The International Ocean Telegraph

The Summer of 1865 was one of great relief for most citizens of the so-recently reaffirmed United States of America. A few weeks earlier, on April 12, Robert E. Lee had surrendered his Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to a victorious Ulysses S. Grant and, before the end of the following month, the last Confederate force of consequence remaining in the field, then serving under General Edmund Kirby Smith of St. Augustine, had followed suit. The nation had been shocked and saddened by the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln two days after Lee’s surrender, but to some extent the outrage over that crime had waned in the aftermath of the execution of the Lincoln conspirators on July 7