Lee immediately accepted Grant's terms and signed the surrender document, without any diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy. The vanquished Lee, afterward asked Grant that his former Confederate troops keep their horses. Grant generously allowed Lee's request.[273][274] Grant ordered his troops to stop all celebration, saying the "war is over; the rebels are our countrymen again."[275] Johnston's Tennessee army surrendered on April 26, 1865, Richard Taylor's Alabama army on May 4, and Kirby Smith's Texas army on May 26, ending the war.[276]

Lincoln's assassination
Main article: Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
On April 14, 1865, five days after Grant's victory at Appomattox, he attended a cabinet meeting in Washington. Lincoln invited him and his wife Julia to Ford's Theatre but they declined, because they had plans to travel to their home in Burlington. In a conspiracy that also targeted top cabinet members in one last effort to topple the Union, Lincoln was fatally shot by John Wilkes Booth at the theater and died the next morning.