Appomattox was not a battle, but the end of battles. Fondly do we hope
that never again shall Americans lift against Americans the avenging
hand in such a strife! Here at a little court-house, twenty-five miles
east of Lynchburg, on the ninth of April, 1865, the great tragedy of
our civil war was brought to a happy end. Here General Robert E. Lee,
with the broken fragments of his Army of Northern Virginia, was
brought by the inexorable logic of war to the end of that career which
he had so bravely followed through four years of battle, much of which
had shown him to be one of the great commanders of the century.
The story of the downfall of the Confederacy has been many times
repeated. It has entered into our literature, and is known by heart
wherever the history of the war is read. Generally, however, this
story has been told as if the narrator approached the event from the
Union side. We have the pursuit of General Lee from Petersburg
westward, almost to the spurs of the Alleghanies. We follow in the
wake. We see the unwearied efforts of the victorious host to close
around the retreating army which has so long been the bulwark of the
Confederacy. We hear the summons to surrender, and the answer of "_Not
yet_;" but within a day that answer is reversed, and the stern wills
of Lee and his fellow-commanders yield to the inexorable law of the
strongest.
Only recently, however, the story has been told with great spirit from
the Confederate side, by General John B. Gordon, who was at that time
at the right hand of his commander-in-chief, and who stood by him to
the last hour. General Gordon's account of the final struggle of the
Confederate army and of the surrender is so graphic, so full of
spirit, so warmed with the animation and devotion of a great soldier,
that we here repeat his account of