Grant wrote the letter at five o'clock in the afternoon on April 7, 1865, from the Randolph House hotel in Farmville. He was forty-two years old and three days from the end of a four-year war. Three miles up the road, beyond the Appomattox River, his Second Corps was being repulsed in front of a Methodist meeting house called Cumberland Church. Confederate fire had broken the Union assaults. The Army of Northern Virginia, somehow, was still fighting. Grant set down his pen, addressed the letter to General Robert E. Lee, and asked him to surrender. Brigadier General Seth Williams delivered it through the lines around eight-thirty that night. Lee showed it to James Longstreet, who read it and said, "Not yet."
Cumberland Church was not the only thing burning that afternoon. After the catastrophe at Sailor's Creek the day before, Confederate troops under Richard Anderson and John B. Gordon had fled to High Bridge over the Appomattox, the railroad bridge with a wagon road underneath, and crossed to the north side. They tried to destroy the bridge behind them. Union II Corps troops under Andrew Humphreys reached the bridges before the fire could finish the job and saved the lower wagon span. Then James Longstreet's corps, coming up from Rice's Station, marched into Farmville itself, drew rations from a train that had finally arrived, and burned the bridges behind them as they crossed to the north bank. The Confederate army was now north of the river; the Union II Corps was already there too.
William Mahone, the Petersburg railroad president who had become one of Lee's most reliable division commanders, fortified the high ground around Cumberland Church about four miles west of High Bridge and three miles north of Farmville. Longstreet brought up the rest of the surviving Confederate infantry to join him. About 12,000 effective Confederate men with artillery held the position. When Humphreys's Union divisions arrived around one in the afternoon, they assumed they faced only Mahone's division. They attacked. The attacks failed. Brigadier General Thomas A. Smyth, an Irish-born Union officer who had been at Gettysburg and Spotsylvania, was mortally wounded in the fighting that led up to the church. Colonel Daniel Woodall of the 1st Delaware took over his brigade.
Humphreys realized he was facing not one Confederate division but the entire remaining Army of Northern Virginia. He sent word back to Meade asking for reinforcements. The Union VI Corps was supposed to come up from the south, but no one north of the river yet knew that the Confederates had burned the Farmville bridges. Then Humphreys heard gunfire from the direction of the town and saw the Confederate right shorten. He assumed the VI Corps was attacking from the south and ordered another assault. The gunfire was actually from George Crook's Union cavalry, which had crossed the river separately and attacked a wagon train. Confederate troops repulsed the cavalry attack so completely that Lee, watching, tried to lead a counterattack in person and had to be physically restrained by his officers. The Union assault on Cumberland Church was repulsed. Colonel John Irvin Gregg was taken prisoner.
While the fight at Cumberland Church was breaking off in the late afternoon, Grant was at the Randolph House in Farmville writing the letter that would begin the surrender correspondence. He had been a quartermaster in the Mexican War twenty years before, had failed at farming and clerking before the rebellion brought him back into uniform, and he understood, perhaps better than any commander in either army, that the war was over but Lee would have to be told. The letter was short and direct, expressing his view that further effusion of blood was hopeless. Williams brought it forward under flag of truce. Lee read it, showed it to Longstreet, and waited. Longstreet, who had argued against the Pennsylvania campaign two years before and had only returned to field command the previous October after being badly wounded at the Wilderness, knew defeat when he saw it. But "not yet" was the answer he gave.
Around eleven that night Lee pulled his army out of Cumberland Church and started west again. Roads turned into quagmires under the rain and the constant traffic. Mules died in their traces. Wagons that could not be moved were burned. Longstreet, with Lee in his column, moved by the Buckingham Plank Road through Curdsville. Gordon, followed by Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry, took the shorter Richmond-Lynchburg Stage Road. The fight at Cumberland Church had bought the Confederates one more delay, but the delay also gave Union cavalry and Sheridan's infantry south of the river the time to swing around ahead of Lee. Two days later they would block him at Appomattox Station and Appomattox Court House. The II Corps's 571 casualties at Cumberland Church and Farmville were the last large butcher's bill the Army of the Potomac would pay.
Cumberland Church sits in rolling Piedmont farmland at 37.35 N, 78.39 W, about three miles north of Farmville on Cumberland County's southern edge. The high ground Mahone fortified is still visible from the air as a long ridgeline; the church building is still standing. Cruise at 3,000 to 4,000 feet to trace the position. Nearest field is Farmville Regional (KFVX), 4 miles south-southwest. Lynchburg Regional (KLYH) is 35 miles west.