%450.  Surrender of Lee.%—­At the beginning of 1865 the situation of Lee was desperate, and in February, Alexander H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, met Lincoln and Secretary Seward on a war vessel in Hampton Roads to discuss terms of peace.  Lincoln demanded three things:  1.  That the Confederate armies be disbanded and the men sent home. 2.  That the Confederate States submit to the rule of Congress. 3.  That slavery be abolished.  These terms were not accepted, and the war went on.  Sherman marched northward through the Carolinas and was reenforced from the coast; every seaport in the Confederacy was soon in Union hands; Sheridan finally dispersed Early’s troops, and joined Grant before Petersburg; and the lines of Grant’s army were drawn closer and closer around Petersburg and Richmond.

Plainly the end was near.  On April 2 Lee announced to Davis that both Petersburg and Richmond must be abandoned at once.  The rams in the James River were immediately blown up, and on the morning of April 3 General Weitzel, hearing from a negro what was going on, entered Richmond and found that Lee was in full retreat.  Grant followed, and on April 9 forced Lee to surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, seventy-five miles west of Richmond.  Grant’s treatment of Lee was most generous.  He was not required to give up his sword, nor his officers their side arms, nor his men their horses, which they would need, Grant said, “to work their little farms.”  Each officer was to give his parole not to take up arms against the United States “until properly exchanged”; each regimental commander was to do the same for his men; and, “this done, each officer and man will be allowed to return to his home.”  Immediately after this surrender 25,000 rations were issued to Lee’s men.

[Illustration:  The house in which Lee and Grant arranged the surrender]

%451.  End of the Confederacy.%—­What little was left of the Confederacy now went rapidly to pieces.  On April 26 Johnston surrendered to Sherman near Raleigh, North Carolina.  A few days later the victorious army started for Richmond, and then went on over battle-scarred Virginia to Washington.  May 10, Jefferson Davis was captured.  When Lee fled from Richmond, Davis hurried to Charlotte, N.C., with his cabinet, his clerks, and such gold and silver coin as was in the Confederate Treasury.  But the surrender of Johnston forced Davis to retreat still farther south, till he reached Irwinsville, Ga., where the Union cavalry overtook him.

%452.  The Grand Army disbands.%—­As this was practically the end of the Confederacy, the great Union army of citizen soldiers, numbering more than 1,000,000 men, was called home from the field and disbanded.  Before these veterans separated, never to meet again with arms in their hands, they were reviewed by the President, Congress, and an immense throng of people who came to Washington from every part of the loyal states to welcome them.  During two days (May 23 and 24, 1865) the soldiers of Grant and Sherman, forming a column thirty miles long, marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, and then, with a rapidity and quietness that seems almost incredible, scattered and went back to their farms, to their shops, to the practice of their professions, and to the innumerable occupations of civil life.