Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 21.djvu/100

 92 Southern Historical Society Papers.

records show Grant captured during that period by nearly 7,000 men. Grant, in his Memoirs, states the number at 19,132, and the

that he had only sixty-three field pieces at Appomattox. It is preposterous, therefore, to ask anybody to believe that Lee surrendered at Appomattox more field pieces than he had when he left Petersburg and twice as many as his army ever had. So, if it is proper construction that these two reports are intended to give the number of " cannon " captured at Appomattox, it is proved by undisputable historical evidence, that they are monstrously false, as to the number of " cannon " at least.

How stands the case as to the 32,633 small arms reported, if Badeau's version is correct and " Lee did not carry many extra muskets in wagons? " All these small arms, on Badeau's idea, must also have been captured at Appomattox, for, as we have seen, there was no other place between the 8th of April and the dates of the reports where any captures could be made by either Meade's or Ord's army. If these small arms were captured at Appomattox, how did they get there ? Lee surrendered only 28,536 officers and men at Appomattox Of this number at least 5.500 were officers and detailed men, teamsters, etc., who did not carry muskets. This left only 23,000 men to bring 32,000 muskets to Appomattox, if every soldier whose duty it was to bear arms had been able to do so. It is not pretended that any of the infantry carried two muskets, or denied that many were unable to carry one. The 9,000 excess of muskets, if both reports are included in getting the number of small arms, is what disturbed Badeau ; and he illogi- cally rejects one report, and then takes the other solely because the number of small arms the latter reports will not exceed the whole number of officers and men captured at Appomattox.

There is much reason for believing that the report of April nth, the date when the last of Lee's troops stacked arms before Ord's men, and which, if Badeau's version is correct, could not possibly have included small arms captured elsewhere, gives the number of small arms surrendered by Lee's troops at Appomattox Courthouse, and that it is, perhaps, slightly in excess of the number of both cavalry and infantry who bore arms on the morning of the 9th of April.

Ord's troops, the Army of the James, arrested our progress beyond the Courthouse on the morning of the gth, and were in the immediate vicinity of the Courthouse, where our troops stacked arms before some of his, after the paroles were made out. General Gibbon, one of Ord's corps com- manders, was the ranking officer charged with seeing to the formal surren- der. Ord's ordnance officers quite naturally received the stacked muskets and the small arms of the cavalry, and reported them as surrendered to that army, and also included in their captures of "cannon," field pieces taken by his troops on the retreat, and siege pieces on the part of the en- trenchments taken by Weitzel, his other corps commander, who entered Richmond.