April 9 · This Day in America
In the front parlor of a farmhouse in a quiet Virginia village, two men end the bloodiest war in American history. Robert E. Lee, in his finest dress uniform, sits across from Ulysses S. Grant, mud-spattered and plain. Lee's army is starving, surrounded, out of room to run. Grant writes the terms by hand: the men may go home, keep their horses for the spring planting, and will not be disturbed if they keep the peace. No prisons. No gallows. Let them go home. Outside, when Union gunners begin to celebrate, Grant orders them to stop. The rebels, he says, are our countrymen again. Six hundred thousand Americans are dead. The country it leaves behind is broken and unfinished, the hardest work still ahead. But the guns, at last, go quiet, and a nation that nearly destroyed itself chooses to keep being one.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1939
Barred from Constitution Hall because she was Black, the great contralto Marian Anderson instead sings on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday. Seventy-five thousand people stand below; millions more listen by radio. She opens with "America" — my country, 'tis of thee — her voice carrying over the Reflecting Pool toward a marble Lincoln. It is one of the first great public moments of the civil rights century.
Source: prologue.blogs.archives.gov
“The war is over; the rebels are our countrymen again.”Ulysses S. Grant, 1865