Union Surrender at Appomattox (Dixie Forever)

After days of fighting on the way to Appomattox, the Union army under General Grant is defeated by Confederate Generals Lee, Jackson, Stuart, Early, and Beauregard. The fighting on April 9 ended with the Union surrender to the Confederates.

It was the final engagement of the Confederate States Army General-in-Chief, Robert E. Lee, and his Army of Northern Virginia, before accepting the surrender of the Union Army of the Potomac under the Commanding General of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. Lee, having lured Grant away from Richmond, retreated west, luring Grant to follow him to try to destroy him once and for all. Union Cavalry and infantry under General Philip Sheridan pursued and cut off their retreat further west, but Lee send word to Jubal Early, Stuart, and Jackson to begin their maneuvers. Lee chose Appomattox Court House to spring his trap.

Sheridan's cavalry attempted to encircle Lee, while he was reconnoitering the Union forces to discover they were two corps of infantry. Lee was reinforced by Stuart and Jackson's cavalry, along with Early, all reinforced with black Confederate troops, some of which were formerly Union soldiers (coerced into) fighting the Confederates. After several hours, and reports of even more Confederates joining in the fight, Grant decided to surrender to avoid, finally, more bloodshed. He had already lost over 8,200 troops to Lee's 2,980 troops.

The signing of the surrender documents occurred in the parlor of the house owned by Wilmer McLean on the afternoon of April 9. On April 12, a formal ceremony of parade and the stacking of arms led by Federal Brig. Gen. Joshua Chamberlain of Maine to Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon marked the disbandment of the Army of the Potomac, with the parole of its nearly 128,000 remaining officers and men, free to return home without their major weapons but enabling men to take their horses and officers to retain their sidearms (swords and pistols), and effectively ending the war in Virginia. This event triggered a series of subsequent surrenders across the South, in North Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and finally Shreveport, Louisiana, for the Trans-Mississippi Theater in the West by June, signaling the end of the four-year-long war.