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troops, and his subordinates showed greater power of carrying out such combinations harmoniously and successfully than had yet been seen in the war except in the Southern armies under Lee. On November 24, Sherman fought his way across the Tennessee river on the north of the town, and Hooker took possession of Look-out Mountain, a height to the south. Thus the whole Federal force was brought into line on the east side of the river. Bragg's army now lay opposite, on a line of heights. called Missionary Ridge, a strong position, but too extensive to be properly held by the diminished forces of the Confederates. The battle opened with a fierce attack by Sherman on the Confederate right. This compelled Bragg to weaken his centre. Grant then attacked with his main body, and after a hard struggle the Confederates were driven down the heights. The loss on each side was about five thousand. The victory of Chattanooga saved Knoxville. Sherman's troops, though wearied by the battle and their previous marches, were at once hurried off to relieve Burnside. Longstreet, on hearing of Bragg's defeat, made one desperate and unsuccessful assault on Knoxville, and then withdrew into Virginia.

The Conscription and the Riots of New York.-It was seen early in the war that the voluntary enthusiasm of the South was unequal to the support of so great a struggle. In the summer of 1862 an Act was passed by the Southern government, making all male citizens between eighteen and thirtyfive years of age liable for military service, with a special exemption in favor of certain professions. As the war went on, fresh acts were passed, extending the age, till at length no male between eighteen and fifty-three was exempt. The North, rich and able to offer liberal bounties, did not feel the need for compulsion so soon, but it came at last. In February, 1864, an Act was passed, making all male citizens between eighteen and forty-five liable for military duty. Payment or provision of a substitute was allowed in place of personal service. These measures were differently received in the North and in the South. The Southerners were, as we have said, thoroughly united, and fired by an enthusiastic passion for their cause. Moreover they felt that they were fighting to ward off invasion from their own homes. The population of the North had not the same direct and personal interest in the war.

Accordingly the ballot for conscripts at New York led to disturbances, which seemed at one time likely to endanger the city. Troops, however, were brought up, the municipality raised a fund to enable poor persons to pay for substitutes, and tranquillity was restored. It is remarkable, as showing how little sympathy New York had with the antislavery feeling of New England, that the negroes were made the special object of attack by the rioters.

Naval Operations.-All this while the blockade of the Southern ports was successfully maintained. By this means the staple commodity of the South, cotton, was rendered worthless. At the same time, fort after fort was taken along the Southern coast. The only two affairs of this kind which were important enough to need separate notice were the capture of Mobile by the Federals and their unsuccessful attempt upon Charleston. The attack on Charleston was undertaken rather for political than for military reasons. The place had always been the object of peculiar hatred in the North, as being the hotbed of secession. From a military point of view, any advantage that its capture might give was probably equalled by the fact that it kept thirty thousand men idle within its defences. On April 7, 1863, the Federal fleet of iron-clads entered the harbor and opened fire upon the works, but were utterly unable to stand against the guns of the forts. After an engagement lasting forty minutes the fleet retreated, and their commander, Admiral Dupont, declared that in another half hour every vessel would have been sunk. The Federal force then confined itself to detached attacks on Fort Wagner and Fort Sumter. The former was evacuated, the latter was bombarded till it was a heap of ruins. Nevertheless, the possession of it enabled the defenders of the place to impede the entrance of the harbor by the use of torpedoes and the like. Accordingly an attempt was made to dislodge them by an assault, but without success. Further south the Federals fared better. In the summer of 1864 Farragut attacked Mobile. The harbor was strongly fortified, and was a frequent resort for blockade-runners. With fourteen wooden ships and four iron-clads, Farragut forced his way in, destroyed the Confederate fleet in the harbor, and reduced the forts. Throughout the war the commerce of the Northern States was greatly harassed by Confederate cruisers, some of them built in British dock-yards. The most note

worthy of these was the Alabama, which was launched in July, 1862. During the next two years she captured sixty-five vessels, till she was at length destroyed by the Federal war-ship Kearsage, near Cherbourg harbor.

Grant's Plan of Campaign.-In the spring of 1864 Grant was appointed commander-in-chief of the whole Federal forces, under the title of Lieutenant-General, a distinction never conferred by the Federal government on any one since Washington. He undertook, and successfully carried out, a more definite and continuous policy than had hitherto been attempted. Yet, in comparing him with those who had gone before him, we must not overlook several advantages which he enjoyed. The Southern Confederacy was fast becoming exhausted. Every campaign was draining it both of men and resources. The North, on the other hand, was becoming more united and more alive to the necessity of vigorous efforts. Grant too could learn by the failures of his predecessors, and he was at the head of armies whom these very failures had trained and disciplined. Yet the clearness with which Grant saw what were the great leading movements needful for success, and the dogged courage and unwearied patience with which he strove for those ends, must ever give him a high place among great commanders. His policy was to abandon all minor movements, to concentrate the whole force of the Federal arms on two great lines of attack, and to penetrate the Southern States from the south-west and from the north. The superior resources of the North would, he knew, enable him to wear down the South by sheer hard fighting. He would be able to bring fresh soldiers into the field when the Southern armies were annihilated and there were none to fill their place.

