The Telegram Announcing the End of the Civil War

Signed in the name of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, it was sent by the War Department to Maj. Gen. George Thomas, in command of the Union’s Western Theater of war

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Obtained by us from the collection of a Union general, and descended through his family

Robert E. Lee’s surrender of his Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865 to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House ended all practical hope for a Southern Confederacy. On April 11, 1865, at 1...

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The Telegram Announcing the End of the Civil War

Signed in the name of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, it was sent by the War Department to Maj. Gen. George Thomas, in command of the Union’s Western Theater of war

Obtained by us from the collection of a Union general, and descended through his family

Robert E. Lee’s surrender of his Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865 to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House ended all practical hope for a Southern Confederacy. On April 11, 1865, at 1 o’clock in the morning, Gen. Joseph Johnston, who headed the Army of the Tennessee, Confederacy’s only remaining large army, heard of the event, and since he had intended to unite his army with Lee’s somewhere near the North Carolina-Virginia border, saw his plans were ruined. Word of Lee’s surrender reached Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman at 5 a.m. on April 12. Sherman had just completed one of the most remarkable campaigns in military history, having stormed through the Carolinas like “a plague of locusts” in February and March, and was now perched outside the North Carolina capital of Raleigh, ready to close in on Johnston.

Naturally, Sherman’s troops celebrated wildly upon hearing the news of Lee’s surrender, but Sherman still could not be certain how Johnston or the Confederate government would respond. And when the Sherman’s men entered Raleigh on April 13, they discovered that Johnston and his force had already begun moving to the west, toward Greensboro, roughly 70 miles away. Meanwhile, however, Confederate President Jefferson Davis remained unconvinced that Lee’s surrender was the fatal blow to the Confederacy and the war effort. Rather, Davis entertained grand illusions of raising a large, well-armed, well-fed field army comprised of recalled deserters and those who avoided conscription to continue the fight for Confederate independence. On April 13 during a military meeting in Greensboro, Johnston tried to dissuade Davis from his plan for renewed combat by arguing that the Union forces outnumbered the Confederates by eighteen to one, the Confederacy lacked the money, credit, and factories to purchase or produce more arms, and fighting would only further devastate the South without significantly harming the enemy. With the surrender at Appomattox, Johnston shifted his objective to procuring the best possible terms for surrender, as he argued: “it would be the greatest of human crimes to continue the war.”

Johnston decided to engage in negotiations with Sherman without Davis’s authorization and suggested a meeting on April 17, which Sherman agreed to. On April 17 the two met at James Bennett’s 350-acre farmstead in Durham’s Station, a rail stop between Raleigh and Greensboro. At the meeting, Sherman handed Johnston the telegraph announcing Lincoln’s assassination. After hearing the news, Johnston told Sherman he believed “the event was the greatest possible calamity to the South,” and reaffirmed his goal of obtaining the best possible terms of surrender. Upon word of negotiations, morale in Johnston’s army collapsed, Johnston later noting that their meeting “and the armistice that followed, produced great uneasiness in the army. It was very commonly believed among the soldiers that there was to be a surrender, by which they would be prisoners of war, to which they were very averse. This apprehension caused a great number of desertions between the 19th and 24th of April—not less than four thousand in the infantry and artillery, and almost as many from the cavalry; many of them rode off artillery horses, and mules belonging to the baggage-trains.” On the 18th an armistice was agreed upon, as well as surrender terms, but the government in Washington thought Sherman had been too liberal and rejected the terms, demanding they be the same as Grant had given Lee.

Learning the terms had been rejected Sherman immediately notified Johnston. A few minutes later, he sent a second dispatch: “I am instructed to limit my operations to your immediate command and not to attempt civil negotiations. I therefore demand the surrender of your army on the same terms as were given General Lee at Appomattox, of April 9, instant, purely and simply.” Sherman then instructed Gen. James H. Wilson in Georgia to make arrangements to resume hostilities on April 26. He also drafted orders for his army to prepare to move against Johnston’s command as soon as the truce expired. At Johnston’s request, he and Sherman met again on April 26. Johnston and Sherman now agreed to terms that closely resembled the Appomattox terms. Johnston then surrendered his command. In addition to his Army of Tennessee, General Johnston also surrendered forces under his command in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. This was the biggest surrender of the war, involving some 90,000 men. On the 27th a codicil to the surrender agreement was agreed upon, and President Johnson and his Cabinet ratified the agreement. It was done.

With Sherman’s departure from the Western Theater to march through Georgia and into the Carolinas, the Union’s major army in the West was the Army of the Cumberland, led by Gen. George Thomas. In 1865, he had recently crushed the main remaining Confederate army in the West, led by Gen. John Bell Hood, but Thomas remained militarily responsible for that huge area of the country. Gen. Edward Canby was then in command of the Union’s Military Division of Western Mississippi. In this capacity, he oversaw the remaining Confederate resistance in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Thus the Union command structure in April 1865 was Grant in command in Virginia taking on Lee’s army, Sherman in the Carolinas chasing Johnston, Thomas in the upper West surpassing any resistance from the remnants of Hood’s army, and Canby in the Southwest.

The War Department, knowing of Johnston’s surrender and its approval by the authorities in Washington, determined to notify three people: Thomas and Canby in the as yet unsurrendered Western Theater, and Gen. John Dix in New York, who was responsible for disseminating important news to the press. It sent out three identical dispatches, of which this is the one to General Thomas.

Telegram, on U.S. Military Telegraph letterhead, April 28th 1865, to Gen. George Thomas, commander of the Army of the Cumberland. “The following has been received by the Dept. this evening. To Maj. Genl. Thomas: A dispatch from Genl. Grant dated at Raleigh 10 am April 26th just received by this department states that Johnston surrendered the forces under his command embracing all from here to the Chattahoochee to Genl. Sherman on the basis agreed upon between Lee and myself for the army of Northern Virginia. Edwin M. Stanton, Sec. War.”

Although after Johnston’s surrender there were still some 12,000 remaining Confederates in Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana, led by Gen. Richard A. Taylor, Taylor would start negotiations immediately upon learning the news, and surrender on May 4; and Gen. E. Kirby Smith would surrender the small Trans-Mississippi Department on May 26; both surrendered to Canby. But the surrender of Johnston marked the effective end of the Civil War.

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