I Felt Like Anything Rather Than

From Grant's Personal Memoirs, describing his state of mind at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, as he received Robert E. Lee's surrender. Grant wrote that he felt "sad and depressed" rather than triumphant, because he saw in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia men who had "fought so long and valiantly and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought." His magnanimity in victory — allowing Confederate soldiers to keep their horses, prohibiting any formal ceremony of surrender — set the tone for Reconstruction and was later praised by Lee himself. The passage is among the most admired in American military memoir writing.