All these things and others like unto them, were done by the steadily diminishing company of Confederates who were determined to hold out to the end even if the end should prove to be death by starvation. But hour by hour that small company of heroic souls was growing smaller and smaller. Many died by the roadside. Many were killed while delivering their own despairing fire. Many, seeing that further resistance was hopeless, and knowing how terribly their wives and children needed them in the homes which a farther march would leave behind, simply went home. During the last days of his retreat Lee had at no time so many as 20,000 men, all starving, while his adversary was assailing him by day and by night, with a force numbering 150,000, or about eight to one. Surely even the story of the Confederate war presents no spectacle which better illustrates the high quality of American manhood than does this resistance through many days of starvation and discouragement, by a mere handful of men, assailed in flank, in rear and in front by seven or eight times their number of perfectly equipped and well fed men. At Appomattox Court House Lee found himself completely surrounded. By good marching Grant had succeeded in pushing an infantry column of 80,000 men into Lee's front, in support of Sheridan's cavalry operations there. There was only one course open to the great Confederate chieftain. He surrendered on the ninth and tenth of April all that remained of the Army of Northern Virginia. They numbered, all told, including teamsters, quartermaster's men and all, only 26,000 men, of whom no more than 7,800 carried muskets. In effect this surrender made an end of the most stupendous war of modern times. As the army under Lee had been from the beginning the backbone of the Confederate cause, its destruction resulted in the surrender of all the other Confederate forces as soon as the news of the event at Appomattox could reach the detached commanders. Here ends the story of the Confederate war. In these pages a conscientious effort has been made to tell it with the utmost impartiality and the most scrupulous regard for truth. That war began about forty-nine years ago. It is now forty-five years since it ended in the restoration of the American Union. The American people are again completely one, and the great Republic has come to be the most potent as it is the freest nation that has ever existed on earth. The bitternesses and resentments to which the fierce struggle gave birth have been displaced by kindlier thoughts in all but the narrowest and most ungenerous minds. The two great commanders, Lee and Grant, have alike been assigned to honored places in all our Halls of Fame. The time has come when all Americans may fitly rejoice together in the story of the great deeds done on the one side and on the other in that Confederate war which did so much to give to the Republic its foremost place among the nations of the earth. END OF VOL. II. INDEX