The Surrender

On April 9, 1865 after four years of Civil War, approximately 630,000 deaths and over 1 million casualties, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, at the home of Wilmer and Virginia McLean in the town of Appomattox Court House , Virginia...

Let's see, if I've done my math correctly, that's 140 years ago today. I sometimes wonder why, in school, it seemed much, much longer ago than that? Ancient history, if you wanted to get right down to it. And where did I get the notion that this one surrender meant the war was over? I have to keep reteaching myself that there were other armies besides Lee's, and they had to surrender also, over a course of several months. I mean, for most of my youth I thought that Grant versus Lee was essentially all there was to the Civil War. (Sigh.)