g--The Greetings of Petersburg Ladies to
the Retreating Columns--The Retreat and Pursuit to Appomattox Court
House.

When I returned to my command in the early part of March, after a long
absence as a prisoner, I was greatly depressed at the sad state of feeling
in which I found almost the whole army.--The buoyant, hopeful tone that
animated them during the bloody and heroic struggles in the Wilderness,
and at Spotsylvania, was gone. The men who followed the immortal Jackson
in his historic and eventful campaigns, and endured every fatigue and
hardship without a murmur, in the full hope of eventual victory, were
dejected, crestfallen and despondent. The wear and tear of a continuous
campaign from the Rappahannoc to the James, and the disasters of the
Valley struggle of the previous fall, together with the continuous
marching and counter-marching on their present lines, without rest and
with short rations, were telling upon their hardy natures. Longstreet's
veterans, who had followed their old leader from the ensanguined fields of
Virginia to Chicamauga and East Tennessee, and who had again been
forwarded to their old fields of conflict, were thinned in numbers, and
had lost much of the fierce fire of pluck that characterised them of old.

The lines were long, stretching from below Richmond, on the north side of
the James, to Hatcher's run, away beyond Petersburg, on the south side. A
countless host were just in front of them, watching an opportunity to
strike where the lines were the weakest.--The Confederate army numbered
perhaps 60,000 all told--artillery, cavalry and infantry, and with 40
miles of defence, the battle-line was thin as a skirmish, and the duty
incessant and fatiguing in the greatest degree. On some parts of the line
the crack of the rifle, the booming of artillery, and the bursting of the
mortar shells were incessant.

Desertions were very numerous, both to the enemy and to the rear, and I
early found that the army had at last succumbed, not to the enemy in
front, but to the discontent, the murmurings, despondency and
demoralization among the people at home, who infused their hopeless
dejection, by furloughed men returning to their commands, and by letters.

Longstreet commanded the Confederate left, across the James, and his right
division extended to within a few miles of Petersburg. Gordon came next,
with his three divisions, thinned by arduous and fatiguing marches and
bloody battles