PREPARATIONS FOR THE DECISIVE BLOW
The situation of the Confederates was now desperate in the extreme.
During January an expedition ordered by Grant captured Fort Fisher, at
the mouth of Cape Fear river, and made itself master of Wilmington,
North Carolina. New Orleans had long ago fallen, Mobile had been
completely closed by Farragut's Bay fight and Sherman had secured
possession of Savannah. Charleston was the only Southern port still in
possession of the Confederates, and Sherman was already threatening
that from the rear in such fashion as to render it useless as an avenue
of supplies.
The county west of the Mississippi was completely cut off. Georgia
had been desolated and all the railroads that might otherwise have
carried supplies from Alabama and Mississippi to Lee's army were
destroyed. Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana were
in possession of Federal troops. Sheridan had reduced the Valley
of Virginia to the condition of a desert, while Grant's forces at
Petersburg held the Weldon railroad and were rapidly pushing their
works toward the South Side railroad which connected Petersburg with
Lynchburg. They were also threatening the Richmond and Danville
railroad--Lee's last line of communication southward.
In the meanwhile Sherman was preparing to move northward from Savannah,
opposed only by Johnston's army of fragments, and to form a junction
with Grant.
Obviously the end was drawing near. Obviously it was the duty of the
Confederate Government to make the best terms it could for the ending
of the war. It still had Lee's army, and that army was even yet a force
to be reckoned with by its adversary. It could still offer to the enemy
a choice between the granting of favorable terms of peace on the one
hand and the endurance of such further slaughter as Lee's army could
inflict on the other. The Confederacy still had in its hands a fighting
capacity that might serve as legal tender in the purchase of peace
conditions. It was perfectly well known that Mr. Lincoln and indeed the
whole North were eager to end the war upon any reasonable terms that
might secure the restoration of the Union without a further effusion of
blood or a further expenditure of the nation's substance.
It was absolutely certain now that the Confederacy could never win
its independence. It was absolutely certain that every day's further
fighting must reduce that resisting capacity upon which alone the
Southern people could rely as a means of securing terms other than
those of unconditional surrender.
In view of these obvious conditions an effort was made in February,
1865, to bring about a peace. A Confederate Commission, with Alexander
H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, at its head, met Mr.
Lincoln and others on board ship in Hampton Roads to discuss the
question of ending the war. Mr. Lincoln and his advisers were eager
to stop the conflict without further bloodshed. They demanded only the
restoration of the Union and the abolition of slavery in accordance
with the terms of the emancipation proclamation. All else they were
willing to concede. They were ready to admit all the seceding states
to the Union again upon equal terms; to grant universal amnesty;
to recognize all the state governments; to set free all military
prisoners; to give up all property held in capture; and to negotiate
for money compensation in every case in which hardship should appear to
have been inflicted upon individuals.
In brief Mr. Lincoln's supreme desire to end the war in a complete
restoration of Union, and to reëstablish fellowship and good will among
the states was so dominant that the South might at that time have made
any terms it pleased, short of a dissolution of the Union, or the
reëstablishment of slavery.
Mr. Jefferson Davis decreed otherwise. Perfectly knowing that the
Confederate capacity of resistance was nearing its end, and perfectly
knowing that the restoration of the Union was with Mr. Lincoln a
_sine qua non_ of all negotiations, he deliberately and emphatically
instructed the Confederate Commissioners not even to discuss that
proposal. He thus practically forbade all negotiations for peace.
With the Confederacy manifestly conquered Mr. Davis insisted that its
commissioners should adopt the attitude of conquerors, dictating terms
of peace to a vanquished enemy.
The result was foredoomed, of course. Speaking of the affair years
afterwards Mr. Stephens pithily said:
"Mr. Davis carefully spiked all our guns and then ordered us to the
front."
