Appomattox

CHAPTER 10 · JAN–APR 1865 · The American Civil War, 1861–1865

The war’s last winter is a vice with two hands. Sherman comes north through the Carolinas (the blue arrow — his men consider Georgia to have been the gentle rehearsal; South Carolina, where secession began, burns hotter, Columbia included), while Grant keeps stretching the Petersburg lines. Study Petersburg as the future glimpsed: thirty miles of trenches, bombproofs, wire entanglements, mining and counter-mining, trench raids — the Western Front of 1915 rehearsed at walking distance from Richmond. Lee’s army, unfed and unrelieved, loses men nightly to desertion; by March he holds one man per

The turn: Appomattox Court House, 9 April 1865.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.