Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 21.djvu/95

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number of casualties in Grant's army, from the commencement of the final movement to the surrender, which, according to official reports, amounted to 9,994 officers and men or near one-fourth of the Confederate strength at the beginning of the final struggle bears striking testimony to the high courage of the retreating army. Its heroic endeavors are made still more conspicuous by the fact that the Army of Northern Virginia, encumbered as it was with immense trains, moving over bad country roads, perishing from exposure and lack of food, and fighting daily a vastly superior force, marched, on the routes taken by it, in the six days from the night of April 2d to the morning of the 9th, over eighty-five miles, or an average of about fourteen miles a day. Such marches of an army of its size, under such circumstances, have few, if any, parallels in military annals.

On the loth of April officers made out muster-rolls of their com- mands in duplicate, and then signed and gave them paroles, on printed blanks, which had been struck off by the force of printers gathered up from the headquarters of the various Federal Corps commanders. The Confederate troops then marched, brigade at a time, past an equal number of Federal troops, commanded, if my memory is not at fault, by General Chamberlain, and stacked arms and banners. The Federal troops often presented arms to their foes, and uniformly treated them with the utmost respect. With this simple ceremony the surrender was over.

NUMBERS LOSSES WHAT THEY PROVE.

Lee's army, as will be remembered, numbered not over fifty thou- sand men of all arms when Grant commenced operations on the 29th of March. Lee lost in killed, wounded, captured, and stragglers at least seven thousand men in the battle at Five Forks, and the encounters at other places on the 3Oth and 3151 March, and the gen- eral assault on the lines on the morning of April 2d cost Lee, from the same causes, at least seven thousand more; so that he had only thirty-six thousand men of all arms for duty, including 2,500 dis- mounted cavalry, the artillery and the mounted cavalry, E well's command and the naval battalion, on the night of April 2d, or morning of the 3d, to take upon the retreat. He left the Petersburg line with about 26,000 infantry.

In the desperate fighting of April 6th, when Ewell and Anderson's commands were captured, and when Gordon, after engaging in a