There, Lee signed the document that agreed the surrender of the Army of North Virginia, the largest component of the Confederate States of America military, which Lee commanded. When Grant, commander of the entire Union army, accepted Lee’s signature, the American Civil War effectively came to an end. Pockets of Confederate resistance would continue to fight on, some of them until June, but politically as well as militarily, after four years of bloody conflict, the Union had won. Five days later, 26-year-old actor John Wilkes Booth took advantage of his celebrity to pass unhindered through Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC. Fresh from his victory, Abraham Lincoln was enjoying a performance of Our American Cousin when Booth, a Confederate sympathiser, slipped into the balcony box where the President sat and shot him in the back of the head with a small pistol. Lincoln died from his injuries the next morning. Following the assassination, all telegraphic communication between the Union and the Confederacy was cut off.
