The Appomattox Campaign was a series of battles fought March 29 – April 9, 1865, in Virginia that culminated in the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and the effective end of the American Civil War.
At the conclusion of the Richmond–Petersburg Campaign (also known as the Siege of Petersburg), Lee's army was outnumbered and exhausted from a winter of trench warfare over a 30 mi (48 km) front, numerous battles, disease, and desertion. At the Battle of Five Forks on April 1, Union forces under Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant cut the final railroad line supplying Lee's army in Petersburg, and ordered a general assault along the Petersburg fortification line. On April 2, Grant's army achieved a breakthrough of the lines in the Third Battle of Petersburg, which prompted Lee to order the evacuation of both Petersburg and the Confederate capital of Richmond on the night of April 2–3.
Lee hoped to withdraw to the southwest and unite his army with Confederate forces in North Carolina, but Grant's army pursued relentlessly. On April 6, Lee's army suffered a significant defeat at the Battle of Sayler's Creek, but continued to move to the west in an attempt to elude the Union Army. Cornered, outnumbered, and short of supplies, Lee finally agreed to surrender his army on April 9 at Appomattox Court House.
Read more about Appomattox Campaign: Background, Aftermath, Classifying The Campaigns
Famous quotes containing the word campaign:
“The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)