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Just three weeks later, Lincoln was elected to a second term by a comfortable margin. Clearly, the North was prepared to continue the fight, and the defenders of Petersburg, starving, sick, and exhausted, at last broke in March 1865. On April 2, Lee evacuated Richmond. Jefferson Davis and the entire Confederate government fled the Southern capital.
The March to the Sea
While Grant concentrated on taking Richmond, William Tecumseh Sherman, after leaving, Chattanooga in early May 1864, invaded Georgia with 100,000 men. Sherman was opposed by Joseph P. Johnston’s army of 60,000, which repeatedly fell back during the onslaught—although Johnston scored a victory at Ke
After the fall of Atlanta, Hood played a desperate gambit by invading Te
In the meantime, General Hood did win a battle at Franklin, Te
The Country Courthouse
Although sporadic fighting would continue west of the Mississippi until the end of May, the principal land campaign of the Civil War ended at Durham Station on April 26. However, an earlier event is traditionally considered the symbolic end of the Civil War. Following the collapse of Petersburg and the evacuation of Richmond, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia desperately foraged for food and arrived at Appomattox Court House, about 25 miles east of Lynchburg, Virginia. Lee’s forces, which now stood at perhaps 9,000 effective troops, were surrounded by the Army of the Potomac under General George Meade.
After heavy skirmishing on the morning of April 9, Lee concluded that his was a lost cause. He met Ulysses S. Grant, who pressed him to surrender all the Confederate armies, which were nominally under his command. Lee refused to do that, but his surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, over which he had direct command, signaled the inevitable end of the war.
With Malice Toward Some
Confident of ultimate victory, President Lincoln delivered a gentle, healing message in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, calling for a consummation of the war with “malice toward none” and “charity for all” in an effort to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” Weary, careworn beyond imagining, Lincoln nevertheless looked forward to the end of the war. On the evening of Good Friday, April 14, 1865, he and his wife, Mary Todd, sought a few hours’ diversion in a popular comedy called Our American Cousin. The play was being presented at Ford’s Theatre, a short distance from the White House.
An Evening at Ford’s Theatre
John Wilkes Booth was a popular young scion of America’s foremost theatrical family. While he had no part in Our American Cousin, Booth was desperate to play a role in the drama of the great Civil War, which was now rushing to conclusion. Back in 1864, the Maryland-born racist had concocted a plot to kidnap Lincoln and ransom him in exchange for Confederate prisoners of war. That plan came to nothing, and now, with surrender in the air, there was no point in simply kidnapping Lincoln. Booth wanted raw vengeance. He conspired with a small band of followers, George A. Atzerodt, David Herold, and a former Confederate soldier called Lewis Paine (real name Louis Thornton Powell). They plotted to murder Lincoln and also kill Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward.
On April 14, Atzerodt backed out of his assignment to kill Johnson. In the meantime, Herold held Paine’s horse while Paine broke into Seward’s residence. He stabbed and clubbed Seward, an aged man who was recuperating from injuries suffered in a carriage accident. It was a bloody scene: Seward, his son Augustus, and his daughter Fa
Booth was more efficient. Booth simply walked into the theater, entered the president’s box, raised his derringer, and pointed it between Abraham Lincoln’s left ear and spine. fie squeezed off a single shot. Booth leaped from the box onto the stage, shouting “Sic semper tyra
Reconstruction Abuses
The mortally wounded president had been carried to a house across the street from the theater. There Lincoln died at 7:22 the next morning. With him died any hope of “malice toward none” and “charity for all.” Booth murdered Lincoln to avenge the South. In fact, the South became the most thoroughly brutalized victim of the assassination.
As the war was winding down, President Lincoln had formulated plans to set up loyal governments in the Southern states as quickly as possible. New governments were, in fact, formed in Louisiana, Te
After Lincoln was assassinated, his vice president, Andrew Johnson, modified the Wade-Davis plan by issuing amnesty to anyone who took an oath to be loyal to the Union in the future. Johnson required that the states ratify the 13th Amendment (which freed the slaves), abolish slavery in their own state constitutions, repudiate debts incurred while in rebellion, and declare secession null and void. By the end of 1865, all of the secessionist states, except for Texas, had complied.
Congress, however, was not satisfied with Johnson’s program, which, Congress feared, restored power to the very individuals who had brought rebellion. Moreover, the readmitted states persisted in keeping former slaves in subservience. To correct this problem, Congress passed in 1866 the Freedman’s Bureau Act and the Civil Rights Act, both intended to ensure African-American equality before the law. When Johnson vetoed these acts, Republicans responded by refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the Southern states and overrode the veto.