On May 5, 1925, high school science teacher John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution in one of Tennessee’s public schools. Scopes had agreed to act as defendant in a case intended to test Tennessee’s new law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in its public schools. On May 4, the day before Scopes’s arrest, the Chatanooga Times had run an ad in which the American Civil Liberties Union offered to pay the legal fees of a Tennessee teacher who was willing to act as a defendant in a test case. Several Dayton residents hatched a plot at a local drugstore. They hoped that a trial of this type would bring much needed publicity to the tiny town of Dayton.
The men enlisted several local attorneys and one easy-going teacher who believed in academic freedom and in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution which states that all organisms developed from earlier forms through a process of natural selection. While volumes of scientific evidence support the theory of evolution, many felt that it contradicted the story of creation as described in the Bible and thus did not want evolution taught in schools.
The trial pitted famous labor and criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow against former senator and secretary of state William Jennings Bryan, who worked for the prosecution. The trial was such a media circus that, on the seventh day in the courtroom, the judge felt compelled to move the proceedings outdoors under a tent due to the unbearable heat and for fear that the weight of all the spectators and reporters would cause the floor to cave in.
As Judge John T. Raulston incrementally disallowed the use of the trial as a forum on the merits or validity of Darwin’s theory, the trial swiftly drew to a close. The jury took only nine minutes to return a verdict of guilty. After all, Scopes had admitted all along that he had, in fact, taught evolution. As the trial came to a close, reporter and critic H.L. Mencken explained to readers of the Baltimore Sun and the American Mercury:
All that remains of the great cause of the State of Tennessee against the infidel Scopes is the formal business of bumping off the defendant. There may be some legal jousting on Monday and some gaudy oratory on Tuesday, but the main battle is over, with Genesis completely triumphant. Judge Raulston finished the benign business yesterday morning by leaping with soft judicial hosannas into the arms of the prosecution.When the defense appealed the verdict, the Tennessee State Supreme Court acquitted Scopes on a technicality but upheld the constitutionality of the state law. Not until 1967 did Tennessee lawmakers overturn the law, finally allowing teachers to teach evolution. The trial did bring Dayton, Tennessee a great deal of publicity, mostly comprised of reinforcements of a stereotype of the south as an intellectual backwater, certainly not the type Daytonians had hoped to attract.
Category: History
Brief narratives about people and events in the American past.
George Washington
… took office as the first President of the United States on this date in 1789.
Washington’s term began officially March 4, but because neither the House nor Senate achieved a quorum until April, Washington’s unanimous election on February 4, wasn’t made official until April 14. Washington immediately departed Mount Vernon for New York to take the oath and was met along the way with parades and dinners in every little town.
As James Madison noted, Washington was about the only aspect of the new government that really appealed to people.
Fort Laramie National Historic Site (Wyoming)
… was designated on this date in 1960. It had been a national monument since 1938.
Fort Laramie- the Crossroads of a Nation Moving West. This unique historic place preserves and interprets one of America’s most important locations in the history of westward expansion and Indian resistance.
In 1834, where the Cheyenne and Arapaho travelled, traded and hunted, a fur trading post was created. Soon to be known as Fort Laramie, it rested at a location that would quickly prove to be the path of least resistance across a continent. By the 1840s, wagon trains rested and resupplied here, bound for Oregon, California and Utah.
In 1849 as the Gold Rush of California drew more westward, Fort Laramie became a military post, and for the next 41 years, would shape major events as the struggle between two cultures for domination of the northern plains increased into conflict. In 1876, Fort Laramie served as an anchor for military operations, communication, supply and logistics during the “Great Sioux War.”
Fort Laramie closed, along with the frontier it helped shape and influence in 1890. Its legacy is one of peace and war, of cooperation and conflict; a place where the west we know today was forged.
U(nconditional) S(urrender) Grant
HEADQUARTERS ARMY IN THE FIELD
Camp near Fort Donelson
February 16, 1862.
