of any kind.  In this manner the President made his advent into Richmond, landing near Libby Prison.  As the party stepped ashore they found a guide among the contrabands who quickly crowded the streets, for the possible coming of the President had been circulated through the city.  Ten of the sailors, armed with carbines, were formed as a guard, six in front and four in rear, and between them the President, Admiral Porter, and the three officers who accompanied them walked the long distance, perhaps a mile and a half, to the center of the town.

The imagination can easily fill up the picture of a gradually increasing crowd, principally of negroes, following the little group of marines and officers, with the tall form of the President in its center; and, having learned that it was indeed Mr. Lincoln, giving expression to joy and gratitude in the picturesque emotional ejaculations of the colored race.  It is easy also to imagine the sharp anxiety of those who had the President’s safety in charge during this tiresome and even foolhardy march through a city still in flames, whose white inhabitants were sullenly resentful at best, and whose grief and anger might at any moment culminate against the man they looked upon as the incarnation of their misfortunes.  But no accident befell him.  Reaching General Weitzel’s headquarters, Mr. Lincoln rested in the mansion Jefferson Davis had occupied as President of the Confederacy, and after a day of sight-seeing returned to his steamer and to Washington, to be stricken down by an assassin’s bullet, literally “in the house of his friends.”

XXXVI

Lincoln’s Interviews with Campbell—­Withdraws Authority for Meeting of Virginia Legislature—­Conference of Davis and Johnston at Greensboro—­Johnston Asks for an Armistice—­Meeting of Sherman and Johnston—­Their Agreement—­Rejected at Washington—­Surrender of Johnston—­Surrender of other Confederate Forces—­End of the Rebel Navy—­Capture of Jefferson Davis—­Surrender of E. Kirby Smith—­Number of Confederates Surrendered and Exchanged—­Reduction of Federal Army to a Peace Footing—­Grand Review of the Army

While in Richmond, Mr. Lincoln had two interviews with John A. Campbell, rebel Secretary of War, who had not accompanied the other fleeing officials, preferring instead to submit to Federal authority.  Mr. Campbell had been one of the commissioners at the Hampton Roads conference, and Mr. Lincoln now gave him a written memorandum repeating in substance the terms he had then offered the Confederates.  On Campbell’s suggestion that the Virginia legislature, if allowed to come together, would at once repeal its ordinance of secession and withdraw all Virginia troops from the field, he also gave permission for its members to assemble for that purpose.  But this, being distorted into authority to sit in judgment on the political consequences of the war, was soon withdrawn.