Petersburg had held for nearly ten months - the longest siege in American history - because Lee had stretched his army to cover almost forty miles of trench. Grant's plan was to keep extending his own line westward, around the Confederate right flank, until Lee either had to abandon his works or watch them be flanked. On April 1, at a country crossroads called Five Forks, Philip Sheridan's cavalry and Gouverneur Warren's V Corps shattered George Pickett's force and took 2,400 prisoners. The next morning, April 2, the Sixth Corps broke through the Petersburg line itself. A.P. Hill, the Confederate corps commander who had served Lee for years, rode toward the breakthrough and was shot dead by Union soldiers who recognized him as an officer. That night Lee evacuated Petersburg and Richmond. The Confederate capital burned behind him.

Lee's hope was Danville, where the railroad south might let him link up with Joseph E. Johnston's army in North Carolina. Grant's hope was to cut him off before he got there. For a week, two exhausted armies ran a parallel race across the Virginia Piedmont, the Federals on the south road, the Confederates on the north. The roads were mud. The supply trains promised at Amelia Court House were empty. Men collapsed in the ranks from hunger. On April 6 at Sailor's Creek, the Confederate rear guard was overtaken: nearly a quarter of the Army of Northern Virginia was killed, wounded, or captured in a single afternoon. Watching the disaster from a hilltop, Lee was heard to say, 'My God, has the army been dissolved?'

Lee's last hope was four trains of rations and ammunition waiting at Appomattox Station, sent up the Southside Railroad from Lynchburg. On the afternoon of April 8, George Armstrong Custer's cavalry got there first. Union troopers with railroad experience drove the captured trains east into Union lines while Custer turned his division on the Confederate artillery park parked along the Lynchburg stage road. Under a full moon, after three failed charges, Custer's men finally broke the Confederate gunners and took nearly a thousand prisoners. With the trains gone, Lee's army had no food. With the road west blocked, it had nowhere to go. The next morning would be the morning of surrender.

Wilmer McLean had moved his family from Manassas to the quiet village of Appomattox Court House to escape the war. The war found him anyway. On the afternoon of April 9, 1865, Lee rode in dress uniform to McLean's house to meet Grant, who arrived in a mud-spattered field coat. The terms were generous: Confederate soldiers would be paroled, allowed to keep their horses for spring plowing, and sent home. Grant ordered his own army to stop firing salutes when the surrender was confirmed. 'The rebels are our countrymen again,' he reportedly said. About 28,000 Confederate soldiers stacked arms over the following days. The largest army the Confederacy had ever fielded simply ceased to exist.

Joseph Johnston surrendered to William T. Sherman in North Carolina seventeen days later. Other Confederate forces held out through May. But Appomattox is the date the country remembers because Appomattox is the moment the constitutional question of secession was answered by force, and because Appomattox guaranteed that the Thirteenth Amendment - already passed by Congress in January and being ratified state by state - would actually be enforced. For nearly four million Black Americans held in bondage, the men marching home from Lee's army were marching home to a different country. The cost was staggering: roughly 750,000 dead on both sides over four years, more than every other American war combined. The Appomattox Campaign closed the ledger, but the work of what came next - Reconstruction, citizenship, freedom in practice and not just law - was only beginning.