Lee telegraphed to the President that he was going to retreat that night; and at the moment when the officers of the government hastily left Richmond by the Danville railroad, the army at Petersburg began to retire.
Did you witness what I describe, reader? What a spectacle!—the army of Northern Virginia, or what was left of it, rather, stealing away amid darkness. I sat my horse on the Hickory road, north of the Appomattox, near the city, and looked at the ragged column, which defiled by from the bridge over the river. In the starlight I could see their faces. There was not a particle of depression in them. You would have said, indeed, that they rejoiced at being out of the trenches—to be once more on the march, with Lee, riding his old iron-gray, in front of his old soldiers—with the battle-flags of a hundred battles still floating defiantly.
General Lee stood at the forks of the road, directing his column. He had said little during the day, and said little now, but his voice was as calm and measured, his eye as serene as before.
“This is a bad business, colonel!”{1} I had heard him say, at the moment when the shell burst near him in the morning.
{Footnote 1: His words.}
I heard but one other allusion which he made to the situation.
“Well, colonel,” he said to an officer, in his deep and sonorous voice, “it has happened as I told them it would, at Richmond. The line has been stretched until it has broken."{1}
{Footnote 1: His words.}
So, over the Hickory road, leading up the northern bank of the Appomattox, in the direction of Lynchburg—amid the explosion of magazines, surging upward like volcanoes, the old army of Northern Virginia, reduced to fifteen thousand men, went forth, still defiant, into the night.