Appomattox

On the afternoon of 9 April 1865, in the front parlor of Wilmer McLean's house at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant. The terms took Grant a few minutes to write. Officers kept their side arms, men who owned their horses kept those, everyone was paroled and sent home, and Grant ordered rations sent across the lines. Lee kept his sword. No one asked for it, and the famous offering and refusal, Grant wrote later, never happened.

Diego Velázquez painted The Surrender of Breda around 1635 for the Hall of Realms in Madrid; it hangs in the Prado. The Dutch governor of Breda arrives to hand over the keys of the city and the Spanish commander, Spinola, stops him with a hand on his shoulder before he can kneel. Behind them a wall of upright lances gives the painting its Spanish name, Las Lanzas.

The parlor is traded for the field where the two armies stood. Grant, in a plain dark coat with his hat in his left hand, reaches across the mud and closes his hand over Lee's rather than over the sword held out hilt-first between them. Lee stands bareheaded in gray and a red sash. Behind Grant stand his staff, two horses and the flag; behind Lee, the Spanish lances become a hedge of Confederate bayonets. A brick house and a thread of smoke sit on the horizon under a pale sky.

The scene is legend; the generosity was not. Grant's terms are what Velázquez painted: a victor declining to humiliate the defeated.