Appomattox Court House Village- Visitor’s Center Selected Exhibits
On this table- Officers from both sides were designated to place into effect the terms of surrender reached on April 9, 1865, by Generals Grant and Lee. On April 12, 1865, at 5:30 PM Confederate Generals Longstreet, Gordon and Pendleton along with Union Generals Gibbon, Griffin and Merritt signed the final agreement for the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia on this table.Telegraph exhibitSword of Captain George AbbittElizabeth Custer wrote in a letter to General Morris Schaff in March of 1910. “This wood is from the panel of a drawer of the table given to me by General Sheridan on which the surrender of General Lee to General Grant was written at Appomattox.”1st Lt. Horace Evans, 199th Pennsylvania Infantry “I rode up to one of General Lee’s staff officers who had been mortally wounded. He was lying on the ground having been shot in the forehead (actually a cut received in the fall from his horse) and breast. He was pulling his brains out and acting as if nothing was the matter with him. When all at once he said, It is a terrible thing to be killed on the last day of the war.” I cut off one of his buttons and have it now…”Sergeant William W. Williams, 10th New York Cavalry, Co. D “As we went over the field where the engagement took place…., I … a man lying on the ground. I rode out to him and found one of the enemy. Someone had written his name on a slip of paper and placed it just inside of his jacket. The slip stated that he was a minister’s son… The young man said he was wounded through the spine and could not be moved, neither could he get well,and that he was in great pain. He begged me to shoot him and end his misery. I told him that I was to[o] tender-hearted to do that. Then he asked for the loan of my revolver, so that he could shoot himself.I had to refuse him again,and told him to keep up good courage,and that someone would come and tend to him.
