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When Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant after the Battle of Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, the South’s defeat in the Civil War had been all but assured.

“You were birthed in the heat of revolution, from the Battle of Bunker Hill to the bitter winter quarters of Valley Forge — and finally victorious at Yorktown. You became a nation on battlefields from Shiloh to Vicksburg to Gettysburg, and showed amazing grace at Appomattox Court House,” Mr. Cohen said.

The sign had asserted that after his surrender at Appomattox Court House, Lee returned to his boyhood home and climbed the wall “to see if the snowballs were in bloom.”

But following the surrender at Appomattox Court House, the president would have had every legal and moral right to have Lee promptly court-martialed and hanged.

At the Appomattox Court House in 1865, Grant and Lee brokered a deal in which Lee would surrender his troops in exchange for pardons, Union rations, and assurance that Confederate men would be able to keep their private property.