Details of the surrender were arranged on the next day by staff-officers of the respective armies. The parole officers were instructed by General Grant to permit the Confederate soldiers to retain their own horses—a concession that was most welcome to many of the men, who had with them animals brought from the home farm early in the war.
There were only twenty-eight thousand men to be paroled, and of these fewer than one-third were actually bearing arms on the day of the surrender. The Confederate losses of the last ten days of fighting probably exceeded ten thousand.
The Confederate supplies had been captured by Sheridan, and Lee’s army was almost at the point of starvation. An order from Grant caused the rations of the Federal soldiers to be shared with the “Johnnies,” and the victorious “Yanks” were only too glad to tender such hospitality as was within their power. These acts of kindness were slight in themselves, but they helped immeasurably to restore good feeling and to associate for all time with Appomattox the memory of reunion rather than of strife. The things that were done there can never be the cause of shame to any American. The noble and dignified bearing of the commanders was an example to their armies and to the world that quickly had its effect in the genuine reconciliation that followed.
The scene between Lee and his devoted army was profoundly touching. General Long in his “Memoirs of Lee” says: “It is impossible to describe the anguish of the troops when it was known that the surrender of the army was inevitable. Of all their trials, this was the greatest and hardest to endure.” As Lee rode along the lines of the tried and faithful men who had been with him at the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania, and at Cold Harbor, it was not strange that those ragged, weather-beaten heroes were moved by deep emotion and that tears streamed down their bronzed and scarred faces. Their general in broken accents admonished them to go to their homes and be as brave citizens as they had been soldiers.
Thus ended the greatest civil war in history, for soon after the fall of the Confederate capital and the surrender of Lee’s army, there followed in quick succession the surrender of all the remaining Southern forces.
While these stirring events were taking place in Virginia, Sherman, who had swept up through the Carolinas with the same dramatic brilliancy that marked his march to the sea, accomplishing most effective work against Johnston, was at Goldsboro. When Johnston learned of the fall of Richmond and Lee’s surrender he knew the end had come and he soon arranged for the surrender of his army on the terms agreed upon at Appomattox. In the first week of May General “Dick” Taylor surrendered his command near Mobile, and on the 10th of the same month, President Jefferson Davis, who had been for nearly six weeks a fugitive, was overtaken and made a prisoner near Irwinsville, Georgia. The Southern Confederacy was a thing of the past.
| 1. Colonel Horace Porter | 3. Colonel T. S. Bowers | 5. General John G. Barnard | 7. General U. S. Grant | 9. General Seth Williams | 11. Colonel Adam Badeau |
COPYRIGHT, 1911, REVIEW OF REVIEWS CO.