to the sea, and his northward progress through the Carolinas, had predisposed the great interior region to make an end of strife:  a tendency which was greatly promoted by the masterly raid of General J.H.  Wilson’s cavalry through Alabama, and his defeat of Forrest at Selma.  An officer of Taylor’s staff came to Canby’s headquarters on April 19 to make arrangements for the surrender of all the Confederate forces east of the Mississippi not already paroled by Sherman and Wilson, embracing some forty-two thousand men.  The terms were agreed upon and signed on May 4, at the village of Citronelle in Alabama.  At the same time and place the Confederate Commodore Farrand surrendered to Rear-Admiral Thatcher all the naval forces Of the Confederacy in the neighborhood of Mobile—­a dozen vessels and some hundreds of officers.

The rebel navy had practically ceased to exist some months before.  The splendid fight in Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864, between Farragut’s fleet and the rebel ram Tennessee, with her three attendant gunboats, and Cushing’s daring destruction of the powerful Albemarle in Albemarle Sound on October 27, marked its end in Confederate waters.  The duel between the Kearsarge and the Alabama off Cherbourg had already taken place; a few more encounters, at or near foreign ports, furnished occasion for personal bravery and subsequent lively diplomatic correspondence; and rebel vessels, fitted out under the unduly lenient “neutrality” of France and England, continued for a time to work havoc with American shipping in various parts of the world.  But these two Union successes, and the final capture of Fort Fisher and of Wilmington early in 1865, which closed the last haven for daring blockade-runners, practically silenced the Confederate navy.

General E. Kirby Smith commanded all the insurgent forces west of the Mississippi.  On him the desperate hopes of Mr. Davis and his flying cabinet were fixed, after the successive surrenders of Lee and Johnston had left them no prospect in the east.  They imagined they could move westward, gathering up stragglers as they fled, and, crossing the river, join Smith’s forces, and there continue the war.  But after a time even this hope failed them.  Their escort melted away; members of the cabinet dropped off on various pretexts, and Mr. Davis, abandoning the attempt to reach the Mississippi River, turned again toward the east in an effort to gain the Florida coast and escape by means of a sailing vessel to Texas.

The two expeditions sent in pursuit of him by General Wilson did not allow this consummation, which the government at Washington might possibly have viewed with equanimity.  His camp near Irwinville, Georgia, was surrounded by Lieutenant-Colonel Pritchard’s command at dawn on May 10, and he was captured as he was about to mount horse with a few companions and ride for the coast, leaving his family to follow more slowly.  The tradition that he was captured