Joshua L. Chamberlain of Maine and John B. Gordon of Georgia led the Union and Confederate armies, respectively, at the formal surrender ceremony at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, on April 12, 1865. In one of the most dramatic and memorable moments of the Civil War, as the Confederate soldiers marched through the Union lines to stack their weapons and flags, Chamberlain, moved by the historic moment and desiring to pay honor to a valiant, defeated foe, ordered his Union soldiers to salute Gordon's Confederates. Gordon, surprised but stirred by the same emotion, immediately responded, and ordered his men to return the salute. Both men had volunteered for military service, feeling a strong need to fight for their respective causes. They entered military service as low level officers with no formal military training. Repeatedly, they exhibited exceptional aptitude and responsibility, rising through the ranks as they received the glowing accolades of their superiors. Yet, they remained humble, continually demonstrating extraordinary courage, which earned them the respect of their men. Ultimately, their heroism and leadership culminated in their meeting as the commanders at the Appomattox Courthouse surrender. After the war, Chamberlain and Gordon entered politics in their respective states.

The Army of Northern Virginia's chaotic dispersal began even before Lee and Grant met at Appomattox Court House. As the Confederates had pushed west at a relentless pace for nearly a week, thousands of wounded and exhausted men fell out of the ranks. When word spread that Lee planned to surrender, most remaining troops stacked their arms and accepted paroles allowing them to return home, even as they lamented the loss of their country and cause. But others broke south and west, hoping to continue the fight. Fearing a guerrilla war, Grant extended the generous Appomattox terms to every rebel who would surrender himself. Provost marshals fanned out across Virginia and beyond, seeking nearly 18,000 of Lee's men who had yet to surrender. But the shock of Lincoln's assassination led Northern authorities to see threats of new rebellion in every rail depot and harbor where Confederates gathered for transport, even among those already paroled. While Federal troops struggled to keep order and sustain a fragile peace, their newly surrendered adversaries seethed with anger and confusion at the sight of Union troops occupying their towns and former slaves celebrating freedom. In this dramatic new history of the weeks and months after Appomattox, Caroline E. Janney reveals that Lee's surrender was less an ending than the start of an interregnum marked by military and political uncertainty, legal and logistical confusion, and continued outbursts of violence. Janney takes readers from the deliberations of government and military authorities to the ground-level experiences of common soldiers. Ultimately, what unfolds is the messy birth narrative of the Lost Cause, laying the groundwork for the defiant resilience of rebellion in the years that followed.

From a Pulitzer Prize winner comes the story of an unforgettable moment in American history: the historic meeting between General Robert E. Lee and General Ulysses S. Grant that ended the Civil War. MacKinlay Kantor captures all the emotions and the details of those few days: the aristocratic Lee’s feeling of resignation; Grant’s crippling headaches; and Lee’s request--which Grant generously allowed--to permit his soldiers to keep their horses so they could plant crops for food.

“Original and revelatory.” —David Blight, author of Frederick Douglass Avery O. Craven Award Finalist A Civil War Memory/Civil War Monitor Best Book of the Year In April 1865, Robert E. Lee wrote to Ulysses S. Grant asking for peace. Peace was beyond his authority to negotiate, Grant replied, but surrender terms he would discuss. The distinction proved prophetic. After Appomattox reveals that the Civil War did not end with Confederate capitulation in 1865. Instead, a second phase of the war began which lasted until 1871—not the project euphemistically called Reconstruction, but a state of genuine belligerence whose mission was to shape the peace. Using its war powers, the U.S. Army oversaw an ambitious occupation, stationing tens of thousands of troops in outposts across the defeated South. This groundbreaking history shows that the purpose of the occupation was to crush slavery in the face of fierce and violent resistance, but there were limits to its effectiveness: the occupying army never really managed to remake the South. “The United States Army has been far too neglected as a player—a force—in the history of Reconstruction... Downs wants his work to speak to the present, and indeed it should.” —David W. Blight, The Atlantic “Striking... Downs chronicles...a military occupation that was indispensable to the uprooting of slavery.” —Boston Globe “Downs makes the case that the final end to slavery, and the establishment of basic civil and voting rights for all Americans, was ‘born in the face of bayonets.’ ...A remarkable, necessary book.” —Slate

