On 9 April 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House. Although this event has come to represent the end of the Civil War, the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who had fled Richmond the week before, urged his troops in the field to keep fighting. Many wished to see the Confederate forces disband and form guerrilla forces that would continue to resist Union occupation. However commanders in the field, who had fought and suffered most directly, followed their instincts. General Joe Johnston informed President Davis in late April that continuing to fight would be ‘impractical’ and would spread ‘ruin all over the South’. He surrendered to General William T. Sherman on 26 April 1865. On 9 May Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose daring and cunning raids against Union forces throughout the western theatre had stymied commanders throughout the war, parried President Davis's call to resist. ‘It is our duty to divest ourselves’ of ‘all feelings of animosity, hatred and revenge’, he counselled his followers. ‘Obey the laws, preserve your honor, and the government to which you have surrendered can afford to be and will be magnanimous’.

But could the government of the reunited nation afford magnanimity? For four long years, lawmakers feared that the fiscal demands of the war would over-burden, and eventually collapse, the effort to reunite the nation. Now that victory had been achieved, and the president's ‘paramount object’ seemed within reach, the question turned to how to recreate a nation that had been torn apart by Civil War. Earlier that year, on 31 January 1865, Congress approved the Thirteenth Amendment, guaranteeing that slavery would no longer persist in the reunited nation. However, as Eric Foner observed, passage of the amendment ‘closed one issue only to open a host of others’.

As the war dragged on, longer and bloodier than anyone had anticipated, the public understood that they would have to shoulder the war costs. The New York Tribune predicted in December 1861 that loyal citizens will ‘cheerfully submit’ to a system of taxation to prosecute the war.