pended the order, but after two days' further waiting, with eager interchange of telegrams, he ordered Logan to Nashville to replace Thomas in command of the Army of the Cumberland. In his anxiety he started West himself, but on his way at Washington, on December 15, got word that Thomas had attacked, and then that Hood was routed with Thomas in pursuit. The battle of Nashville, on December 15 and 16, was the most complete victory won by the Union forces during the rebellion, a perfect battle in the eyes of experts in the science of war. Hood's army was so badly beaten that when after the pursuit he left its wreckage on the south side of the Tennessee, it hardly numbered 15,000 men, and was soon disintegrated save for a few who turned up afterwards with Johnston's little force in North Carolina. Grant did not quarrel with success. He asked that Thomas be made a Major-General in the regular army, overwhelmed him with congratulations, wrote in his report that the defeat of Hood was so complete that it would be accepted as a vindication of the successful general's judgment.

On the 10th of December, thirty days after he cut loose from his communications at Atlanta, Sherman could see Savannah. His march of three hundred and sixty miles through hostile territory had been a holiday, and on the 21st he occupied the town and

offered it to Lincoln as a Christmas present for the North. Half of the task Grant set himself when he came East was now accomplished. Organized rebellion west of the Alleghanies had been crushed. The whole Southwest was open to the Union troops whenever they saw fit to occupy it.

Sherman for the moment far outdazzled Grant in popular esteem. The fine audacity of his accomplishment had caught the fancy of the world. Lincoln congratulated him: "The undertaking being a success the honor is all yours; for I believe none of us went further than to acquiesce." Some would have made him a Lieutenant-General and put him over Grant, who to appearances had loafed at City Point, while his subordinates were winning victories. "I would rather have you in command than anybody else," Sherman wrote Grant, "for you are fair, honest, and have at heart the same purpose that should actuate all. I should emphatically decline any commission calculated to bring us into rivalry"; and Grant replied: "No one would be more pleased at your advancement than I, and if you should be placed in my position and I put subordinate, it would not change our relations in the least. I would make the same exertions to support you that you have ever done to support me, and I would do all in my power to make our cause win."

CHAPTER XXII

PEACE

GRANT, for the moment partly in eclipse, bided his time. Events were shaping the success of his grand strategy, which he now knew the end would justify. His lines were tightening on the Confederacy. Sherman was on his way north from Savannah, cutting a path of devastation across the Carolinas; marching four hundred miles through winter sleet and icy floods, quagmires and swamps and rutty roads, a bitter contrast to the Georgia frolic. Fort Fisher, after many trials, was seized at last by Terry brilliantly in early January, and Wilmington, which it protected, the sole remaining port of the Confederacy, fell into Union hands as had already happened with every other rebel stronghold south or west of Richmond. Lee's army could no longer live upon the crops of the Southwest or tap its former granary in the Valley of the Shenandoah. The time was near at hand when the compressed Confederacy, upon which Grant was closing in, must either choke or starve unless Lee's ragged and emaciated troops slipped through the Union lines to the Southwest. No recruits were coming, and there could be no hope for a

successful fight against the Union army, which now, almost encircling Petersburg and Richmond after months of siege, was hardening the latest levies into veterans. While Lee had lost his sources of supply, Grant had at call the teeming farms and factories of the North. Davis had reached the limit of his credit, while Lincoln still had full financial reservoirs to drain.

Yet Davis could not bring himself to think his cause was lost; he was for goading his exhausted armies to fight on, and if compelled to flee, he would transfer the Richmond archives to a roving capital, and keep rebellion bristling in the Alleghany wilds. His patriotic selfishness would not have stopped at any sacrifice by his devoted men.

City Point, with Grant's log-cabin headquarters, was a secondary Union Capital. Lincoln came there with Seward and other members of the Cabinet; members of Congress drifted in to look things over; there was an unbroken line of Northern visitors. At the end of January the "Peace Commission," Stephens, Campbell, and Hunter, came from Richmond on their futile errand, and Grant, who was a soldier not vested with authority in such affairs, asked Lincoln to come down with Seward to hear their tale.

Stephens, who then for the first time saw Grant,

has said that he was never more surprised in any man. "He was plainly attired, sitting in a log cabin busily writing on a small table by a kerosene lamp. There was nothing in his appearance or surroundings which indicated his official rank. There were neither guards nor aides about him. Upon Colonel Babcock rapping at his door the response, 'Come in,' was given by himself"; and he soliloquizes: “In manners he is simple, natural, and unaffected; in utterance frank and explicit; in thought, perception and action, quick; in purpose fixed, decided, and resolute." 1

The commissioners met Lincoln and Seward on Lincoln's boat in Hampton Roads. The peace they had in mind did not contemplate the dissolution of the Confederacy, which was of course the one condition Lincoln could consider; but they learned from him that the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery had just been passed by Congress, that the restoration of the Union was the first requirement in any peace, and that the way for this to be assured by them was "by disbanding their armies, and permitting the National authorities to resume their functions."

The conference had its value in revealing Lincoln's mind. "Stephens," he said, "if I were in Georgia and entertained the sentiments I do, . . . I would go

1 Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, pp. 79, 80; 401-02.