Proposal by the Confederate Leader Rejected by General Johnston

With the surrender of General Lee at Appomattox, the war was virtually ended. But only the Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered. That of Johnston, in North Carolina, and smaller bodies elsewhere, were yet in arms. When Sherman heard of the evacuation of Richmond and Petersburg, he put his whole army in motion and moved on Johnston, who was at Smithfield, on the Neuse River, with full thirty thousand men, starting at daybreak on the 10th of April, for the purpose of striking his rear. Johnston had just heard of the surrender of Lee, and retreated through Raleigh, and along the course of the railway westward, toward Greensboro'. At the same time Davis and his cabinet, who had made Danville the seat of the Confederate government for a few days, had fled from that place to Greensboro', with anxious solicitude for themselves and their treasures. They had proposed to Johnston that he should disperse his army excepting two or three batteries of artillery, and as many infantry as he could mount, and with these should form a body-guard for the "government," and strike for the Mississippi and beyond, with Mexico as their final objective. Johnston, a man of honor, spurned this base and selfish proposal to desert his companions-in-arms far away from their homes and unprovided for, and subject the people in the region where the army would be disbanded to the sore evils of plunder, which lawless bands of starving men would engage in. Governed by the principles of justice and humanity, he had the moral courage to do his duty according to the dictates of conscience, and refused to fight any more in a hopeless cause. He stated frankly to the people of his military department, that "war could no longer be continued by them, except as robbers," and that he should take immediate steps to save the army and people from further evil and to "avoid the crime of waging a hopeless war." On the 26th of April, Johnston, and the army under his command, excepting a body of cavalry led by Wade Hampton, surrendered to Sherman, near Durham Station, in Orange county, North Carolina, on the same generous terms accorded to Lee and his troops. The number surrendered and paroled was about twenty-five thousand, with one hundred and eight pieces of artillery, and about fifteen thousand small arms. The whole number of his troops present and elsewhere was seventy thousand. On the 4th of May, General Taylor surrendered the Confederate forces in Alabama to General Canby, at Citronville; and the Confederate navy in the Tombigbee River was surrendered to Admiral Farragut at the same time. The last conflict in the terrible Civil War occurred near Brazos Santiago, in Texas, on the 13th of May, when hostilities entirely ceased.