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Honest Abe and Sam Grant and their boys in blue proved it for me, and Bobby Lee was forced to agree at a place called Appomattox Court House deep in the heart of ole Virginny.



The fact that the surrender took place at Appomattox itself proves that the South NEVER conceded/agreed that its claims were wrong or that its cause was empty and false. Lee was trying to get away to continue the fight when he was overtaken and trapped at Appomattox. The South admitted NOTHING about its cause or reasons for struggling for its independence after the formal MILITARY surrender. In fact, legally, there is much to substantiate the South's position, the Confederacy's basis for existing and right for "independence" (or, that is, existence as its own sovereign nation.)

Lee was desperately trying to shake loose of Grant/Meade and the Grand Army of the Potomac which had kept him bound and tied to Richmond-Petersburg and its trenches of death since August of 1864. After the battle of Five Forks on April 1, 1865, when Pickett was remiss and off attending a Shad Bake and left the remnants of 5 brigades to weather a overwhelming attack by Sheridan, the southern defenses collapsed...but Lee actually saw this as a blessing in disguise because it allowed him to finally abandon the hopeless position defending Richmond and gave him and his army the 'hope' anyway, of once again being on the move and possibly drawing the Yankees into some trap in the future. Lee wanted to hook up with Joseph Johnston's Army in North Carolina and combined together would allow him to field an army once again of about 70,000 men, which he intended to throw against Sherman's force marching up from the North/South Carolina border. The hope being that the south could show the North that the cost in time, money and lives to subjugate it was prohibitive, and thus gain the South some type of negotiated peace, or a stalemate, and thus preserve the confederacy's independence.
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