Success had made them good natured. Those we came in contact with were soldiers--fighting men--and, as is always the case, such appreciate their position and are too proud to bear themselves in any other way. They, in the good nature of success, were more willing to give than our men, in the soreness of defeat, to receive. The effect of such conduct upon our men was of the best kind; the unexpected consideration shown by the officers and men of the United States army towards us; the heartiness with which a Yankee soldier would come up to a Confederate officer and say, "We have been fighting one another for four years; give me a Confederate five dollar bill to remember you by," had nothing in it offensive. They were proud of their success, and we were not ashamed of our defeat; and not a man of that grand army of one hundred and fifty thousand men but could, and I believe would, testify, that, on purely personal grounds, the few worn-out half-starved men that gathered around General Lee and his falling flag held the prouder position of the two. Had the politicians left things alone, such feelings would have resulted in a very different condition of things. Those of us who took serious consideration of the state of affairs, felt that with our defeat we had as absolutely lost our country--the one we held under the Constitution--as though we had been conquered and made a colony of by France or Russia. The right of the strongest--the law of the sword--was as absolute at "Appomattox" that day as when Brennus, the Gaul, threw it in the scale at the ransom of Rome. So far, it was all according to the order of things, and we stood on the bare hills men without a country. General Grant offered us, it was said, rations and transportation--each man to his native State, now a conquered province, or to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Many would not have hesitated to accept the offer for Halifax and rations; but, in distant Southern homes were old men, helpless women and children, whose cry for help it was not hard to hear. So, in good faith, accepting our fate, we took allegiance to this, our new country, which is now called the "United States," as we would have done to France or Russia. With all that was around us--the destruction of the "Army of Northern Virginia," and certain defeat of the Confederacy as the result--no one dreamed of what has followed. The fanaticism that has influenced the policy of the Government, to treat subject States, whose citizens had been permitted to take an oath of allegiance, accepted them as such, and promised to give them the benefit of laws protecting person, property and religion, as the dominant party in the United States has done--exceeds belief.