Grant had spent Saturday night struggling with a sick headache, his feet in hot water and mustard, his wrists and the back of his neck covered with mustard-plasters. On Sunday morning, still sick and suffering, he was jogging along on horseback towards the front, when a Confederate officer was brought before him. He carried a note from Lee offering to surrender. "When the officer reached me," writes Grant, "I was still suffering with the sick headache; but the instant I saw the contents of the note, I was cured." The ending of the war ended Grant's headache.
The two commanders met at Appomattox Court House, a sleepy Virginian village, five miles from the railroad and endless miles from the great world. It lies in a happy valley, not wrapped in happiness that April day, for Sheridan's forces held the crest at the south and Lee's were deployed along the hilltop to the north. A two-hour armistice had been granted. If that did not bring the end desired, that end was to be fought out with all the horrors of warfare amid the peaceful houses that had straggled together to make the peaceful little town.
At the northern end of the village street, surrounded by an apple orchard, stood a two-story brick house with a white wooden piazza in front of it. It was the home of Wilmer McLean, a Virginia farmer upon whose farm part of the battle of Bull Run had been fought at the outbreak of the war. Foreseeing that other battles might be fought there—as the second battle of Bull Run, in 1862, was—he had sold his property there and had moved by a strange chance to the very village and the very house in which the final scene of the great tragedy of this war between brothers was to be played. Here Lee awaited Grant.
The Union general had gone to Sheridan's headquarters before riding up to the McLean house. Sheridan and his staff had gone on with him. Least important of the little group of Union officers who followed Grant into the presence of Lee was Tom Strong, but the boy's heart beat as high as that of any man there.
The McLeanN House, Appomattox Courthouse
It was in the orchard about the house that the myth of "the apple-tree of Appomattox" was born. Millions of men and women have believed that Lee surrendered to Grant under an apple tree at Appomattox. That apple tree is as famous in mistaken history as is that other mythical tree, the cherry tree which George Washington did not cut down with his little hatchet. Washington could not tell a lie, it is true, but he never chopped down a cherry tree and then said to his angry, questioning father: "Father, I cannot tell a lie; I cut it down with my little hatchet." That fairy story came from the imagination of one Parson Weems, who did not resemble our first President in the latter's inability to tell lies. Perhaps the myth of the apple tree will never die, as the myth of the cherry tree has never died. In 1880, when Grant's mistaken friends tried to nominate him for a third Presidential term, other candidates had been urged because this one, it was said, could carry Ohio, that one Maine, and so on. Then Roscoe Conkling of New York strode upon the stage to nominate Grant and declaimed to a hushed audience of twenty thousand men:
"And if you ask what State he comes from,
Our sole reply shall be:
He comes from Appomattox
And the famous apple tree!"