lees] Capture of Davis. Final surrenders. 543 extended no further than Greensborough, whence they continued their journey with the aid of such vehicles and horses as they could scrape together. For a while their escort was swelled by little detachments that had broken away when Johnston surrendered his army ; and, when Davis joined his family at Abbeville, South Carolina, they were provided with a comfortable waggon-train. From this time, however, under rumours of swift pursuit, the disintegration of the escort was rapid; and when finally the presidential party was arrested at daylight on May 10, in their camp near Irwinville in southern Georgia, by a detachment of Federal cavalry under command of Colonel Pritchard, there remained together only Jefferson Davis, six members of his family, Postmaster- General Reagan, seven staff officers, several servants, and twelve private soldiers. The government had offered a large reward for the capture of Davis, under the supposition that the Southern president had been an ac- complice in the assassination of President Lincoln ; but the allegation was eventually proved false. After an imprisonment of about two years in Fortress Monroe, he was indicted and arraigned for the crime of treason, and liberated on bail. Pending a motion to quash the indictment, President Johnson, on December 25, 1868, issued a general proclamation of amnesty which included Davis; and he thereafter remained at liberty at his home in Mississippi until his death, which occurred at New Orleans, while he was visiting that city, on December 6, 1889. Two days before the capture of Jefferson Davis, General Richard Taylor surrendered to General Canby the Confederate forces in the States of Alabama and Mississippi, 42,293 in number ; and on May 26 General E. Kirby Smith surrendered to General Canby the final remnant of all the Confederate armies, some 17,686 men, under his command in the trans-Mississippi department. If the warlike strength of the government of the United States had been fully tested during four years by the valour and patriotism of an average of a million armed men, the power of its civil authority was now demonstrated in an equally shining example, by their devotion to law and then* love of peace. Two days after the surrender of Johnston to Sherman, the Secretary of War ordered every chief of bureau in his department to begin immediately the reduction of expenses to a peace footing. A few days before General E. Kirby Smith made a formal surrender of the last fragments of Confederate military organisation still under arms in the immense department west of the Mississippi river, the two great armies of Grant and Sherman were assembled at Washington on their homeward march, where on May 23 and 24 they passed in a last grand review along Pennsylvania Avenue, and before President Johnson, surrounded by the various state dignitaries in a temporary pavilion erected in front of the White House. From this magnificent pageant of two days' duration, they returned to their ce. xvi.
