At the Bennett House one hundred feet east of this spot, General Joseph E. Johnston and Major General William T. Sherman met at noon on April 17, 1865, to discuss terms of a proposed surrender. They met there again on April 18 and wrote and signed a Basis of Agreement under which Johnston agreed to surrender all Confederate armies then in the field. President Andrew Johnson rejected those terms, ordered Sherman on April 24 to give forty-eight hours’ notice and then resume hostilities, and directed General Grant to go to Raleigh to direct military movements. Grant arrived in Raleigh on April 24 but, out of consideration for Sherman, did not assume command. On the evening of April 25, Johnston asked for another interview with Sherman to renew negotiations, and on April 26 at 2 P.M. the two generals met a third time at the Bennett House and signed the terms of a military convention under which 36,817 Confederate soldiers in North Carolina and 52,453 in Georgia and Florida laid down their arms. The site was regarded as the place where the military force of the United States of America finally triumphed and the principle of an indissoluble Union was established as inviolate, and also as the place of the Confederacy’s last stand in maintaining its ideal of indestructible states.