Sherman's Invasion of the South-west.-One part of this scheme, the invasion of the west, was entrusted to the ablest of Grant's subordinates, Sherman, to whose support, as Grant ever frankly acknowledged, his earlier successes in the West were in a great measure due. Sherman's first point of attack was Atlanta in Georgia, an important centre of railway communication. It was about a hundred miles from Chattanooga, Sherman's point of departure. He set out early in May. His line of march lay along a railway which kept up his communication with Chattanooga. His army numbered nearly

a hundred thousand. The Confederate force opposed to him, under Johnston, was barely half that number. Johnston gradually fell back, impeding Sherman's advance and harassing him on every occasion, but avoiding a pitched battle. The march was, in Sherman's own language, "one gigantic skirmish." Johnston had never stood well with the Southern government, and his present policy met with no favor. On July 17 the command of the Confederate army was transferred to Hood. Whatever may be thought of Johnston's policy, it was hardly a well-chosen time for such a change. All the mischief that might result from Johnston's caution had now been done. His previous career showed that his retreat was not the result of weakness or indecision, but part of a deliberately arranged plan. To make a change now was to suffer all the mischief of such a plan and to forego the compensating gain. Hood at once adopted a bolder policy, but with no good result. He was defeated with heavy loss in a series of engagements round Atlanta. Sherman then marched to the west of Atlanta, and by threatening Hood's communication with the rear, forced him to evacuate the place.

On September 2, Sherman telegraphed to Washington "Atlanta is ours." His total loss in the campaign which ended thus was about thirty thousand, that of the enemy some ten thousand more. Merciless severity in his dealings with the inhabitants of the South, when the operations of war seemed to need it, was Sherman's fixed and deliberate policy. He was not wantonly, or even revengefully, cruel; but he went on the principle that the South could be crushed only by bringing home to the inhabitants a full sense of the miseries of war, and that no feeling of pity for them ought to stand in the way of any arrangement which could bring the war to a speedy end. In his own words, "war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it." In this spirit he ordered that all the inhabitants, without regard for sex, age, or sickness, should quit Atlanta, and he destroyed the buildings of the town, sparing only churches and dwelling-houses. The capture of Atlanta was but a step towards further ends. To penetrate into the heart of the Southern Confederacy was Sherman's ultimate aim. With this view he quitted Atlanta, abandoning his communications with the rear, and determining to maintain his army, nearly seventy thousand men, on the re

sources of the country and such supplies as he could carry with him. Hood, instead of opposing him, resolved to invade Tennessee; thus two invasions were going on simultaneously.

The object of Sherman's march was the city of Savannah. On November 14 he started, and from that time till he arrived at the sea no clear tidings of his army reached the North. On Dec. 20 a division of the army appeared before Fort McAlister, some fourteen miles from Savannah. The Federals had made more than one unsuccessful attack on this place from the sea, but it now fell at the first assault. General Hardee, who was in command of the Confederate forces at Savannah, found that it would be impossible to hold the place, and evacuated it. Sherman sent a message to the president announcing that he presented him, as a Christmas gift, with the city of Savannah. He had marched more than three hundred miles in thirty-six days, with a loss of little more than five hundred men. His own report stated that he had done damage to the amount of a hundred millions of dollars, of which eighty millions was sheer waste and destruction. The march of an invading army, subsisting on the country, must always be accompanied by great suffering to the inhabitants, and little was done by Sherman or his officers to lessen it. The absence of an enemy relaxed discipline, and the army became little better than a horde of savage plunderers. The negroes rushed in troops to the army and followed their march, hailing them as deliverers; but, as might be supposed, they could find no means of support, and perished in numbers from misery and hunger.

Hood's Defeat.-Widely different in its result from Sherman's invasion had been Hood's sortie into Tennessee. The army opposed to his was commanded by Thomas, and was stationed at Nashville. A detachment was sent forward under General Schofield to harass Hood and check his advance. Having done this successfully, Schofield fell back and joined the main body. On December 15 the two armies engaged in front of Nashville, and after two days' fighting the Confederates fled in confusion, hotly pursued. Their sufferings in the retreat were intensified by all the horrors of mid-winter. For the first time in the history of the war, a Southern army was not only repulsed, but utterly shattered and routed.

