The American Civil War Ends

APR 09 1865 · 12:00

Alexander Gardner, photographic portrait of Abraham Lincoln, November 1863. Place: Wilmer McLean's parlor, Appomattox Court House, Virginia Figures: Ulysses S. Grant, general-in-chief of all Union armies · Robert E. Lee, surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia · Wilmer McLean, the unlucky householder · Abraham Lincoln, assassinated five days later The Parlor at Appomattox Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, reduced to perhaps 28,000 effectives, is cut off west of Petersburg in the first week of April 1865. On 9 April, after a final attempt to break through fails, Lee asks for terms. Grant and Lee meet at the house of Wilmer McLean, a merchant whose previous home, in Manassas, had been used as a Confederate headquarters during the first battle of the war in July 1861. McLean is fond of remarking, after the surrender ceremony in his parlor, that the war began in his front yard and ended in his front room. Grant's terms are deliberately generous: officers and men paroled and sent home, officers keeping their sidearms and horses, no prosecutions for treason. Lincoln's reasoning, communicated through Grant, is that magnanimity in victory is the precondition of reunion. Five days later, on 14 April, Lincoln is shot at Ford's Theatre. He dies the following morning. Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat, becomes president. Sovereignty That Cannot Be Divided The war that ends at Appomattox has killed approximately 620,000 soldiers (a number revised upward in recent demographic studies) and an unknown number of civilians, by far the greatest mortality the United States has ever sustained in any conflict. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolishes slavery. The Fourteenth (1868) guarantees due process and equal protection against state governments. The Fifteenth (1870) prohibits racial denial of the vote. The Westphalian implication of the verdict is precise. Sovereignty in the United States is national, not state-by-state. The compact theory of the Union (states retain a residual right to withdraw) is killed at Antietam, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, and finally Appomattox. The Reconstruction Amendments translate this into constitutional text: there are individual rights the federal government may enforce against the states, against the states' will if necessary. The American experiment, after 1865, is recognizably a single sovereign state on the European pattern, with federalism reduced to an administrative arrangement rather than a residue of original sovereignty. The Westphalian principle of indivisible internal sove Video: The Trust marks the 160th anniversary of Lee's surrender to Grant on 9 April 1865, the moment a continental federal nation-state was preserved by force of arms.