The Army of the Potomac marched to Washington, and there (Sixth Corps excepted), uniting with Sherman's army, held the Grand Review of May 23, 1865. The Sixth Corps, with many detachments, numbering about 30,000 in all, arrived later, and was reviewed by President Johnson and his Cabinet and Generals Grant, Sherman, and Meade, June 8, 1865. The Army of the Potomac was disbanded June 28, 1865. All the armies of the Union were soon broken up and the volunteers composing them mustered out and sent to their homes to take up the pursuits of peace.(33) The prisons of the South had given up their starving victims.
On the recommendations of Wright, Meade, and Grant I was appointed a Brevet Major-General of Volunteers, the commission of the President reciting that it was "for gallant and distinguished services during the campaign ending in the surrender of the insurgent army under General R. E. Lee."
I was mustered out at Washington June 27, 1865, having served continuously as an officer precisely four years and two months, and fought in about the first (Rich Mountain) and the last (Sailor's Creek) battles of the war, and campaigned in six of the eleven seceding States, and in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Maryland.(34)
The regiments of my brigade (110th, 122d and 126th Ohio, 67th and 138th Pennsylvania, 6th Maryland, and 9th New York Heavy Artillery) lost, killed on the field, 54 officers and 812 enlisted men, wounded 101 officers and 2410 enlisted men, aggregate 3377, only six less than the killed and wounded under Scott and Taylor in their conquest of Mexico, 1846-1848,(35) and more than the like casualties under the direct command of Washington in the Revolutionary War—Lexington to Yorktown.
The terms of capitulation accorded to Lee's army were granted to other armies.
With Lee's surrender came the capture of Fort Blakely, Alabama,
April 9th, followed by the surrender of Mobile, April 12th; Joe
Johnston's army in North Carolina, April 26th; Dick Taylor's in
Mississippi; May 4th; and Kirby Smith's in Texas, May 26th.
Jefferson Davis, with members of his Cabinet, was captured at
Irwinville, Georgia, May 10, 1865.
As the curtain fell before the awful drama of war, 174,233 Confederates surrendered, who, with 98,802 others held as prisoners of war (in all 273,035), were paroled and sent to their homes, and 1686 cannon and over 200,000 small arms were the spoils of victory.
The war was over; it was not in vain.
State-rights and secession—twin heresies, as promulgated by Calhoun and his followers and maintained by Jefferson Davis and the civil and military powers of the would-be Confederacy, and human slavery, a growth of the ages, fostered by avarice, and a blot on our civilization for two hundred and fifty years—were likewise overthrown or destroyed; and the integrity of the Union of the States and the majesty of the Constitution as a charter of organized liberty were vindicated, and the American Republic, full-orbed, was perpetuated, under one flag, and with one destiny.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, declaring that: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to its jurisdiction"; submitted, February 1, 1865, by Congress to the States for ratification, and proclaimed ratified December 18, 1865, is but the inevitable decree of war, in the form of organic law, resulting from the triumph of the Union arms, accomplished through the bloody sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of devoted men, together with the concurrent sufferings of yet other hundreds of thousands of wounded and sick and the sorrows of disconsolate and desolate millions more, superadded by billions in value of property laid waste and other billions of treasure expended. Such, indeed, was the penalty paid to eradicate the crime of the centuries— SLAVERY.