In the meantime, Lincoln was sworn in to the office of the Presidency for a second term.  Lincoln sensed that the war was finally drawing to a close, although exactly when the killing might end was still an uncertain matter.  But in his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln was already looking to what lay ahead as the Union moved to reunite and mend the wounds of the war.  He reviewed the course of the war, spoke lengthily of the hand of God in using the war to transact justice in a morally challenged (slavery) America, and looked forward to a postwar healing of the entire nation, North and South.  In the first part of this address he went over the origins of the war. He then continued:

... Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease.  Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.  It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.  The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

He then explained that slavery was one of those offenses against God that God would allow – but only until such time as he was ready to exact his judgment, through the terrible war they had been experiencing.

If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?  Fondly do we hope – fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.  Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.

He concluded:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with a firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

These were the words of a great leader, made ever wiser by the very impossibility of meeting the challenges he had facing him solely through his own intellectual abilities.  Lincoln had learned to persevere in the face of massive uncertainty and huge risk, simply by trusting that he was merely a servant of the will of God himself and that it was up to God – not Lincoln – to bring the true and the good to bear in this Covenant nation that God himself had, centuries earlier, called into being.  Indeed, this was the kind of wisdom that few American leaders after Lincoln were able to match even on a partial basis.

After his victory at Nashville, Thomas sent General James Wilson to head south through Alabama all the way to the Gulf coast.  Following a policy similar to Sherman's, Wilson destroyed the last of the South's industrial capacity as he went, notably at Birmingham and Selma (where he also crushed Nathan Forrest's Confederate cavalry), and even burned down the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa in the process.

At the same time a Union army under Edward Canby overwhelmed the Confederate defenses at Spanish Fort, which in turn finally brought the town of Mobile to surrender (April 9).

Upon Sheridan's return to Petersburg from the Shenandoah Valley, he was given orders by Grant to undertake a flanking attack to the West of Petersburg, to cut off the final supply line supporting Petersburg.  Confederate General Pickett was sent by Lee to counter Sheridan's move, a move initially successful, but then set back with a major defeat at Five Forks delivered by Sheridan on April 1st.

The next day Grant's forces attacked a greatly weakened and thinly stretched line of Confederate troops south and southwest of Petersburg, and swept away the Confederate defense.  Lee pulled his forces from both Petersburg and Richmond and headed them west with the intention of then turning south to join up in North Carolina with what was left of General Johnston's Confederate army.  Both cities were quickly occupied by Union troops on April 3rd, though most of the Union troops were sent in pursuit of the fleeing Confederates.  But the Confederate army was finding itself cut off from supplies and was being forced in huge numbers into surrender.

Lee's hope to join his forces with Confederate troops still operating in North Carolina was anticipated by Union cavalry, who positioned themselves in front of his path of retreat.  When in attacking these cavalry units at dawn on the 9th, Lee came immediately to realize that they had been joined by two corps of Union infantry, and that effectively he was surrounded by a Union army far larger than his.  He also was running very short on food and supplies.  At this point Lee knew that it was time to surrender.  At 8:00 in the morning he rode to the McLean House to meet Grant to sign the terms of surrender.

Lee's surrender effectively brought the Confederate will to continue to a nearly complete halt.  Skirmishes here and there between the two sides would continue for a while longer.  But for all practical purposes, the war was over.

Lincoln was already at work seeking ways to bring the nation back together ... minus slavery.  The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ending slavery anywhere within the United States, had been ratified by the Senate in April of 1864 and in the House of Representatives finally (following a bitter contest there) at the end of January (1865), just a few months previously.  It was yet to be submitted to the states – Northern only at that point – for their ratification.  But the amendment was expected to be easily approved by the states.

As Lincoln had stated in his second inaugural address, he was indeed looking for ways "to bind up the nation's wounds; . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace."  That would not be an easy task, given the level of hatred still smoldering in many Northern hearts, and given the bitterness Southerners felt about their humiliating loss to the Unionists.  However, achieving a just and lasting peace was where he was now directing all his efforts

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But success in that endeavor was not to be.  On the night of April 14th the actor John Wilkes Booth was able to complete part of his plot to kill Lincoln and Grant while attending together the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater in Washington (but Grant had instead left to visit his children in New Jersey), as well as Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward (the legal successors to a vacated presidency).  Lincoln was shot in the back of the head – and then Booth escaped by leaping from the balcony to the stage and then fleeing the city.  Lincoln died early the next morning.  Meanwhile Seward was attacked and nearly killed the same night by another of the plotters, who after repeated attempts to stab Seward to death finally fled into the night when confronted by other members of Seward's family.  Seward survived.  Booth was found with a co-conspirator in Virginia twelve days later, surrounded and shot.  Arrests of other members of the plot soon followed.  On July 7, four of the conspirators were hanged.

And so the war was over.  The South found itself desolate and the North simultaneously found itself in a condition of profound mourning.  The whole thing had been a sad tragedy, pushed to monumental proportions by the inability or unwillingness of American leaders before Lincoln to confront the slavery issue directly.  It finally took not political reason, but war and devastation of monumental proportions to bring this burning issue to a resolution.  But so often is this the case.  Passion, not Reason, plus the mysteries of circumstances seemingly beyond human control, quite frequently bring human crises to a resolution ... not pretty, but well resolved.

Most tragically of all, a Southern bullet had taken the life of the one person who could have healed the nation's wounds and brought the South back to life more quickly than turned out to be the actual case.  As it was, the bullet left many in the North without pity for the South and its vast suffering, and left the South itself to begin a process of recovery that would take generations to complete.  Such is often the cruel irony of history.

¹Of the approximately 2.6 million who had enlisted in the Union army and the 1 million in the Confederate army, 360 thousand Union and 258 thousand Confederate soldiers had died either from battlefield deaths or eventually from wounds, disease, etc.  The total casualty count is around 1.5 million of those 3.6 million men serving. In addition to the 620 thousand deaths, there were 476 thousand counted as wounded and another 400 thousand as captured and dying in prison, or missing.  One in four of the Civil War soldiers never returned home after the war.  The number of Americans killed in the Civil War exceeded the total of the American losses in all of its other wars from the War of Independence through the Korean War (battlefields.org/ learn/articles/civil-war-casualties).