“What Roman triumph would have approached the triumph of General Grant had he led the remnant of the Army of Northern Virginia, with its great commander in chains, up Pennsylvania Avenue, thenceforth to be known as the ‘Way of Triumph!’
“But so simple, so patriotic was the mind of General Grant that the thought of self seems never to have affected his conduct.
“He was no more tempted at Appomattox to forego the true interests of his country for his own advantage than Washington was tempted when the time came for him to lay down his commission at Annapolis. I doubt if the self-abnegation of Washington at Annapolis was greater than that of Grant at Appomattox, and it is the glory of America that her institutions breed men who are equal to the greatest strain that can be put upon their courage and their patriotism.
“On that eventful morning of April 9, 1865, General Grant was called upon to decide the most momentous question that any American soldier or statesman has ever been required to decide. The great question was, How shall the war end? What shall be the relations between the victors and vanquished?
“Upon the decision of that question depended the future of American institutions. If the extreme rights of military success had been insisted upon, and had the vanquished been required to pass under the yoke of defeat and bitter humiliation, the war would have ended as a successful war of conquest—the Southern States would have been conquered States, and the Southern people would have been a conquered people, in whose hearts would have been sown all the enmity and ill-will of the conquered to the conquerors, to be transmitted from sire to son.
“With such an ending of the war there would have been United States without a united people. The power of the Union would then have reposed upon the strength of Grant’s battalions and the thunder of Grant’s artillery. Its bonds would have stood upon the security of its military power, and not upon the honor and good faith and good-will of its people. The federal government would have been compelled to adopt a coercive policy toward the disaffected people of the South, which would soon have established between the government and those States the relations between England and Ireland, and some Northern Gladstone would be demanding for the Southern people the natural right that the English Gladstone claimed for the Irish against their haughty conquerors.
“Does any man desire to exchange the present relations between the people of the Northern and Southern States for the relations of conqueror and conquered? Does any wish to have a union of the States without a union of the people?
“General Grant was called upon to decide this great question on the morning of April 9, 1865. The Southern military power was exhausted. He was in a position to exact the supreme rights of a conqueror, and the unconditional submission of his adversary, unless that adversary should elect to risk all on the event of a desperate battle, in which much ‘American blood’ would certainly be shed.
“The question was gravely considered in Confederate councils whether we should not accept the extreme risk, and cut our way through the hosts of General Grant, or perish in the attempt. This plan had many advocates, but General Lee was not one of them, as will be seen by his farewell order to his army.
“Under these circumstances General Lee and General Grant met to discuss the terms of surrender of General Lee’s army, and, at the request of General Lee, General Grant wrote the terms of surrender he proposed to offer to the Confederate general. They were liberal and honorable, alike to the victor and the vanquished, and General Lee at once accepted them.