of that once proud organization known as the Army of Northern Virginia.

Grant too returned to his lines, whither the glorious news had preceded him, and where salutes were already firing in honor of victory and his coming. He ordered this kind of demonstration to cease, saying, "The war is over, the rebels are our countrymen, and the best sign of rejoicing after the victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations in the field." Then sitting on a stone by the wayside and calling for paper and pencil, he penned the words which were to electrify the nation, announce the birth of peace, and begin a new era in our civilization. It was 4.30 P. M. of Sunday, April 9th, 1865.

"HON. E. M. STANTON,

"Secretary of War, Washington. "General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this afternoon on terms proposed by myself. The accompanying additional correspondence will show the conditions fully.

"U. S. GRANT, Lieutenant-General."

Not in all the history of this great country had such welcome news been borne to an anxious and long-tried people. When Richmond fell the jubilation had known no bounds, but now every patriotic instinct was touched as never before, and unlimited freedom was given to every impulse of joy and thanks. The one calm, self possessed spirit among the excited and unrestrained millions was his, to which under kind Providence, these glorious results were chiefly due. He would have no spectacular triumph then, not even a field review, but would return immediately to Washington to disband his armies and save expense.

cers.

On the 10th he rode to the Confederate lines and had a final and kind interview with Lee and the leading Confederate offiHis officers did the same. There was cordial talk of war times and war issues, sad confessions on the one side that all was lost, happy assurance on the other that the country

was on the eve of a new and brighter destiny, and general agreement that the principle of property in man had been obliterated from our institutions. Victors indulged in no offensive exultation; vanquished found balm for defeat in the magnanimous and satisfactory conditions of surrender, and recompense for supposed loss of estates and political privileges in the thought of escape from trial and execution for the crime of treason. Grant was now off for Washington. On April 12th, Lee's army marched past a spot designated for the deposit of its arms and paraphernalia. Sadly and doggedly they filed by the ranks of their conquerors, who uttered no cheer, aimed no taunt. Grimly they approached the spot which was soon to be piled high with trophies, and there they silently parted with gun, bayonet, accoutrement and the standards they had followed with veneration through four long years of bloody conflict. The glory had departed from their ranks. The sun had set forever on their ambitions and their cause. Lee did not witness this solemn ceremony. He had started for Richmond which he entered on the 12th, to find it so impoverished that he was glad to accept a "destitute ration" as his first supper within the conquered and lost capital.

And now Grant's great spring campaign had ended on the line and in the way he proposed from the beginning. He made Petersburg and Richmond untenable, started their armed occupants into the open, baffled them in every attempt to get south and join Johnston, marched by them, followed them, out-manoeuvred them, beat them when they stood in battle, surrounded them in an open country, crowded them into an area so small that they could not move, compelled surrender. It was not bloody victory, but bloodless annihilation; not a blow, but an end. Petersburg was nothing; Richmond was nothing. They were not entered in force, hardly looked into. The corporate energy, the armed vigor, the living moving presence of the Confederacy was what Grant saw.

That he would have. All else was secondary. For this he planned and wrought. Having that, his triumph was supreme. The immediate and material results of his wonderful strategy and persistent effort were 27,516 prisoners at Appomattox, and 46,495 captured between that and the opening of the campaign, making a total of 74,011 since the 29th of March, 1865. During the same time the Confederate losses in killed must have been 5000. The losses in the Army of the Potomac from March 29th to April 9th were 1051 killed, 5704 wounded, 1769 missing, total 8524.

The grand result-that to the country, the world—cannot be measured by words. It was the end of a long, bloody, exhausting, fratricidal war, the extinction of a cause which inspired it, the downfall of institutions which sought foundation and recognition through it, the revolution of that government and those institutions which survived under the name of the again United States of America, by cutting them off forever from the barbarous principle of property in man, by giving them the baptism of a truer freedom, by preparing them for a future whose triumphs should be only those of peace, whose benefactions should be for all the people, whose history should be the most glorious among the nations.

A

CHAPTER XX.

NASHVILLE AND THE MARCH TO THE SEA.

FTER his appointment as Lieutenant-General, Grant's first care was, as we have seen, to divide the country into such military departments and secure for the same such armies and generals, as would make all his plans harmonious and most effectively co-operative. There was now one responsible mind; there should be but one set of forces working together for a common result.

Just before Chattanooga, the Military Division of the Mississippi had been established for him.

To this he now added Arkansas, and made (spring of 1864) Sherman his successor. After the failure of Bank's Red River expedition he created a department on the lower Mississippi and Gulf coast called the Military Division of West Mississippi, with General Canby in command. We have already seen how he consolidated the discordant departments around Washington under Sheridan, when Washington was threatened. These evidences of generalship at the beginning of, and throughout, the campaigns of 1864-65, bring the organizing ability of the Lieutenant-General into conspicuous relief and, coupled with the unerring direction thereby given to the Federal armed forces, furnish a standpoint for study and admiration found in

26

GEN. CANBY.

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