The Battles in the Wilderness.-In the meantime Grant had been himself endeavoring to carry out the other half of his scheme in Virginia. His ob ject was twofold; firstly, to destroy or cripple Lee's army; secondly, to capture Richmond. Accordingly he began by a direct advance on Richmond, intending if that failed to proceed against it on the south-east side, as McClellan had done two years before. The Federal army advanced in three bodies. The main body marched through the country in which the battle of Chancellorsville had been fought. The right wing, under Sigel, marched up the Shenandoah valley; the left, under Butler, near the coast between the Rappahannock and the James rivers. The country through which the main body marched was called the Wilderness. It consisted of tobacco-fields, thrown out of cultivation, covered with low, scrubby wood, and cut across by deep ravines. Most of the fighting throughout the war had been carried on in woody and broken country. This gave the battles a peculiar character. No one, in reading an account of the war, can fail to notice that the great battles often took several days, almost always more than one. From the nature of the ground, it was usually impossible for the general to carry out movements with great masses of troops, such as in the great battles of Europe have often decided the matter almost at a single blow.

Moreover, in a country where a foe could always approach unseen, troops were liable to be taken suddenly in flank. This led to the general use of roughly and hastily-constructed defences. Thus a great battle was often a series of petty sieges, the troops defending themselves in one post after another by felling trees and hastily throwing up earthworks. All these peculiarities were seen in the highest degree in the battles of the Wilderness. The centre of the Federal army, under Meade, numbered one hundred and forty thousand. Against this Lee could only bring sixty thousand men. Outnumbered as he was, Lee at first acted on the offensive. In the first engagement he lost ten thousand men, the enemy double that number. After this, Lee contented himself with holding his ground against the attacks of the Federals. In all the history of war, it would be hard to find an instance of an army making so brilliant and so successful a resistance against an enemy far superior both in numbers and in resources. Again and

again did Grant hurl his forces upon Lee's line, and each time he was forced by a flank movement to turn the position which he had failed to carry.

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After a month of this continuous carnage, Grant found himself on the south-east side of Richmond, with the Confederate line still unbroken and his own force lessened by sixty thousand men. His position was one which McClellan had reached with comparatively trifling loss. All that he had to compensate him was the enemy's loss of eighteen thousand men, a loss in reality more serious than his own, since they could not be replaced. South, too, had lost the services of Stuart and Longstreet. The former had fallen in some detached cavalry operations to the north-east of the main army. Longstreet, by a strange chance, had nearly met the same fate as Jackson. He and his staff as they rode along in front of his line were mistaken for Federal cavalry. The men fired, and Longstreet fell, seriously, though not, as was at first thought, mortally, wounded. In the meantime Butler's force had been checked by Beauregard. That general had formed the daring scheme of withdrawing fifteen thousand men from Lee's army, falling with his force thus strengthened on Butler, and then, if successful, attacking Grant's left flank. Jefferson Davis, however, refused to sanction this scheme, fearing that it would endanger Lee's army.

Early's Sortie.-The operations in the Shenandoah valley were important enough to need a separate notice. In the beginning of May Sigel was utterly routed by Breckenridge. Sigel resigned his command and was succeeded by Hunter. He obtained some trifling success, but was afterwards out-manoeuvred and forced to retreat into Western Virginia. Lee then, in hopes of creating a diversion, detached Early with twelve thousand men to threaten Washington. Hunter threw himself across Early's line of march, and, although defeated, created a hindrance and gave time for the defence of Washington. When the rumor came thither that Early had crossed the Potomac, the inhabitants at first mocked at all idea of danger. Extravagant terror soon took the place of over-confidence, and it was reported that Lee with sixty thousand men was marching on the capital. The danger was undoubtedly real, but troops arrived in time to make an attack impossible. Early, who had advanced

within a few miles of Washington, withdrew across the Potomac. In his march through Maryland he ravaged the country mercilessly, giving the inhabitants their first insight into the actual horrors of

war.

In the beginning of August, Grant sent Sheridan, one of the ablest of his subordinates, with forty-five thousand men, to act against Early. For some weeks nothing was done beyond skirmishing. On September 19, Sheridan attacked Early at Opiquan Creek and defeated him, with a loss of about five thousand men on each side. Sheridan then, obeying Grant's orders, utterly laid waste the valley. The alleged defence for this was the necessity of making it impossible for a Southern army to advance by that route against Washington. On October 19, Early surprised the Federal army at Cedar Creek. His attack was at first completely successful, but his forces became scattered and demoralized in pursuit, and betook themselves to plundering the enemy's camp and feasting. Sheridan rallied his troops, fell upon Early, and utterly defeated him, capturing all his stores and a large portion of his artillery. The actual loss of men was about equal, but the Confederates were driven out of the Shenandoah valley. Thus ended the last attempt of the South to carry the war into the enemy's country.

