similar to those that he had negotiated with Lee at Appomattox. Johnston, ignoring instructions from President Davis, accepted those terms on April 26, 1865, formally surrendered his army and all the Confederate forces in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. This was the largest single capitulation of the war. Sherman proceeded with some of his troops to Washington, where they marched in the Grand Review of the Armies on May 24, 1865. Slavery and emancipation Sherman was not an abolitionist before the war and, like others of his time and background, he did not believe in "Negro equality". Before the war, Sherman expressed some sympathy with the view of Southern whites that the black race was benefiting from slavery, although he opposed breaking up slave families and advocated that laws forbidding the education of slaves be repealed. Throughout the Civil War, Sherman declined to employ black troops in his armies. In his Memoirs, Sherman commented on the political pressures of 1864–1865 to encourage the escape of slaves, in part to avoid the possibility that "able-bodied slaves will be called into the military service of the rebels". Sherman rejected this, arguing that it would have delayed the "successful end" of the war and the "[liberation of] all slaves". According to Sherman, Tens of thousands of escaped slaves nonetheless joined Sherman's marches through Georgia and the Carolinas as refugees. Their fate soon became a pressing military and political issue. Some abolitionists accused Sherman of doing too little to alleviate the precarious living conditions of these refugees, motivating Secretary of War Stanton to travel to Georgia in January 1865 to investigate the situation. On January 12, Sherman and Stanton met in Savannah with twenty local black leaders, most of them Baptist or Methodist ministers, invited by Sherman. According to historian Eric Foner, "the 'Colloquy' between Sherman, Stanton, and the black leaders offered a rare lens through which the experience of slavery and the aspirations that would help to shape Reconstruction came into sharp focus." After Sherman's departure the spokesman for the black leaders, Baptist minister Garrison Frazier, declared in response to Stanton's inquiry about the feelings of the black community: Four days later, Sherman issued his Special Field Orders, No. 15. The orders provided for the settlement of 40,000 freed slaves and black refugees on land expropriated from white landowners in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Sherman appointed Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton, an abolitionist