On April 12, four years to the day after the attack on Fort Sumter which started the war, Lee's Confederate troops marched into the village and stacked their arms. Here the final act of healing that runs through the whole Appomattox story took place, set in motion by another remarkable figure—Joshua L. Chamberlain, the Union general designated to receive the surrender. A Bowdoin College professor who left to enlist in the army, Chamberlain won a battlefield commission for repeated acts of bravery and was wounded six times, once so severely that an army doctor gave him up for dead.

Now, with his soldiers standing at attention, General Chamberlain watched the first ragged Confederate soldiers coming up the road, led by Gen. John B. Gordon.

The momentous meaning of this occasion impressed me deeply, Chamberlain later wrote. "I resolved to mark it by some token of recognition: which could be no other than a salute of arms. I was well aware of the criticisms that would follow. My main reason, however, was one for which I sought no authority nor asked forgiveness. Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve;