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in advance the terms that
Grant would impose on
Lee. This fact he has repeatedly stated to me. Matters of such consequence he never decided until the moment for decision came, and he never in his life arranged the details of any matter until it was presented to him for actual determination.
Thus, until he knew that he had the remains of the army of
Lee within his grasp, he did not reduce to form, even in his own mind, the exact conditions upon which he would allow it to surrender.
He had indeed long felt that when the war was ended there should be no vindictive policy toward the vanquished, and he informed
Lee at once when they met that he meant to accept paroles; but the important final provision, that which gives all its peculiar character to the capitulation, was unstudied, and its language spontaneous.
Yet the language is as precise as words can make it, and enunciates a policy which has done as much as victory itself to secure the results of the war. ‘Each officer and man will be allowed to return to his home,
not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they reside.’
The terms, however, were not in the least the result of chance, or carelessness, or indifference.
They were the legitimate outgrowth of Grant's judgment and feeling; the consequence of all that had gone before; embodied then for the first time, because then for the first time the necessity for the embodiment had arrived.
In this way Grant always did his greatest things.
It may be strange or inexplicable, but he could not often explain his methods, nor, indeed, always his reasons.
He had at this moment no defined large views about separating the military from the civil power, far less any intent of encroaching on the domain or prerogative of politics.
He did not even, like Sherman, take into consideration the fate or condition of other forces of the enemy, although he was General-in-Chief; he confined himself strictly
