Meanwhile Grant, through the autumn of 1864, was encompassing Petersburg and drawing zigzag lines around it, that were too much like the short epistles that creditors send to unwilling debtors, to be agreeable. The autumn leaves here fell on busy workers; and among the busiest, the Silent Man, who was casting up long accounts in his head, which only opened to let out smoke. In him, however, there was much fire, American and Greek.
On the 24th of March, the Silent Man issued an order for a centripetal movement on Richmond. Lee, in every way tried to break the converging fate. Along the Appomattox River, at Fort Stedman, and at every weak-looking place, he hurled himself against the links of a chain, now slowly drawing around him; but all to no purpose. On the 2d of April Grant broke through Lee’s intrenched lines about Petersburg; and Lee at once disturbed J. Davis, although at church in Richmond, by a sudden notice that Petersburg and Richmond were insecure places, and that he must flee to other refuges, than his old ones. Neither sitting nor lying would now do; and accordingly the head of the Confederacy took to his feet, and fled with the few depraved treasures which had not gone already to corruption. Hurrying through Richmond, he got away as fast as a very un-express train would carry him, over railroads hacked by Sheridan, Stoneman, and Grierson. The next morning General Weitzel entered the capital of the dissolving Confederacy—so long held by brave men—with a body of colored troops,—representatives of that fate which four years before had been ignorantly invoked, and now rapidly fulfilling,—representatives, too, of those one hundred and eighty thousand others, with skins colored like their own, who had given themselves to the service of a Union, whose stripes they had often felt, and whose stars for them had just peeped above the eastern hills and were beginning to sing for joy.
Lee at once commenced a retreat towards the Southwest, hoping to unite his broken forces with Johnston, who, however, was too actively taken up by Sherman to reciprocate his intentions. At Amelia Court-House Sheridan and his centaurs suddenly appeared before the astonished Confederates on the 6th of April, and cut seven thousand away from them. The remainder General Lee dragged forward to Appomattox Court-House, and there delivered them over to the generous justice of his brother-in-arms, the silent-lipped, whose magnanimity was a fit type of the large forbearance of a country, which, wronged by a causeless war,—generated for ends that in other lands would have brought its authors to the place where all ropes terminate,—has to look back on no crosses, but for itself.
A really fine character, a great strategist, and personally brave man, the chief of the Confederate Army, who had delivered such “bloody instructions” to the fathers, became the head of a college, and deals out, it is to be hoped, better lessons to the sons.
This surrender was followed, on the 26th of April by that of Johnston; on the 4th of May, by the remaining Confederate forces under General Dick Taylor; by the miscellaneous taking of Mobile, Selma, Tuscaloosa, and Montgomery, and the unfortunate capture of Mr. J. Davis, whose lean head—made valuable to his captors by a useless expense to the treasury—was, at an additional expense, taken several times to Richmond, and shown to the court in satisfaction of his bail bond, and at last dismissed—to the gibbet of history.
The black cloud, charged with such thunderous bolts, had dissolved, and the blue sky was showing through the rifted masses, when a sudden clap, a hissing sound, a sharp wrenching cry, and there lay the straightened form of Abraham Lincoln.
The victories which he had helped to organize were forgotten; cotton worsted was unheeded; even the terrible struggles with the long, wrestling nightmare, were all lost sight of in the grief for the Great and the Good, whose patriotism had warmed, whose integrity had strengthened, and whose genial humor had kept warm and mellow, the heart and hope of a brave and self-sacrificing nation through the contest just closed,—closed to open upon questions which had need, too, of a Solomon rather than a Jeroboam.
CHAPTER XX.
VELOCIPEDAL.
How mixed Blood effervesces.—Of the Causes and Developments of American Fastness.—Unrest in Prisons and at Home.—Time lost in Sleep, etc.—The distressing Hurry of Brains.—Compressing a Cow in a Milk-Pot.—Of Doctors’ Gigs and Apoplectic Whirligigs.—American Stomachs considered.—A general Stomach; how employed and hired out.—Doctors’ Bills.—Clothes Wringers and State Wringers.—“Speedy Trials” secured.—The Common and Un-common Law of the United States considered at length.—Of Dower, and how taken.—Property administered before Death.—Heirs cheated.—Injunctions used.—Illinois Divorces.—Of Prohibited Degrees of Marriage.—Of Fat People and Servants.—Boarding-Houses and Hotels.—American Trade and its Feats at diminishing Quantities.—Fast Americans in Europe.—How they overcome Distances, History, and Landlords.—The Paris Genus.
If “in the midst of life we are in debt,” so in the midst of debt Americans are always lively. Mixed blood seems to discharge rapidly its effervescing ingredients.