When he arrived at Appomattox Court House, April 9th, a week from the day he set out, he found Sheridan's dismounted cavalry in line across his path, and his infantry advanced confidently to brush them away. But the cavalrymen drew off to the right, and disclosed a heavy line of blue-coated infantry and gleaming steel. Before this the weary Confederates recoiled, and just as Sheridan was preparing to charge upon their flank with his cavalry a white flag was sent out and hostilities were suspended on information that negotiations for a surrender were in progress. Grant had first demanded Lee's surrender in a note written on the afternoon of the 7th. Three or four other notes had passed between them, and on the 9th the two commanders met at a house in the village, where they wrote and exchanged two brief letters by which the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia was effected; the terms being simply that the men were to lay down their arms and return to their homes, not to be molested so long as they did not again take up arms against the United States. The exceeding generosity of these terms, to an army that had exacted almost the last life it had power to destroy, was a surprise to many who remembered the unconditional surrender that General Grant had demanded at Vicksburg and Fort Donelson. But he considered that the war was over, and thought the defeated insurgents would at once return to their homes and become good citizens of the United States. In pursuance of this idea, he ordered that they be permitted to take their horses with them, as they "would need them for the ploughing." The starving Confederates were immediately fed by their captors; and, by General Grant's orders, cheering, firing of salutes, and other demonstrations of exultation over the great and decisive victory were immediately stopped. The number of officers and men paroled, according to the terms of the surrender, was twenty-eight thousand three hundred and sixty-five.
The next day General Lee issued, in the form of a general order, a farewell address to his army in which he lauded them in unmeasured terms, to the implied disparagement of their conquerors, and assured them of his "unceasing admiration of their constancy and devotion to their country." It seems not to have occurred to the general that he had no army, for it had been taken away from him, and no right to issue a military document of any kind, for he was a prisoner of war; and he certainly must have forgotten that the costly court of last resort, to which he and they had appealed, had just decided that their country as he defined it had no existence.
General Johnston, who was confronting Sherman in North Carolina, surrendered his army to that commander at Durham Station, near Raleigh, on the 26th of April, receiving the same terms that had been granted to Lee; and the surrender of all the other Confederate armies soon followed, the last being the command of Gen. E. Kirby Smith, at Shreveport, La., on the 26th of May. The number of Johnston's immediate command surrendered and paroled was thirty-six thousand eight hundred and seventeen, to whom were added fifty-two thousand four hundred and fifty-three in Georgia and Florida.
| THE McLEAN HOUSE WHERE GENERAL LEE SURRENDERED TO GENERAL GRANT. |
| THE SURRENDER OF GENERAL LEE. |
CHAPTER XLIV.
PEACE.
THE WAR GOVERNORS—CIVILIAN PATRIOTS—THE SUDDEN FALL OF THE CONFEDERACY—CAPTURE OF MR. DAVIS—CHARACTER OF THE INSURRECTION—MAGNANIMITY OF THE VICTORS—THE ASSASSINATION CONSPIRACY—LINCOLN'S SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS—LINCOLN IN RICHMOND—THE GRAND REVIEW—THE HOME-COMING—LESSONS OF THE WAR.