Readers may be forgiven for thinking the Civil War came to its formal end in a town called Appomattox, but this historic event actually took place in a grocer’s parlor in a small Virginia village known as Appomattox Court House. In Southern states, many rural county seats formed their names by adding the words “Court House” to the name of the county.
This is one of two stamps with which the U.S. Postal Service concludes its 10-stamp series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. Since 2011, souvenir sheets with two stamp designs have been issued for each year of the war (1861–1865). The other stamp on the 2015 souvenir sheet depicts the Battle of Five Forks, near Petersburg, Virginia, on April 1, 1865.
Ironically, grocer Wilmer McLean had moved to this quiet country town—the seat of Appomattox County—partly to get away from the heavy fighting near his previous residence in Manassas, VA, where the first major battle of the war had been fought four years earlier. After Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant met with Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in McLean’s house to discuss terms for Lee’s surrender, the grocer was said to have remarked that the Civil War began in his front yard and ended in his front parlor.
Two days earlier, as Lee’s exhausted army suffered from a high rate of desertion and Union forces surrounded his remaining troops, he had received a note from Grant pointing out the “hopelessness of further resistance.” In reply, Lee did not concede that the situation was hopeless, but said he did share Grant’s desire “to avoid useless effusion of blood.” Grant then sent Lee his conditions for surrender, but Lee answered that he was ready only to discuss peace terms generally, not to surrender his army. Grant was not authorized to enter peace negotiations, so the fighting resumed.
But, on the morning of April 9, 1865, Lee knew his fight was over. Federal troops had blocked his escape routes and cut him off from receiving fresh supplies. “There is nothing left for me to do,” Lee admitted, “but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths.”
The meeting between these two opposing military leaders lasted for 90 minutes. It began with the two generals conversing about their mutual service in the Mexican-American War, the only previous time they had met. Grant seemed reluctant to bring the discussion around to his terms for surrender; it was Lee who finally brought up the subject.
Grant’s terms, reflecting President Abraham Lincoln’s views on treating Confederate soldiers with dignity, paroled the surrendered Confederates and allowed them to return to their homes rather than face imprisonment and the threat of trials for treason. At Lee’s request, Grant allowed men to keep their horses; Lee believed this would “do much toward conciliating our people.”
Three days later, a formal ceremony took place involving more than 20,000 Confederate infantrymen stacking their weapons. Although other Confederate armies remained in the field, the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia—the force that had achieved many important victories against the Union in previous battles—effectively ended the war.
In his farewell address to his troops on April 10, Lee praised their “unsurpassed courage and fortitude” and claimed his army had been “compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.” This was a part of the story, but not the whole story. Historians point to Lee’s speech as the beginning of a “Lost Cause” narrative of the war, playing down the role of slavery as a cause of the conflict and ignoring the role of African Americans in fighting for their freedom.
The Appomattox Court House stamp is a reproduction of the 1895 painting “Peace in Union” by Thomas Nast, the political cartoonist who devised the donkey as a symbol of the Democratic Party and the elephant to represent the Republicans.
