THE CONFEDERATE ARMY CROSSING THE APPOMATTOX AT PETERSBURG.

Minegerode, abruptly concluded the service. Richmond to be evacuated! People were astonished. There was hurrying here and there. One who was there has pictured the scenes:

"As the day wore on clatter and bustle in the streets denoted the progress of the evacuation,

and convinced those who had been incredulous of its reality. The disorder increased each hour. The streets were thronged with fugitives making their way to the railroad depots; pale women and little shoeless children struggled in the crowd; oaths and blasphemous shouts smote the ear. Wagons were being hastily loaded at the departments with boxes and trunks, and driven to the Danville depot. In the afternoon a special train carried from Richmond President Davis and some of his Cabinet. At the departments all was confusion; there was no system, no answer to inquiries; important officers were invisible, and every one felt like taking care of himself. Outside of the mass of hurrying fugitives there were collected here and there mean-visaged crowds, generally around the commissary depots; they had already scented the prey; they were of that brutal and riotous element that revenges itself on all communities in a time of great misfortune." (") The railroad leading to Dan

ville and the James River Canal were the only avenues by which the Confederate Government could leave the city. Coaches, wagons, carts, vehicles of every description were brought into use. It was the harvest-time for hackmen, who could demand hundreds of dollars for a fare; but the Confederate money would soon be of no more account in trade than the last year's leaves of the forest. At the railroad there was a pile of boxes, chests, trunks, valises, carpet-bags-filled with documents from the departments, and the private baggage of Jefferson Davis, the members of the Cabinet, and of gentlemen not in public life; a crowd of excited men red in the face and perspiring as never before; women with dishevelled hair, unmindful of their wardrobes, wringing their hands and adding to the confusion by their lamentations; children lost in the crowd and erying for parents; sentinels with fixed bayonets guarding the entrances to the train, pushing back all except the privileged few, giving precedence to Jefferson Davis and the high officials of Government.

Within pistol-shot of the executive mansion stood a dark and gloomy building with iron-riveted door and grated windows, the prison-house of the slave-trader Mr. Lumpkin. Out from its cells came a gang of slavesfifty or more men, women, and children with clanking chains-the last slave-coffle of the Confederacy, the last vestige of its corner-stone, of the institution for the preservation of which the war had been inaugurated. Down to the train marched the slave-gang, but there was no place for slave-driver Lumpkin in the car, or upon the train which was to bear the President of the Confederacy from the capital, with several million dollars in gold, packed in nail-casks from a hardware store-the gold of the Treasury Department. Those bodies and souls owned by Mr. Lumpkin would have commanded fifty thousand dollars in the market a few days before, but with the rising of to-morrow's sun they will not be worth a cent to him. In the turmoil of the night the "corner-stone" will crumble to dust. The sun goes down, and the train with the President and his secretaries, several doctors of divinity, who have preached eloquently in support of slavery as an institution divinely ordained by Almighty God for the welfare of the human race, moves out from the station, leaving a struggling, panic-stricken crowd behind. In the Sunday evening twilight the governor of the State, William Smith, and the members of the Legislature hasten to the upper basin of the James River Canal, and embark on canal-boats for Lynchburg. On all the roads leading north and west were processions of carts, carriages, wagons, men and women on horseback and on foot carrying huge bundles, scarcely knowing whither they are bound or where they can find a resting-place, fleeing in terror from

the imagined atrocities which would fall upon the city with the coming in of the Union troops.

Little did the panic-stricken multitude forecast what was about to take place that those from whom they were to suffer greatest loss were those whom they had implicitly trusted; that the soldiers of the Union were not coming to destroy, but to save, to be their true friends in the hour of their calamity. General Ewell had been placed in command in Richmond, with orders to withdraw his troops during the night, destroy the iron-clads in the river, set the great warehouses filled with tobacco on fire, that it might not fall into the hands of the Union army, and burn the bridges. One who remained in Richmond, and who was in a position to know what was going on, says: "To the rear-guard of the Confederate force on the north side of James River, under General Ewell, had been left the duty of blowing up the iron-clad vessels in the James, and destroying the three bridges that spanned that river. General Ewell, obeying the letter of his instructions, had issued orders to fire the four principal tobacco warehouses of the city; one of them, the Haxall, situated near the centre of the city, side by side with the Gallego flour-mills, just in a position from which a conflagration might extend to the business portion of Richmond. In vain Mayor Mayo and a committee of citizens had remonstrated against this reckless military order. The warehouses were fired; the flames seized on the neighboring buildings, and soon involved a wide area; the conflagration passed rapidly beyond control; and in this mad fire, this wild, unnecessary destruction of their property, the citizens of Richmond had a fitting souvenir of the impudence and recklessness of the departing administration." (")

It is not known whether the order to Ewell was issued by General Breckinridge, Secretary of War, President Davis, or Adjutant - General Cooper; but in all probability General Ewell received his instructions from one of them, and he executed it regardless of what might come of it. History will hold one of the three as responsible for the horrors of the night.

A soldier of the Confederate army has portrayed the events as he saw them: "The adjutant-general informed me that the general did not intend to leave till four or five o'clock in the morning, and as it was then but two, I gained permission to stroll uptown. No large body of troops had yet passed through the city, but the wagons had been moving all night, and the artillery was then rumbling over the stones, while squads of men were straggling in every direction-some few in discharge of duty, but many more in pursuit of plunder. As I passed the old market-house I