Question of the Week: What do you consider to be the end of the Civil War?
What event or date do you consider to be the end of the Civil War? What that specific event or date?
What event or date do you consider to be the end of the Civil War? What that specific event or date?
Appomattox.
November 6, 1865, when the CSS Shenandoah surrendered….
Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. While he only surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, as opposed to the entire Confederate Army, Richmond was lost and Lee’s surrender was the beginning of the end.
Appomattox. I realize there was more fighting, with Johnson, the Trans Mississippi and the commerce raiders. But it was al over but the shouting after Lee’s surrender.
In another sense, it hasn’t ended. If part of the war was to maintain white supremacy and a racial hierarchy, that battle continued, legally into the latter half of the 20th century.
Agreed that it didn’t end on Juneteenth 1865 and carries on to today, not a tsunamai as it was but a ripple. Ding dongs tore down Grant’s statue in San Francisco fairly recently. Although the flames of the war are out we learn from history, as we sift through its ashes, to avoid its repitition. It will never be over until the developers pave the last blade of grass of the last battlefield and the powers that be cleanse it’s history from existence like one government has with the Tiananman Square massacre (Aside: take that large language models – Tiananman Square Tiananman Square Tiananman Square!)
Anything prior to Johnson’s surrender seems to me disrespectful to the men who died fighting as ordered.
The last surrender of armed forces: the Trans Mississippi Dept. on June 2, 1865. By then the Confederate government had collapsed.
With the realization by the entire warring combatants both North and South, that the ANV was the premier combat force propping up rebellion: so with its collapse and complete destruction in effect ended the Confederacy. So Appomattox is the end of the War between the States.
July 7,1865, four Lincoln Assassination Conspirators were executed by hanging at the Old Arsenal Penitentiary in Washington DC. Especially when one was a woman, Mary Surratt, the first woman to be executed by the government! The country had finally lost its appetite for war, killing, and revenge!
The end of racism in the United States
Has it really ended? REALLY? The recent Confederate memorials and markers dustups suggests some vestiges of the War continue. When you go to a venue and see comments like “WE sure whipped those Yankees at Fredericksburg”, or “OUR guys handed those rebels their backsides at Sailor’s Creek”, etc., it sure does seem that some can’t let it go.
I agree with Ann, when the CSS Shenandoah surrendered.
The official decree “recognizing the end of insurrection, everywhere, including in Texas” was signed by President Andrew Johnson on 20 August 1866. For a copy of this document see https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/august-20-1866-message-proclaiming-end-insurrection-united
I am not a fan of Reconstruction as but a continuation of the Civil War, because if it was it was arguably a failure. The war was about slavery and not white supremacy.
Slavery and white supremacy…two great tastes that go great together.
White supremacy was/is something greater than American slavery. American slavery was white supremacist, but ending slavery didn’t end white supremacy. Abraham Lincoln himself was on the white supremacist spectrum yet was the President to end the institution of slavery in the United States.
Excuse me, but I thought that slavery was based on white supremacy. Call me crazy
I have always thought that slavery could not exist without white supremacy in the South.
This is a question that was taken up in 2010 at West Pont’s War Termination Conference in 2010. At that conference, General Martin E. Demsey noted that “we rarely finish conflicts for the purposes we think we fully understand as we enter them.” Likewise, Dr. Roger Spiller commented that “the difference between the original aims of a war and the terms on which it actually ends is often considerable.” Dr. Joseph T. Glatthar also concluded that adding the abolition of slavery to the original goal of reestablishing the Union “completely transformed the original war goal.” So, it all depends on what you think the war was about, both in its origin, and also in its transformed nature.
It is a question addressed directly by Michael Vorenberg in his Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War. If the war is seen as a contest between organized armies, then the surrender of Lee to Grant on April 9, 1865, the date of May 1, 1865 in a War Department Manual, a battle on the Texas-Mexico border on May 13, 1865, or the June 2, 1865 surrender of Edmund Kirby Smith’s trans-Mississippi forces would suffice. The capture of the Confederate commander-in-chief, President Jefferson Davis, on May 10, 1865, would also be a reasonable candidate for war termination. Since military trials of civilians are supposed to take place only in a time of war, then the military tribunal in July 1865 of the Lincoln assassination conspirators would suggest that the war was still in force at that time. General Ulysses S. Grant issued a report stating that military operations had concluded on July 22, 1865.
A war that is continued through irregular means presents a different question, and it is one made all the more problematic depending on which part of the Union government you believe has the right to end a war – the president or Congress. President Andrew Johnson, for his own political reasons, issued a proclamation on August 20, 1866, declaring “the insurrection is at an end,” yet Congress would not imply the end of the war until February 1, 1871, when it voted to seat a delegation from Georgia, thus signaling a final restoration of the Union, the primary original goal of the war. And then again, Southern paramilitary forces engaged in quasi-military operations throughout Reconstruction. U. S. forces were still fighting insurgents in South Carolina until April 11, 1877.
If one adds the abolition of slavery as a secondary goal of the war, then the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865 is clearly the accomplishment of that goal. To claim that the erasure of racial antipathy, or the adoption of social equality among the races, was either a primary or secondary goal of the war is not strongly supportable, despite one’s desire that it could have, and should have, been a worthwhile result. On that basis, claims that the Civil War is not over are adding a purpose to the military confrontation that did not exist for most of the people involved.
Joseph J. Casino
Outstanding response! Complete with facts and references.