THE END OF THE CONFEDERACY

Sherman employed a scorched earth policy as he marched from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia, in November and December of 1864, In early April of 1865 General Lee took the Confederate army from Richmond and tried to escape to the south. The Union army caught up to him, and he finally surrendered on April 9, 1865, at the courthouse in Appomattox. Virginia. By the first week of June all other Confederate forces also surrendered and began to return home to oftentimes devastated homelands.

Lincoln only had time to begin to plan for what a post-Civil War America would look like. On April 14, 1865, he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theater. Booth was a pro-Southerner, He and a group of coconspirators also planned to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson and other members of the Lincoln cabinet. Booth was hunted down several days later and was killed by gunfire; several others conspiring with him were found and, after trials by military tribunals, hung. The incredibly difficult task of reconstruction would have to be handled by the new president, Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat who Lincoln had chosen to be his vice president.