518 LEE SURRENDERS. [1865. seventy miles of the race was a long track of blood. There were collisions at Jetersville, Detonville, Deep Creek, Sailor's Creek, Paine's Cross Roads, and Farmville; the most important being that at Sailor's Creek, where Custer broke the Confederate line, capturing four hundred wagons, sixteen guns, and many prisoners, and then the Sixth Corps came up and captured the whole of Ewell's corps, including Ewell himself and four other generals. Lee was stopped by the loss of a provision train, and spent a day in trying to collect from the surrounding country something for his famished soldiers to eat. When he arrived at Appomattox Court House, April 9, 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 bluecoated 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 1865.] GRANT'S GENEROUS TERMS. 519 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 520 SURRENDER OF THE OTHER ARMIES. [1865. 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 General 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. CHAPTER XXXIII. PEACE. No account of the war, however brief, can properly be closed without some mention of the forces other than military that contributed to its success. The assistance and influence of the "war Governors," as they were called-including John A. Andrew of Massachusetts, William A. Buckingham of Connecticut, Edwin D. Morgan of New York, William Dennison of Ohio, and Oliver P. Morton of Indiana - was vital to the cause, and was acknowledged as generously as it was given. There was also a class of citizens who, by reason of age or other disability, did not go to the front, and would not have been permitted to, but found a way to assist the Government perhaps even more efficiently. They were thoughtful and scholarly men, who brought out and placed at the service. of their country every lesson that could be drawn from history; practical and experienced men, whose hard sense and knowledge of affairs made them natural leaders in the councils of the people; men of fervid eloquence, whose arguments and appeals aroused all there was of latent patriotism in their younger and hardier countrymen, and contributed wonderfully to the rapidity with which quotas were filled and regiments forwarded to the seat of war. 522 THE SUDDEN END. [1865. There were great numbers of devoted women, who performed uncomplainingly the hardest hospital service, and managed great fairs and relief societies with an enthusiasm that never wearied. And there were the Sanitary and Christian Commissions, whose agents went everywhere between the depot in the rear and the skirmish-line in front, carrying not only whatever was needed to alleviate the sufferings of the sick and wounded, but also many things to beguile the tedious hours in camp and diminish the serious evil of homesickness. It was a common remark, at the time, that the Confederacy crumbled more suddenly in 1865 than it had risen in 1861. It seemed like an empty shell, which, when fairly broken through, had no more stability, and instantly fell to ruins. It was fortunate that when the end came Lee's army was the first to surrender, since all the other commanders felt justified in following his example. To some on the Confederate side, especially in Virginia, the surrender was a surprise, and came like a personal and irreparable grief. But people in other parts of the South, especially those who had seen Sherman's legions marching by their doors, knew that the end was coming. Longstreet had pronounced the cause lost by Lee's want of generalship at Gettysburg; Ewell had said there was no use in fighting longer when Grant had swung his army across the James; Johnston and his lieutenants declared it wrong to keep up the hopeless struggle after the capital had been abandoned and the Army of Northern Virginia had |