The fabric of history is often woven of surprising threads: the chance meeting, the extravagant whimsey of fate. No better illustration of this can be found than the string of events surrounding the table in Wilmer McLean’s parlor upon which Ulysses S. Grant drew up the terms that brought the Civil War to a close.

When the war began, McLean was a pacifist with Southern sympathies who owned a 1,400-acre plantation near Manassas Junction, Virginia. His land was cut by a creek, then unknown, now famous—Bull Run. It was here, on Sunday, July 21, 1861, that the first important battle of the Civil War was fought, making of the McLean house a hospital for the dying and a morgue for the dead. When his plantation was overrun again a year later in the Second Battle of Bull Run, McLean decided that he had had enough and prepared to move his family to a place “where the sound of battle would never reach them.” He chose a tiny village in the hills of south-central Virginia. The village was Appomattox Court House. There he bought a large red-brick house with a white wooden porch across the front, the best house in the immediate vicinity.

It was here, in April of 1865, that the McLeans again found themselves surrounded by the clash of arms as Grant’s Army of the Potomac dealt the deathblow to Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

When on Sunday, April 9, General Lee ordered his military secretary, Colonel Charles Marshall, to go into Appomattox Court House and find a building suitable for his meeting with Grant, McLean was the first white civilian Marshall met. At first McLean recommended a house other than his own, but Marshall decided that only McLean’s was a setting worthy of the historic conference. Thus the man who had seen from his own windows the first massive bloodletting of the war was to have the war end in his own parlor.

But the whim of fate did not end there. Among those present when the surrender was signed was General E. O. C. Ord, a distinguished Union veteran who longed for peace so that he could return to his wife Molly and his young children. Just how strange Ord’s presence in McLean’s parlor was is revealed in a recently discovered biographical sketch of the General written by his granddaughter, Mrs. Lucy Ord Dunlop, who based it on anecdotes related by Ord to his family. The first half of the story probably took place early in 1865. Mrs. Dunlop writes:

” . . . For a time and until the spring should really come, the armies of both sides at Petersburg and Richmond were generally inactive, held so by the fearfully muddy and impassable roads. It was cold and mean, food was short everywhere. One rainy, windy night a young Confederate soldier, grown desperate from privation and homesickness, decided to drop out of the damned army and go home. The fact that