A wave of Confederate surrenders followed.

On April 14, just five days after Lee's

surrender, Lincoln was assassinated. On May 26, the last military department of the
Confederacy, the Department of the Trans-Mississippi, effectively surrendered, but
the conclusion of the American Civil War lacks a clear end date, and Appomattox is
often symbolically referred to. Small confederate ground forces continued
surrendering past the May 26 surrender date until June 23. By the end of the war,
much of the South's infrastructure was destroyed, especially its railroads. The
Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and four million enslaved black
people were freed. The war-torn nation then entered the Reconstruction era in an
attempt to rebuild the country, bring the former Confederate states back into the
United States, and grant civil rights to freed slaves.

The Civil War is one of the most extensively studied and written about episodes in
U.S. history. It remains the subject of cultural and historiographical debate. Of
particular interest is the persisting myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.
The American Civil War was among the first wars to use industrial warfare.
Railroads, the telegraph, steamships, the ironclad warship, and mass-produced
weapons were all widely used during the war. In total, the war left between 620,000
and 750,000 soldiers dead, along with an undetermined number of civilian
casualties, making the Civil War the deadliest military conflict in American
history.[f] The technology and brutality of the Civil War foreshadowed the coming
World Wars.