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similar to those arranged between Grant and Lee. All acts of war on the part of Johnston's army were to cease at once; all arms and public property to be delivered to an ordnance officer of the United States, at Greensboro; the officers and men to give their individual obligations not to take up arms against the United States until properly released from this parole; and then to be permitted to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by national authorities so long as they observed their obligations and the laws.
This, it will be seen, was a purely military convention, and referred only to the surrender of Johnston's command.
The great civil questions of amnesty, the courts, the state governments, and of political and personal rights and franchises were remitted to the civil authorities.
Thirty-one thousand two hundred and forty-three men of Johnston's army were paroled.1
During these negotiations Grant kept himself carefully in the background.
He was not present at any interview with Johnston, remaining at Raleigh while Sherman went out to the front, and his name did not appear on any of the papers, except when he wrote, after the signatures of Sherman and Johnston, ‘Approved, U. S. Grant.’
Even this the rebel commander was not aware of, and Grant went
1 Yet General Johnston, one of the most honorable of the rebel commanders, does not hesitate, in his ‘Military Narrative,’ p. 398, to designate the entire remaining rebel command as ‘an army of about 20,000 infantry and artillery and 5,000 mounted troops,’ and to contrast this with what he calls ‘Grant's, of 180,000 men; Sherman's, of 110,000 at least; Canby's, 60,000—odds of seventeen or eighteen to one.’
Over 70,000 rebels were surrendered by Johnston and Richard Taylor alone.
New York Appleton 1885.
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