On the very day of the assassination Sherman had written to
Johnston offering the same terms Grant had given Lee and Lincoln
had most heartily approved. Three days later, on the seventeenth,
just as Sherman was entering the train for his meeting with
Johnston, the operator handed him a telegram announcing the
assassination. Enjoining secrecy till he returned, Sherman took
the telegram with him and showed it to Johnston, whom he watched
intently. "The perspiration came out on his forehead," Sherman
wrote, "and he did not attempt to conceal his distress. He
denounced the act as a disgrace to the age and hoped I did not
charge it to the Confederate Government. I told him I could not
believe that he or General Lee or the officers of the Confederate
army could possibly be privy to acts of assassination." When
Sherman got back to Raleigh he published the news in general
orders, and experienced the supreme satisfaction of finding that
not one man in all that mournful army had to be restrained from a
single act of revenge.

After much misunderstanding with Washington now in lesser hands,
the surrender of Johnston's and the other Confederate armies was
effected. Each body of troops laid down its arms and quietly
dispersed. One day the bugles called, the camp fires burned, and
comrades were together in the ranks. The next, like morning
mists, they disappeared, thenceforth to be remembered and admired
only as the heroes of a hopeless cause.


It was a very different scene through which their rivals marched
into lasting fame with all the pride, pomp, and circumstance of