due the loyal States whenever their strength should be recruited and an opportunity offered.*

Reaching Moorhead City, North Carolina, on April 23, Grant despatched the substance of Stanton's instructions to Sherman, who transmitted their purport to Johnston, adding a notification that the truce would close forty-eight hours after the receipt thereof and demanding that the Confederate army be forthwith surrendered. Johnston requested another conference, which was held on the 25th, when the terms of surrender accorded to Lee were agreed upon and approved by Grant.

Sherman and his partisans and McClellan and his writers have been unsparing in their denunciation of the part Stanton played in this incident, yet no one has sustained the Secretary so thoroughly as Sherman himself. In a letter of April 15, to Stanton, he wrote: "I will give the same terms General Grant gave General Lee and be careful not to complicate any points of civil policy."

Three days later, under the personal influence of General Johnston and John C. Breckinridge, he did the very thing he said he would not do, and, in transmitting his "agreement," wrote requesting General Halleck to see President Johnson and "influence him, if possible, not to vary the terms at all, for I have considered everything!" He also requested Grant to ask the President to "commission" him to "carry out the terms!" On the following day, before the terms were known outside of Richmond and his own staff, Sherman assumed them to be final and published a rejoicing order to the country announcing "an agreement with General Johnston and other high officials [Jefferson Davis, John C. Breckinridge, and J. H. Reagan] which, when formally ratified, will make peace from the Potomac to the Rio Grande." Immediately afterward, having had his "agreement" peremptorily and entirely reversed and having received Grant's views, he wrote to Stanton on the 25th: "I admit my folly in embracing in a military convention any civil matter."† Later

*Jefferson Davis agreed exactly with Stanton as to the meaning of the terms of surrender. On April 23, while waiting for their approval at Washington, he wrote: "To us they are hard enough, tho' freed from wanton humiliation and expressly recognizing the Confederate State governments, and the rights of persons and property [slaves] as secured by the constitution of the United States and of the several States."

†On April 27, the newspapers being filled with comments upon the "agreement," John Sherman wrote at length from Cleveland in behalf of

the sledge-hammer character of the nine reasons, which were prepared and sent out without the knowledge of the President or the cabinet, began to dawn upon him, and a flood of furious censure by the press for having been "trapped" into signing the "agreement" came pouring in.

Besides, Grant, who attended the cabinet meeting at which the terms were reversed, committed the grave breach of informing Sherman that in that meeting Stanton declared them to be "little short of treason." The General now became overwhelmingly incensed. At the Grand Review, a few days afterwards, he undertook to avenge himself by publicly insulting Stanton, his superior, for having overridden, in the interest of their common country, what he himself, in his letter of April 25, had correctly described as his "folly."

his brother, saying to Stanton among other things: "I am distressed beyond measure at the terms granted to Johnston by General Sherman. They are inadmissible. I will gladly go to Washington or anywhere else where I can render the least service. I do not want General Sherman to be unjustly dealt with, and I know you will not permit it; and especially I do not want him drawn into fellowship with the copperheads. You can, if you choose, show this to the President, or indeed to any one"

CHAPTER XLVI.

LINCOLN'S COLOSSAL BLUNDER RECTIFIED.

Assistant-Secretary C. A. Dana, with Quartermaster-General M. C. Meigs, was at City Point when the President entered Richmond after its fall, during the morning of April 4, 1865. In the columns of the paper announcing his coming was an official statement that Lincoln had instructed General Godfrey Weitzel to permit the insurgent legislature of Virginia to assemble at once.*

General Meigs discovered the announcement and handed it to Dana, who despatched the facts to Stanton. On receiving them Stanton telegraphed private instructions to Dana to prevent General Weitzel from taking any action under the "permit" until further orders. Lincoln returned (at Stanton's confidential request) and consulted with Stanton, when General Weitzel was ordered to countermand the "permit."

Judge Campbell, in a written report to the insurgent legislature, concerning his interview with Lincoln, avers that the President stated: "If the government of Virginia will administer the laws in connection with the authority of the United States, no attempt will be made to establish or sustain any other authority." Here was one of the great political crises of the war, and Stanton

*Before the night of the day on which Richmond fell, Lincoln had a long conference with John A. Campbell (a justice of the United States Supreme Court, who had resigned in 1861 to cast his fortunes with the Confederacy) in reference to rehabilitating the State of Virginia by means of a "permit" which (together with a guiding memorandum to Judge Campbell) he gave to General Weitzel as follows: "It is intimated to me that the gentlemen who have acted as the legislature in support of the Rebellion may now desire to assemble at Richmond and take measures to withdraw the Virginia troops and other support of resistance to the general Government. If they attempt it, give them permission and protection, until, if at all, they attempt some act hostile to the United States in which case you will notify them, give them reasonable time to leave, and at the end of which time arrest any one who remains. Allow Judge Campbell to see this, but do not make it public."

lifted the administration and the nation from the engulfing danger by main strength.*

Had the legislature been allowed to assemble and proceed unbridled as if nothing had happened since 1860, a precedent would have been set for recognizing all the insurgent legislatures-in not one of which could be found a Union man-and the fruits of the war would have been nullified.

Lincoln alone failed to see the import of his blunder. The subofficers of the army saw it; the Confederates understood and planned for it, and General Sherman quoted it as a justification for the destructive terms of surrender which he had just offered to General J. E. Johnston. In his letter of April 23, 1865 (before he had received Stanton's reversal of his terms or was aware that the permit to assemble the insurgent legislature of Virginia had been countermanded), General Sherman wrote to Johnston: "I send you a late paper showing that the Virginia State authorities are acknowledged and invited to resume their lawful functions." Lincoln and Sherman labored under the same disability; they could not see that an insurgent and absolutely unlawful legislature never could have, under the Government they had rebelled against, any "lawful functions" to "resume."

The latter has suffered severely in history on account of his attempt to fix the political status of the rebellious sections by a mere military stipulation with an insurgent commander; yet Sherman was only a soldier, whose terms could be, as they were, reversed and annulled, while Lincoln was president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the army and navy, with supreme discretion in military affairs. Therefore, when, by the secret letter to General Weitzel, he undertook to hand over to the Virginia legislature that which the Confederate armies had been unable to secure by four years of war, he entered the vortex leading to destruction, for there was no one above him to countermand his orders.

Stanton, however, always potential in emergencies, urged his return to Washington, freed his mind from error and prevented a political catastrophe. Stanton alone understood Lincoln; he alone

*"I received instructions from Mr. Stanton," says Charles A. Dana, then assistant secretary of war, "to gather all papers, information, and documents I could find at the fall of Richmond and to keep as close as possible to Mr. Lincoln for the purpose of watching and reporting. The great end was near and Mr. Stanton was determined to prevent steps or proceedings of any kind that might prove destructive or embarrassing in the future."