1865. |
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bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting Peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
1
let us now return to a consideration of the operations of the armies of Grant and Lee, on the borders of the James and Appomattox rivers.
We have seen nearly all of the other armies of the Conspirators discomfited, and these, with those of Sherman and Johnston not far off, now demand our exclusive attention, for they, at the period we are considering, were about to decide the great question whether the Republic should live or die. Let us see in what manner that question was decided.
we left the armies of the Potomac and the James in winter quarters in front of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, with which he was defending the Confederate capital.
The left of the Army of the Potomac was maintaining its firm grasp on the Weldon road;2 and the Army of the James on the North side of that River, and forming the right of the besiegers, had its pickets within a few miles of Richmond.3 Sheridan was in good quarters at Kerns-town, near Winchester, full master of the Shenandoah Valley, from Harper's Ferry to Staunton, and bearing the honors of a major-general in the regular Army.4
Grant held the besieging forces in comparative quiet during the winter of 1864-65, their chief business being to keep Lee from moving, while Sherman, Thomas, and Canby were making their important conquests in accordance with the comprehensive plan of campaign of the General-in-chief.
To this business those forces were specially directed, when the operations against Wilmington, and Sherman's approach to the coast and his March through the Carolinas, were going on, for it was well known that the Conspirators were contemplating a transfer of both the Confederate Government and Lee's Army to the cotton States, where that of Johnston and all the other forces might be concentrated.
No doubt this would have been ordered by Davis before it was evidently too late, had not the politicians of Virginia clamored loudly against the abandonment of that State, and the almost certainty that the Army of Northern Virginia would not have been permitted to go.5
it was at about the close of March
before Grant was ready for a General movement against Lee. Meanwhile, there had been some events that broke the monotony of his Army in. Winter quarters; and Sheridan had been performing gallant and useful services North and west of Richmond.
To prevent Lee from receiving any supplies by the Weldon road, Meade sent Warren, early in December, with his own (Fifth) Corps, Mott's division of the Third Corps, and Gregg's mounted men, to destroy that
1 on entering upon his second term, Mr. Lincoln retained the members of his cabinet then in office. There had been some changes. For the public good he had requested Montgomery Blair to resign the offiee of post-master-general. He did so, and William Dennison, of Ohio, was put in his place. On the death of chief-justice Taney, a few months before, he had appointed Salmon P. Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury, to that exalted station, and Hugh McCulloch was placed at the head of the Treasury Department.
2 see page 861.
3 see page 862.
4 see page 372.
5 alluding to this contemplated abandonment of Richmond, Mr. Jones, in his Diary, says, after mentioning the gayety with which Davis and his aids had ridden past his House: “no one who beheld them would have seen any thing to suppose that the capital itself was in almost immediate danger of falling into the hands of the enemy; much less that the President himself meditated its abandonment at an early day, and the concentration of all the armies in the cotton States.”
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