This noble utterance expressed the best thought of the North, with deepest interpretation of the Civil War-the cause of the war and the immediate duty of the American people to bring that war to a speedy end and the Nation to its own.

The collapse of the Confederacy was now swiftly approaching. Sherman did not long delay at Savannah, but on February 1st started northward with his army, for Goldsborough, North Carolina, which he reached, March 23d: a march of fifty days and 425 miles. The army destroyed property as on the march through Georgia. Columbia, the capital, was burned despite the efforts of Colonel Stone, of the Union army, to prevent it: but the place was filled with drunken soldiers and negroes. On February 18th, while yet Columbia was burning, the Confederates evacuated Charleston, first setting fire to the city. As South Carolina had led the way in secession and brought on the war, Sherman's soldiers felt harshly toward its people, and the stragglers did not refrain from many acts of pillage and wanton destruction. They who had precipitated war were now tasting war. General Sherman forbade outrage and pillage and many soldiers were punished for attempting such acts. Throughout Sherman's long march, from Atlanta, as Sherman himself testified, he heard of but two cases of rape. But the destruction wrought by his army cannot be easily estimated or described. It was war in its fiercest aspect to a people engaged as were those of the interior of the South, in peaceful pursuits-raising food and supplies for themselves and the soldiers they had sent to the Confederacy. On March 11th, Sherman was at Fayetteville and immediately communicated with General Grant; the commanding general and the secretary of war had followed his march with the aid of the Richmond papers, but until March 8th had not had direct word from him. Fayetteville contained an arsenal which Sherman destroyed, as he had destroyed arsenals at Cheraw and Columbia. He had also destroyed the railroad system of the two States

through which he had passed, thus cutting off Lee's supplies from the lower South.

On February 23d, General Joseph E. Johnston, at the time residing in Lincolnton, North Carolina, received orders from Richmond, and from General Lee, recently made general-in-chief of the Confederate armies, to assume command of the Army of Tennessee and all troops in the Department of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, and to "concentrate all available forces and drive back Sherman." This appointment was made by Davis at the insistence of public opinion at the South, and not with any diminution of the antagonism which existed between the two men. It was Lee, not Davis, who finally made the appointment. From the time of his reappointment, however, the holiday trip of Sherman's army was over and serious fighting began. At City Point, March 27th, Sherman met Grant and Lincoln. Grant and Sherman, in reply to Lincoln's wish that another battle might be avoided, agreed in the opinion that one last bloody battle must be fought unless Davis and General Lee decreed otherwise.

"Grant appears at his best," writes the historian Rhodes, "in the final operations of his army. He is the Grant of Donelson, Vicksburg and Chattanooga, with the judgment developed through larger experience and the discipline of adversity. The full reports and detailed despatches admit us to the actual operations of his mind as he surveys the vast field over which his armies, always in touch with him, move to their several tasks in his grand strategy. He combined self-confidence with caution. He did not underestimate his enemy; he did not, as he perceived the successful operation of his plans, give way to elation, thinking the work was done when it was only half done. But he was not so cautious that he did not move forward boldly without fear of the result. In Sherman and Sheridan he had helpers on whom he could rely as if each were another self. Seeing things alike they were in complete sympathy with him; they comprehended his orders and carried them out in letter and

in spirit as did no other of his subordinates. Sherman's marching and fighting were now over, but Sheridan was to be to Grant a prop and a weapon such as Stonewall Jackson had been to Lee in his earlier campaigns. With the force immediately under him Grant had, besides Sheridan, an efficient coadjutor in Meade, and good corps commanders in Warren, Humphreys, Ord, Wright and Parke. At the commencement of the Appomattox campaign he had in this army 113,000 men while Lee mustered 49,000."

On March 29th, Grant began his "movement by the left" and by night had an unbroken line from Dinwiddie Court House to the Appomattox River. He wrote Sheridan: "I feel now like ending the matter if it is possible to do so without going back." On April 1st, Sheridan dealt the Confederates a fatal blow in the battle of Five Forks. Lee evacuated Petersburg and Richmond next day. Jefferson Davis was at St. Paul's Church, Sunday, April 2d, and the clergyman had read the prayer for the President of the Confederacy, when a messenger brought news from the War Department of the disaster which had befallen Lee at Five Forks and the general's advice to abandon Richmond. The remainder of the day was spent by Davis and his Cabinet in preparations for flight; at 11 o'clock that night the Confederate government was speeding southward over the Richmond and Danville road, reaching Danville in safety about twenty-four hours later. General Lee had given orders that all stores that could not be removed from Richmond should be burned, and early in the morning, April 3d, the city was on fire and given over to plunder. When the Union troops under General Weitzel entered the city, between eight and nine in the morning, their first effort was to fight the flames and restore order, but before this was effected much of the city had been destroyed. Lincoln was at City Point when news came of the evacuation of Richmond and Petersburg and he immediately went to the latter place, remained with Grant an hour and a half, and announced to Stanton that he would go to Richmond next day. His

visit to Richmond on the 4th was thirty-six hours after Davis had left. "Never in the history of the world," remark Nicolay and Hay, "did the head of a mighty nation and the conqueror of a great rebellion enter the captured chief city of the insurgents in such humbleness and simplicity. As the party stepped from the barge, they found a guide among the contrabands who quickly crowded the streets; for the probable coming of the president had been circulated through the city. Ten of the sailors, armed with carbines, were formed as a guard, six in front and four in rear, and between these the party, consisting of the President, Admiral Porter, Captain C. B. Penrose of the army, Captain A. H. Adams of the navy, and Lieutenant W. W. Clemens of the signal corps, placed themselves, all being on foot; and in this order the improvised street procession walked a distance of perhaps a mile and a half to the centre of Richmond." The president passed the night in Richmond and returned to City Point next morning.

Lee's army was surrounded; Sheridan was in possession of the Richmond and Danville railroad which had both brought supplies to the Confederates and kept open a way of retreat southward. Many accounts of what followed have been written. Grant clearly saw the end; Lee still indulged in the illusion of escape or of a junction with Johnston's army and an indefinite prolongation of the war. On the 7th a number of his general officers made known to him through one of their number their belief that further resistance was useless. General Lee thought it too soon, and his army too strong to surrender; and he did not like to open negotiations. General Grant, desiring to stop the useless strife, sent Lee this summons on the 7th:

"The results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the party of the army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood, by asking of you