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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.