow conspirator Lewis Paine assaults Secretary of State Seward in his home, wounding Seward and several members of his household.) Shouting “Sic semper tyrannis” (Thus always to tyrants) as he leaps to the stage (breaking his leg in the process), Booth manages to escape from the theater and, on horseback, crosses a bridge over the Potomac River into Virginia. In the theater, meanwhile, all is chaos. “The shrill cry of murder from Mrs. Lincoln first roused the horrified audience,” witness James S. Knox will write to his father, “and in an instant the uproar was terrible…. Strong men wept, and cursed, and tore the seats in the impotence of their anger.” The wounded president is carried across Tenth Street to a boardinghouse. When he dies there, at 7:22 the following morning, a grieving Secretary of War Stanton whispers, “Now he belongs to the ages.”¹³⁸

APRIL 15, 1865: As grief sweeps through the Union and U.S. authorities begin a manhunt for the president’s assassin and his co-conspirators, Attorney General James Speed calls on Vice President Andrew Johnson at his rooms in the Kirkwood House hotel, delivers a letter signed by members of the cabinet outlining the events of the previous night, and declares: “By the death of President Lincoln, the office of President has devolved, under the Constitution, upon you.” Johnson chooses to have Chief Justice Salmon Chase administer the oath of office in his rooms, with a few cabinet officers and congressmen present. In the Confederate states, there is little rejoicing. Many realize that Lincoln’s moderate policies would have eased their way to rejoining the Union; the Richmond Whig refers to the Union leader’s death as “the heaviest blow which has ever fallen upon the people of the South.”¹³⁹

The Surrender of Genl. Joe Johnston near Greensboro N.C., April 26th 1865. Hand-colored lithograph published by Currier & Ives, 1865.

Funeral Car of President Lincoln. New York, April 26th, 1865. Hand-colored photograph of a painting by P. Relyea, circa 1879. On the same day Confederate troops in North Carolina surrendered and Federal troops cornered John Wilkes Booth, tens of thousands of mourners in New York City were completing their final farewells to President Lincoln, as his funeral train prepared to move on in its sad journey to Illinois.

APRIL 18, 1865: After two days of surrender negotiations in North Carolina, Major General William T. Sherman and General Joseph E. Johnston sign a “memorandum or basis of agreement” calling for an armistice of all armies remaining in the field. On April 24, Sherman will be informed that President Johnson has rejected this far-reaching and controversial document; further, he will be ordered to inform Johnston that should he not surrender within forty-eight hours, Sherman will resume hostilities against his army.¹⁴⁰

APRIL 19, 1865: Funeral services are held for President Lincoln at the White House, with only the Lincolns’ eldest son, Robert, present to represent the family. Too grief-stricken to attend, Mary and Tad Lincoln remain sequestered as the brief service concludes and the president’s body is moved to the rotunda of the Capitol, where a steady stream of mourners will move past it over the next two days. On April 21, the body will be placed aboard a train to begin a remarkable journey, a sad echo of President-elect Lincoln’s journey to Washington in 1861. Grieving citizens will wait in long lines to view the body in the eleven cities (in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois) where the train will stop along the way from Washington to Springfield, Illinois. Thousands more will line the train tracks. “In out-of-the-way places, little villages, or single farm-houses, people came out to the side of the track and watched,” an 1865 publication, The Lincoln Memorial, will report, “some on foot and some in carriages, wearing badges of sorrow, and many evidently having come a long distance to pay this little tribute of respect, the only one in their power, to the memory of the murdered president.”¹⁴¹

APRIL 26, 1865: Early in the morning, Federal troops surround a barn outside Port Royal, Virginia, to which they have tracked John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirator David Herold. They order the two fugitives to surrender, but only Herold complies. Seeking to flush Booth out of the barn, the troops set it on fire. The first presidential assassin in American history is then killed by a single shot fired into the burning building, against orders, by Sergeant Boston Corbett. Near Durham Station, North Carolina, General Sherman accepts the surrender of the Confederate troops commanded by Joseph E. Johnston. Confederate forces in Alabama and Mississippi will surrender on May 4, and other Confederate army and navy forces will continue to surrender through June.¹⁴²

APRIL 27, 1865: Hundreds of just-released Union prisoners of war are among the victims of the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history when four boilers on the severely overloaded Mississippi River steamboat Sultana explode, destroying the ship and setting its larger remnants afire. Passengers who are not killed outright are plunged into the river. Many of the men cannot swim, and nearly all of them are weak from long months of debilitating captivity; large numbers drown in the muddy current. Because nearly 2,000 people had been crammed onto a boat designed to carry 376, it will be difficult to determine the exact number of casualties, but it will be estimated that between 1,500 and 1,700 people died in this terrible accident.¹⁴³

Jeff in Petticoats. Cover of a song composed by Henry Tucker, with lyrics by George Cooper, 1865. Erroneous reports that Jefferson Davis was disguised in a woman’s dress when he was apprehended by Union cavalry on May 10, 1865, were eagerly seized upon by Northern cartoonists and songwriters.

The Casemate, Fortress Monroe, Jeff Davis in Prison. Pencil and Chinese white drawing on tan paper by Alfred R. Waud, 1865. Though he was imprisoned for two years at Fort Monroe, Davis was never prosecuted for treason as originally intended. After traveling abroad, he settled in Mississippi, where he wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881).

MAY 1865

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