General S. B. BUCKNER,
Confederate Army.SIR: Yours of this date, proposing armistice and appointment of commissioners to settle terms of capitulation, is just received. No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.
I am, sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
U.S. GRANT,
Brigadier-General, Commanding.
Ulysses S. Grant
… was born on this date in 1822. The Writer’s Almanac has a fine essay on Grant, some of which is excerpted here:
But by that time, Grant had also been diagnosed with throat cancer and his health deteriorated rapidly. He realized that he didn’t have long to live, and wrote his memoirs as fast as he could. In extreme pain, and in a daze from pain medication, he still managed to write 275,000 words in less than a year. In the last few weeks of his illness, he couldn’t even speak, but he kept writing and revising, and checking everything he wrote against the official records to make sure it was all factual. He finished his memoirs in July 1885, and died four days later. …
Critics and writers of the time were shocked at how well Grant wrote. His book Personal Memoirs (1885) is one of the few books ever written by an American president that qualifies as great literature.
Among the most famous passages in the book is Grant’s description of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at the Appomattox Court House. Grant wrote, “What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know … [but] my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause (slavery) was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
The Library of Congress has information on Grant and his White House biography is here.
Chernobyl — 20 years
“This is quite possibly the most horrifying — and utterly heartbreaking — presentation I’ve ever seen.”
Link via Mind of Gutter, Mouth of Potty, whose introduction I couldn’t top.
Little William
William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, England. As customary, the entry in the baptismal registry of Holy Trinity Church announces the event in Latin: “Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere.”
The poet’s birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23 because babies generally were baptized about three days after birth. Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, and is buried in the church where he was christened.
Although contemporary references to William Shakespeare and his family abound, the first biography of the playwright appeared in the early 18th century. In 1714, Nicholas Rowe published Some account of the life, &c., of Mr. William Shakespear, one of many rare books in the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library.
A Library of Congress neighbor on Capitol Hill, the Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library was built and endowed by Henry and Emily Folger to house and maintain a valuable Shakespeare collection they bequeathed to the American people. Completed in 1932, the building is made entirely of American materials, including a neoclassical exterior of Georgia marble and a Tudor interior of Appalachian oak. Shakespearean scholars come from all over the world to use the Folger’s rich holdings related to Shakespeare and his times.
The last dozen
… Pulitizer prize-winners in History.
- 2006 Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky
- 2005 Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer
- 2004 A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration by Steven Hahn
- 2003 An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943 by Rick Atkinson
- 2002 The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand
- 2001 Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis
- 2000 Freedom from Fear by David M. Kennedy
- 1999 Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace
- 1998 Summer for the Gods by Edward J. Larson
- 1997 Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution by Jack N. Rakove
- 1996 William Cooper’s Town by Alan Taylor
- 1995 No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Two national battlefields
… were established on this date in 1960.
Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield (Missouri)
The battle fought here on August 10, 1861, was the first major Civil War engagement west of the Mississippi River, involving about 5,400 Union troops and 12,000 Confederates. Although a Confederate victory, the Southerners failed to capitalize on their success. The battle led to greater federal military activity in Missouri, and set the stage for the Battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862. Wilson’s Creek was also the scene of the death of Nathaniel Lyon, the first Union general to be killed in combat. With the exception of the vegetation, the 1,750 acre battlefield has changed little from its historic setting, enabling the visitor to experience the battlefield in near pristine condition.
Stones River National Battlefield (Tennessee)
A fierce battle took place at Stones River between December 31, 1862 and January 2, 1863. General Bragg’s Confederates withdrew after the battle, allowing General Rosecrans and the Union army to control middle Tennessee. Although the battle was tactically indecisive, it provided a much-needed boost to the North after the defeat at Fredericksburg. Lincoln later wrote to General Rosecrans, “I can never forget […] you gave us a hard-earned victory, which had there been a defeat instead, the nation could scarcely have lived over.”
Wouldn’t this have been a much happier ending?
