Adam Badeau, Military history of Ulysses S. Grant from April 1861 to April 1865. Volume 3

[623] succession, these infantry soldiers marched; all day and all night. From daylight till daylight again, after more than a week of labor and fatigues almost unexampled, they pushed on, to intercept their ancient adversary, while the remainder of the army of the Potomac was at his heels.

Finally, Lee, still defiant, and refusing to treat with any view of surrender, came up to his goal, but found the national cavalry had reached the point before him, and that the supplies were gone. Still he determined to push his way through, and with no suspicion that men on foot could have marched from Rice's station to his front in thirty hours, he made his last charge, and discovered a force of infantry greater than his own before him, besides cavalry—while two corps of the army of the Potomac were close in rear. He had run straight into the national lines. He was enclosed, walled in, on every side, with imminent, instant destruction impending over him. He instantly offered to submit to Grant, and in the agony of alarm lest the blow should fall, he applied to Meade and Sheridan also for a cessation of hostilities. Thus in three directions at once he was appealing to be allowed to yield. At the same moment he had messengers out to Sheridan, Meade, and Grant. The emergency whose existence he had denied had arrived. He was out-marched, and out-fought, out-witted, out-generalled; defeated in every possible way. He and his army, every man surrendered. He and his army, every man was fed by the conqueror.

Twenty-seven thousand five hundred and sixteen officers and men were paroled at Appomattox