By early April 1865, Robert E. Lee’s greatest fear was no longer defeat in battle. It was escape—or rather, the impossibility of it. For ten months, Lee had held Richmond and Petersburg through one of the most exhausting sieges of the Civil War.
His army was starving. His supplies were gone. Every night, hungry, exhausted men slipped away from their lines and went home. Lee understood that if Grant could fix him in place, surround him, and cut his line of retreat west toward North Carolina and General Joseph Johnston’s army, the war would be over.
On April 2, Grant broke through Petersburg’s defenses. Lee had no choice. He evacuated Richmond and Petersburg on the night of April 2–3 and began a desperate final march westward. As Lee’s ragged columns moved toward Appomattox Station, hoping to resupply before continuing to North Carolina, Grant issued a direct order to his cavalry commander, General Philip Sheridan.
The instruction was simple and unmistakable: get there first. Do not let him escape. Cut off his retreat. Keep pushing.
Grant had already made the decision that would cost him politically: destroy Lee’s army through relentless pursuit rather than allow it to regroup and fight again. Within just seven days, from April 3 to 9, everything Grant predicted came true. A war that had stretched across a thousand miles would end in a chase of one hundred. A general would be forced to surrender, and a nation would finally begin to heal.
Lee’s situation was desperate, but desperation and impossibility were not the same thing. Grant held roughly 125,000 men. Lee had perhaps 60,000 in the field, and that number shrank daily. Yet Lee remained the Confederacy’s greatest tactical commander, a man who had repeatedly made smaller armies beat larger ones through brilliant maneuver and offensive action.
Grant had learned this lesson throughout 1864. At the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, whenever Grant fought Lee in open ground, Lee forced a draw or better despite Grant’s overwhelming numbers. What terrified Grant and Lincoln was not the possibility of Lee winning a major battle. It was the possibility that Lee would escape the siege, reach North Carolina, and join Johnston’s army.
Then the Union would face two armies fighting from fortified defensive positions, and Grant would confront months of brutal pursuit across hundreds of miles. Lincoln had already given Grant complete authority. The response was simple: do not let Lee escape. The siege of Petersburg had been a masterpiece of patience and constant pressure.
Grant slowly extended his lines westward, forcing Lee to stretch his exhausted defenses ever thinner. By March 1865, Lee’s lines were barely holding. On March 25, Lee made a desperate gamble, attacking Fort Stedman east of Petersburg, hoping to break through Grant’s lines and escape south toward North Carolina. The assault initially surprised Union forces, and Confederate troops broke through the outer defenses.
For a moment, it seemed Lee had achieved a breakthrough. But Grant had positioned his reserves perfectly. Union counterattacks crushed the Confederate assault. By noon, the attack had collapsed completely.
Seeing his opportunity, Grant moved boldly. On April 1, he launched a massive cavalry raid aimed at cutting the Southside Railroad, one of the last supply lines open to Lee’s army. The raid was placed under Sheridan, an officer who embodied Grant’s own approach: bold, unyielding, and willing to take risks. At the Battle of Five Forks, Sheridan’s cavalry worked with the Fifth Corps under General Charles Griffin to turn Lee’s right flank and shatter his western defenses.
When the Union attack was complete, Lee’s trenches had broken. The siege was over. Lee had to evacuate Petersburg and Richmond immediately or see his entire army surrounded and destroyed. On the night of April 2, Lee’s army pulled out of the fortifications it had held for ten months.
The men were exhausted and starving, their uniforms torn. Many did not even know where they were going. They only knew they were retreating west through the darkness. Richmond, the Confederate capital, was left to Union forces.
When Grant’s troops entered the city the next morning, they found it burning. Confederates had set the fires to deny resources to the Union army. Lee was already gone, pushing west toward Amelia Court House, where he hoped to find railroad supplies before turning south toward North Carolina and Johnston. Grant ordered Sheridan to pursue.
Sheridan understood what was required. Do not let Lee stop. Do not let him rest. Do not let him turn and fight.
Keep pressing. Keep chasing. Make him run until he has nowhere to go. Sheridan’s cavalry, about 13,000 troopers organized into three divisions, moved west behind Lee’s army.
