On April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered his rebel army to the U.S. Army under the command of General Ulysses Grant at the Virginia hamlet of Appomattox Court House.

News spread quickly that the most important Confederate military force had capitulated. In the Pennsylvania mining town of Pittston, the editor of the Pittston Gazette began assembling his editorial in response.

George Richart was an unabashed supporter of the the Union cause, tying it together with the effort to end slavery in America. His editorial reflects his view, shared by millions of other Americans at the time, that slavery played a central role in the Civil War breaking out in 1861 and its continuance over four bloody years.

Richart’s editorial appeared in the April 13, 1865 edition of the Pittston Gazette alongside the details of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

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The End of the Slave Rebellion

The rebellion against the Government of the United States has been defeated, after a four years’ struggle unexampled in the armies called to the field, the loss of precious lives, the expenditure of treasure, the cruelty of the guilty authors of the war, the commanding issues involved, and the everlasting principles rescued and secured by the final Union triumph.

It was in Virginia, in October of 1781, that the American rebellion against British tyranny achieved its last victory, and where the Revolutionary War was closed by the surrender of the British army and navy, commanded by Lord Cornwallis, to George Washington, commander of the American forces.

In this same Virginia, not very many miles from the scene of the defeat and capitulation of the British mercenaries, and in the vicinity of Richmond, the capital of the State, the rebellion of American slavery against American freedom has just been beaten and crushed by the American army under command of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, and his captains. Grant, Sheridan and Meade.

It remains with the vanquished traitors to choose the hour between their formal submission to the majesty of an outraged Government and their complete and inevitable extermination. Never were two rebellions so different in the causes which provoked and precipitated them. The one was the revolt of a young and struggling People against a Power which had plundered and oppressed them.

The other was the revolt of a besotted Aristocracy, which had been fed and flattered by an indulgent Government until, spoiled by prosperity, after having practically governed the majority by its money and its arrogance, it raised its arm against its generous benefactor. God decided that, as the one rebellion was just and holy, it should prevail against all the hosts and the money of the foreign tyrant.

And God has also decided that, as the other rebellion was unjust and unholy, it should perish, even sustained as it has been by the same foreign influences which hunted and proscribed our common ancestors. The surrender of Cornwallis opened the door of the Centuries to the maxims and examples of American freedom, a freedom born in the tortures and throes of European bigotry and persecution; and when Slavery attempted to close the door upon the progress of Enlightened Democracy, the infant of 1781 grown to the giant of 1865, completed the work of vengeance and vindication by the annihilation of the crime which caused the rebellion and the criminals who conducted it.

Since the surrender of General Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy has no force which need be feared by the powerful combinations of Grant, Sherman and Sheridan; either of whom are more than a match for the Rebel Johnson. He will not be likely to be far behind in following Lee’s example for his necessities will soon be as pressing as his were.

Let us be duly thankful to an over-ruling Providence for his aid in enabling us to achieve these great triumphs.

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The celebrations of victory were short-lived. Just one day after this editorial appeared in the Pittston Gazette, President Lincoln was assassinated by actor and extremist white supremacist John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. The assassin, like Richart, connected the Civil War to the fight over slavery.

After hearing President Lincoln give a short address following Lee’s surrender, which included a line about giving African American soldiers who served in the United States Army the right to vote, Booth hissed to a friend: “That means n*gger citizenship. Now, by God, I will put him through.” Booth killed the President of the United States three days later, part of a wider, failed effort to decapitate the Federal government.

A week later, Richart wrote this in response to news of the assassination:

“President Lincoln fell a sacrifice to his country’s salvation… The wretch who killed him… imagined himself an avenger of that downcast idol which, disliking to be known simply as Slavery, styles itself ‘the South.’

[Lincoln] was murdered, not that Slavery might live, but that it might bring down its most conspicuous enemy in its fall.”

(Featured Image: A New York newspaper’s headline about the surrender of Lee’s army in April 1865)

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