The True Story of Appomattox and the Danger of Myths

On March 27, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order, insisting that our history must “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” At the root of Trump’s order was the belief that historians have pushed a “factually baseless ideology aimed at diminishing American achievement.”

Trump’s order included critiques of historians “interrogating institutional racism” and an exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum which suggests that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”

However, modern scholarship asks us to reckon honestly, and unflinchingly, with complex facts and not gloss over painful parts of our history. Trump’s order therefore raises the question: should Americans accept incomplete, or inaccurate, stories of national “greatness” in place of the messy realities of history?

The case of one of the famous moments in American history—Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox—dramatically illustrates the dangers of letting myth substitute for accurate history.

For generations, Americans learned the same basic story about the end of the Civil War. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Va. In a sublime moment of selflessness, the two great leaders nobly transcended their differences and chose the path of peace and reconciliation. Grant paid homage to Confederate courage by setting lenient surrender terms, which let the defeated rebels go home unpunished. In a reciprocal show of respect, Lee handed over his ceremonial sword to Grant, only to have his counterpart return it. The two men effectively ended the war and set the stage for America’s rise as a world power.

This story, however, was never true. Instead, it originated in 19th-century Americans’ yearning for a swift reunion, which could sweep away the unresolved issues of the war. The story served as a resolution to help prove that America was unique and not destined to experience the interminable rivalries and miseries of the Old World.

But politically, Appomattox settled nothing. Rather than a time of reconciliation, Lee’s surrender was a moment in which a wide range of Americans, including both generals, staked rival political claims.

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Neither Grant nor Lee arrived at Appomattox expecting to heal, in one grand gesture, the fractured country. Both men were fierce warriors, deeply committed to their respective causes. Far from proposing lenient surrender terms to exonerate the Confederates, Grant did so in an effort to change their hearts and minds. He regarded the Union victory as one of right over wrong and wanted to secure Confederate repentance and compliance. The story that he handed back Lee’s sword was “the purest romance,” as Grant later wrote in his memoirs.

Grant and his army believed that their victory vindicated the superiority of a free labor society over a slave labor society. African American Union regiments, which consisted mostly of men who had escaped slavery, felt their patriotic sacrifices had earned them the full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote. As William McCoslin of the 29^th Regiment USCT put it in a May 1865 letter, “We the colored soldiers, have fairly won our rights by loyalty and bravery. …shall we obtain them? If they are refused now, we shall demand them!”

Confederates, by contrast, recoiled from both of these ideas and had little interest in repentance. Instead, Lee tried to claim the moral high ground, asserting that the Union victory was one of might over right. The goal was to deny the victors a mandate to govern the vanquished. 

His posture reflected the hope among most Confederates that their cause—one of establishing a slaveholding republic—might still somehow be vindicated. Confederate General William Nelson Pendleton decried the need to surrender to an army of “German, Irish, negro, and Yankee wretches,” men he and his fellow Confederates regarded as their social and racial inferiors.

Unsurprisingly, given their lack of remorse, the Confederates also tried to avoid any consequences for their rebellion. At Appomattox, Lee requested that the Union army issue each of his soldiers a printed parole pass to vouch that if they went home and observed the laws in force where they resided, they would “remain undisturbed.” In an interview with the New York Herald a few weeks later, Lee warned that if the Yankee government adopted “arbitrary or vindictive or revengeful policies,” Southerners would consider the surrender terms breached and would renew the fight.

In Lee’s eyes, one goal of this “gentlemen’s agreement” with Grant was to hold the line against Black civil rights. Lee and his allies sought the restoration—not the reimagining—of the South. He wanted to turn back the clock to before abolitionists had challenged slavery and Southern rule. In the aftermath of Appomattox, ex-Confederates moved quickly, using propaganda, fraud, and terrorism, to preempt Black freedom and impose a system akin to slavery.

Both Congress and the Union army, however, were unwilling to see the slave South recreated in all but name. The army maintained a tenuous occupation of the region. Congress also moved to grant freedpeople civil rights protections—provoking vehement objections from white Southerners that such measures violated the terms of the surrender, namely the promise that they would “remain undisturbed.”

The dispute highlighted how the surrender meant two very different things to the victorious Union and defeated Confederates. 

When Grant became president in 1869 and tried to crack down on the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, ex-Confederates demonized him as a radical extremist who had betrayed his promises to Lee. They also turned on any white Southerner who had the temerity to support Grant and Reconstruction. Confederate general James Longstreet became a pariah among white Southern conservatives because he had embraced the Republican Party and Black voting rights after the war. He had done so out of gratitude for Grant’s leniency at Appomattox.

This and other evidence exposed the reality behind the myth that the Appomattox “gentlemen’s agreement” restored national harmony. Not only was the story untrue, but it quickly became a weapon for ex-Confederates as they tried to shape the postwar settlement. Spreading their version of the myth allowed Confederates to cast themselves as the innocent victims of Reconstruction—even as they sowed chaos and violence in the South.

When former Confederate general John Brown Gordon, who headed the Georgia KKK, testified before Congress in 1871 on the conditions in the Reconstruction South, he credited Lee and Grant with banishing the spirit of vengeance. The problem, he falsely asserted, was insurrectionary Southern Blacks, who revived it. This racist propaganda sought to justify white terrorism as a means of self-defense.

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The myth about Appomattox thus became a key element of Lost Cause orthodoxy, a form of propaganda that glorified slavery and the Confederacy and demonized Reconstruction. It merged with efforts by the white South to put Lee on a pedestal, both figuratively and literally. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scores of Southern cities and towns erected Confederate memorials, like Richmond’s towering Lee statue, that aimed to block from public view any story, memory, or perspective that did not accord with the Lost Cause orthodoxy. 

The sanctification of Lee and other Confederate leaders, in turn, pushed the complexities of the surrender and of the Civil War era into the shadows, allowing the myth of Appomattox to flourish for more than a century. 

The weaponization of this moment exposes the dangers of allowing myths to continue to stand in for history. The Confederate interpretation of Appomattox did lasting damage to Americans’ quest for national progress and unity: it exonerated insurrectionists, lionized them as martyrs, and helped return them to power. The essence of the Lost Cause was that the Civil War was not lost and could yet be won by new forms of racial proscription; for white supremacists, the Jim Crow era of disfranchisement, segregation, and one-party Democratic rule in the South was that promise vindicated.

To peel back the layers of the Appomattox myth, and assess its damaging effects, is not to push a “baseless ideology” but instead to gain a clear-eyed, informed perspective on events that still reverberate in the present. A deeper, more nuanced account of Appomattox reveals that the war did not end neatly in April 1865 and that sectional animus was channeled into bitter partisan conflict. It helps Americans understand why Reconstruction failed and why racial justice has proved so elusive.

Dispelling the myth reveals, too, counter-narratives to the dominant story, and the powerful lessons they might convey as Americans continue to grapple with the legacy of racism. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, an acclaimed Black abolitionist who toured the South in 1867, offered a telling counterpoint to Grant’s hopes for repentance and Lee’s for restoration. After listening to the “heart-saddening stories of grievous old wrongs” endured by formerly enslaved Southerners, she observed that the “shadows of the past” remained, but they bore “the promise of a brighter coming day. The work goes bravely on.” For those in the postwar world determined to seize the promise of freedom, that was the true meaning of Appomattox.