Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/809

1863-1864.] later, to $1,700,000,000 in June 1864, and reached its maximum August 31, 1865,—$2,845,907,626. But this lavish expenditure was directed with energy and judgment. The blockading fleets were kept in perfect order and with every condition of success. The railroad and telegraph were brought into systematic use for the first time in modern warfare. Late in 1863 Stanton, the secretary of war, moved two corps of 23,000 men from Washington to Chattanooga, 1200 miles, in seven days. A year later he moved another corps, 15,000 strong, from Tennessee to Washington in eleven days, and within a month had collected vessels and transferred it to North Carolina. Towards the end of the war, when the capacity of the railroad for war purposes had been fully learned, these sudden transfers of troops by the Federal Government almost neutralized the Confederate advantage of interior lines.

294. On the other hand, the Federal armies now held almost all the great Southern through lines of railroad, except the Georgia lines and those which supplied Lee from the South (§ 296). The want of the Southern people was merely growing in degree, not in kind. The

conscription, sweeping from the first, had become omnivorous; towards the end of the war every man between seventeen and fifty-five was legally liable to service, and in practice the only limit was physical incapacity. In 1863 the Federal Government also was driven to conscription. The first attempts to carry it out resulted in forcible resistance in several places, the worst being the “draft riots” in New York (July), when the city was in the hands of the mob for several days. All the resistance was put down; but exemptions and substitute purchases were so freely permitted that the draft in the North had little effect except as a stimulus to the States in filling their quotas of volunteers by voting bounties.

295. Early in 1864 Grant (§ 290) was made lieutenant-general, with the command of all the armies. He went to Washington to meet Lee, leaving Sherman to face Johnston at Dalton. Events had thus brought the two ablest of the Confederate generals opposite the two men who were the best product of the war on the Northern side. It remained to be seen whether Lee, with his army of northern Virginia, could resist the methods by which Grant and Sherman had won almost all the great tableland which occupies the heart of the country east of the Mississippi. And it remained to be seen, also, whether the reputation which Grant hid won at a distance from the political atmosphere of Washington would not wither in his new position. It was necessary for him to take the overland route to Richmond, or meet M‘Clellan's fate. He did not hesitate. Early in May 1864, with about twice as many men (125,000) as Lee, he entered the “Wilderness” on the other side of the Rapidan. At the same time he sent 30,000 men, under Butler, up the James river; but this part of his plan proved of comparatively little service.

296. Two weeks hard fighting in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania Court House (May 5-18), and four days more at North Anna (May 23-27), with flank movements as a means of forcing Lee out of positions too strong to be taken from the front, brought the army of the Potomac to Cold Harbor, in the immediate defences of Richmond. One assault, bloodily repulsed, showed that there was no thoroughfare in this direction. Lee had so diligently prepared that his position became stronger as he was driven into greater concentration; and Grant began to move along the eastern face of the line of Confederate fortifications, striking at them as he passed them, but finding no weak spot. As he crossed the James river and reached Petersburgh, he came at last into dangerous

proximity to the railroads which brought Lee's supplies from the South—the Weldon Railroad, running directly south, the Danville Railroad, running south-west, and the Southside Railroad, running west. At this end of his line, therefore, Lee kept the best part of his troops, and resisted with increasing stubbornness Grant's efforts to carry his lines farther to the south-west or to reach the railroads. Resorting to the plan which had been so effective with M‘Clellan, he sent Early on a raid up the Shenandoah Valley, to threaten Washington (July). But Early was not Jackson, and he returned with no more success than the frightening of the authorities at Washington. Grant put Sheridan in command in the valley, and he beat Early at Cedar Creek (October), scattering his army for the remainder of the war. In August Grant succeeded in seizing a few miles of the Weldon Railroad; but Lee brought his supplies in waggons round that portion held by Grant. Late in the year this was stopped by the destruction of some twenty miles of the road. Here Grant was himself stopped for the time. Lee had so taken advantage of every defensive position that Grant could not reach the nearer of the other two railroads without an advance of 15 miles, or the further one without a circuit of about 40 miles. The two armies remained locked until the following spring. Grant, however, was operating still more successfully elsewhere through Sherman.

297. Sherman (§ 295) had moved on the same day as

Grant (May 5). Johnston's retreat was skilfully conducted; every position was held to the last moment; and it was not until the middle of July that Sherman had forced him back to his strongest lines of defence—those around Atlanta. The Confederate forces could not retreat much beyond Atlanta, for the great central tableland here begins to fall into the plains which stretch to the Atlantic. Sherman had now been brought so far from his base that the two armies were much more nearly on an equality than in May; and Johnston was preparing for the decisive battle when Davis made Sherman's way clear. A feature in Davis's conduct of the war had been his extraordinary tendency to favouritism. He had been forced to take Johnston as commander in Georgia; and the widespread alarm caused by Johnston's inexplicable persistence in retreating gave him the excuse he desired. He removed Johnston (July 17), naming Hood (p. 789), a “fighting general,” as his successor. Before the end of the month Hood had made three furious attacks on Sherman and been beaten in all of them.

Moving around Atlanta, as Grant was doing around Petersburgh, Sherman cut the supplying railroads, and at last was able to telegraph to Washington (September 2), “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”

298. Hood, by the direct command of Davis, then adopted a course which led to the downfall of the Confederacy in the following spring. Moving from between Sherman and the open country, he set out for Tennessee, expecting to draw Sherman after him. Sherman sent Thomas (p. 790) to Nashville, called out the resources of the North-West to support him, and left Hood to his

march and his fate. Hood reached Nashville; but in the middle of December Thomas burst out upon him, routed his army, and pursued it so vigorously that it never again reunited. One of the two great armies of the Confederacy had disappeared; and Sherman, with one of the finest armies of the war, an army of 60,000 picked veteran troops, stood on the edge of the Georgia mountains, without an organized force between him and the back of Lee's army in Virginia.

299. In the meantime the presidential election of 1864 had taken place, resulting in the re-election of Lincoln,