Page History

"\[A\]t one point the President broke in to ask: 'Sherman, do you know why I took a shine to Grant and you?'
'''I don't know, Mr. Lincoln,' he replied. 'You have been extremely kind to me, far more than my deserts.'
"'Well, you never found fault with me,' Lincoln said.
"This was not true. Sherman had found a good deal of fault with the President over the past four years, beginning with the day he heard him say, almost blithely, 'Oh, well, I guess we'll manage to keep house.' But it was true from this day forward. For one thing, Lincoln had in fact managed to 'keep house,' though sometimes only by the hardest, and for another, now that Sherman knew him he admired him, perhaps beyond all the men he had ever known. Again at the wharf, he boarded the _Bat_ and set out down the James. Afterwards, looking back, he said of Lincoln, who had walked him to the gangplank: 'I never saw him again. Of all the men I ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other'" (857).

"\[Johnston\] got in touch with Sherman to arrange a third meeting and work out the details for surrender in accordance with the scaled-down terms. Two days later . . . they met again in the Bennett farmhouse and the matter was soon disposed of, including an issue of ten days rations for 25,000 paroled graybacks, offered by Sherman 'to facilitate what you and I and all good men desire, the return to their homes of the officers and men composing your army.' Johnston replied that 'the enlarged patriotism manifested in these papers reconciles me to what I previously regarded as the misfortune of my life \-\- that of having had you to encounter in the field.' On this high note of mutual esteem they parted to meet no more, though Johnston would die some twenty-six years later from the effects of a severe cold he contracted in New York while standing bareheaded in raw February weather alongside the other pallbearers at Sherman's funeral. 'General, please put on your hat,' a friend urged the eighty-four-year-old Virginian; 'you might get sick.' Johnston refused. 'If I were in his place,' he said, 'and he were standing here in mine, he would not put on his hat'" (996).