The Appomattox Effect: Searching for the End of War in the American Civil War and Beyond

Americans tend to mark the surrender at Appomattox as the end of the Civil War, but the last battle came more than a month later, the last surrender a month after that, and the official “cessation of hostilities” more than a year later. A similar Appomattox effect shapes the way Americans think of other wars, making people assume, even when well-known facts indicate otherwise, that wars have discrete, identifiable endpoints. This lunch discussion raises some of the issues associated with identifying the end of any U.S. war in light of the search for an end of the Civil War.