The numbers told the story of a gamble that failed badly. The Union lost about 1,044 men at Fort Stedman, killed, wounded, and captured. The Confederates lost roughly 4,000, with around a thousand of them taken prisoner in the collapse. For an army that could no longer replace anyone, those were men Lee could not afford, thrown away in a single morning on an attack that gained nothing and held nothing. The line he had broken at dawn he had handed back by breakfast, and he had given up ground elsewhere to do it.

Fort Stedman was the last offensive the Army of Northern Virginia would ever launch. After nearly four years of carrying the war to the enemy, Lee’s one remaining stroke had been a pre-dawn lunge that spent itself in four hours, and there would not be another. From here to the end, his army would only retreat and defend.

The end came fast. Grant’s own planned offensive opened within days, swinging hard around Lee’s right, the flank Lee had thinned to feed Gordon’s attack. On April 1 the Confederate line cracked at Five Forks, west of Petersburg, and the next day Grant ordered an all-out assault straight through the trenches. The line that had held for nine months gave way at last.

On the night of April 2, Lee abandoned Petersburg and Richmond and marched west, hoping even then to slip away to North Carolina, exactly the escape Fort Stedman had been meant to make possible. He never reached it. Grant’s army pursued, cut across his front, and ran him down. On April 9, 1865, just over two weeks after the failed sortie at Fort Stedman, Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House.

Looking back, Fort Stedman reads less like a battle than like the last move of a player who has already lost. It was a clever plan, well begun and gone in a morning, and its real meaning was the verdict it delivered. The army that had marched into Maryland and Pennsylvania, that had beaten back Union offensive after offensive for three years, no longer had the strength to break a siege line and hold it for an hour. After Fort Stedman, the only question left was how the war would end, not whether.