inspiriting effect.* General Wright had already brought order out of confusion and made dispositions for attack. These were left unchanged by Sheridan, except that Custer's cavalry division was transferred to its place on the right flank. A counter-charge was begun at three o'clock in the afternoon. Notwithstanding the success of the morning, or rather by reason of that success conjoined with bad discipline, the Confederates were at this time in a very unfit moral condition to resist attack, for a large part of Early's force, in the intoxication of success, had abandoned their colors and taken to plundering the abandoned Federal camps.† The refluent wave was as resistless as the Confederate surge had been; the enemy was driven out of Middletown and beyond, and pressed upon back to Cedar Creek. The retreat soon became a rout, in which the Confederates abandoned much material. The Union infantry halted within their old camps; but the cavalry, forcing the passage of Cedar Creek, hung on the flanks and rear of the enemy and followed beyond Strasburg till night put an end to the pursuit. Early succeeded in halting his force for the night at Fisher's Hill, and next morning continued his retreat southward. In the pursuit all the captured guns were

* The dramatic incidents attending the arrival of Sheridan have perhaps caused General Wright to receive less credit than he really deserves. The disaster was over by the time Sheridan arrived; a compact line of battle was formed, and Wright was on the point of opening the offensive. Wright certainly had not the style of doing things possessed by Sheridan, but no one who knows the steady qualities of that officer's mind can doubt that he would have himself retrieved whatever his troops had lost of honor.

+ General Early, in an address made to his army subsequent to this action, held the following language: "Had you remained steadfast to your duty and your colors, the victory would have been one of the most brilliant and decisive of the war. But many of you, including some commissioned officers, yielding to a disgraceful propensity for plunder, deserted your colors to appropriate to yourselves the abandoned property of the enemy; and subsequently, those who had previously remained at their posts, seeing their ranks thinned by the absence of the plunderers, when the enemy, late in the afternoon, with his shattered columns, made but a feeble effort to retrieve the fortunes of the day yielded to a needless panic, and fled the field in confusion, thereby converting a splendid victory into a disaster."

retaken and twenty-three in addition. The captures included, besides, near fifteen hundred prisoners, which fully made up for those lost by the Union force in the morning.

With this defeat of Early, all operations of moment in the Valley of the Shenandoah forever ended. The complete destruction of forage in this region rendered it impossible for the Confederates to sustain there any considerable body of cavalry. The prestige won by Sheridan enabled General Grant to recall the Sixth Corps to the Army of the Potomac, and to take away two of Sheridan's mounted divisions. Soon afterwards most of Early's infantry returned to rejoin the main Confederate force at Petersburg.

In this stirring campaign of two months' duration, Sheridan's operations, characterized by great vigor, were crowned with complete success. It is indeed to be borne in mind that the credit awarded to warlike exploits is to be measured by the obstacles overcome, and that Sheridan certainly had a very great preponderance of force. Nevertheless, the cleanness with which the work was done, the energy of the execution, the completeness of the solution of a long-time vexatious problem, are all very admirable. Sheridan's operations were characterized not so much, as has been supposed, by any originality of method, as by a just appreciation of the proper manner of combining the two arms of infantry and cavalry. He constantly used his powerful body of horse, which under his disciplined hand attained a high degree of perfection, as an impenetrable mask behind which he screened the execution of manoeuvres of infantry columns hurled with a weighty momentum on one of the enemy's flanks.

XIII.

THE FINAL CAMPAIGN.

MARCH-APRIL 9, 1865.

I.

THE CIRCLE OF THE HUNT.

THE time has now come when it is no longer possible to consider the Army of the Potomac apart from that colossal combination of force that, pressing from all sides on the structure of the Confederacy, finally bore it to the ground.