It was about this time that Lee visited Mr. Davis and explained the
situation to him. He set forth the fact that Grant, with his enormously
superior force, could indefinitely extend his lines to the left, thus
compelling the Confederate commander to stretch out his own lines
to nothingness; that Grant could, and surely would, concentrate an
overwhelming force at some point and there irresistibly break through
the Confederate lines of defenses; and that when this should be done,
successful retreat would be impossible to the Confederate army.
There is good historical ground for the belief that General Lee at that
time proposed an alternative course of action. He asked Mr. Davis to
give him the negroes of the South as soldiers; to permit him to put
them into the defensive works, and thus set his veterans free to make a
last desperately determined invasion of the North; or, if the negroes
were denied to him, that he should be permitted to abandon the defense
of Richmond and Petersburg, while retreat was yet possible, retire to
the line of the Roanoke river, form a junction with such other forces
as the Confederacy still had at command and make a final stand in the
far interior against Grant.
It is credibly reported that Mr. Davis resolutely refused to permit
General Lee to carry out either of these alternative plans; that he
refused to permit the enlistment of negroes and at the same time
forbade General Lee to withdraw his army from the defense of Richmond
and Petersburg.
There was left to the great Confederate commander only the duty of
returning to his headquarters, resisting while resistance was possible,
and accepting the inevitable end whenever the advance of spring and
the consequent hardening of the roads should open the way for Grant to
bring that end about by a decisive movement.
The time was not yet ripe for the delivery of the final blow. Mud still
stood in the way; but while awaiting his opportunity Grant continued
those operations in other quarters which effectually prevented Lee's
reinforcement and contributed in important ways to the accomplishment
of his ultimate purpose. He kept Canby pounding at Mobile. He drew from
Thomas in Tennessee strong reinforcements for the Army of the Potomac.
In February he directed Sheridan to move up the Valley of Virginia in
irresistible force, brush the remnant of Early's army out of existence,
destroy the locks of the James river and Kanawha canal, cut the
railroad communications and then sweep like a hurricane eastward to
join the main army before Petersburg and Richmond. At the same time he
ordered a column to move from Chattanooga eastward toward Lynchburg,
destroying the railroad as it marched and thus additionally hemming Lee
in and crippling him.
In the meanwhile his own pounding on Lee's lines was ceaseless. The
object of this was to occupy all of Lee's attention and prevent him
from detaching troops for operations in any direction.
Grant's lines now extended from a point north of Richmond, eastward,
southward and westward to positions south and west of Petersburg,
and at every opportunity he was pushing his left wing farther around
Lee's flank, with the double purpose of still further weakening the
Confederates by attenuation and rendering impossible the successful
retreat of the Army of Northern Virginia when the time should come to
concentrate an overwhelming Federal force against some point in it and
break through.
To meet this strategy General Lee undertook a bold operation on
the twenty-fourth of March which was brilliantly, but in the end
unsuccessfully, executed by General Gordon. His plan was by an attack
upon the Federal left wing to compel Grant for a time to contract his
lines on the left and thus to secure to the Confederates a way out of
the net in which they had been enmeshed. The attack was made in the
night, a fact which would have rendered it perilous in the extreme
had the troops that made it been other than war-worn veterans. At the
point selected for assault the Federal and Confederate lines lay within
one hundred yards of each other, and both were strongly fortified.
By an adroit movement the Confederates captured the whole body of
Federal pickets and sent them as prisoners to the rear, thus reducing
the distance between themselves and the earthworks to be assaulted to
less than fifty yards. Then with a rush they hurled themselves upon
the Federal works and carried them. For a time it seemed likely that
they would crumple up the whole of Grant's left wing and compel the
contraction of his lines by several miles. But General Parke, who
commanded the Federal forces in that quarter, made hurried dispositions
to check the Confederate assault, and after some hours of hard
fighting, in which the Confederates lost 4,000 men and the Federals
2,000, the Federal lines were reëstablished.
All this occurred just before Grant's final and decisive blow was
delivered. Earlier in the war this conflict would have been everywhere
heralded as a great battle. In the spring of 1865--so used had the
country become to such things--it was a scarcely noticed incident in
the siege operations about Petersburg.