Grant knew that the destruction of Lee's army, and not the capture of Richmond, was the profoundest strategy. The Army of the Potomac, under the consummate leadership of General Grant, won infinitely more prestige at Appomattox, where eight thousand worn-out Confederates laid down their arms, than the German army, under its great field-marshal, Von Moltke, won at Sedan, where the French Emperor, Louis Napoleon, and 86,000 French soldiers, neither footsore nor hungry, surrendered, and for the plain reason that no such conflicts as those in Spotsylvania lay across the march of Von Moltke to Sedan. The march to Appomattox was over the battlefields of Spotsylvania, and Appomattox was only the culmination of the courage and carnage of those fields. It was the conspicuous characteristic of both the Union and Confederate armies that their courage was alike invincible; defeat could not quench it; it shone with additional splendor amid the gloom of disaster, and no soldier on either side need blush to have borne a part in any one of the great battles of the Civil war, whatever fortune may have decreed as to its temporary result. It is noteworthy, above almost any other events of history, that the two most memorable and momentous struggles in which the Anglo-Saxon race has embarked, both closed on the soil of Virginia, a century apart, by the surrender of one Anglo-Saxon army to an army of the same race, and without the loss of prestige on either side. For our great race, when vanquished by itself, proudly rears its crest unconquered and sublime! One of those memorable struggles closed at Yorktown, where colonial dependence perished, national independence was secured and our great republic born. The other closed at Appomattox, where the doctrine of secession and the institution of slavery perished and a more perfect union than our fathers made was established. Secession and slavery perished on Virginia soil, and her people, though impoverished by the loss of the latter, have shed no tears over the grave of these dead issues; but they love and cherish the memory of the Southern heroes whose sacred ashes repose in her bosom, and they proudly spurn any suggestion that such moral heroism and sublime self-sacrifice as they exhibited could be born of other than conscientious conviction! If the South was, by a wise providence, denied in that grand struggle the honor of final triumph, her people to-day share equally with the victors of that day the glorious fruits of their victory in a more perfect and indissoluble union of indestructible States, under that superlative symbol of a world-power--the glorious Stars and Stripes. All through this splendid address Mr. Fitzhugh was vociferously applauded, the President and his cabinet heartily and enthusiastically joining in the applause, and when he closed the demonstration was kept up for several minutes.