Had Booth missed, Lincoln could have risen from his chair to confront his assassin. At that moment the president, cornered, with not only his own life in danger but also Mary’s, would almost certainly have fought back. If he did, Booth would have found himself outmatched facing not kindly Father Abraham, but the aroused fury of the Mississippi River flatboatman who fought off a gang of murderous river pirates in the dead of night, the champion wrestler who, years before, humbled the Clary’s Grove boys in New Salem in a still legendary match, or even the fifty-six-year-old president who could still pick up a long, splitting-axe by his fingertips, raise it, extend his arm out parallel with the ground, and suspend the axe in midair. Lincoln could have choked the life out of the five-foot-eight-inch, 150-pound thespian, or wrestled him over the side of the box, launching Booth on a crippling dive to the stage almost twelve feet below.
But Lincoln had not seen Booth coming.
From James L. Swanson’s Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. Fifty pages in, this book reads like a novel just as Jill said in a comment here last week.
Go try that thing with an axe or other long-handled tool.
Hitler
Adolf Hitler was born at Braynau, Austria, on this date in 1889. The New York Times obituary from May 2, 1945, (Hitler died April 30) is an excellent contemporary source. It’s worth reading the entire piece, but here are a few excerpts:
Like Lenin and Mussolini, Hitler came out of the blood and chaos of 1914-18, but of the three he was the strangest phenomenon. Lenin, while not know[n] to the general public, had for many years before the Russian Revolution occupied a prominent place as leader and theoretician, of the Bolshevist party. Mussolini was a widely known Socialist editor, orator and politician before making his bid for power. Hitler was nothing, and from nothing he became everything to most Germans.
Many who watched Hitler from the time when he first made his appearance on the political scene noticed his megalomania, his gambler’s readiness to take risks, his habit of wild exaggeration and inability to grasp the full implications of things he said and did. It was this failure to measure the significance of his words and deeds that was considered responsible for the coolness he displayed at critical moments after violent outbursts of thought and temper, although on occasions he was reported to fall into tears and hysterics.
The German dictator himself never married. At the age of 16 he suffered from lung trouble. On his mother’s side there were several eccentrics in the family. In general, the family showed definite tendencies to illness and mental instability.
Adolf Hitler was an ascetic, a celibate and a vegetarian and he neither smoked nor drank. From his early youth he was an eccentric. At the age of 16 he suffered from lung trouble and his passionate ambition to become a great historical figure impelled him to take good care of himself. Careful diet was his deliberately chosen method.
Though merciless to political opponents, he was kind to animals. A militarist, he was sickened by the sight of blood. A Wagnerian mystic, he loved spectacles of heroics and death. He was simple, Spartan and vain to the point of megalomania.
It was
… 11 years ago today that a bomb was exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people, and injuring 500.
Stylized chairs representing some of the public servants and others (including 19 children) who lost their life that day (Oklahoma City National Memorial).
Cover up
[Update April 19: See this post for link to article.]
Rolling Stone cover for the issue out this Friday — according to Drudge.
Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding and James Buchanan are generally considered the presidential failures — so far.
NewMexiKen is currently reading Sean Wilentz’s The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln.
The midnight ride of William Dawes
Late on the night of April 18, 1775, Boston patriot Joseph Warren learned of a British military operation planned for the next day. To warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were across the Charles River in Lexington, Warren dispatched two riders, Paul Revere and William Dawes. Revere took the shorter route “by sea,” while Dawes went “by land” over the isthmus from Boston to Roxbury, then crossing the Charles River over a bridge in Cambridge. Revere’s ride has been celebrated in poems and textbooks, but Dawes’ role was at least as important.
