Chapter 75

Grant Appointed Lieutenant-General--Takes Command in Virginia--Battles of the Wilderness--The Two Armies--Battle of Cedar Creek--Sheridan's Ride--He Turns Defeat Into Victory--Confederate Disasters on Land and Sea--Farragut at Mobile--Last Naval Battle of the War--Sherman Enters Atlanta--Lincoln's Re-election--Sherman's March to the Sea--Sherman Captures Savannah--Thomas Defeats Hood at Nashville--Fort Fisher Taken--Lee Appointed General-in-chief--Confederate Defeat at Five Forks--Lee's Surrender--Johnston's Surrender--End of the War--The South Prostrate--A Resistance Unparalleled in History--The Blots on the Confederacy--Cruel Treatment of Union Men and Prisoners--Murder of Abraham Lincoln--The South Since the War.

The Confederacy having been dismantled in the Southwest--except in Texas, where secession simply awaited the result in other States--Virginia became the central battle-ground of the rebellion. There its chief energies were concentrated for the closing struggle, and there its greatest leader commanded. It was the part of wisdom, therefore, for the National Government to make its most successful general chief of all the National armies, with the understanding that he would personally direct operations in the most important field. Grant was appointed lieutenant-general in March, 1864, and he at once gave his attention to the Army of the Potomac, which Meade continued to command under his supervision. The Army of Northern Virginia was no longer the well-equipped host which had gained victory after victory in the earlier period of the war, but its spirit was undaunted, and Lee, as his resources diminished, displayed more signally than ever his remarkable military genius. The two great commanders were face to face, but not on the equal terms that in '62 or '63 would have presented a duel of giants. The Confederacy was falling, gradually, it is true, but the end was in sight. It was virtually confined to four States, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia, and these but shells that only needed Sherman's march to the sea to prove how hollow they were. General Grant fought his way through the battles of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania and Cold Harbor, and across the James River to Petersburg. His losses of men were enormous, but the strength of his army was maintained by a continuous supply of recruits from the North. Grant established his lines in front of Petersburg, and proceeded to reduce that place. He gave Lee no rest, and exhausted the Confederates with repeated surprises and attacks.

General Lee had about 50,000 men to defend two cities and a line of intrenchments enveloping both, thirty-five miles long, against about 150,000 men, a large proportion of them veterans, trained and steeled to war. The time had passed for offensive operations on any effective scale on the part of the Confederates, although a desperate dash now and then gave a false impression to the world outside that the Confederacy still had a vigorous vitality. While General Philip H. Sheridan, Chief of Cavalry of the Army of the Potomac, was at Winchester, October 19, General Jubal Early suddenly attacked Sheridan's forces at Cedar Creek, nearly twenty miles from Winchester. The attack was made at dawn, and proved a complete surprise. The National troops were defeated, and the roads were thronged with fugitives, while camp, and cannon and a large number of prisoners fell into the hands of the enemy. Sheridan was riding leisurely out of Winchester, when he met his routed troops. At once he dashed forward on his black charger, crying out to his men: "Face the other way, boys! Face the other way!" and, as he learned the extent of the disaster, he added: "We will have all the camps and cannon back again!" With courage revived by their leader's example, the Union troops rallied and turned upon the foe, recovering all the spoil, and virtually destroying Early's army.

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Disaster attended the Confederate cause on land and sea. The British cruiser Alabama, flying the Confederate flag, was defeated and sunk by the United States frigate Kearsarge, off the coast of France, in June, 1864. Admiral David Glasgow Farragut entered Mobile Bay, August 5, lashed to the mast of his flagship, the Hartford, and fought the last naval battle of the war. The monitor Tecumseh, which led the National vessels, was struck by the explosion of a torpedo, and sank with Commander Craven and nearly all her officers and men. Farragut, unshaken by this disaster, ordered the Hartford to go ahead heedless of torpedoes, and the other vessels to follow. He silenced the batteries with grapeshot, destroyed the Confederate squadron, and on the following day captured the forts with the assistance of a land force of 5000 men from New Orleans. The impatience of the Richmond government, chafing under its own impotence, hastened the catastrophe. General Joseph E. Johnston, who had succeeded Bragg, and who husbanded as far as compatible with an efficient defence the troops under his command, was removed to give way to General John B. Hood, who was willing to waste his forces in hopeless conflict with Sherman. On September 2 Sherman entered Atlanta.

The news of Lincoln's re-election by 212 electoral votes to 21 for McClellan, put an end to Confederate reliance on Northern sympathy and aid. Even the most sanguine now lost hope.

