Jefferson Davis and his cabinet proceeded to Danville, where, two days after his arrival, the rebel President made still another effort to fire the Southern heart, announcing, “We have now entered upon a new phase of the struggle.  Relieved from the necessity of guarding particular points, our army will be free to move from point to point to strike the enemy in detail far from his base.  Let us but will it and we are free”; and declaring in sonorous periods his purpose never to abandon one foot of ground to the invader.

The ink was hardly dry on the document when news came of the surrender of Lee’s army, and that the Federal cavalry was pushing southward west of Danville.  So the Confederate government again hastily packed its archives and moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, where its headquarters were prudently kept on the train at the depot.  Here Mr. Davis sent for Generals Johnston and Beauregard, and a conference took place between them and the members of the fleeing government—­a conference not unmixed with embarrassment, since Mr. Davis still “willed” the success of the Confederacy too strongly to see the true hopelessness of the situation, while the generals and most of his cabinet were agreed that their cause was lost.  The council of war over, General Johnston returned to his army to begin negotiations with Sherman; and on the following day, April 14, Davis and his party left Greensboro to continue their journey southward.

Sherman had returned to Goldsboro from his visit to City Point, and set himself at once to the reorganization of his army and the replenishment of his stores.  He still thought there was a hard campaign with desperate fighting ahead of him.  Even on April 6, when he received news of the fall of Richmond and the flight of Lee and the Confederate government, he was unable to understand the full extent of the national triumph.  He admired Grant so far as a man might, short of idolatry, yet the long habit of respect for Lee led him to think he would somehow get away and join Johnston in his front with at least a portion of the Army of Northern Virginia.  He had already begun his march upon Johnston when he learned of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

Definitely relieved from apprehension of a junction of the two Confederate armies, he now had no fear except of a flight and dispersal of Johnston’s forces into guerrilla bands.  If they ran away, he felt he could not catch them; the country was too open.  They could scatter and meet again, and so continue a partizan warfare indefinitely.  He could not be expected to know that this resolute enemy was sick to the heart of war, and that the desire for more fighting survived only in a group of fugitive politicians flying through the pine forests of the Carolinas from a danger which did not exist.