The Army of Northern Virginia's surrender at Appomattox Court House on the 9th of April 1865 closed the principal Confederate field army's resistance after three days of running battles westward from the Petersburg-Richmond lines. The terms Grant offered Lee at the McLean House were generous: officers retained their side arms and horses, men were paroled rather than imprisoned, and all received rations from Union supply trains for the journey home. Lee accepted; the formal stacking of arms followed on the 12th of April, with Joshua Chamberlain (the Little Round Top defender, by then a brigade commander in the Union Fifth Corps) commanding the federal troops along the surrender road and ordering them to present arms as the Confederate column passed — a gesture of soldierly respect that became one of the most-remembered images of the war's closing. Five days later, on the 14th of April, Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington by the actor John Wilkes Booth; he died the following morning. The combination of the surrender and the assassination, falling within a single week, set the terms under which the post-war reconstruction of the southern states would proceed — and substantially complicated them.
The remaining surrenders
Lee's surrender did not end the war: Joseph E. Johnston's Confederate forces in North Carolina remained in the field until the surrender to Sherman at Bennett Place near Durham on the 26th of April 1865. Other Confederate forces surrendered in sequence: Richard Taylor's army in Alabama on the 4th of May, Kirby Smith's Trans-Mississippi Department on the 26th of May, the Confederate Indian regiments of Stand Watie on the 23rd of June (the last formal Confederate military surrender, in Oklahoma). The CSS Shenandoah, a Confederate commerce raider that had not received word of the surrenders, continued to capture Union whaling vessels in the Bering Sea until the 28th of June 1865 and finally surrendered to British authorities in Liverpool on the 6th of November — the last Confederate military force to lay down arms. Jefferson Davis was captured by Union cavalry near Irwinville, Georgia, on the 10th of May 1865 and held at Fort Monroe until 1867, when he was released without ever being tried for treason.
The Reconstruction Amendments
The constitutional response to the war was the three Reconstruction Amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in January 1865 and ratified in December 1865, formally abolished slavery in all states. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in June 1866 and ratified in July 1868, established birthright citizenship, guaranteed equal protection of the laws, guaranteed due process, and disenfranchised certain Confederate leaders. The Fifteenth Amendment, passed in February 1869 and ratified in February 1870, prohibited the denial of the vote on the basis of race. The three amendments collectively created the legal architecture of a multi-racial constitutional republic — an architecture that would, over the subsequent ninety years, be substantially evaded by the southern states through the Black Codes (1865-66), the Ku Klux Klan and other paramilitary organisations (1866 onward), the Jim Crow legal regime (substantially codified from the 1890s), the elimination of black voting through poll taxes, literacy tests, and white-primary devices (from the 1890s), and the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of separate-but-equal (1896). The structural reversal of these evasions would not be completed until the civil rights legislation of 1964-65, a century after Appomattox.
Reconstruction
Reconstruction — the period 1865 to 1877 during which the federal government attempted to reorganise the political institutions of the former Confederate states — went through three principal phases. The Lincoln-Johnson phase (1865-66) was lenient: the southern states were required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment and adopt revised constitutions, but otherwise allowed to reorganise themselves under existing political leadership. The result, the Black Codes of 1865-66, substantially re-criminalised the freedom of African-American workers under various vagrancy, apprenticeship and contract-enforcement laws. Northern public opinion reacted with outrage. The 1866 Congressional elections produced a Republican supermajority that overrode Andrew Johnson's veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and adopted the Military Reconstruction Acts of March 1867, beginning the Radical Reconstruction phase (1867-77).
Radical Reconstruction divided the former Confederacy into five military districts under Union army administration, required new state constitutions guaranteeing black male suffrage, and supervised the readmission of the former Confederate states to congressional representation. The reconstructed state governments — typically biracial coalitions of African-American legislators, white Republican "carpetbaggers" from the North, and white southern "scalawags" — produced substantive achievements: public education systems (the first in most southern states), debt-relief legislation, expansion of civil rights, and approximately 1,500 African-Americans elected to public office between 1865 and 1877, including two U.S. senators (Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, both of Mississippi) and approximately twenty congressmen. These governments were destabilised by sustained paramilitary violence — the Ku Klux Klan from 1866, the Knights of the White Camellia, the White League, the Red Shirts, the Mississippi Plan — and by progressive northern political fatigue with the costs of continued military supervision. The contested 1876 presidential election produced the Compromise of 1877, in which Rutherford B. Hayes received the presidency in exchange for the withdrawal of remaining federal troops from the South. The withdrawal allowed the "Redeemer" Democratic governments to take power across the former Confederacy and substantially undo the Reconstruction's political and civil-rights achievements over the subsequent twenty-five years.
The Lost Cause
The Lost Cause — the post-war revisionist tradition that minimised slavery as the war's cause, presented the Confederate war effort as a noble defence of states' rights and constitutional principle, romanticised Robert E. Lee as a tragic hero, and substantially mischaracterised the conduct of Reconstruction — emerged in the 1870s and dominated American public discourse on the war from the 1890s through the 1950s. Its principal vehicles were the United Daughters of the Confederacy (founded 1894), the Sons of Confederate Veterans (1896), the proliferation of Confederate memorials erected predominantly in the periods 1900-1920 and 1955-1965 (the second period coinciding with active resistance to civil rights), and substantial elements of academic historiography until the post-1945 reconstruction of Civil War scholarship by professional historians (Kenneth Stampp, James McPherson, Eric Foner, David Blight, and others). The Lost Cause tradition has been substantially refuted by professional historical scholarship for at least sixty years, but it continues to shape popular American memory of the war in many regions.
The contemporary debate over Confederate monuments — substantially intensified after the 2015 Charleston church shooting and the 2017 Charlottesville violence — has produced the removal of several hundred Confederate statues, plaques, and place names across the southern states (and from the United States military installations, after the 2020 congressional mandate). The argument is not, as is sometimes claimed, about "erasing history" — the historical record of the war is the largest single subject of American historical scholarship and is in no danger of disappearance. The argument is about which public spaces should be devoted to commemorating which historical figures, and what is being commemorated when a public memorial is erected. The honest historical answer to the second question, in the cases of figures like Lee and Davis, is the cause of preserving the largest single property regime of human enslavement in modern history. The implications of that answer for public memorial practice are, properly, a matter of democratic debate. The historical foundation of the debate is, however, no longer seriously contested by professional scholarship. The Confederacy is a closed chapter. What is open is what subsequent generations choose to make of it.
End of Chapter VIII · End of Volume XVIII