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CHAPTER XVI. BATTLE OF FIVE FORKS AND LEE'S SURRENDER—1865.

the latter part of May, 1865, a steamer which had left New York two months before for San Francisco, by way of the Straits of Magellan, touched at Callao, Peru. Her passengers were anxious for news from home. Hurrying on shore, one of them found a man who had just arrived from New York by steamer from that port to Aspinwall, and the English mail steamer from Panama. "What has happened in the last sixty days, and how is the war getting on?" was the passenger's inquiry. "Oh, nothing much," was the reply. "Richmond 's taken, Lee and Johnston's armies have surrendered, Lincoln has been assassinated, and Jeff. Davis is captured." It is not an overstatement to say that the listener was deprived of the power of speech for fully a minute, so great was his astonishment at this momentous intelligence.

The closing scenes of the rebellion were dramatically rapid in their movement, hardly less so than represented by the terse declaration quoted above. The battle that compelled the evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond was fought on the first day of April, the evacuation took place on the 2d and 3d, Lee surrendered his army on the 9th, President Lincoln was assassinated on the 15th, Johnston's army surrendered on the 26th, General Dick Taylor's army surrendered May 4th, President Davis was captured on the 11th, on the 22d May a proclamation of President 289