[227] quarters together an hour or two before daybreak. After they had received from me as full an account of the discussion of the day before as my memory enabled me to give, and had learned the terms agreed upon, and the difficulty in the way of full agreement, Mr. Reagan proposed to reduce them to writing to facilitate reconsideration. In doing so, he included the article for amnesty without exceptions, the only one not fully agreed to. This paper being unfinished when General Breckinridge and myself set out to the place of meeting, was to be sent to me there. When we met, I proposed to General Sherman that General Breckinridge should be admitted to our discussion, as his personal relations with the President of the Confederacy might enable him to remove the obstacle to agreement that we had encountered the day before. He assented, and that gentleman joined us. ‘We had conversed on the subject discussed the day before, perhaps a half hour, when the memorandum written by Mr. Reagan was brought. I read this paper to General Sherman, as a basis for terms of peace, pointing out to him that it contained nothing which he had not already accepted, but the language that included the President and Cabinet in the terms of amnesty. After listening to General Breckinridge, who addressed him six or eight minutes in advocacy of these conditions of peace, General Sherman wrote very rapidly the memorandum that follows, with the paper presented by me before him. He wrote so rapidly that I thought at the time that he must have come to the place prepared to agree to amnesty, with no exceptions. His paper differed from mine only in being fuller.’General Sherman gives the following account of his consultations with his principal officers after his first interview with Johnston in regard to the character of terms that should be offered:
‘During the evening of the 17th and morning of the 18th, I saw nearly all the general officers of the army (Schofield, Slocum, Howard, Logan, Blair), and we talked over the matter of the conference at Bennett's house of the day before, and without exception, all advised me to agree to some terms, for they all dreaded the long and harassing march in pursuit of a dissolving and fleeing army; a march that might carry us back again over the thousand miles that we had just accomplished. We all knew that if we could bring Johnston's army to bay, we could destroy it in an hour, but that was simply impossible in the country in which we found ourselves. We discussed all the probabilities, among which was, whether, if Johnston made a point of it, I should assent to the escape from the country of Jeff. Davis and his fugitive Cabinet; and some one of my general officers, either Logan or Blair, insisted that if asked for, we should even provide a vessel to carry them to Nassau from Charleston.’
