Adam Badeau, Military history of Ulysses S. Grant from April 1861 to April 1865. Volume 2

[646] were earnest and determined, but never so frantic as the Southerners. Then, too, they were never so hard pushed; their territory was not invaded, their homes were not burned, their fields were not devastated, their families not impoverished. But the rebels had staked all, and could lose no more than all. They could take every risk, throw away every restraint, incur every danger.

This superior desperation of the enemy was an enhancement of Grant's difficulties, and from June to January another phase of the war went on. Although he had fought it out on the same line, he still had not won. He had reached the position he set out for in May, but had not yet cut the great southern roads leading into Richmond. He had shaken the whole fabric of the rebellion, and shattered, if he had not overthrown, its most powerful armies; but it was necessary to renew his combinations and adapt them to the shifting necessities. There was no change in the general plan or aim. Lee and Johnston's armies were still the principal object of his campaigns, and he still sought to compress and contract and drive to a single focus all the other and subsidiary forces of the rebels; still to destroy their resources, and exhaust their supplies, and annihilate their armies. But the method now was to hold Lee in Richmond, and to sweep all the other rebel forces towards the same point with his wide, encompassing command.

In September, Sherman captured Atlanta, but he still had the army of Hood to contend with; and although he had won a victory, as yet reaped none of its results. On the contrary, by the advance of Hood he was speedily placed in a more precarious