‘Please give all orders necessary according to the views the Executive may take, and influence him, if possible, not to vary the terms at all, for I have considered every thing, and believe that the Confederate armies once dispersed, we can adjust all else fairly and well.’It is now known, from documents which might have slept but for General Sherman's revival of this matter, that the members of Jeff. Davis' Cabinet construed the Sherman-Johnston terms exactly as Mr. Stanton and the other members of Lincoln's Cabinet did. It has already been made to appear that Mr. Reagan, the Confederate Postmaster-General; Mr. Breckinridge, Secretary--of War; Wade Hampton, and General Johnston held a consultation at the headquarters of the latter, late at night, after the first conference with General Sherman. Up to that time no draft of ‘terms’ had been prepared by either side, and Mr. Reagan thereupon drew up outlines, based upon Johnston's conversations with Sherman, and this paper was the next day handed to the latter, and, with it before him, he rote the memorandum, which was afterward signed. This was agreed to, and did not differ in its most important points from the draft prepared by Mr. Reagan. The latter, therefore, was well qualified to inform Mr. Davis of the character of these terms; and a few days later, when they had been under consideration in the rebel Cabinet, he, in common with his associate members, at the request of Mr.
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hand, but I declined it publicly, and the fact was universally noticed’—but how decidedly to the discredit of General Sherman he does not relate in his new capacity of historian.
His main complaint is directed at the reasons assigned by Mr. Stanton for the rejection of his terms.
He contends that personally he ‘cared very little whether they were approved, modified, or disapproved in toto,’ only he ‘wanted instructions;’ and yet in a letter to Halleck, quoted in the Memoirs, and written the day these terms were agreed upon, is this appeal:
Cincinnati: Wilstach, Baldwin & Co. 1875.
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