After the fall of Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, on April 2, 1865, representatives of the Confederate government, including President Jefferson Davis, fled. The dominoes began to fall. The surrender at Appomattox took place a week later, on April 9. In the years leading up to the advent of film, radio and television, image publishers had considerable power and colored the public`s perception of the events of the time. The illustrations falsified the images of news and news creators – whether realistically depicted or not – into the collective consciousness of the national public. It was the same with the story of Appomattox. When General Nathan Bedford Forrest, „The Magician of the Saddle,“ heard of Lee`s surrender, he also surrendered and read his farewell address on May 9, 1865, in Gainesville, Alabama. General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered on 26 September. He died in 1865 near New Orleans, Louisiana, in front of the Confederate Department of the Trans-Mississippi.

Also on May 26, 1865, the Camp Napoleon Council of Native American Tribes, including some who had sided with the Confederacy, met in Oklahoma and decided to ask the commissioners to offer peace to the United States. The chief and general of the Cherokee, Stand Watie, who commanded the 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles, surrendered on June 23, 1865,[32] to Choctaw County, Oklahoma, to the last major organized Confederate force.[32] The Battle of Appomattox Court House took place on April 9, 1865, near the town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, and resulted in Confederate General Robert E. Lee returning his Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. A few days earlier, Lee had left the Confederate capital of Richmond and the city of Petersburg; His goal was to gather the remains of his besieged troops, meet Confederate reinforcements in North Carolina, and resume combat. But the resulting Battle of Appomattox, which lasted only a few hours, effectively ended the four-year civil war. The series of events that marked the end of the war began with Lee`s Appomattox campaign. But recent research shows that capitulation in Appomattox has not inspired all citizens to reconcile. Some members of Confederate associations, such as the United Daughters of the Confederation, have argued vehemently against the erection of a peace monument in Appomattox in the twentieth century. Some have suggested that the clemency of Grant`s terms anticipated and, in some ways, favored a more general leniency of the North toward Southern racism during and after Reconstruction (1865-1877), and in terms of the history of African Americans in the United States, the capitulation at Appomattox sparked new conflicts, albeit ended others. What the capitulation did was bring the regular military operations to a relatively quick conclusion, which could have continued over a longer period of time in much of the Confederacy if the Confederates who were able to continue fighting had rejected the reassuring content of the agreement reached at Wilmer McLean`s Salon. The Battle of Appomattox Court House, fought in Appomattox County, Virginia, on the morning of April 9, 1865, was one of the last battles of the American Civil War (1861–1865).

This was the last position of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia before surrendering to the Army of the Union of the Potomac under the command of the commanding general of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. Two notable figures who helped turn appomattox`s surrender into an image of national reconciliation were Confederate General John B. Gordon and Union General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Skeptics have argued that each man exaggerated or romanticized the role he played in the official surrender ceremony that took place on Wednesday, April 12, in Grant`s absence, the Appomattox left on April 10 to see Lincoln in Washington, D.C, and Lee, who left on April 11 to return to his family in Richmond. It is not clear, for example, what authority Chamberlain actually possessed, as he was not the most senior Union leader to remain at the Appomattox courthouse. But whatever the veracity of Gordon and Chamberlain`s respective accounts of the surrender ceremony – Chamberlain produced several throughout the rest of his life – they largely coincided, and these accounts have shaped and still shape many people`s vision of surrender. „It would be useless and therefore cruel,“ Remarked Robert E. Lee on the morning of April 9, 1865: „To cause further bruising, I met with General Grant to surrender.“ 1 After Lee`s surrender, there were several other small battles.

The Battle of Palmito Ranch, east of Brownsville, Texas, september 12–13. May 1865 is widely regarded as the last land battle of the war (ironically, a Confederate victory, soon followed by the surrender of Confederate forces). Commander James Iredell Waddell, commander of the CSS Shenandoah, a Confederate Navy commercial thief, was the last to surrender when he lowered the Confederate flag in Liverpool and handed over his ship to the British government on November 6, 1865 (Waddell was on the other side of the world in the Pacific when he learned that the war was over). Grant, who arrived after Lee, looked at a witness as if he had had a very bad time. He came wearing a bag coat and a loose fatigue blouse. In stark contrast to Lee`s glorious new full-dress uniform, Grant didn`t wear handguns: Lee wore his gorgeous ceremonial sword with a golden handle. Grant looked a little dusty and a little dirty. Lee was impeccable and magnificent, now and forever the perfect knight of legend, beaming with bravery in defeat. The simple truth was that Grant had dressed in a supposedly rude travel suit, the uniform of a corporal with the stripes of a lieutenant general, because his own supply of fancy uniforms had not yet arrived at his headquarters.

This ironic contrast between the simplicity of the victor and the greatness of the vanquished would be clearly reflected in many of Appomattox`s prints and would become a legend in American history. As Grant was still a few miles from the Appomattox courthouse at the time and could not receive direct communication from him, Lee sent flags to Meade in the back and Sheridan in the front, requesting a suspension of hostilities until he could communicate directly with Grant. At first, Sheridan suspected Lee of deception, but eventually agreed to a suspension. Meanwhile, Lee sent the following message to Grant, with whom he had been corresponding since Friday, April 7, in terms of peace, through a Union officer escorted through the Confederate lines to reach Grant by the shortest route: „I received your note this morning at the picket line where I had come to meet you and determine definitively, what terms in your proposal yesterday in relation to the surrender of this army. .