Surrender at Appomattox Court House

After the fall of Richmond and Petersburg, the Army of Northern Virginia retreated west while Union forces blocked its escape. Robert E. Lee met Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865 and accepted terms of surrender.

Other Confederate forces remained in the field, but Appomattox became the symbolic end of the Civil War. Soldiers returned to homes, communities and economies transformed by destruction and emancipation.

This context supports fiction beginning at the end of Confederate military resistance and moving into the uncertain social world of Reconstruction.