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

Questions for Further Study

• 1. The leniency of the “surrender terms” is credited with the avoidance of a guerrilla war by the defeated Confederacy. Given what you know about the conditions in the South by the spring of 1865 and considering Lee's opposition to continuing the war by unconventional means, how real was the threat of protracted guerrilla war? To what extent do you think guerrillas would have enjoyed popular support?
• 2. Lincoln proposed to win the war and restore the Union first and then to reconstruct the Confederate states without slavery and with civil and political rights for the freedmen. To accomplish the first goal, he amnestied the leaders of the rebellion. By 1868 former Confederate officials were returned to the U.S. Congress under presidential Reconstruction. This rapid resurgence of the old antebellum elite is usually attributed to the laxity of President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee. Did the liberality of the surrender terms contribute to this outcome? Or did the onus lie exclusively with Johnson?
• 3. Many Civil War historians argue that the Emancipation Proclamation and the enlistment of Black troops in 1863, in the wake of War Department General Order 143, transformed the conflict from a conservative effort to preserve the Union to a revolutionary struggle to overturn the social order of the slave South. How, then, would you explain surrender terms that exempted the military leaders of the rebellion from treason charges and even offered them assistance to return home? Had Lincoln survived, how would he have responded to the charge that his surrender policy contradicted his Reconstruction goals?
• 4. After President Andrew Johnson rescinded Sherman's wartime distribution of land to former slaves and returned four hundred thousand slaves to their former owners, land redistribution was forgotten, and the hopes of the freed people for land were dashed. Despite its failures, Reconstruction did achieve gains for the freed people. Discuss what steps were taken to secure Black rights—for example, in the areas of education and civil and political rights.