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

[376] moving at right angles with his own, and their junction at a point still in the enemy's hands was indispensable. Sherman himself declared: ‘Were I to express my measure of the relative importance of the march to the sea, and of that from Savannah northward, I would place the former at one, and the latter at ten, or the maximum.’¹

On the 29th of January, he wrote to Grant: ‘You may rest assured that I will keep my troops well in hand, and if I get worsted, will aim to make the enemy pay so dearly that you will have less to do. . . . I must risk Hood, and trust to you. . . . to hold Lee, or be on his heels, if he comes south.’ This was the last dispatch Grant had from Sherman till the 12th of March.

Amid all these movements of his great subalterns, the general-in-chief himself remained apparently quiescent; but he was not without his reasons for this course. On the 4th of February, he said to Stanton: ‘I do not want to do anything to force the enemy from Richmond until Schofield carries out his programme. He is to take Wilmington, and then push out to Goldsboro, or as near it as he can go, and build up the road after him. He will then be in a position to assist Sherman if Lee should leave Richmond with any considerable force, and the two together will be strong enough for all the enemy have to put against them. Terry is being reinforced from here with the fragments of divisions which were left behind when he started on his expedition. . . . I shall necessarily have to take the odium of apparent inactivity, but if it results, as I expect it will, in the discomfiture of Lee's army, I shall be entirely satisfied.’