Of contemporary accounts to be added to those already mentioned are W. T. Sherman's _Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman_ (1875), and especially the _Home Letters of General Sherman_, edited by M. A. DeWolfe Howe (1909); G. B. McClellan's _McClellan's Own Story_ (1887); E. A. Pollard's _A Southern History of the War_ (1866); Horace Greeley's _The American Conflict_ (1864-67); and Jefferson Davis's _Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government_ (1881). CHAPTER XVI THE COLLAPSE OF THE CONFEDERACY As one looks to-day over the sources of the history of the great Civil War, it seems plain that the responsible spokesmen of the Confederacy should have made overtures to the North for peace on the basis of an indissoluble union of the warring sections in the autumn of 1863. But the Southern leader who proposed reunion at that time would have been regarded as untrue to his cause or unduly timid. Neither Jefferson Davis nor General Lee had any thought of surrender, though from the attitude of representatives of the United States it was plain that an offer to return to the Union would have been met with ample guaranties to the owners of slaves and full amnesty to those who had brought on the war. Alexander Stephens alone foresaw the outcome and began now to ask for a new national convention in which terms of restoration and permanent union should be fixed. Stephens was, however, already out of harmony with President Davis; and the State of Georgia, led by Joseph E. Brown, the Governor, and the Confederate Vice-President himself, was regarded by loyal Southerners as recalcitrant and therefore not authorized to propose solutions of the problem. The cup of Southern defeat and humiliation had not been drained to the bottom.