Raphael Semmes, Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States

[820] slunk away from me one by one, and became deserters! I was ashamed of my countrymen. Johnston, by reason of his great, personal popularity, and of the confidence which the troops had in his ability, was enabled to gather around him the fragments of several armies, whilst Grant had been pressing Lee; and but for Lee's disaster would soon have been able to hold Sherman in check very effectually. But the moment the news of Lee's surrender reached him, there was a stampede from his army. It melted away like a hillock of snow before the sunshine. Whole companies deserted at a time. Still, many true men remained with him, and with these he stood so defiantly before Sherman, that the latter was glad to enter into negotiations with him for the dispersion of his troops. The reader will be pleased to pay attention to this expression. Johnston dispersed his troops, under the capitulation which will presently be spoken of. He never surrendered them as prisoners to the enemy. The country is familiar with what occurred at Greensboroa, between Johnston and Sherman, and I do not propose to rehearse it here. Sherman, yielding to the impulses of Johnston's master-mind, entered into an agreement with the latter, which would have achieved more fame for him in the future than all his victories, if he had had the courage and ability to stand up to his work. This agreement was that the Southern States should be regarded as ipso facto, on the cessation of the war, restored to their rights in the Union. The stroke was one of a statesman. It is in times of great revolutions that genius shows itself. The Federal Government, at the time that this convention was made, was prostrate beneath the foot of the soldier, and a military man of genius might have governed it with the crook of his finger. If such a one had arisen, he might have applied the scourge to the back of the Northern people, and they would have yelped under it as submissively as any hound. They had yelped under the scourging of Abraham Lincoln. But Sherman was not the man to conceive the emergency, or to avail himself of it. He, on the contrary, permitted himself to be scourged by a creature like Stanton, the Federal Secretary of War, and if he did not yelp under the scourging, he at least submitted to it with most admirable docility. Stanton insolently rejected