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By Root 1989 0

the job was entrusted to Ben Butler, who was not up to smashing anything. He had the assistance of a first-class fleet under Admiral David Porter — brought east from the Mississippi and Red River valleys for a job that seemed to need the attention of a top-flight fighting man — but even the help of the United States Navy could not make a successful soldier out of Butler. Butler filled a ship with powder, sent it in under the walls of Fort Fisher, and exploded it, fancying that the blast would level the fort and make the work of his troops easy. The explosion took place on schedule, but it had so little effect on the fort that the Confederates merely assumed that a Yankee boiler had blown up. Butler got troops ashore, considered taking the place by storm, then changed his mind, re-embarked his soldiers, and sailed back to Hampton Roads, reporting that the fort was too strong to be taken.

Butler had tried his luck one notch too far. He was a strange and devious character, a one-time Democrat who possessed much political influence and whom it had always been necessary to treat with extreme consideration. But the Lincoln administration had just won a presidential election and it was clearly winning the war as well, and suddenly both Grant and Lincoln realized that Butler was no longer an untouchable. Admiral Porter, good friend of Grant since the Vicksburg campaign, wrote the lieutenant general that Fort Fisher would fall when ever the army cared to send a competent general down to attend to the job. Butler went back to Massachusetts, a general without an army; a new amphibious expedition was mounted, the army gave Butler’s old command to tough Major General Alfred H. Terry — and on January 15, after a prodigious bombardment by the fleet and a smart charge by the sailors and the infantry, Fort Fisher was captured. The South had lost its last seaport. The dwindling armies which were the Confederacy’s only hold on life would get no more equipment than that which the South itself could provide, and the South’s own resources were coming down close to the vanishing point. In Tennessee youthful General Wilson was putting together a vast mounted army — twelve thousand, five hundred men, all armed with repeating carbines, trained to fight on foot, using their horses only as means of getting from place to place swiftly … true mechanized infantry, in the modern sense, except that their means of locomotion consumed hay and grain rather than gasoline. It would be two months before this mounted army was ready to move, but by spring it would go plunging down into Alabama to break up anything it found that had not already collapsed, and there was no conceivable way in which it could be headed off.

And in Savannah, General Sherman was starting north with his sixty thousand veterans, heading for nothing less than Richmond itself.

The men would make a tough campaign. They had long since come to look on themselves as the appointed agents through which the country would take vengeance on those who had tried to destroy it. To a man, they felt that South Carolina, above all other places, was the spot where vengeance was most called for. (This idea was not unknown, even in the South; many of Sherman’s men, despoiling a Georgia town or plantation, had heard their victims express the hope that when they got to South Carolina they would give the people there a full measure of what they were giving Georgia.) Until now these soldiers had performed the act of devastation casually, without animus; in South Carolina they would act with genuine venom. They could march anywhere, over any ground and in any weather; they believed that they could whip any enemies they would ever meet — a belief that had especial justification in the fact that they were certain to meet no enemy whom they did not greatly outnumber — and the rowdy spirit that lies near the surface all across America never found a more complete fulfillment than it found in them. They would go through South Carolina, if General Sherman led them there, like the wrath of an outraged God.

General