That this army cannot rightly be viewed independently of the co-operative forces throughout the general theatre of war, is made apparent by the single fact that during the winter months succeeding the close of the campaign of 1864, so far from its being any longer a desirable object to capture Petersburg and Richmond, Grant's efforts were mainly directed to restraining the Confederates from voluntarily giving up to him those strongholds that, having been for four years the prize so eagerly coveted, were now the possession most of all to be shunned. How this was and must have been so, will become manifest from a brief glance at the relations which the gigantic vigor of Sherman had established between his own army and the opposing forces in Virginia.

The communications on which Lee's army depended, not only for the maintenance of its interior lines with the remaining forces of the Confederacy in the Southwest, but for its supplies of food and ammunition, ran through the Carolinas

and the seaboard States and radiated over the great productive territory of the central zone.

By the capture of Atlanta, gained in the midsummer of 1864, Sherman grasped one of the main ganglia of the Southern railroad system. This was a loss terrible indeed to the Confederates, and narrowing the sphere of their activity and their means of intercommunication, yet not so deadly but that they might still, by the judicious use of such force as they had, oppose a menacing front and greatly prolong the war.

But whatever opportunity was then afforded the Confederates of thus acting, was thrown away, with that species of madness with which the gods are said to inspire those whom they would destroy, when Hood, at this time in command of the Confederate army of the West, quitting his proper defensive, was directed to make his ill-judged and disastrous aggressive movement into Tennessee. What would have been a thorn in the side of an inferior man, was to Sherman an opportunity, and with one of those inspirations such as are possible only to military minds of the first order, he determined to offer a counter to Hood's initiative by laying hold of and advancing along those interior lines voluntarily abandoned to him by his antagonist. Sherman's march assumes the aspect of a great swinging movement, the pivot of which was the army before Petersburg. But it was a swinging movement described on a radius of half a continent-one of those colossal enterprises whereof there are few exemplars in military history, and which fill up the measure of the imagination with the shapes of all that is vast and grandiose in war.

From Atlanta Sherman advanced, destroying the Southern railroads, foundries, mills, workshops, and warehouses, to Savannah on the sea. That city was reached the 21st of December, after a march of above three hundred miles, in fourand-twenty days. It was now open to General Grant to unite Sherman's army with the army before Petersburg either by water or by an advance of Sherman through the seaboard States. The latter course was determined on as the more decisive in its character, and its execution begun on the 1st

of February, 1865, when Sherman crossed the Savannah into South Carolina.

When Hood's crushing defeat by Thomas before Nashville had made an end of the campaign that Mr. Davis had projected as the means of throwing Sherman back out of Georgia in a "Moscow retreat," and when it was seen that Sherman, heading his columns northward towards Virginia, approached like an irresistible fate, sweeping a wide swathe of desolation through the centre of the South, the Richmond authorities, awaking to a sense of their fatal folly and goaded by the clamors of an alarmed and frenzied people, sought a measure of amelioration for the shattered fortunes of the Confederacy by the reappointment of General Johnston to the command of the forces opposing Sherman.

But it was already too late. Johnston did all he could; and all he did was judicious: but he could only stay for a time a result seen to be inevitable. Withdrawing the garrisons of the seaboard cities, and uniting thereto the corps lately under Beauregard and the remnants of Hood's army, which with much address he succeeded in bringing to a junction with the troops confronting Sherman, he prepared to oppose such a resistance as was possible to the onward march of his formidable antagonist. Johnston had on paper a numerous army; but, in effect, it was not, all told, above twenty thousand strong; while the troops were in such condition of morale as may be imagined of men who had already been driven through two States into the forests of North Carolina. In this state of facts it was vain for Johnston to attempt an aggressive policy, unless indeed he should find an opportunity of striking a blow at a detached fragment. But his antagonist carried too much art into his dispositions of his columns of march to present such an opening, and the one stroke at Bentonville (a partial and unimportant success), was all the offensive essayed by Johnston.

The Confederate commander was, moreover, in a trying dilemma in order to keep open the Danville line, by which a junction of the forces of Lee and Johnston might be made, it