Qualla: Appomattox Campaign

Appomattox Campaign: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mathew Benjamin Brady, Public domain. By the last week of March 1865, the men in the Confederate trenches outside Petersburg had been eating less than a pound of cornmeal a day for months. Some had no shoes. Many had not seen their families in years. On the morning of March 29, Ulysses S. Grant gave the order that would end the largest war in American history: stretch the line until it broke. Within eleven days, the Army of Northern Virginia would be reduced from a defending force to a fleeing one, then a surrendering one. The country that emerged from those eleven days was not the country that had entered the war - and for nearly four million Americans who had been enslaved, the change came at the speed of cavalry hooves moving west.

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Image: Mathew Benjamin Brady | Public domain

Appomattox Campaign: The Breaking of the Line

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philip_Sheridan_1.jpg: Mathew Brady. Original uploader was Hlj at en.wikipedia derivative work: PawełMM (talk) and Orionist (talk), Public domain. 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 aban...

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Image: Philip_Sheridan_1.jpg: Mathew Brady. Original uploader was Hlj at en.wikipedia derivative work: PawełMM (talk) and Orionist (talk) | Public domain

Appomattox Campaign: The Race West

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Original uploader was Hlj at en.wikipedia (Original text: Montage by Hal Jespersen), Public domain. 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 so...

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Image: Original uploader was Hlj at en.wikipedia (Original text: Montage by Hal Jespersen) | Public domain

Appomattox Campaign: Appomattox Station, April 8

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Muhranoff, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 train...

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Image: Muhranoff | CC BY-SA 4.0

Appomattox Campaign: McLean's Parlor, April 9

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Muhranoff, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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. Th...

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Image: Muhranoff | CC BY-SA 4.0

Appomattox Campaign: What the War Ended

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Muhranoff, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 forc...

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Image: Muhranoff | CC BY-SA 4.0