One By Land
William Dawes rode by land past the guard at the gate of the strip of land that connected Boston to Roxbury. Dawes had befriended a number of guards in the preceding weeks, and was lucky to find a friendly face on duty that night. He slipped through the gate after some Redcoats. Continuing west to Brookline, over the Charles at a bridge in Cambridge, he sped his horse through Menotomy (today called Arlington) to Lexington.One By Sea
Paul Revere took the more direct sea route. After he was rowed quietly across the Charles, within sight of the British warships, Revere obtained a horse at Lechmere and rode through Cambridge toward Adams and Hancock in Lexington. Stopped by British officers en route, Revere made a quick escape and chose an indirect path to Lexington, through Medford.The Alarm is Sounded
Both riders arrived in Lexington just after midnight and delivered their news of the British plans. The two messengers also decided to warn the militia in Concord that their military supplies would be targeted. They were joined on this leg by Dr. Samuel Prescott, a Concord resident who had been visiting a Lexington friend. Prescott proved invaluable when the riders were surprised by more British soldiers. Revere was captured and Dawes lost his horse, but Prescott took the back trails he knew to reach Concord and sound the alarm.
Excerpted from American Experience | Patriots Day
The greatest of the war correspondents
Earlier NewMexiKen noted Ernie Pyle’s death 61 years ago today. Here’s some more, this via CNN:
COMMAND POST, IE SHIMA April 18, (AP) — Ernie Pyle, war correspondent beloved by his co-workers, G.I.s and generals alike, was killed by a Japanese machine-gun bullet through his left temple this morning.
The bulletin went via radio to a ship nearby, then to the United States and on to Europe. Radio picked it up. Reporters rushed to gather comment. In Germany General Omar Bradley heard the news and could not speak. In Italy General Mark Clark said, “He helped our soldiers to victory.” Bill Mauldin, the young soldier-cartoonist whose warworn G.I.’s matched the pictures Pyle had drawn with words, said, “The only difference between Ernie’s death and that of any other good guy is that the other guy is mourned by his company. Ernie is mourned by the Army.” At the White House, still in mourning only six days after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, President Harry Truman said, “The nation is quickly saddened again by the death of Ernie Pyle.”
And this from the report of his death in The New York Times:
Ernie Pyle was haunted all his life by an obsession. He said over and over again, “I suffer agony in anticipation of meeting people for fear they won’t like me.”
No man could have been less justified in such a fear. Word of Pyle’s death started tears in the eyes of millions, from the White House to the poorest dwellings in the country.
President Truman and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt followed his writings as avidly as any farmer’s wife or city tenement mother with sons in service.
Mrs. Roosevelt once wrote in her column “I have read everything he has sent from overseas,” and recommended his writings to all Americans.
For three years these writings had entered some 14,000,000 homes almost as personal letters from the front. Soldiers’ kin prayed for Ernie Pyle as they prayed for their own sons.
In the Eighth Avenue subway yesterday a gray-haired woman looked up, wet-eyed, from the headline “Ernie Pyle Killed in Action” and murmured “May God rest his soul” and other women, and men, around her took up the words. This was typical.
It was rather curious that a nation should have worked up such affection for a timid little man whose greatest fear was “Maybe they won’t like me.”
And here’s what Ernie Pyle had to say about his adopted hometown:
Yes, there are lots of nice places in the world. I could live with considerable pleasure in the Pacific Northwest, or in New England, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, or in Key West or California or Honolulu. But there is only one of me, and I can’t live in all those places. So if we can have only one house — and that’s all we want — then it has to be in New Mexico, and preferably right at the edge of Albuquerque where it is now. Ernie Pyle, January 1942
Then and now
Joel Achenbach has a good posting about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that includes this:
In that day and age, no one knew basic structure of the surface of the Earth — how it is divided into plates that move, grind against one another, build stress. People didn’t know that continents could migrate across the globe. They had no grasp of tectonic forces that shaped the dramatic landscape of California. They didn’t know anything of mid-oceanic ridges and subduction zones and the relationship between subducting crustal plates and volcanoes. They didn’t even know if faults in the Earth caused earthquakes, or if it was the other way around. You know, the ground shakes, maybe that causes those cracks and scarps?
It was 100 years ago this morning
… that a magnitude 8.3 earthquake struck San Francisco killing an estimated 3,000 people (out of a population of 450,000).
