MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · April 1 · 1865
ON THIS DAY · 1 APRIL 1865
Five Forks
1 Apr 1865 — Sheridan crushes Pickett at the crossroads guarding the last railroad into Petersburg. The next morning Grant attacks along the whole line, and the ten-month siege ends in a day.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
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 yard. Johnston’s scraped-together force strikes one of Sherman’s wings at Bentonville — the last Confederate offensive, brave and hopeless — and is brushed aside. On 1 April Sheridan crushes the line’s last hinge at Five Forks; on the 2nd Grant attacks everywhere; that night Richmond burns its own warehouses and falls.
From Chapter 10 — Appomattox of The American Civil War, 1861–1865 (APR 1865).
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TEACH THIS IN 5 MINUTES
- Why it happened — Why the end came fast. Four years of siege logic collapsed in a fortnight because Petersburg was never a siege of walls but of railroads: when the Southside line fell at…
- The turn — Appomattox Court House, 9 April 1865. Not the largest surrender (Johnston’s was), but the decisive one: the Confederacy’s legend-army and its indispensable general accepting that the…
- What it changed — Assassination changes the peace. Lincoln dies at the exact hinge between war powers and reconstruction, replaced by Andrew Johnson — a Unionist Democrat with a white-supremacist’s…
Then ask the room: Grant’s terms at Appomattox are universally praised — and Reconstruction failed anyway. Was the “soft peace” a mistake? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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