Articles of Agreement Relating to the Surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia

Impact

The surrender terms served their immediate purpose of disarming the Army of Northern Virginia; by removing Robert E. Lee from the battlefield, they effectively ended the Civil War. Nine days later, in Durham, North Carolina, General Johnston disregarded Jefferson Davis's plea for continued resistance and surrendered his thirty-seven thousand men to Sherman.

The leniency of the surrender terms definitely helped prevent transformation of the Civil War into a prolonged guerrilla war. Lee's lieutenants had urged that he take this course before the surrender, and Jefferson Davis favored this course as well. Such a decentralized war fought over the 500,000-plus square miles of the secessionist South would have been a long and bloody struggle reminiscent of the terror of “Bleeding Kansas” in the 1850s but on a grander scale. Lincoln had the foresight to see that this would have been the worst possible outcome. While the generous surrender terms did not produce a miracle of reconciliation, they succeeded in ending the bloodshed by demobilizing the rebel armies. With the armed conflict ended, the stage was set for a political and constitutional resolution of the underlying causes of the Civil War.