150 years ago today. April 9, 1865. Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

A delegation from the Army of Northern Virginia arrives at the pre-determined location, the home of Wilmer McLean. General Robert E. Lee is wearing an immaculate dress uniform, silk sash, and golden spurs. He and his staff are early, and have to wait some time for their counterparts. When the Union officers finally arrive, they enter the house sweating and out of breath, after a hard ride. General Ulysses. S. Grant is wearing a plain, mud-spattered frock coat, no sidearm, and tarnished shoulder straps.

As the two generals shake hands, Grant nervously makes small talk about their only previous meeting, in the Mexican-American war 20 years earlier. Lee converses politely, but quickly brings him back to the issue at hand, and requests the terms of surrender.

Grant is generous. Southern soldiers must pile their weapons and ammunition, and in exchange would be given rations to sustain them on their trips back to their homes; there would be no imprisonments or prosecutions for treason. Southern officers would be allowed to keep their pistols, as well as their mules and horses, which they would need for the coming planting season.

Lee and Grant sign the document, and step outside onto the porch. As news of the surrender begins to spread amongst the Union army outside, a cheer begins. Grant orders it stopped immediately, in deference to Lee.

Meanwhile, inside the McLean home, Grant’s officers start helping themselves to poor Mr. McLean’s furniture. One officer grabs the table Lee used for signing the surrender, another takes the table used by Grant; they rudely compensate Mr. McLean by handing him whatever insufficient cash they have in their pockets.

(This is doubly ironic: just 4 years earlier, Wilmer McLean’s previous home was completely destroyed at the very outset of the Civil War. He and his family had lived in Manassas, and the McLean farmhouse had been used by the Confederates as their headquarters. During the Battle of First Manassas/Bull Run, a cannonball had struck the home’s chimney and exploded through the kitchen fireplace, gutting the building and forcing the McLean family to relocate south, to Appomattox. Thus, for the rest of his life, Wilmer McLean would bemoan his fate and could accurately say, “The Civil War started in my front yard and ended in my parlor.”)

As soon as news spread that Lee had surrendered, Confederate forces throughout the south did the same. And just like that, the nation’s defining war, that had torn the South apart and claimed some 620,000 lives, was over.

Today, in a similarly low-key commemoration at Appomattox, the National Park Service rang a bell for 4 minutes, one minute for each year of the war.

Hundreds of churches across the country did the same.