At 5:12 A.M. on April 18, 1906, an 8.3 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco. With thousands of un-reinforced brick buildings and closely-spaced wooden Victorian dwellings, the city was poorly prepared for the quake. Collapsed buildings, broken chimneys, and a shortage of water due to broken mains led to several large fires that soon coalesced into a city-wide holocaust. The fire raged for three days, sweeping over nearly a quarter of the city, including the entire downtown area.
Over 3,000 people are estimated to have died as a result of the disaster. For those who survived, the first few weeks were hard; as aid poured in from around the country, thousands slept in tents in city parks, and citizens were asked to do their cooking in the street. A severe shortage of public transportation made a taxicab out of anything on wheels. Numerous businesses relocated temporarily to Oakland, and many refugees found lodgings outside the city. Most of the cities of central California were badly damaged. However, reconstruction proceeded at a furious pace, and by 1908, San Francisco was well on the way to recovery.
The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco has an engrossing online exhibit about the quake that includes photographs, eyewitness accounts, police and fire department reports, the Mayor’s “Shoot to Kill” Order and more.
Good Friday, 1865
Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth on this date, also Good Friday, in 1865. Lincoln died the next morning.
As Atzerodt and Paine fanned out to seek their targets, Booth, a celebrated actor, familiar to everybody who worked at Ford’s Theatre, had no trouble in slipping upstairs during the performance of Our American Cousin. Moving quietly down the aisle behind the dress circle, he stood for a few moments near the President’s box. A member of the audience, seeing him there, thought him “the handsomest man I had ever seen.” John Parker, the Metropolitan policeman assigned to protect the President, had left his post in the passageway, and the box was guarded only by Charles Forbes, a White House footman. When Booth showed Forbes his calling card, he was admitted to the presidential box. Barring the door behind him, so as not to be disturbed, he noiselessly moved behind Lincoln, who was leaning forward, with his chin in his right hand and his arm on the balustrade. At a distance of about two feet, the actor pointed his derringer at the back of the President’s head on the left side and pulled the trigger. It was about 10:13 P.M.
When Major Rathbone tried to seize the intruder, Booth lunged at him with his razor-sharp hunting knife, which had a 7¼-inch blade. “The Knife,” Clara Harris reported, “went from the elbow nearly to the shoulder, inside, — cutting an artery, nerves and veins — he bled so profusely as to make him very weak.” Shoving his victim aside, Booth placed his hands on the balustrade and vaulted toward the stage. It was an easy leap for the gymnastic actor, but the spur on his heel caught in the flags decorating the box and he fell heavily on one foot, breaking the bone just above the ankle. Waving his dagger, he shouted in a loud, melodramatic voice: “Sic semper tyrannis” (“Thus always to tyrants” — the motto of the state of Virginia). Some in the audience thought he added, “The South is avenged.” Quickly he limped across the stage, with what one witness called “a motion…like the hopping of a bull frog,” and made his escape through the rear of the theater.
Up to this point the audience was not sure what had happened. Perhaps most thought the whole disturbance was part of the play. But as the blue-white smoke from the pistol drifted out of the presidential box, Mary Lincoln gave a heart-rending shriek and screamed, “They have shot the President! They have shot the President!”
From David Herbert Donald’s outstanding biography of Lincoln.
On April 26, Booth and co-conspirator David Herold were surrounded while hiding in a tobacco shed in Port Royal, Virginia. Herold surrendered to Union troops, but Booth held out and was shot while the shed burned down around him.
Click on the image to see a larger version of the poster.
Read The New York Times story from the day after the assassination, headlined Awful Event.
Thomas Jefferson
… was born on this date in 1743.
Eight-three years later, at the end of his remarkable life, he wished to be remembered foremost for those actions that appear as his epitaph:
Author of the
Declaration
of
American Independence
of the
Statute of Virginia
for
Religious Freedom
and Father of the
University of Virginia.
At a White House dinner honoring 49 Nobel laureates in 1962, President Kennedy remarked, “I think this is the most extraordinary talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
It seems to NewMexiKen that the country could use a federal holiday during that long spell from Washington’s Birthday to Memorial Day. I propose that today, April 13, Jefferson’s birthday, would be ideal.
