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ioned. When we have attained our goal, we are not very far from regretting the ardent emotions of the strife, in the tranquil security of victory. There is in this something of the meminisse juvabit of the poet. But, after all, who can know? Would I have had the same regrets if I had at the time known that my commission of major-general was to date from that day?

erous.

The conditions accorded by General Grant were genWith true greatness of soul, while securing the fruits of his victory, he applied himself to softening the bitterness of defeat for the adversaries he held at his mercy. Unconditional Surrender Grant (this is the interpretation given by the soldiers to the initials U. S.) departed from his old habits, to honor a rival struck down by the fortune of war, and as he himself says in his report" these enemies, whose manly vigor, however unworthy the cause, has accomplished prodigies of valor."

These are the terms offered by General Grant and accepted by General Lee:

"Rolls of all the officers and men to be made in duplicate; one copy to be given to an officer to be designated by me, the other to be retained by such officer or officers as you may designate. The officers to give their individual paroles not to take up arms against the government of the United States until properly exchanged. And each company or regimental commander to sign a like parole for the men of his command. The arms, artillery, and public property to be packed and stacked and turned over to the officers appointed by me to receive them. This will not embrace the side-arms of the officers, or the private horses or baggage. This done, each officer and man will be allowed to return to his home, not to be disturbed by the

United States authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside."

Griffin, with the Fifth Corps, Gibbon, with two divisions of the Twenty-fourth, and McKenzie, with his cavalry command, were appointed to assist in the last formalities, and take charge of the arms, munitions of war, and wagons of the rebels. After a day of repose, all the rest of the army moved out to await at Burksville the speedy crumbling of the last remains of the Confederacy of the South, a necessary consequence of the capture of Richmond and the destruction of Lee's forces.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

CONCLUSION.

THE existence of the rebellion depended so completely on the fate of Lee's army that, when the latter succumbed, the former disappeared. Johnston surrendered to Sherman, Dick Taylor and Kirby Smith to Canby, and there remained no longer a rebel 'soldier in the whole extent of the ex-Southern Confederacy.

The man who had been its president, beset on every side, fled, not knowing where to go to conceal his proscribed head. The roads were cut off, the communications intercepted by the expeditions of General Canby, who had just captured Mobile with two corps, and of General Wilson, who, at the head of more than twelve thousand cavalrymen, had passed like a rocket across Alabama and part of Georgia, forcing the fortified city of Selma, destroying Tuscaloosa, capturing Montgomery, taking Columbus and West Point by assault, and finally entering Macon, to receive there the submission of the Georgia militia and five Confederate generals.

In that fiery expedition of one month, - from March 20 to April 20,- he had taken prisoners by thousands, captured cannon by hundreds, destroyed bridges, railroads, arsenals, manufactories of arms and machinery, naval foundries, depots of provisions and of every sort of supplies. He had nothing else to do but to send detachments in every direction in pursuit of Jefferson Davis, who was overtaken and captured by one of them on the 11th of May. Everybody knows the incidents

of that miserable Odyssey, begun under the sinister plan of burning Richmond, and terminated in the mud, under a grotesque disguise of a woman.

Mr. Lincoln was assassinated, April 14. A detestable cause must have recourse to detestable means. The war which had been carried on upon the fields of battle and in the camps where the honor of the South had taken refuge was not enough for the Richmond government. Its familiars and its agents had organized to burn our great hotels and our public places most frequented, and, calling even the yellow fever to its aid, had introduced into the North loads of clothing impregnated with pestilential emanations. These infamous plots having failed in their execution, the men who had charge of the great strife of democracy against oligarchy, of liberty against slavery, were especially devoted to the pistol and the poniard, in the dark council rooms whose ramifications extended even to Paris.

This was the result:

The noble mission of Abraham Lincoln in this world was crowned with martyrdom; the glorious immortality of the hero-martyr was sealed with his own blood by the ball of an assassin.

The Army of the Potomac left Burksville on the 2d of May, for Washington. On the 6th, it passed through Richmond in triumph, and Fredericksburg on the 10th. On the 23d, it marched in great state before President Johnson and the higher authorities, amid the plaudits of a vast concourse of people assembled in the capital to witness that great review. The next day, a part of Sherman's army had its turn, before departing for Kentucky. Then the disbanding began; and in a few months the armies of the Republic returned to a pacified country as many citizens as before it had counted. volunteer soldiers in its ranks. The number amounted

to 800,963. Amongst these, the regular army easily found enough men to fill its almost vacant ranks, and to complete the increase of its permanent force by the creation of new regiments.

The number of Confederate forces who laid down their arms and were dismissed to their homes on parole was 174,223, to whom must be added 98,802 prisoners of war confined in the North, which brings the total of the troops of the Southern Confederacy released on parole to 273,025. But it must be noted that, at the time of the overthrow of the armies of Lee, Johnston, and Taylor, a great many detachments were scattered over the immense extent of the country, to pursue delinquents, guard the depots, watch the railroads, etc., and that the most of them disbanded, to return directly home to their families. It is said that a great part of the troops of Kirby Smith in Texas dispersed in this manner, after having pillaged the public property. In estimating this number at twenty-seven thousand in addition to those regularly surrendered, we find that the rebellion had still three hundred thousand men enrolled, without taking into account the deserters at the time when it laid down its arms.

It had put into the field a little more than eleven hundred thousand men during the war, and, according to the best information obtained from the Confederates themselves, it had lost during these four years between six and seven hundred thousand men killed or wounded, which makes a number of dead at least equal to the Union armies, that is to say, as we have seen, double in proportion to the number of the armies, and triple in proportion to population.

In fine:

By reducing the contingents furnished by all the levies to the uniform proportion of three years to each

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