The Civil War Ends

On this day in 1865, Confederate General Robert E Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia. At the time General Lee was in command of around 28,000 troops. The two generals met at 1:00 pm to discuss terms in the parlor of the Wilmer McLean home.

Some scattered resistance continued for a few weeks, however, for all intensive purposes, the war was over.

Approximately 625,000 men were killed during the civil war. That is more men than WW I, WWII, Korean War, and Vietnam War put together.


Here are a couple more facts that I found interesting:

Robert E Lee's Virginia estate was confiscated and turned into a cemetery.

As war descended on Virginia, Lee and his wife Mary fled their 1,100-acre Virginia estate, known as Arlington, which overlooked Washington, D.C. In 1863 the U.S. government confiscated it for nonpayment of $92.07 in taxes. Meanwhile, Lincoln gave permission for a cemetery to be built on the property, including a burial vault on the estate’s former rose garden. The idea was that, should Lee ever return, he would “have to look at these graves and see the carnage that he had created,” according to his biographer Elizabeth Brown Pryor. After the war, the Lees quietly looked into reclaiming Arlington but took no action before they died. In 1877 their oldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, sued the federal government for confiscating Arlington illegally; the Supreme Court agreed and gave it back to him. But what could the Lee family do with an estate littered with corpses? George Lee sold it back to the government for $150,000. Over time, 250,000 soldiers would be buried in what is now Arlington National Cemetery.

Lincoln was shot at and almost killed in 1863.

Late one August evening in 1863, after an exhausting day at the White House, Lincoln rode alone by horse to the Soldiers’ Home, his family’s summer residence. A private at the gate heard a shot ring out and, moments later, the horse galloped into the compound, with a bareheaded Lincoln clinging to his steed. Lincoln explained that a gunshot had gone off at the foot of the hill, sending the horse galloping so fast it knocked his hat off. Two soldiers retrieved Lincoln’s hat, which had a bullet hole right through it. The president asked the guards to keep the incident under wraps: He didn’t want to worry his wife Mary.

-Red

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