with platonic discussions in the rear.  But on arriving at the rendezvous he had suggested, he received Grant’s courteous but decided refusal to enter into a political negotiation, and also the news that a formidable force of infantry barred the way and covered the adjacent hills and valley.  The marching of the Confederate army was over forever, and Lee, suddenly brought to a sense of his real situation, sent orders to cease hostilities, and wrote another note to Grant, asking an interview for the purpose of surrendering his army.

The meeting took place at the house of Wilmer McLean, in the edge of the village of Appomattox, on April 9, 1865.  Lee met Grant at the threshold, and ushered him into a small and barely furnished parlor, where were soon assembled the leading officers of the national army.  General Lee was accompanied only by his secretary, Colonel Charles Marshall.  A short conversation led up to a request from Lee for the terms on which the surrender of his army would be received.  Grant briefly stated them, and then wrote them out.  Men and officers were to be paroled, and the arms, artillery, and public property turned over to the officer appointed to receive them.

“This,” he added, “will not embrace the side-arms of the officers, nor their private horses or baggage.  This done, each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their parole and the laws in force where they may reside.”

General Grant says in his “Memoirs” that up to the moment when he put pen to paper he had not thought of a word that he should write.  The terms he had verbally proposed were soon put in writing, and there he might have stopped.  But as he wrote a feeling of sympathy for his gallant antagonist came over him, and he added the extremely liberal terms with which his letter closed.  The sight of Lee’s fine sword suggested the paragraph allowing officers to retain their side-arms; and he ended with a phrase he evidently had not thought of, and for which he had no authority, which practically pardoned and amnestied every man in Lee’s army—­a thing he had refused to consider the day before, and which had been expressly forbidden him in the President’s order of March 3.  Yet so great was the joy over the crowning victory, and so deep the gratitude of the government and people to Grant and his heroic army, that his terms were accepted as he wrote them, and his exercise of the Executive prerogative of pardon entirely overlooked.  It must be noticed here, however, that a few days later it led the greatest of Grant’s generals into a serious error.