Last Terms of Surrender
General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House left some 175,000 Confederate soldiers
still in arms in three armies and numerous garrisons scattered across the South. The war’s final acts
were played out in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and even Liverpool, England.
COLLAPSE OF THE CONFEDERACY 1865whipped and will not fight.” Shocked
into silence, Davis unwillingly gave
Johnston permission to put out peace
feelers to Sherman.
In the meeting that followed—held
on April 17, in a log cabin near Durham
Station—Sherman initially went
beyond his remit from Washington.
He held out to Johnston the prospect
of the readmission of Southern states to
the Union on terms of full citizenship
with no threat of persecution for
treason or war crimes. In doing so, he
strayed into political rather than purely
military territory. He was subsequently
reprimanded by the authorities in
Washington and General Ulysses S.
Grant was sent to take over the
negotiations. Grant made it clear that
while the military terms offered at
Appomattox still stood and applied to
Johnston’s army as well as Lee’s, there
could be no bargaining on the larger
postwar settlement.Johnston surrenders
When Davis was informed of Grant’s
conditions, he was eager to fight on.
Johnston’s reply was scathing. “We have
to save the people, spare the blood of
the army, and save the high civic
functionaries,” he told the Confederate
president. He added that “your plan,
I think, can do only the last.” The
next day, April 26, Johnston agreed
to surrender the forces under his
command, including Confederate troops
in Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas, a
total of almost 90,000 men.
In Alabama, the Confederate
commander, General Richard Taylor,
watched developments to the north with
fatalistic gloom. Like Johnston, he hadB
y far the largest and best
organized of the Confederate
armies remaining in the field after
Lee’s surrender was the one confronting
General William T. Sherman in North
Carolina under the command of General
Joseph E. Johnston. Here, the balance of
power had altered in late March 1865,
when Sherman made a successful
rendezvous with reinforcements from
Wilmington. Confronted with the
Union’s overwhelming superiority in
numbers, Johnston retreated westward to
the North Carolina state capital, Raleigh.Meeting with Davis
Johnston was preparing to abandon
Raleigh to Sherman’s advancing Union
forces when word came of events at
Appomattox. While still digesting the
news, Johnston was summoned to a
meeting with Confederate
President Jefferson Davis
in Greensboro, about
80 miles (130km) away.
When the two men met
on April 12, Davis—
without even requesting
Johnston’s opinion of
the military situation—
talked ramblingly of
gathering up deserters to
fight on. Once Johnston
was eventually given a
chance to speak, he was
blunt: “My views are, sir,
that our people are tired
of war, feel themselvesBEFORE
After April 9, 1865, when General Lee’s
Army of Northern Virginia laid down its
arms ❮❮ 316–19, most of the South’s
generals accepted that the cause was lost.
DIEHARD RESISTANCE
Some Southern leaders, however, wanted to
fight on. The most prominent of these diehards,
Confederate President Jefferson Davis
❮❮ 48–49 was still urging resistance three
weeks after Lee’s surrender. By then, he and his
cabinet had abandoned the Confederate capital,
Richmond, and fled south to Greensboro,
North Carolina. The cabinet met for the last
time on May 5, 1865, in Washington, Georgia,
after which Davis went into hiding.
A NEW PRESIDENT
Meanwhile, events in Washington, D.C. had
taken a dramatic turn with the assassination of
President Lincoln ❮❮ 320–21, fatally shot on
April 14. Lincoln was succeeded by his vice
president, the Southern War Democrat Andrew
Johnson 326–27 ❯❯, who was swiftly sworn
in as 17th President of the United States on
the morning after the shooting.
been fighting a losing battle, in his case
against two separate Union forces in the
north and south of the state. As soon as
he heard of Johnston’s negotiations with
Sherman, he too sued for peace. On
May 8 at Citronelle, Alabama, heagreed with General Edward Canby, the
Union commander-in-chief in the state,
to accept terms similar to those that had
been offered to Lee and Johnston.By that time only one Confederate army
was still officially at war with the Union:
that of the vast Trans-Mississippi
Department, under the command of
General Edmund Kirby Smith. Not having
suffered the reverses that Johnston and
Taylor had known, Kirby Smith proved
less willing to come to terms. On the
day after Taylor’s capitulation, he flatly
refused a Union invitation to lay down
his arms. On May 12 and 13, a final
engagement was fought at Palmito Ranch,
a Confederate outpost on the Rio Grande.
Twice the position fell to attacking Union
regiments, and twice
the defenders reclaimed
it. Ironically, it was the
Confederates who thus
won the last battle of the
Civil War, at a cost of four
men killed and a dozen or
more wounded—the Union
force suffered 30 casualties.The surrender of Johnston
Confederate General Johnston (on the right) surrenders
to General Sherman on April 26, 1865. The two men
became firm friends, and a quarter of a century later
Johnston was a pallbearer at Sherman’s funeral.
Imprisoned president
A contemporary sketch shows the
captured Jefferson Davis at Fort
Monroe on the Virginia coast. He was
held a prisoner there for two years
until released on bail paid by wealthy
citizens from both North and South.“My small force
is melting
away like
snow before
the sun ...”
JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON, APRIL 13, 1865A three-man detachment posted to
Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp are
thought to have been the last Confederate
soldiers to lay down their arms. They
finally emerged in July 1866, 15 months
after Lee’s surrender.