. The flower
of the South's chivalry had also fallen upon the field and in the
trenches, and now youths and old men were taking the places of
soldiers who had died in the "Bloody Angles" and the tangled
Wilderness.

A talk of peace began once more, but the men of the South were
determined to yield nothing as long as a rifle could be raised.
Nothing but their unrestricted independence would satisfy them. The
man who could call nothing his own but what was on his back was as
much determined on his country's independence as those who were the
possessors of broad acres and scores of negroes.

Congressman Boyce, of South Carolina, began to call for a peace
conference in the Confederate Congress. Montgomery Blair, the father
of General Frank P. Blair, then commanding a corps in Sherman's Army,
begged the North to halt and listen to reason--to stop the fratricidal
war. Generals, soldiers, statesmen, and civilians all felt that it
had gone on long enough. Some held a faint hope that peace could be
secured without further effusion of blood. A peace conference was
called at Hampton Roads, near the mouth of the Potomac. President
Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward, on the part of the
North, and Vice-President Stephens, Honorable R.T.M. Hunter, and Judge
Campbell, on the part of the South, attended. Lincoln demanded an
"unconditional surrender" of the army--emancipation of the slaves
and a return to our former places in the Union. Mr. Stephens and his
colleagues knew too well the sentiment of the Southern people to even
discuss such a course. Not a soldier in ranks would have dared to
return and face the women of the South with such a peace and on such
terms as long as there was the shadow of an organized army in the
field.

General Ord, of the Union Army, a humane and Christian gentleman,
wrote and sought an interview with General Longstreet. He wished that
General to use his influence with General Lee and the officers of the
army to meet General Grant, and with their wives mingling with the
wives of the respective Generals, talk over the matter in a friendly
manner, and see if some plan could not be framed whereby peace could
be secured honorable to all parties. All had had glory enough
and blood sufficient had been shed to gratify the most savage
and fanatical. These officers or the most of them had been old
school-mates at West Point, had been brother officers in the old army,
their wives had mingled in pleas