Behind them, Grant pushed the infantry: the Army of the Potomac and the Army of the James, together nearly 150,000 men, all converging on Lee’s line of retreat. But the cavalry was the decisive force. Infantry could hold cities and ground, but cavalry could move faster, push ahead of any army, and force it to stop. Grant needed Sheridan to get ahead of Lee.
Lee reached Amelia Court House on April 4, expecting supplies that were not there. They had been delayed or sent to the wrong place. That lost day—just twenty-four hours—changed everything. Lee’s starving men searched the surrounding farms and found little more than dry corn, which they ate raw.
The hunger slowed their march and made it more disordered. Every hour lost was an hour Sheridan gained. By April 5, Sheridan’s forces were directly on Lee’s heels, harassing the rear of his column, capturing stragglers, and destroying Confederate supply wagons. On April 6, at Sailor’s Creek, Sheridan caught the Confederate column and attacked.
It was no simple skirmish. Sheridan struck Lee’s rear guard with dismounted cavalry fighting as infantry. The Confederates resisted, but they were exhausted, starving, and increasingly outnumbered. As Union infantry reached the field, cavalry moved to cut off the Confederate retreat.
About 7,700 Confederate soldiers were captured or surrendered, including Confederate General Richard S. Ewell and six other generals. When Lee heard of the number of men and generals lost, he exclaimed in shock, “My God, has the army dissolved? ” It was a question that haunted him for the next three days.
Still, Lee did not surrender. He ordered another night march. The army had to move faster. Every hour mattered.
If he could only reach Appomattox Station, where four supply trains carrying 300,000 rations awaited, he could feed his starving men and continue west toward North Carolina. The Confederate army marched through the night of April 6–7, covering nearly thirty miles in darkness and rain. They crossed the Appomattox River at the High Bridge, and Lee ordered the bridge burned behind them. But Union engineers under General Edward Wright had already secured the crossings, preventing their full destruction.
The bridge remained usable, and Grant’s pursuit continued without pause. On April 7, Grant sent Lee a letter. “The results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia,” he wrote. “The armies you have been trying to maintain have been badly beaten, and the men are very much exhausted.
” Grant asked for the surrender of Lee’s army. He was not threatening. He was stating facts. Lee did not surrender, but he replied, asking what terms Grant would offer.
Negotiations had begun. Lee’s last hope was Appomattox Station. On April 8, his army approached from the east, hoping to find the supply trains waiting. But Sheridan was faster.
Union cavalry under General George Armstrong Custer reached Appomattox Station on the evening of April 8, ahead of Lee. Custer attacked the supply trains, seized them, burned what he could, and took control of the high ground west of the village. Lee’s supplies were gone. His escape route was blocked.
On the morning of April 9, Lee tried one final time. He ordered infantry under General John B. Gordon to attack Sheridan’s cavalry. If the cavalry could be broken, the army might escape west to Lynchburg and then south to North Carolina.
Gordon’s men attacked at dawn. Union cavalry fell back at first, outnumbered and exhausted. For a moment, it seemed the impossible might happen. Then Gordon saw them: Union infantry, not cavalry.
Thousands of infantry appeared over the ridge. Grant had been thinking ahead all along. Two Union corps, the Fifth under Griffin and the Twenty-Fourth under General John Gibbon, had marched through the night on shorter roads to beat Lee. Gibbon’s corps alone covered thirty miles in twenty-one hours.
They reached Appomattox Court House around 4 a. m. on April 9 and deployed along a ridge southwest of the village. When Lee’s attack came, Gordon’s men did not face isolated cavalry.
They faced a full field army. Gordon sent word to Lee: his troops were completely exhausted and could not advance further. Lee received the message and told his staff quietly, “There is nothing left for me to do but to go and see General Grant. ” It was not a defeat that had come suddenly, but the moment when Lee finally understood that continuing resistance would mean only more pointless death.
Lee asked Grant for a meeting to discuss surrender terms. Grant, traveling with Sheridan’s cavalry, received the message on the road. According to those present, Grant’s face brightened. The headache that had plagued him throughout the pursuit disappeared.
