How the war ended
Peace is declared
On 27 and 28 March 1865, Sherman visited
Lincoln, Grant, and Porter at City Point.
After his long travels, Sherman regaled them
with tales of the trek. But this was not all
fun. Grant and Sherman discussed the
closing campaign, and Lincoln instructed
both officers on the terms of surrender they
could offer.
Before Sherman had reached North
Carolina, Grant had turned Lee out of his
defenses around Petersburg. Both Union
generals were wary that Lee would somehow
unite with Johnston and attack Sherman.
With 100,000 troops, Sherman felt confident
he could withstand any onslaught, but he
accelerated the pace of replenishing his
supplies to get his army into the field as
soon as possible. The march against
Johnston began on 10 April, and within two
days, he learned that Lee had surrendered to
Grant on the 9th. His army celebrated wildly.
Johnston had hoped that Lee could elude
Grant and unite with him. While his army
waited to see the results of Lee's desperate
move, Johnston gathered with President
Davis and other cabinet members at
Greensboro, North Carolina. During the
meeting, they received confirmation of the
rumors that Lee had surrendered. Davis
urged them to keep fighting, but Johnston
announced his opposition. The people were
whipped and his army was deserting in large
numbers. The war was over.
With Davis's reluctant consent, Johnston
contacted Sherman to open negotiations for
peace. On 17 April, the two generals who
had opposed each other in Mississippi, in
Georgia, and again in North Carolina.
assembled at the home of James and Nancy
Bennett, not far from Durham Station.
Sherman, forceful in war and soft in peace,
offered Johnston mild terms that clearly
overstepped his bounds. He permitted
Confederate soldiers to take their arms
home and deposit them at state capitals;
he recognized state governments, restored
the franchise, and said nothing of
emancipation.
Had Lincoln been president, he no doubt
would have corrected his general's excessive
generosity. By then, however, an assassin
named John Wilkes Booth had shot and
killed him. At the moment when Sherman's
terms arrived, Washington officials were in
near hysteria. The new President, Andrew
Johnson, and the cabinet unanimously
rejected the terms, and Secretary of War
Stanton intimated in a letter published in
the New York Times that Sherman was a
traitor.
Grant volunteered to resolve the problem.
President Johnson directed Grant to
supersede Sherman, but Grant refused to
insult his friend that way. He traveled down
to North Carolina with little fanfare and
instructed Sherman to offer the same terms
as he gave Lee, that they would stack arms
and sign paroles, and as long as they
behaved themselves and obeyed the laws,
the Rebels could live undisturbed by Federal
authorities. The two wrangled a bit, but
Johnston, confronted with the reality of a
collapsed war effort, signed on 26 April.
On 12 April, Union forces under
Major-General E. R. S. Canby battled
their way into Mobile. For two years,
Grant had sought its capture, and as Grant
ruefully noted, it finally happened when
its fall meant nothing. Two weeks after
Sherman and Johnston concluded the
surrender agreement, Union cavalrymen
captured Confederate President Jefferson
Davis in Georgia. By 26 May, General
Edward Kirby Smith had surrendered the
Rebel forces in the trans-Mississippi west.
The war was over.