"I have news which will be painful to you. It hurts me to tell you, but I think you had rather hear it from me than from a stranger—General Lee has surrendered."
It was an awful blow to us. All was over. All the suffering, bloodshed, death—all for nothing!
General Johnston's army was surrendered to General Sherman in North Carolina on April 26. The banner which had led the armies of the South through fire and blood to victory, to defeat, in times of starvation, cold, and friendlessness; the banner that Helen's lover had waved aloft on a forlorn hope until it fell from his lifeless hands; the banner found under the dying boy at Gettysburg, who had smilingly refused assistance lest it be discovered,—the banner of a thousand histories was furled forever, with none so poor to do it reverence.
CHAPTER XXV
WOE TO THE VANQUISHED!
Immediately after General Lee's surrender, the United States Circuit Court held a session at Norfolk, Virginia, and made haste to indict for treason Robert E. Lee, John C. Breckenridge, Roger A. Pryor, and others. These men thereafter were not to feel any sense of personal security. A cloud of doubt and possible disaster still hung over them. Under this cloud they were to commence their lives anew.
Every one who has suffered an overwhelming misfortune must be conscious of a strange deadening of feeling—more intolerable even than pain. It may be a merciful provision of nature. Insensibility at a crucial moment may be nature's anæsthesia. Dr. Livingstone, the African explorer, relates that he was conscious of this insensibility when in the paws of a lion. He had a theory that the instinct of all animals to shake their victim, as the cat does a mouse, may be given in mercy to the vanquished. I was so completely stunned by the thought that all the suffering, all the spilt blood, all the poverty, all the desolation of the South was for naught; that her very fidelity, heroism, and fortitude, qualities so noble in themselves, had wrought her undoing, that I seemed to become dead to everything around me. My husband was compelled to leave me, to seek employment in Richmond. My neighbors, like myself, were stunned into silence. "Here I and sorrow sit" might have been said truly of any one of us.
When the passing troops left us with only General Hartsuff's guard, the small earnings of my little boys ceased. John and his fellow-servants came into town, and reported to me.
"I can no longer maintain you or give you wages," I said to Eliza Page and her sisters.
"We will serve you for the good you have already done us," they said, but of course I could not allow this to any extent. Eliza returned to her husband and their little home.
With John I had more trouble. It was hard to make him understand that I could not afford his services on any terms.