Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 9: Lee surrenders

April 9 is the anniversary of Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House in 1865.

Trevor Plante provided an account of that surrender and others to come in Ending the Bloodshed: The Last Surrenders of the Civil War Prologue Magazine 47:1 (Spring 2015)

We typically think of the Civil War as having begun in 1861 with the firing on Fort Sumter by Confederate forces and essentially ending with Lee's surrender. As Plante points out, some military engagements still continued. He writes:

While Confederate land forces surrendered throughout the late spring and summer of 1865, the Confederate raider CSS Shenandoah continued to disrupt Union shipping. ...

The last Confederate surrender occurred on November 6, 1865, when the Shenandoah arrived in Liverpool. The only Confederate vessel to circumnavigate the globe was surrendered by letter to the British prime minister, Lord John Russell. She was soon turned over to the Americans, who hired a merchant captain to sail her to New York. After a couple days at sea, a winter storm forced the captain to limp back to Liverpool with badly damaged sails. Eventually the vessel was sold to the sultan of Zanzibar and renamed El Majidi.

In a presidential proclamation issued on April 2, 1866, President [Andrew] Johnson declared that the insurrection that had existed in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, and Virginia, was at an end. The one exception was Texas.

Later that summer, the President declared that the insurrection in Texas was suppressed. The President acknowledged that "adequate provisions had been made by military orders to enforce the execution of the acts of Congress, aid the civil authorities and secure obedience to the Constitution and the laws of the United States in the state of Texas."

On August 20, 1866, President Johnson issued a proclamation announcing the end of the American Civil War: "And I do further proclaim that the said insurrection is at an end and that peace, order, tranquility, and civil authority now exists in and throughout the whole of the United States of America." [my emphasis]