is cause. Grant's legions were making more
haste than he. The marvelous marching, not only of Sheridan,
but of the men of the Fifth and Twenty-Fourth Corps, was
doing as much as a battle to bring the rebellion to a close.
Twenty-eight, thirty-two, thirty-five miles a day in
succession these infantry soldiers marched, all day and all
night. From daylight until daylight again, after more than a
week of labor and fatigue 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 his 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, out-fought, out-witted, out-generaled--defeated
in every possible way. He and his army, every man, numbering
27,516, surrendered. He and his army, every man, was fed by
the conqueror."

From the date of Lee's surrender, the confederates, from Virginia to the
Mississippi, began to lay down their arms. Howell Cobb surrendered at
Macon, Ga., on the 21st; Johnston surrendered to General Sherman on the
26th, in North Carolina; Dick Taylor, east of the Mississippi, on the
4th of May, and on the 26th Kirby Smith surrendered his forces west of
the Mississippi. Jeff. Davis had been captured, disguised as a woman,
and thus the cause, which originated in treason, based on the
enslavemen