en back after fierce engagements at Bentonville and
Averysboro. On March 25 Lee decided to attack Grant, and, while the
latter was busy, get out of Richmond and join Johnston, but when this
battle, known as the attack on Fort Steadman, was over, Grant's hold was
tighter than ever.

Sheridan attacked Lee's rear with a heavy force, and at Five Forks,
April 1, the surprised garrison was defeated with five thousand
captured. The next day the entire Union army advanced, and the line of
Confederate intrenchments was broken. On the following day Petersburg
and Richmond were evacuated, but Mr. Davis was not there. He had gone
away. Rather than meet General Grant and entertain him when there was no
pie in the house, he and the Treasury had escaped from the haunts of
man, wishing to commune with nature for a while. He was captured at
Irwinsville, Georgia, under peculiar and rather amusing circumstances.

He was never punished, with the exception perhaps that he published a
book and did not realize anything from it.

Lee fled to the westward, but was pursued by the triumphant Federals,
especially by Sheridan, whose cavalry hung on his flanks day and night.
Food failed the fleeing foe, and the young shoots of trees for food and
the larger shoots of the artillery between meals were too much for that
proud army, once so strong and confident.

Let us not dwell on the particulars.

As Sheridan planted his cavalry squarely across Lee's path of retreat,
the worn but heroic tatters of a proud army prepared to sell themselves
for a bloody ransom and go down fighting, but Grant had demanded their
surrender, and, seeing back of the galling, skirmishing cavalry solid
walls of confident infantry, the terms of surrender were accepted by
General Lee, and April 9 the Confederate army stacked its arms near
Appomattox Court-House.

The Confederate war debt was never paid, for some reason or other, but
the Federal debt when it was feeling the best amounted to two billion
eight hundred and forty-four million dollars. One million men lost their
lives.

Was it worth while?

In the midst of the general rejoicing, President Lincoln was
assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre, April 14. The
assassin was captured in a dying condition in a burning barn, through a
crack in the boarding of which he had been shot by a soldier named
Boston Corbett. He died with no sympathetic applause to soothe the dull,
cold ear of death.

West Virginia