When did the Civil War end?

The Civil War effectively ended in 1865 with the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia on April 9, 1865, although other Confederate armies surrendered over the following weeks and the war's formal end came when President Andrew Johnson declared the rebellion over on May 9, 1865 and August 20, 1866.

The campaign that ended the war began with Grant's appointment as general in chief of all Union armies on March 9, 1864. Grant pursued a strategy of simultaneous pressure on multiple Confederate armies, ordering William Tecumseh Sherman to march through Georgia, George Meade and the Army of the Potomac to engage Lee in Virginia, and other commanders to threaten Confederate territory across the South. The Overland Campaign from May to June 1864 produced enormous casualties at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, and Cold Harbor without breaking Lee, but Grant kept pressing. He pinned Lee in the trenches around Petersburg from June 1864 onward in a ten month siege.

Sherman captured Atlanta on September 2, 1864, conducted his March to the Sea reaching Savannah on December 21, 1864, and turned north through the Carolinas in early 1865. After Sheridan defeated Confederate forces at Five Forks on April 1, 1865, Grant's troops broke the Petersburg lines on April 2, 1865, forcing Lee to abandon the city and the Confederate capital of Richmond. Lee retreated west hoping to link up with General Joseph Johnston's army in North Carolina, but Union cavalry under Phil Sheridan blocked his path.

Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at the home of Wilmer McLean in Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865 (Palm Sunday). Grant's terms were generous: officers and men could go home with their personal property and their horses for spring planting. About 28,000 Confederate troops surrendered.

President Lincoln, who had visited the front and walked through Richmond shortly before, was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. on the night of April 14, 1865 and died early the next morning, April 15, 1865.

The war continued briefly. Confederate General Joseph Johnston surrendered to Sherman near Durham, North Carolina on April 26, 1865. The Confederate cabinet dissolved in May. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was captured in Georgia on May 10, 1865. The last Confederate military force, Edmund Kirby Smith's Trans-Mississippi Department, surrendered on May 26, 1865. The CSS Shenandoah, a Confederate commerce raider, surrendered in Liverpool on November 6, 1865, the last Confederate force to lay down arms. The Thirteenth Amendment ratified December 6, 1865 ended slavery throughout the country.