Re-election of Lincoln.-In the autumn of 1864 the presidential election took place. It seemed at first as if the parties would again be subdivided. A section of the Republicans were inclined to think that Lincoln would not show enough vigor in his dealings with the South. The more thoroughgoing of them still distrusted his views about slavery. They proposed to bring forward General Fremont, the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1856. Early in the war he had held command in the west, and had incurred the displeasure of the Federal government by his summary and, as it was thought, unconstitutional dealings with slavery. The Democrats too were divided into War Democrats and Peace Democrats. The representative of the former was General McClellan. The latter supported Governor Seymour of New York. The main difference between the two parties was, that the War Democrats, although opposed to abolition and in favor of state rights, refused to listen to anything like recognition of Southern independence. At last the

extreme wing of each party withdrew, and the contest lay between Lincoln and McClellan. The latter labored under many disadvantages. His military career, though respectable, had not been brilliant, and was now utterly eclipsed by Grant's

successes.

The time too was a bad one for putting forward the established doctrine of the Democrats, that of state rights. Moreover, as Lincoln himself put it in a homely way, it was not well to change horses while crossing a stream. These considerations were strong enough to enlist on the Republican side all those who were led rather by the special circumstances of the time, than by any fixed preference for either party, and Lincoln was elected by an enormous majority.

Fall of Richmond.-During the winter of 1864 the cause of the South became more and more hopeless. Lee's forces were gradually lessened by desertions and sickness, while he was straitened for supplies, both by mismanagement and by scarcity. In the meantime, Sherman was rapidly approaching from the South. At the end of January he left Savannah and advanced through South Carolina. Columbia, the political capital of that state, was evacuated, and Hampton, the Southern commander, in his anxiety to destroy the stores of cotton there, lest they should fall into the hands of the Federals, burnt down a large part of the city. A like fate befell Charleston. By the last week in March, Sherman had brought his army to the southern frontier of Virginia. Lee, it was clear, would, if he remained before Richmond, be crushed between the two Federal armies. His only hope was to join Johnston, who commanded the Confederate forces in South Carolina.

On March 25, a Confederate force under General Gordon attacked the Federal lines, in the hope of cutting a way through for the escape of the army. At the outset the attempt was successful, and Fort Steadman, a strong work on the Federal right, was seized. The Federals, however, rallied, repulsed their assailants, and recaptured the fort. On March 29, Grant resolved to strike a decisive blow. Sheridan, by a daring and skilful attack, utterly defeated the Confederate right. This was immediately followed by an attack on the whole. The Confederate lines were forced, and the defence of Richmond became impossible. On Sunday, April 2, the news of Lee's defeat was brought to Jefferson

Davis while he was in church. In a few hours the whole city was seized by a panic. As in Columbia and Charleston, the attempt to destroy the public property was followed by a fire, by which half of the town was destroyed. On April 3 the Federal flag floated over the Southern capital. Petersburgh was evacuated on the same day.

Surrender of the Confederate Armies.-The retreat of Lee and the fall of Richmond practically ended the war. The South might prolong the struggle, but all hopes of success were at an end. Yet men remembered how, after Antietam and Gettysburg, Lee's retreating army had turned upon its pursuers, and it yet seemed possible that some signal triumph might win for the South better terms than she could expect by an immediate surrender. But Lee's wearied, starving, disheartened forces, were no longer the same men who had conquered at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Through mismanagement, his supplies went astray, and, after April 5, his army had no food but such as it could glean from an exhausted country in the face of an ever-watchful enemy. The men were glad to feed on the shoots of trees, and the mules fell down in the road from weakness. Whole bodies of soldiers laid down their arms and surrendered, till Lee was left with little more than ten thousand men. By April 9 the energy of Sheridan had barred the path of Lee's retreating force. Once more Gordon tried to cut a way through, but in vain, and then Lee sent in a flag of truce.

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Grant allowed liberal terms of surrender. Southern soldiers were to become prisoners on parole, and were to return to their homes and stay there unmolested as long as they refrained from bearing arms. Men and officers alike were to retain those horses that had been their private property, a condition of no small importance to the Southern farmers. Grant and his officers left nothing undone which could lessen the bitterness of defeat, or relieve the sufferings of the Confederate troops. Lee's parting with his soldiers showed that he had won from them a love and confidence which no defeat or misfortune could lessen. War-worn men, with tears running down their cheeks, pressed round him to say farewell, and all personal distress seemed swallowed up in sympathy for their commander. Johnston's army soon shared the fate of Lee's. On April 18, Sherman and Johnston met

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