[6] General Longstreet says the total number surrendered to Grant was 28,356. Many of these came in voluntarily and surrendered. Lee had with him 1500 prisoners, taken since leaving Petersburg. These were the first to be delivered to the Union army. The first generous act Grant did after the surrender was to furnish Lee's hungry soldiers and horses with food. Grant's army must have numbered not far from 150,000.
Chapter XI.
AN AFTER-THOUGHT.
The Horses.
"Here lies the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolls not the breath of his pride.
The foam of his gasping lies white on the turf,
And as cold as the spray of the rock-beaten surf."
I do not mean to intimate by the headline of this chapter that I forgot the horses of Lee's army. They were on my mind all through the story, but it was not until the manuscript was in the hands of the printer that the thought came to me that they should have a chapter in this book. Ah! the horses—the blacks and bays, the roans and grays, the sorrels and chestnuts that pulled Lee's army from the Rappahannock to Gettysburg and back, and all the other horses that pulled and tugged at the wagons, at the batteries of artillery; the horses that carried the men, the unstabled horses and the half-fed horses. Let my right hand forget its cunning if I forget to pay proper tribute to those noble animals that suffered so much for their masters. How often my mind goes back to that horse that I saw coming across the field from the front at Bull Run with his sides all dripping with blood. He was a hero, for he had been out "where the fields were shot, sown and bladed thick with steel," and was coming back to die. Nearly all the bodies of the men were buried, and some horses, for sanitary purposes, were covered with earth, and a few may now be lying in comfortable graves, marked by marble shafts. Lee's gray horse, "Traveler," and Jackson's little sorrel, though dead, may yet be seen, not unlike they were when they bore their riders along the battle front. But the bones of all the other horses that perished whitened for a while the hills and valleys and the roadsides that stretched from Gettysburg to Appomattox, and then when the war was over, men gathered them up and ground them into merchandise to enrich their coffers. The horses that were alive at the close of the war were, for the most part, tenderly cared for, and have long ago joined their comrades on the other side. I hope they are all grazing together on red-headed clover in the green fields of Eden.
BISHOP ALPHEUS W. WILSON,
Who trained Rover.