Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [445]
Sherman’s March to the Sea proved devastating to Southern property and countryside. Frank Blair, whose troops played a major role in the historic march, rationalized the indiscriminate destruction in a letter to his father: “We have destroyed nearly four hundred miles of Railroad, severing the western from the Eastern part of the Confederacy, and we have burned millions of dollars worth of cotton which is the only thing that enables them to maintain credit abroad & to purchase arms & munitions of war & we have actually ‘gobbled’ up enough provisions to have fed Lee’s army for six months.” Though the military gains justified the march in the minds of Union soldiers, the memory of its terrible impact on civilian lives haunts the South to this day.
In his congratulatory note to Sherman, Lincoln also paid tribute to General George Thomas, who had defeated Hood’s forces at Nashville ten days earlier. News of the two victories, Lincoln wrote, brought “those who sat in darkness, to see a great light.” The telegram announcing Thomas’s victory had been carried to Stanton in the middle of the night. “Hurrah,” Stanton cried as he hurriedly dressed and rushed to the White House with Thomas Eckert, the chief of the telegraph office. Eckert would long remember the delight on Lincoln’s face when he heard the news. Standing at the top of the stairs “in his night-dress, with a lighted candle in his hand,” the tall president created an arresting tableau.
The fall of Fort Fisher, which guarded the port of Wilmington, North Carolina, followed in mid-January. Headlines trumpeted the “Combined Work of the Army and Navy!,” which had gained the capture of the fort and its seventy-two large-caliber guns. “This glorious work,” hailed the National Republican, “closes the port of Wilmington, and shuts off supplies to the rebels from abroad.” Gideon Welles was ecstatic, recording that at the cabinet meeting that morning, “there was a very pleasant feeling. Seward thought there was little now for the Navy to do…. The President was happy.” The defeat was shattering to Southern logistics and morale. Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens considered the fall of Fort Fisher “one of the greatest disasters which had befallen our Cause from the beginning of the war—not excepting the loss of Vicksburg or Atlanta.” With nearly every other port closed by the naval blockade, the closing of Wilmington signaled “the complete shutting out of the Confederate States from all intercourse by sea with Foreign Countries,” bringing an end to the exchange of cotton for vitally needed munitions and supplies.
Stanton was in Savannah, Georgia, for a conference with Sherman when “the rebel flag of Fort Fisher was delivered to [him].” Eager to see the battleground, he journeyed to North Carolina, where he spent the night with General Rufus Saxton and his wife. When he arrived, he warned his hosts that “fatigue would compel him to retire early,” but, relaxing before the fire, surrounded by a collection of books, he revived. “Ah, here are old friends,” he said, picking up a volume of Macauley’s poetry from the table. He asked Mrs. Saxton to read “Horatius at the Bridge,” which he followed with “The Battle of Ivry.” Midnight found him still seated by the fire, “repeating snatches of poetry.” During his stay, Mrs. Saxton noted, “the Titan War Secretary was replaced by the genial companion, the man of letters, the lover of nature—the real Stanton.” For a few hours, Stanton allowed himself the distraction and the levity he had often decried in Lincoln.
Stanton had journeyed south to confer with Sherman, concerned by reports of the general’s hostile behavior toward the black refugees