Where Generals Came to Terms

When Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant shook hands at Virginia’s Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, the Civil War generals began the healing of a nation. In the four years preceding the surrender of Gen. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to the Army of the Potomac, more than 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died, and a million suffered wounds or disease in a bitter conflict that divided the country.

Today, historians in Appomattox, Va. (pop. 1,761), can recount the bloody statistics, but they prefer to remember what happened when fighting ended in Virginia, and Lee and Grant came to terms at Wilmer McLean’s house northeast of the present-day town, setting in motion events that brought the dreadful war to a close.

In April, for the 140th anniversary of the surrender, 3,000 Civil War re-enactors and 15,000 spectators converged on Appomattox to commemorate the historic truce in which Gen. Grant offered generous terms to Lee’s Confederate army. Not only did Grant supply Lee’s ragged troops with food, he sent the soldiers home and allowed Lee’s officers to keep their horses and side arms. In anticipation of victory, President Lincoln had instructed Grant to "let them down easy," and Grant did, with Union brigades lining up to salute the Confederates as they stacked arms for the final time.

"A re-enactment like this teaches people about our history as a nation," says Tony Daniels, a Fernandina Beach, Fla., resident and retired history teacher who portrayed Grant during the three-day re-enactment. "But on this ground, especially, it points up the great schism that split the states and how differences disappear over time. Here at Appomattox, what we’re doing feels like closure."

Reverence for Civil War—and more recent—history abounds in Appomattox. The town’s historical society maintains a museum and a re-creation of a mid-19th-century village; the Appomattox Visitor Information Center features historical displays, including an exhibit on Joel Sweeney, a local man who popularized the five-string banjo; and the local Chamber of Commerce recently formed the Historic Appomattox Foundation to stage this year’s and future Civil War re-enactments.

The National Park Service maintains the 1,800-acre Appomattox Court House Historical Park, including a reproduction of Wilmer McLean’s two-story, red brick house, in whose parlor Grant and Lee met to arrange the truce and begin the process of reconciliation between former foes.

"More than 1,000 Appomattox County residents, out of 10,000 who lived here at the time, fought for the Confederacy," says museum Director Wayne Phelps, 58, a local farmer and businessman. "I recall men working in the tobacco fields when I was a boy still talking about their forbears who were soldiers."

When the town’s statue of a Confederate soldier—dedicated in 1906—was destroyed by a storm, Phelps and others raised money to erect a new one, a project completed in 2000.

That statue stands near the Appomattox County Courthouse in the present-day town of Appomattox, which Phelps says was little more than a train station and a few buildings in 1865. Appomattox Court House, where the fighting ended, is now the national park, and the park’s buildings are a restoration of the Civil War-era town. In 1892, the courthouse that gave the village its name burned, and the town’s center shifted southwest toward the railroad depot, then known as Appomattox Station.

Today, the town’s Main Street is a small collection of businesses: Granny Bee’s restaurant, a bookstore, craft shops and antique galleries, the library, a bank, and two barbershops. But history hangs in the air in Appomattox, which forever will be known as the place where two great generals shook hands and began the healing of a nation.

Richard Matthews is a freelance writer in Goshen, Va.

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