The Confederate army of the American south led by Robert E Lee surrendered 150 years ago to the Union Commander Ulysses S Grant on 9 April 1865 in Appomattox, Virginia.
The four-year conflict is the deadliest in American history. A recent census study concludes that an estimated 750,000 soldiers were killed, more than half through disease and starvation, along with an unknown number of civilians.
After the surrender, some Confederate troops straggled on until the final act of surrender on the Confederate ship CSS Shenandoah in Liverpool on November 6 1865.
The conflict concerned the survival of the Union of then 34 states or the independence of the Confederate States of America which consisted of 11 of those states.
Underpinning the secession was the pivotal question of the ‘ownership’ of fellow human beings, the black slaves, whose work was crucial to the cotton-based economy of many of the southern states.
The south believed that it would get support from European countries because of their need for “King Cotton”, but none intervened and the break-away state was never recognised diplomatically by any foreign nation.
Abraham Lincoln was president throughout the 1861-1865 conflict until he was assassinated by a Confederate sympathiser on 15 April 1985, just five days after Lee’s pivotal surrender.
When the war finally ended, the South was in tatters, its infrastructure smashed and its slaves emancipated. Its wealth evaporated and it was impoverished for a century. The years may have passed and conditions improved, but it has never forgotten.
