Sherman proceeded to rendezvous at Goldsboro with the Union troops that awaited him there after the captures of the coastal cities of New Bern and Wilmington. In late March, Sherman briefly left his forces and traveled to City Point, Virginia, to confer with Grant. Lincoln happened to be at City Point at the same time, making possible the only three-way meeting of Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman during the war. Also present at the City Point conference was Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. This meeting was memorialized in G. P. A. Healy's painting The Peacemakers. After returning to Goldsboro, Sherman marched with his troops to the state capital, Raleigh, where Sherman sought to communicate with Johnston's army regarding possible terms for ending the war. On April 9, Sherman relayed to his troops the news that Lee had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House and that the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia had ceased to exist. Confederate surrender Following Lee's surrender and the assassination of Lincoln, Sherman met with Johnston on April 17, 1865, at Bennett Place in Durham, North Carolina, to negotiate a Confederate surrender. At the insistence of Johnston, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and Confederate Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge, Sherman conditionally agreed to generous terms that dealt with both military and political issues. On April 20, Sherman dispatched a memorandum with those terms to the government in Washington. Sherman believed that the terms that he had agreed to were consistent with the views that Lincoln had expressed at City Point, and that they offered the best way to prevent Johnston from ordering his men to go into the wilderness and conduct a destructive guerrilla campaign. However, Sherman had proceeded without authority from Grant, the newly installed President Andrew Johnson, or the Cabinet. The assassination of Lincoln had caused the political climate in Washington to turn against the prospect of a rapid reconciliation with the defeated Confederates and the Johnson administration rejected Sherman's terms. Grant may have had to intervene to save Sherman from dismissal for having overstepped his authority. The U.S. Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, leaked Sherman's memorandum to The New York Times, intimating that Sherman might have been bribed to allow Davis to escape capture by the Union troops. This precipitated a deep and long-lasting enmity between Sherman and Stanton, and it intensified Sherman's disdain for politicians. Grant then offered Johnston purely military terms,