Despite serious flaws, Jefferson remains one of the most remarkable Americans — statesman, scientist, architect, philosopher agronomist, author.
Click on the image of the document to view Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence. The photo above taken by NewMexiKen, 2001.
And will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States
Harry Truman took the oath of office at 7:09 PM (Eastern War Time) on this date 61 ago. Franklin Roosevelt had died just over two hours earlier at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, the “Little White House.” When called at the Capitol and told he should rush to the White House, Truman is reported to have exclaimed, “Jesus Christ and General Jackson.” Once at the White House, Truman was told of FDR’s death by Mrs. Roosevelt.
The following day, Friday the 13th, is when Truman told several reporters: “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when you told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”
Information and quotations from David McCullough’s outstanding biography of Truman. Photo from the National Archives via the White House web site.
First shot
Fort Sumter — a man-made island some four miles from Charleston, South Carolina — was a symbol well beyond its strategic value in the tensions leading up to the Civil War. Since December 1860, South Carolina officials had been demanding the surrender of the fort as state property. To Northerners, surrendering the fort meant surrendering the very idea of the Union.
When Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, he was informed that the small garrison at Fort Sumter was running out of supplies. By April, he ordered a relief expedition and informed the Governor of South Carolina that it would be “with provisions only,” not men, arms or ammunition. This put the next move into the hands of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Davis ordered that the fort be reduced before the supplies arrived.
The Confederacy opened fire at 4:30 AM on April 12, 1861. The Union garrison surrendered after 33 hours.
The first hybrids
On April 11, 1900, the U.S. Navy acquired its first submarine, a 53-foot craft designed by Irish immigrant John P. Holland. Propelled by gasoline while on the surface and by electricity when submerged, the Holland served as a blueprint for modern submarine design. By the eve of World War I, Holland and Holland-inspired vessels were a part of large naval fleets throughout the world.
Designs for underwater boats date back to the 1500s. In the nineteenth century, the first truly practical submarines began to appear, with a period of intense development occurring at the end of the century as nations strived to establish their sea power. Seizing upon the latest military technology, the United States used subs in both the War of 1812 and the Civil War. It was not until World War I, however, that submarines emerged as major weapons.
Tierra y libertad
“There have been men who, dying, have become stronger. I can think of many of them — Benito Juárez, Abraham Lincoln, Jesus Christ — Perhaps it might be that way with me.”
Emiliano Zapata, Mexican revolutionary, who became stronger on this date in 1919, when he was lured into a trap and killed by one of Carranza’s generals.
Louisiana
The ill-fated René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, reached the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Mississippi River on this date in 1682 and claimed the Mississippi watershed in the name of France, naming it Louisiana in honor of King Louis XIV.
Appomattox Court House
Head Quarters of the Armies of the United States
Appomattox C.H. Va. Apl 9th 1865Gen. R. E. Lee
Comd’g C.S.A.General,
In accordance with the substance of my letter to you of the 8th inst., I propose to receive the surrender of the Army of N. Va. on the following terms to wit; Rolls of all the officers and men be made in duplicate, one copy to be given to an officer to be designated by me, the other to be retained by such officer or officers as you may designate. The officers to give their individual paroles not to take up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged, and each company or regimental commander to sign a like parole for the men of their commands – The arms, artillery and public property to be parked and stacked and turned over to the officer appointed by me to receive them. This will not embrace the side arms of the officers nor their private horses or baggage. This done each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by United States authority as long as they observe their parole and the laws in force where they may reside—
Very Respectfully
U. S. Grant
Lt. Gen
The two generals met shortly after noon on April 9, 1865, at the home of Wilmer McClean in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant, general-in-chief of all United States forces, hastened the conclusion of the Civil War.
In the weeks following, Confederate forces surrendered, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis was captured. On April 14, President Lincoln’s name was added to the list of over 1 million Civil War casualties, and the bloody era the that began four years earlier in the corn fields of Manassas, Virginia finally was brought to a close. (Library of Congress)