Loring was paroled at Greensboro, North Carolina on May 1, 1865. Old Blizzards now led his men on their final mission, accompanying them back to their homes in Alabama and Mississippi. In November, writer Whitelaw Reid visited Meridian, Mississippi. During a conversation at a local boarding house, someone questioned Joseph Johnston’s business acumen (the general had recently started an express company), saying he had heard people suggest that Johnston was probably not the best choice to manage a struggling enterprise. As Reid later recounted, one man in the room begged to differ:

“They were fools, then, who hadn’t sense enough to understand General Johnston. He’s the ablest man in the country, and everybody but a blockhead knows it.”

I looked around in some little surprise. The tone indicated that the speaker did not mean to be personally rude, though the language certainly grazed the border of politeness. In the dim firelight I made out a soldierly-looking personage with an empty coat sleeve. When he went to the window, a moment later, some one whispered, “That’s General Loring, a classmate of Joe Johnston’s, and one of his Division Generals.”

By the way, the feeling was mutual. Despite Loring’s legendary disagreements with commanders like Lee, Jackson, and Pemberton, Joseph Johnston had nothing but respect for Old Blizzards. In a letter written shortly after the end of the war, Johnston apologized for Loring’s lack of promotion:

...it may not be inappropriate on my part, to offer the only evidence I now can of my appreciation of your military character.

When removed from command, in July last, it was my intention to urge strongly your promotion to the first vacant Lieut. Generalcy....The services to which I should have referred, as having earned those promotions, were in Mississippi and Northern Georgia, under my own eye, as undoubted proof of competency, I should have pointed to your command of Polk’s corps after his death.

Following the Civil War, Loring did not renounce his citizenship and flee the country, as some accounts erroneously suggest. Instead, he moved to the financial heart of his former foe, performing work for the banking industry in New York City. Loring served as a consultant on Southern investment matters, with an office located at 36 New Street, just one block from Wall Street. While his new profession was certainly respectable, it was far removed from the exciting life that Loring had left behind. That’s why, in 1869, he jumped at the chance to embark on a new adventure.