The March IX.

This is coolbert:

As described by E. L. Doctorow in his novel "The March", the negotiation, between Sherman and Confederate General Joe Johnston surrender with terms - - Johnston only at that moment made aware of the assassination of Lincoln:

"Johnston, an older man with a silver-white mustache and goatee and an impeccably fitted smart gray uniform, was clearly shocked when Sherman handed him the telegram. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. Surely, he muttered, you do not charge this heinous crime to the Confederate government. Never to you , sir, Sherman said, nor to General Lee. But of Jefferson Davis, and men of that stripe, I would not say as much. This is a disgrace to the age, Johnston said. I have always recognized in President Lincoln a man of compassion and forbearance. That if the war ended badly for us, he would mete out terms that were just and charitable."

Those terms of surrender and offered by Sherman and accepted by Johnston just and fair, even to a fault so. But necessary! Deemed as such, retribution and revenge as NOT sought by the Yankee. Terms "just and charitable" those states of the American South in rebellion to be brought back into the Union without malice further resistance on the part of recalcitrant secessionists not desired.

Those states comprising the Confederacy for a period of ten years in the aftermath of the war ruled by a military governor, under Federal control dictates of Reconstruction observed however without harshness or brutality.

Johnston at the funeral of Sherman many years later acting as a honorary pall bearer having caught a cold from which the man [Johnston] expired two weeks later. Such was the respect one senior commander had for the other.

"He caught a cold that day, which developed into pneumonia and he died several weeks later in Washington, D.C"

coolbert.