Winner, Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction Winner, Eugene Feit Award in Civil War Studies, New York Military Affairs Symposium Winner of the Dan and Marilyn Laney Prize of the Austin Civil War Round Table Finalist, Jefferson Davis Award of the Museum of the Confederacy Best Books of 2014, Civil War Monitor 6 Civil War Books to Read Now, Diane Rehm Show, NPR Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House evokes a highly gratifying image in the popular mind -- it was, many believe, a moment that transcended politics, a moment of healing, a moment of patriotism untainted by ideology. But as Elizabeth Varon reveals in this vividly narrated history, this rosy image conceals a seething debate over precisely what the surrender meant and what kind of nation would emerge from war. The combatants in that debate included the iconic Lee and Grant, but they also included a cast of characters previously overlooked, who brought their own understanding of the war's causes, consequences, and meaning. In Appomattox, Varon deftly captures the events swirling around that well remembered-but not well understood-moment when the Civil War ended. She expertly depicts the final battles in Virginia, when Grant's troops surrounded Lee's half-starved army, the meeting of the generals at the McLean House, and the shocked reaction as news of the surrender spread like an electric charge throughout the nation. But as Varon shows, the ink had hardly dried before both sides launched a bitter debate over the meaning of the war and the nation's future. For Grant, and for most in the North, the Union victory was one of right over wrong, a vindication of free society; for many African Americans, the surrender marked the dawn of freedom itself. Lee, in contrast, believed that the Union victory was one of might over right: the vast impersonal Northern war machine had worn down a valorous and unbowed South. Lee was committed to peace, but committed, too, to the restoration of the South's political power within the Union and the perpetuation of white supremacy. These two competing visions of the war's end paved the way not only for Southern resistance to reconstruction but also our ongoing debates on the Civil War, 150 years later. Did America's best days lie in the past or in the future? For Lee, it was the past, the era of the founding generation. For Grant, it was the future, represented by Northern moral and material progress. They held, in the end, two opposite views of the direction of the country-and of the meaning of the war that had changed that country forever.

This is the history of the military service of John Bratton, a confederate officer from 1861 to 1865, and the sixth South Carolina Volunteers. Bratton was present with his unit in Charleston, South Carolina, during the bombardment of Fort Sumter, opening hostilities, and was at the head of his brigade during the surrender of his army at Appomattox courthouse almost exactly four years later. These events and events between are chronicled and explained vividly with the use of 85 letters written by Bratton to his wife.

Despite popular belief, the Civil War did not end when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia, in April 1865. The Confederacy still had tens of thousands of soldiers under arms, in three main field armies and countless smaller commands scattered throughout the South. Although pressed by Union forces at varying degrees, all of the remaining Confederate armies were capable of continuing the war if they chose to do so. But they did not, even when their political leaders ordered them to continue the fight. Convinced that most civilians no longer wanted to continue the war, the senior Confederate military leadership, over the course of several weeks, surrendered their armies under different circumstances. Gen. Joseph Johnston surrendered his army in North Carolina only after contentious negotiations with Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. Gen. Richard Taylor ended the fighting in Alabama in the face of two massive Union incursions into the state rather than try to consolidate with other Confederate armies. Personal rivalry also played a part in his practical considerations to surrender. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith had the decision to surrender taken out of his hands—disastrous economic conditions in his Trans-Mississippi Department had eroded morale to such an extent that his soldiers demobilized themselves, leaving Kirby Smith a general without an army. The end of the Confederacy was a messy and complicated affair, a far cry from the tidy closure associated with the events at Appomattox.

The ferocious final weeks of the Civil War come alive in Judgment at Appomattox, the final novel of New York Times bestselling author Ralph Peters's breathtaking, Boyd Award-winning series A great war nears its end. Robert E. Lee makes a desperate, dramatic gamble. It fails. Ulysses S. Grant moves. Veteran armies clash around Petersburg, Virginia, as Grant seeks to surround Lee and Lee makes a skillful withdrawal in the night. Richmond falls. Each day brings new combat and more casualties, as Lee’s exhausted, hungry troops race to preserve the Confederacy. But Grant does not intend to let Lee escape... In one of the most thrilling episodes in American history, heroes North and South, John Brown Gordon and Phillip Sheridan, James Longstreet and Francis Channing Barlow, battle each other across southern Virginia as the armies converge on a sleepy country court house. Written with the literary flair and historical accuracy readers expect from Ralph Peters, Judgment at Appomattox takes us through the Civil War’s last grim interludes of combat as flags fall and hearts break. Capping the author’s acclaimed five-novel cycle on the war in the East, this “dramatized history” pays homage to all the soldiers who fought, from an Irish-immigrant private wearing gray, to the “boy generals” who mastered modern war. This is a grand climax to a great, prize-winning series that honors—and reveals—America's past. Battle Hymn Cycle Cain at Gettysburg Hell or Richmond Valley of the Shadow The Damned of Petersburg Judgment at Appomattox At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.