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The conventional narrative of the Civil War is that it ended when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House, or perhaps a month later when Confederate President Jefferson Davis was captured in Irwinville, Georgia. But the true final action of the American Civil War began in Palmito Ranch near Brownsville, Texas, two days after Davis’s capture nearly 1,000 miles away.
To be fair, the end of the Civil War was confusing and opaque. Although Lee did surrender his massive Army of Northern Virginia to Grant on April 9, 1865, at the Appomattox Court House, there were still hundreds of thousands of rebel soldiers motivated to fight for the Confederate States of America. It took nearly three more weeks for the Union to compel the vast Army of Tennessee commanded by Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston and other rebel forces numbering nearly 100,000 to surrender on April 26, 1865. And even after Confederate President Jefferson Davis was imprisoned in May, the Union still had a way to go until the war could be considered finished. Over a year after Lee’s surrender at the Appomattox Court House, President Andrew Johnson announced the end of the Civil War on August 20, 1866. Although the war officially ended in late summer of 1866, the Battle of Palmito Ranch was the final armed conflict of the war and ironically resulted in a Confederate victory in southern Texas.