It was not until after four years of fighting, that is to say, in 1865, that the end came with the surrender {214} of General Lee's Southern army to the forces of General Grant at Appomatox in Virginia. That was the end of the fighting, and peace terms were agreed very shortly afterwards. The claim of any State or collection of States to break away from the Union has never been put forward since, and the authority of Congress was confirmed over the whole Union. The effects of the war were grievous for the vanquished. Their fairest territories had been overrun by the troops of both sides, their crops had been ruined and, heaviest blow of all, their slaves were emancipated so that there was the less labour available to repair the losses. All the money that they might have spent in hiring labour had gone in the war, and the problems of the peace were scarcely less difficult than those of the war. It was very many years before the South recovered, and it has scarcely recovered now. Nor has the bitter feeling of the South towards the North, which arose from the war and from the many differences of which it was the outcome, even yet wholly died away. As lately as 1924 a member of one of the old Virginian families told me that the Great War, of 1914-1918, by summoning Americans from North, South, East, and West to serve in the same regiments and in a common cause, had done more to bring them together and create a sense of unity, and dispel the misunderstandings, than anything that had happened in all the years between the American War of Secession and the Great War. [Sidenote: Maximilian in Mexico]