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Many Southerners assumed that Northern fury would result in the execution of all the leading Confederates. Henry Feilden had heard that President Johnson was “burning with hatred against the South” (which was untrue, though Johnson did exclude owners of plantations worth more than $20,000 before the war from pardon), yet his own experiences showed him there was hope of eventual reconciliation between the two sides. He encountered mostly kindness from Federal troops as he slowly made his way to Charleston. Two Northern officers “acted as well as they could and were as kind and accommodating as possible,” he told Julia. “For instance they insisted on paying all the expenses. We helped them to drink three bottles of whiskey en route. At Branchville they got the US officer to put our horses on the car and saved us 65 miles ride. By the way,” he added, “the 102nd US Colored troops gave us lunch there.”53

President Andrew Johnson proclaimed a general amnesty on May 29, 1865, three days after the surrender of the last Southern army in the field, General Edmond Kirby-Smith’s Army of the Trans-Mississippi. The war was officially at an end, but for many people it was not over. During the past four years, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell had rarely been absent from her work, training nurses at the New York Infirmary for Women; she tried to explain her state of mind to Barbara Bodichon, her friend in England:

You cannot hardly understand and I cannot explain how our private lives have all become interwoven with the life of the nation’s. No one who has not lived through it can understand the bond between those who have.… Neither is it possible without this intense and prolonged experience to estimate the keen personal suffering that has entered into every household and saddened every life.… The great secret of our dead leader’s popularity was the wonderful instinct with which he felt and acted … he did not lead, he expressed the American heartbreak … it has been to me a revelation to feel such influence and to see such leadership. I never was thoroughly republican before … but I am so, thoroughly, now.54

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38.1 A former British Army officer in the Confederate army, Henry O’Brien, lay among the wounded, left for dead by his comrades. He had not expected the war to come to this: “I came to this country last winter,” he explained a few weeks later from prison, his life having been saved by a Federal surgeon. “[I ran] the blockade at Wilmington, NC through a love of adventure and a desire of seeing something of active service on this continent.”8

38.2 Her first performance, on October 15, 1858, had coincided with Lincoln’s final U.S. Senate campaign debate against Stephen A. Douglas. Although Douglas went on to represent Illinois in the Senate, Lincoln’s extraordinary eloquence and clarity regarding the future of slavery had catapulted him to national prominence.

38.3 Consul Archibald broke Foreign Office protocol for the first time in his life to attend a memorial service organized by the British community in New York. He defended his action to Sir Frederick Bruce, arguing that to stay away would have offended not only his own sensibilities but also the entire city’s.

38.4 A paroled Confederate general, Cadmus Wilcox, who bumped into Thomas Conolly in New York on April 22, wrote: “[I] met Conley [sic] the first night. He gave an amusing account of his leaving Richmond in the night and his difficulties in reaching the Baltimore-Ohio railroad. He urged me to go to Ireland with him and, supposing I wanted money, offered me his purse freely.”

38.5 Leslie Stephen prepared a devastating critique of The Times’ reporting on the war, which he published later that year under the title “The Times and the American Civil War.” The thirty-three-page pamphlet carefully dissected each report and essay for its bias and misrepresentation of facts.

38.6 The bulk of the money disappeared and has never been found.

38.7 The Scotsman William Watson was in Havana trying to salvage some of his profits