Appomattox Court House

Appomattox Court House is where the American Civil War effectively ended. On April 9, 1865, in the parlor of a private home in this small Virginia village, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. The generous terms Grant offered set a tone of reconciliation for a shattered nation. Preserved as a national historical park, the restored village stands as the symbolic close of four years of the bloodiest conflict in American history.

By the spring of 1865, four years of war had worn the Confederacy to exhaustion. After the fall of Richmond, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia retreated westward, hoping to escape and fight on, but Ulysses S. Grant's Union forces cut off its path near the village of Appomattox Court House. Surrounded and out of options, Lee requested a meeting to discuss terms.

On the afternoon of April 9, 1865, the two generals met in the parlor of the home of Wilmer McLean. In a striking coincidence, McLean had moved to Appomattox after the war's first major battle was fought around his previous home near Manassas — so, it was said, the war 'began in his front yard and ended in his front parlor.' Grant offered honorable terms: Confederate soldiers would be paroled and allowed to go home, officers could keep their sidearms, and men could keep their horses for spring planting.

Lee accepted, and about 28,000 Confederate troops were paroled in the days that followed. Though other Confederate armies remained in the field for a few more weeks, Appomattox marked the symbolic end of the Civil War. The village later faded, and the McLean House was even dismantled in a failed scheme to move it; the National Park Service reconstructed the house and restored the village, which is now preserved as Appomattox Court House National Historical Park.