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River and White House, and joined the besieging Army on the 26th of March.
He had swept out of existence the Confederate power northward of Richmond.
He had disabled full two hundred miles of railway, destroyed a vast number of bridges, and great quantities of stores, and inflicted a loss of several million dollars. His campaign was most potential in demoralizing the Confederate soldiers, and disheartening the people.
Sheridan's raid; the successful March of Sherman, through the Carolinas; the augmentation of the Union forces on the sea-board by the transfer thither of a part of Thomas's Army from Tennessee, and the operations in Alabama, satisfied Lee that he could no longer hope.
To maintain his position, unless, by some means, his Army might be vastly increased, and New and ample resources for its supply opened.
For these means of salvation he could not indulge a hope.
He had strongly recommended the emancipation and enlistment of the negroes, expressing a belief that they would make good soldiers; but the selfishness and the fear of the slaveholders opposed him. The wretched management of the Commissary Department, under Northrup, who was unlawfully kept at the head of it by Davis, because he was a willing instrument in his hands for every cruel work that was to be done, had not only caused immense numbers of desertions from the Army,1 because of inadequate and unwholesome subsistence, but the villainous way in which, by imprisonment and otherwise, the producers were robbed by the agents of that man, had caused wide-spread discontent and bitter feeling.2 the effect was a great decrease in production, for the producer was not certain that the fruits of his labor would not be taken from him without reward.
Viewing the situation calmly, Lee saw no hope for the preservation of his Army from starvation and capture, nor for the existence of the Confederacy, except in his breaking through Grant's lines and forming a junction with Johnston, in North Carolina.
He knew that the attempt to do so, would be perilous, but the least of two evils.
He chose it, and prepared for a retreat from the Appomattox to the Roanoke.
on the 24th of March, Grant issued instructions to Meade, Ord, and Sheridan,3 for a General movement on the 29th.
Lee had been, for several days, evidently preparing for some important movement, and, on the day after Grant issued his instructions, his Army made a bold stroke for existence in an attempt to break the National line at the strong Point of Fort Steadman, situated in front of the Ninth Corps of the Army of the Potomac, and forming a salient not more than one hundred yards distant from the Confederate intrenchments.
It was toward the extreme right of Grant's Army,
1 it was officially reported at about the first of March, 1865, that the number of deserters from the Confederate armies was about 100,000. the author of the Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac (Mr. Swinton), says, on the authority of General Johnston, that “two main armies of the Confederacy showed four men on their rolls to one in their ranks.”
2 Henry S. Foote, a member of the Confederate Congress, in his book on the Rebellion, speaks of Northrup as “servile and fawning to his Executive chief,” and of the “heartless tyranny practiced by this monster of iniquity in all the States of the South, in connection with the system of forcible impressment of produce, established,” as having never been equaled. “his brutal indifference to the sufferings of the Confederate soldiery,” Foote said, was notorious, yet Davis retained him in office for four years, against remonstrances. And direct charges of delinquency, and “proceedings of both houses of Congress ;” and he “never deigned to present his name to the Senate for the sanction of that body, up to the latest moment of his own official existence.”
3 these were commanders of three distinct and independent armies,--the Potomac, under Meade — the James, under Ord (who had succeeded Butler after the failure to capture Fort Fisher), and the cavalry, under Sheridan; but all acted as a unit under the General command of Grant.
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