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After sending a part of his army under Thomas to cope with Hood, who had moved into middle Tennessee, Sherman started about the middle of November with 60,000 men on his famous march through Georgia to the seacoast. He destroyed the railroads, and devastated the country from which the Confederacy was drawing its supplies. Although I have never seen it mentioned in any publication regarding the war, I believe that previous to Sherman's march it was the purpose of the Confederate Government to retreat to North Carolina when too hardly pressed in Virginia. Otherwise there seems to be no explanation for the vast accumulation of provisions at Salisbury, which were certainly not intended or used for the Union prisoners at that place, and for the large stores of food at Charlotte. Sherman captured Savannah just before Christmas, and proceeded northward through the Carolinas. Meantime General Thomas had completely defeated Hood at the battle of Nashville, and dispersed his army, the remnant of which gathered again under General Joseph E. Johnston to oppose the march of Sherman. Fort Fisher, North Carolina, surrendered to General Alfred H. Terry and Admiral Porter in January, 1865.

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Lee, reduced to the last extremity at Richmond, and appointed in February, 1865, general-in-chief of armies which no longer had a real existence, decided to abandon the Confederate capital and effect a junction with Johnston. Sheridan prevented this by defeating the Confederates at Five Forks, April 1, and turning Lee's right and threatening his rear. Five Forks was the beginning of the end. Thirty-five thousand muskets were guarding thirty-seven miles of intrenchments, and on these attenuated lines General Grant ordered an immediate assault. The defences were found to be almost denuded of men. Petersburg and Richmond fell, and Lee, driven westward, surrendered at Appomattox, on April 9, the remains of the once proud Army of Northern Virginia, now numbering 26,000 ragged and starving soldiers. On learning that Lee's troops had been living for days on parched corn, General Grant at once offered to send them rations, and the Union soldiers readily shared their own provisions with the men with whom, a few hours before, they had been engaged in mortal strife. Lee bade a touching farewell to his troops, and rode through a weeping army to his home in Richmond. A fortnight afterward Johnston surrendered to Sherman, and with the surrender of the Confederate Trans-Mississippi Army, May 26, the war was at an end. The Confederate Government had fled from Richmond when Lee withdrew his army, and on May 10, Jefferson Davis was captured near Irwinsville, Ga., and sent as a prisoner to Fortress Monroe.

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We have read of the sieges of Numantia and of Haarlem, of Scotland's struggle for liberty under Wallace and Bruce, and of the virtual extinction of the men of Paraguay in the war against Brazil and Argentina; but history records no resistance on the part of a considerable population inhabiting an extensive region, under an organized government, worthy to compare in resolution, endurance and self-sacrifice, with that of the Southern Confederacy to the forces of the Union. When the war closed the South was prostrate. When the Governor of Alabama was asked to join in raising a force to attack the rear of Sherman he answered, no doubt truthfully, that only cripples, old men and children remained of the male population of the State. In their desperation the Southern leaders even thought of enlisting negroes, thus adding a grotesque epilogue to the mighty national tragedy. Of course even the most ignorant negro could not have been expected to fight for his own enslavement. I saw Richmond about a month before the surrender. It was like a city of the dead. Two weeks later I was in New York. It teemed with life and bustle and energy.

The blots on the Confederacy were the cruel persecution of Union men living in the South, who were, in many instances, dragged from their families and put to death as traitors, and the maltreatment of Union prisoners. The North tolerated Southern sympathizers, when not actually engaged in plotting against the government, and treated Southern prisoners with all the kindness possible. It has been said for the South that while Union prisoners were starving, the Confederate troops in the field were almost starving too. This is a dishonest subterfuge. The Southern troops were starving not because ordinary food was not plentiful in the Confederacy, but because of lack of transportation to carry the food from the interior to the front, while the Union prisoners perished from hunger in the midst of abundance. Again, even assuming the plea of scarcity to be true, that would not palliate the numerous murders of helpless prisoners by volleys fired into the stockades at the pleasure of the guards.[1] There was a vindictiveness in these crimes which no plea can extenuate.

[1] As one of the survivors of the massacre of November 25, 1864, at Salisbury, North Carolina, I know whereof I speak.

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The murder of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth removed the only man who could have done justice to the South and controlled the passions of the North. Lincoln was signally, providentially adapted to be the nation's guide in the struggle which, under his leadership, was brought to a successful conclusion. For the equally difficult task of reconstruction he was likewise admirably qualified, and his death was followed by a civil chaos almost as deplorable as armed disunion. From that chaos the American people gradually emerged by force of their native character and their fundamental sense of justice and of right. The South, for some years subjected to the rule of camp-followers and freedmen, gradually recovered from the devastation of war, and superior intelligence came to the top, as it always will eventually. The Southern people learned that they had other resources besides cotton, and they began to emulate the North in the development of manufactures and mines. The old slave-owning aristocracy in the South has disappeared, but the "poor whites" have also almost disappeared, and the average of comfort in that section is greater than at any period in American history. The negroes complain, and with too much cause, of political oppression and exclusion from the suffrage, but they seem to be on good terms with their "oppressors," and on the principle of the old Spanish proverb that "he is my friend who brings grist to my mill," the Southern black has no better friend than the Southern white.

Thirty Years of Peace.