There is an incidental matter to which I shall refer in this connection. It is in regard to a statement made by Mr. Swinton. In his "Ultimo Suspiro" he gives the history of a meeting which he says took place on the 7th of April, 1865, between General Lee and his leading officers. He says that this meeting was a private council, and that the officers united in advising General Lee to surrender on that day—two days before the surrender took place at Appomattox. In describing that meeting he does me the grave injustice of putting my name among the officers who gave General Lee this advice. The truth of the matter is, I never attended any such meeting. I had no time to have done so. I was kept incessantly busy in the field during the days preceding the surrender at Appomattox. All night long of the 1st we marched with Field's division from Richmond to Petersburg, reaching that point at early dawn on the 2d. I at once went to General Lee's headquarters. I found him in bed in his tent. While I was sitting upon the side of his couch, discussing my line of march and receiving my orders for the future—this involving a march on the Five Forks—a courier came in and announced that our line was being broken in front of the house in which General Lee had slept. I hurried to the front, and as fast as my troops came up they were thrown into action to check the advance of the Federals until night had come to cover our withdrawal. We fought all day, and at night again took up our march, and from that time forward until the surrender we marched and fought and hungered, staggering through cold and rain and mud to Appomattox—contesting every foot of the way, beset by overwhelming odds on all sides. It was one constant fight for days and days, the nights even giving us no rest. When at length the order came to surrender, on the 9th, I ordered my men to stack their arms, and surrendered four thousand bayonets of Field's division—the only troops that General Lee had left me. I also turned over to General Grant 1,300 prisoners taken by the cavalry and by my troops while on the retreat. As to the conference of officers on the 7th I never attended, and of course did not join in the advice it gave to General Lee. Mr. Swinton has been clearly misinformed upon this point.
Reply to General Longstreet's Second Paper.
BY GENERAL J. A. EARLY.
General Longstreet is of the opinion that he is a very deeply-aggrieved man, because he has not been permitted, without question, to pronounce that General Lee's strategy in the Gettysburg campaign was very defective; that General Lee had lost his mind when he determined to deliver battle at Gettysburg, or, to use the language in which the idea is conveyed, that he had "during the crisis of the campaign lost the matchless equipoise that usually characterized him, and that whatever mistakes were made were not so much