He replied immediately, allowing Lee to choose the place of their meeting. Even after chasing Lee for a week, Grant left him the dignity of choosing the surrender site. It was Grant at his best: not the butcher critics accused him of being, but a general who understood that mercy and resolve were not opposites. Lee’s aide, Charles Marshall, found a suitable location: the home of Wilmer McLean, a retired Virginia militia officer.
McLean was a strange figure in history. His first home near Manassas had been damaged during the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861. He had moved to Appomattox to escape the war. Now the war was ending in his parlor.
At 1:30 p. m. on April 9, 1865, Lee and Grant met. Lee was immaculately dressed in a clean gray uniform with a jeweled sword.
Grant was covered in travel dust, wearing a mud-stained uniform that looked like that of a common soldier. They shook hands and spoke briefly about their service in the Mexican-American War. Grant said he had always remembered Lee’s appearance and thought he would have recognized him anywhere. Lee replied that he could not say the same.
The general who had pursued Lee relentlessly, studied his movements, and never let him rest, remembered him clearly from decades earlier. Lee, the famous commander whom everyone had expected to win, had forgotten the face of the man who would defeat him. Lee asked Grant to write the surrender terms. What Grant wrote was extraordinary.
Officers and men would be paroled and allowed to return home. Soldiers would turn over their weapons, but officers could keep their personal sidearms. Cavalrymen and artillerymen could keep their horses, crucial for farmers who needed them for spring planting. Most surprisingly, Grant offered to provide rations for Lee’s starving army.
Lee read the terms and relief appeared on his face. He had feared unconditional surrender, harsh terms, or even revenge. Instead, Grant offered dignity. Lee said it would be extremely satisfying and would contribute greatly to reconciling the people.
Grant later wrote that his goal was to end the war, and he could not see any benefit in unnecessary bloodshed when Lee’s cause was hopeless. As Lee prepared to return to his army, Union soldiers began to cheer. Grant heard the noise and ordered the men to stop immediately. In his memoirs, he wrote, “The Confederates were now our prisoners, and we did not want to exult over their downfall.
” After nearly a year of fighting Lee with incredible ferocity, after tens of thousands of deaths, Grant’s only thought was not to humiliate them. In the days that followed, Union soldiers took souvenirs from the McLean house: tables, chairs, pieces of furniture. Wilmer McLean, who had moved to Appomattox to escape the war, watched his home being taken apart. Union officers offered to pay for the furniture.
McLean refused. On April 12, Lee’s army formally surrendered their weapons. Soldiers stacked their rifles, folded their battle flags, and marched home: defeated but not destroyed, exhausted but not dishonored. The surrender did not end the war immediately.
Other Confederate armies remained in the field. General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered to William T. Sherman in North Carolina about two weeks later, and scattered Confederate forces continued to surrender over the following weeks and months.
But Lee’s surrender was the symbolic end. The Confederacy’s greatest general, the man who had kept the South fighting against overwhelming odds for four years, had surrendered. The North could finally begin to recover. Tragedy was still coming.
On April 14, just five days after Lee’s surrender, John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre. Lincoln would not live to see Reconstruction. Grant would live to defend Lincoln’s legacy, arguing that mercy toward the South was not weakness but strength. Grant’s generous terms to Lee became a model for other surrenders and for Reconstruction, though that process ultimately became harsher and more vengeful than either Grant or Lincoln envisioned.
Grant’s order to his cavalry—do not let him escape—was military strategy on one level. Lee’s greatest strength was never his numbers; he was always outnumbered. His power lay in his ability to maneuver, to choose where to fight, to make his tactical brilliance compensate for his lack of men. The only way to defeat Lee was to strip away his ability to maneuver, and the only way to do that was to pursue him relentlessly, never letting him rest, never letting him dictate the terms of engagement.
But on a deeper level, the order represented something more essential: the willingness to do what was militarily necessary rather than what was politically acceptable. Grant pursued Lee without mercy, even as it wore out the Union army, because he understood that a week of extra effort could save months of future fighting. In the end, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox was not inevitable. It required Grant to pursue relentlessly, and then to show mercy once the pursuit was complete.
That combination—unyielding pursuit followed by generous terms—paved the way for the nation to begin healing. For a moment on April 9, 1865, in a small Virginia village, two generals met. One accepted defeat with dignity. The other offered mercy with strength.
And a nation began to recover.