SURRENDER OF JOHNSTON'S ARMY.

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Florida; and the fate of this extensive military territory depended upon an army whose effective force was less than twenty thousand men. Gen. Johnston's statement of the force at his command in the vicinity of Raleigh, was 18,578 total, infantry and artillery present for duty, of which not more than 14,179 were effective, with a cavalry force little over five thousand. Florida was destitute of troops, and South Carolina was pretty much in the condition of a conquered province, there being no known Confederate force in it beyond a division of cavalry less than one thousand. Gen. Johnston found himself by the disaster in Virginia, opposed to a combined force of alarming magnitude; there was great difficulty in supplying his troops; the enemy had already captured all workshops within the Confederacy for the preparation of ammunition and repairing of arms; and thus embarrassed, crippled and disheartened, what was accounted in point of importance the second army of the Confederacy, numbering on its rolls more than seventy thousand men, and yet reduced to less than one-third of this number by desertions and "absenteeism," abandoned the hope of successful war, and prepared to surrender.

SURRENDER OF JOHNSTON'S ARMY.

On the night of the 13th April, Sherman's army had halted some fourteen miles from Raleigh, when it received the news of the surrender of Lee. The next day it occupied Raleigh; Gen. Johnston having taken up a line of retreat by the railroad running by Hillsboro, Greensboro, Salisbury and Charlotte. Sherman commenced pursuit by crossing the curve of that road in the direction of Ashboro, and Charlotte; and after the head of his column had crossed the Cape Fear River at Avens Ferry, he received a communication from Gen. Johnston on the 15th April, asking if some arrangement could not be effected, which should prevent the further useless effusion of blood. It was eventually arranged that a personal interview should take place between the two commanders at a designated point; and on the 18th April, they met at a farm-house, five miles from Durham Station, under a flag of truce. In proposing a surrender, Gen. Johnston wanted some more general concessions than had been made in the case of Gen Lee; and the result was a military convention, which Gen. Johnston declared that he signed "to spare the blood of his gallant little army, to prevent further suffering of the people by the devastation and ruin inevitable from the marches of invading armies, and to avoid the crime of waging a hopeless war." This document, which we place here, was certainly an extraordinary one on Sherman's part.