After Lee surrendered, it took months for the last armies to lay down arms — and one Confederate warship kept fighting in the Arctic, not knowing the war was over.
Lee's surrender at Appomattox on April 9 effectively ended the Civil War, but the conflict didn't simply stop — armies across the South still had to formally surrender, a process that took months and involved nearly 200,000 more soldiers laying down their arms.
Just five days after Appomattox, Lincoln was assassinated, casting a shadow over the Union's celebration and raising immediate questions about what kind of peace would follow. The two great events — victory and tragedy — arrived within a week of each other.
General Joseph Johnston surrendered the largest remaining Confederate force — about 90,000 men — to Sherman at Bennett Place, North Carolina on April 26. It was the biggest surrender of the war. The last Confederate general to give up on land was Cherokee leader Stand Watie, who surrendered in the Choctaw Nation on June 23.
On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas and read General Order No. 3, informing the last enslaved people in Confederate territory that they were free. That date — Juneteenth — is now a federal holiday, marking the final, practical end of American slavery.
The strangest postscript belonged to the CSS Shenandoah, a Confederate commerce raider that had been terrorizing Union shipping in the Pacific. In June 1865, the ship fired the war's last two shots in Arctic waters — its captain didn't learn the war was over until June 27. The Shenandoah finally surrendered in Liverpool, England on November 6, 1865, more than seven months after Appomattox.
President Johnson formally declared peace in stages — most states on April 2, 1866, with the legal end of the Civil War officially proclaimed on August 20, 1866. The war that had claimed an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 lives ended not with a single dramatic moment, but with a slow, complicated unwinding across an entire continent.