This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [231]
As the upswing developed, the move to find a new candidate in place of Lincoln withered. Pathfinder Frémont had been brought out, dusted off, and put in position as a species of third-party candidate, to bid for the votes of rock-ribbed abolitionists. He quietly retired, the Republican radicals dutifully lining up behind President Lincoln. Salmon P. Chase, the dignified Treasury Secretary who had always imagined himself as the statesman destined to come in and supply the firm hand Lincoln lacked — Chase, too, was in retirement, no longer a member of the Cabinet, an aspirant for the presidency whom no one could ever take quite seriously. Lincoln had a clear road at last.
In the West and the South, Thomas and Sherman prepared their armies for the mopping-up process; and in the long lines that ran down the James River and half encircled Petersburg, the Army of the Potomac held its ground, pinning Lee’s army there by sheer weight, taking daily casualties and looking less and less like the gallant host that had marched down to the Rapidan in May with bands playing and flags afloat, but still holding on with an unbreakable grip. Autumn was wearing away, and the Confederacy’s last winter was drawing near.
3. The Grapes of Wrath
On November 8 the people of the North re-elected Abraham Lincoln and endorsed a war to the finish. One week later General Sherman and sixty thousand veterans left Atlanta on the march that was to make that finish certain — the wild, cruel, rollicking march from Atlanta to the sea.
Two months had passed since the capture of Atlanta. A part of this time had been spent in resting and refitting the army. Several weeks more had been consumed in a fruitless chase of John B. Hood, who still commanded forty thousand good men and who circled off to the northwest, molesting Sherman’s supply line and hoping to draw the invaders off in retreat. Sherman had tried to catch and destroy this Confederate army, but he had not had much luck, and he complained bitterly, if illogically, that the real trouble was Hood’s eccentricity: “I cannot guess his movements as I could those of Johnston, who was a sensible man and did only sensible things.”
In mid-October Sherman gave up the pursuit entirely and made his plans for the next campaign. Back to Tennessee went Thomas and Schofield, with something fewer than half of the men who had occupied Atlanta. They would see to it that Hood’s Confederates did nothing to upset the military balance; with the rest of his men Sherman would drive for the seacoast.
He had an extended argument over the telegraph wires with Grant on this point. Grant suspected that it would be wise to dispose of Hood before going off on a new campaign; he doubted that Thomas would have quite enough force to protect everything if Hood should march up into mid-Tennessee, and he felt that the navy ought to seize and prepare some seaport city as a base before Sherman moved east. But Sherman convinced him at last that his own plan was sound. He had written off Hood entirely — “Damn him, if he will go to the Ohio River, I will give him rations,” he growled at one point — and he was convinced that nothing would bring the war to a close so speedily as a visible demonstration that a large Union army could go anywhere it chose to go in the Confederacy.1
Jefferson Davis had recently visited Georgia, rousing the people with valiant speeches in which he predicted that Sherman would be overwhelmed in the Southland as Napoleon had been overwhelmed in Russia. To Grant, Sherman wrote contemptuously:
“If we can march a well-appointed army right through his territory, it is a demonstration to the world, foreign and domestic,