No one knows for certain how the myth was born. But no one can deny that it was enduringly appealing and slow to die. As Ulysses S. Grant would put it years later, ‘like many other stories, it would be very good if it was only true.

The legend was that on April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Lt. Gen. Grant, not inside the McLean House in Appomattox Court House, Va., but outdoors, in an apple orchard somewhere outside the village. It was a romantic story, conjuring up a picture of rival commanders on horseback solemnly stacking their arms before opposing lines of blue and gray. It was also entirely false.

Nonetheless, throughout the mid-1860s the tale of the apple orchard surrender was repeatedly introduced, colorfully illustrated and widely distributed to an accepting public by the nation’s most imaginative purveyors of popular culture: the publishers of popular prints. To America’s engravers and lithographers falls the dubious honor of having perpetuated the myth by vivifying it in a seldom-remembered body of gaudy prints for American parlors, taverns and clubhouses.

In the years before the advent of motion pictures, radio and TV, picture publishers had considerable power, coloring public perception of the events of the day. Illustrations forged images of the news and the newsmakers — whether realistically depicted or not — into the collective consciousness of the national audience. So it was with the Appomattox story.

But how did the apple orchard surrender tale get started? As Grant conceded, it was one of those little fictions based on a slight foundation of fact. And it was reinforced by an incidental but much-noticed follow-up to the historic surrender.

As memoir writers on both sides of the Civil War would later recount, Confederate forces were actually occupying a hillside that embraced an apple grove on April 9, 1865. Grant related in his memoirs how a dirt road ran diagonally up that hillside, and how so many Rebel supply wagons had traveled the trail that their wheels had cut through the protruding roots of an apple tree, creating a makeshift embankment along the supply route. It was on this embankment, Grant was told, that his Confederate counterpart was sitting, his back against an apple tree, when he finally decided the time had come to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia.

Union Brevet Brig. Gen. Horace Porter recalled a similar scene. Porter wrote that Lee was lying down by the roadside on a blanket which had been spread over a few fence rails on the ground under an apple-tree, which was part of an orchard.

Reverence for the iconic Robert E. Lee continued for many years after his death in 1870. Charles Walker’s 1893 lithograph commemorates the general’s simple and heartfelt farewell to his troops: You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed, and I earnestly pray that a merciful God will extend to you His blessing and protection (Library of Congress).

Not surprisingly, Confederate writers chose to present a more active Lee: not a broken man lying on the ground, accepting the inevitable, but a mass of energy and resolve, resisting overwhelming forces until he wisely perceived the futility of struggling on. Colonel William W. Blackford, who had been an aide to Confederate Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart until the general’s death in May 1864, was present at Appomattox. He remembered an apple orchard guarded by a line of sentinels, where Lee could be found on surrender day pacing backwards and forwards…looking like a caged lion.

Blackford’s recollection was of a Lee quite unlike the idealized character later immortalized in popular prints and literature. To be sure, the general was the embodiment of all that was grand and noble in man in his full-dress uniform, complete with sword and sash. But he was also in one of his savage moods, Blackford remembered, and when these moods were on him, it was safer to keep out of his way. Lee that day was anything but the oft-portrayed stoic, dignified commander, made still more dignified by his gallantry in defeat.

Lee had good reason to fume, according to his aide, Colonel Charles Marshall. On April 8, wrote Marshall, Lee had proposed meeting Grant on the old stage road to Richmond, between the picket lines of the two armies, to discuss not surrender but peace. Grant made no reply to the invitation, but the next morning, Lee and two of his officers rode under a flag of truce toward the specified rendezvous. The men in the last hours of the Confederacy cheered General Lee to the echo, Colonel Marshall remembered, as they had cheered him many a time before. He waved his hand to suppress the cheering, because he was afraid the sound might attract the ire of the enemy, and we rode on through the line.

To Lee’s disappointment, Grant never showed up. Instead, a Union staff officer delivered a note Grant had written to Lee. Grant had no authority to discuss the subject of peace, it said, only surrender. Marshall read the letter to Lee, and after a few moments’ reflection, the Confederate commander made his most difficult decision. Well, write a letter to General Grant, he told Marshall, and ask him to meet me to deal with the question of the surrender of my army.

Even though Grant refused to meet Lee on the morning of April 9, at least one printmaker immortalized the event-that-never-was with a large lithograph of the Meeting of Generals Grant and Lee Prepatory to the Surrender of General Lee. Nearly a year would pass between surrender day and the publication of the print. But for artist P.S. Duval of Philadelphia and his publisher, Joseph Hoover (both experienced professionals who by then surely knew better), the dramatic appeal of the ride along the old stage road must have seemed irresistible.

What happened after Lee sent his message to Grant has been confirmed by memoirists of both North and South. The best account is probably that of Marshall, who was dispatched to Appomattox to find a place suitable for the surrender meeting. There, he encountered Wilmer McLean, a man…who used to live on the first battle field of Manassas, at a house about a mile from the Manassas Junction. He didn’t like the war, and having seen the first battle of Manassas, he thought he would get away where there wouldn’t be any more fighting.

In the end, the man who didn’t like the war provided the place to end it — not as he first suggested, at a nearby home that Marshall thought all dilapidated, but in his own very comfortable house. Within minutes, in the 20-by-16 1/2-foot McLean parlor, Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Ulysses S. Grant.

Lee arrived first, looking to one observer quite bald and wearing one of the side locks of his hair thrown across the upper portion of his forehead, which is as white and as fair as a woman’s. Nonetheless, to his aide Armistead L. Long, even vanquished, Lee was yet a victor….Under the accumulation of difficulties his courage seemed to expand…his presence inspired the weak and weary with renewed energy….Those who watched his face to catch a glimpse of what was passing in his mind could gather thence no trace of his inner sentiments.

His image stands out clearly before me, Long wrote years later. Just after he had signed the surrender papers and emerged from the McLean House, Lee suddenly seemed to Long older, grayer, more quiet and reserved…very tired. But he would not be so portrayed.

The orchard myth was a popular subject for printmakers. P.S. Duval’s orchard scene is an early example of the myth in print. (Library of Congress).

Northern printmakers were the only such artisans to produce Appomattox surrender scenes. They also produced most of the portraits of Lee, Confederate Lt. Gen. Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson and Confederate President Jefferson Davis in the postwar era. But they were not aggressive researchers. Many searched no further for contemporary descriptions of Lee’s appearance at Appomattox than the New York Herald’s report of April 14: Lee looked very much jaded and worn, but nevertheless, presented the same magnificent physique for which he had always been noted….During the whole interview he was retired and dignified to a degree bordering on taciturnity, but was free from all exhibition of temper or mortification. His demeanor was that of a thoroughly possessed gentleman who had a very disagreeable duty to perform, but was determined to get through it as well and as soon as he could.

Grant, who arrived after Lee, looked to one witness as though he had had a pretty bad time. He came dressed in a sack coat and a loose fatigue blouse. In sharp contrast to Lee’s glorious new full-dress uniform, Grant wore no side arms: Lee wore his magnificent gold-handled ceremonial sword. Grant appeared somewhat dusty and a little soiled. Lee was impeccable and grand, now and forever the perfect knight of legend, exuding gallantry in defeat. The simple truth was that Grant had garbed himself in what he called a rough traveling suit, the uniform of a private with the stripes of a Lieutenant-General, because his own stock of fancy uniforms had not yet arrived at his headquarters. This ironic contrast between the simplicity of the victor and the grandeur of the vanquished would be pointedly reflected in many prints of Appomattox and would grow into a legend in American history.

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