CAPTURE OF FORT M'ALLISTER. 613 found adequate to the display of ten thousand men, and reflect how small a Confederate force, put between Sherman and the sea, might have disputed his march, exacted a bloody toll at every defile, and brought him to grief and disaster. But there was no such force. The general story of the march is that the Confederates had no partisan fighting as in days past; that their levies of regular troops did not make their appearance in season for a concentration of strength at any one point; that Hardee, having a command of not more than ten thousand men, remained to cover Savannah; that the clans of militia and small detachments of Wheeler's cavalry were utterly unable to cope with the enemy, and were rather calculated to provoke his enterprise than to impede his march; and that the consequence was that the sum of opposition to Sherman's march was little more than a series of small skirmishes, without result on either side. On the 2d December Sherman's army pivoted upon Millen, swung slowly round from its eastern course, and swept down in six parallel columns, by as many different roads, towards Savannah. About ten miles from the city his left wing struck the Charleston Railroad, and encountered some Confederate skirmishers, which indicated for the first time the presence of Hardee's army. Sherman's right wing was now thrown forward; his army closed gradually and steadily in upon Savannah; and on the 10th December it lay in line of battle, confronting the outer works about five miles distant from the city. His first task was to open communication with Dahlgren's fleet, which lay in Ossabaw Sound, and he therefore determined to capture Fort McAllister, at the mouth of the Ogeechee, which enters the ocean but a few miles south of the Savannah. Fort McAllister was a large enclosure, with wide parapets, a deep ditch and thickly-planted palisades. There were twenty-one guns, large and small, in the fort, all mounted en barbette. It had resisted two or three bombardments of the enemy's iron-clads; and it appears that Gen. Hardee had overlooked the possibility of a land attack, and had neglected to strengthen the garrison. Anyhow the Confederate commander was not up to the quick decision of Sherman, who, instead of building entrenchments and rifle-pits, resolved to take the fort by assault. A whole division was ordered for the work, on the evening of the 30th December. The fort was commanded by Major Anderson; and its garrison, at the time of attack, was less than two hundred men. The fact that its guns were mounted en barbette exposed the gunners to the deadly aim of sharpshooters; and as the division of the enemy's troops commanded by Gen. Hazen advanced to the assault, it was found that the artillery of the fort did but little execution upon them. The Federals went easily over the parapet; but the little Confederate garrison, although desperately outnumbered, fought to the last. Many of these devoted men disdained quarter, and were bayoneted at their posts. Capt. Clinch, who commanded THE LOST CAUSE. the artillery, refused to surrender until he was disabled by three sabre and two gun-shot wounds, and faint from loss of blood. When Sherman saw the Federal flag raised upon Fort McAllister, he seized a slip of paper, and telegraphed to Washington: "I regard Savan nah as already gained." The possession of the fort opened Ossabaw Sound, effected communication with Dahlgren's fleet, and indeed made the capture of Savannah, where Hardee appeared to be shut up with ten or twelve thousand men, but a question of time. But it was Sherman's hope to capture Hardee's army with the city; and movements were made to close up all avenues of escape, Sherman's army stretching from the Savannah to the Ogeechee River, while Foster's troops covered the railroad to Charleston. It was intended to place a division to operate with Foster by way of Broad River; but while Sherman's flank movement was in process of operation, Hardee outwitted him, and on the night following the enemy's demand for the surrender of the city, the Confederates had evacuated it, and were on the Carolina shore. The evacuation was a complete surprise to Sherman. On the night of the 28th December, Hardee opened a fierce bombardment, expending his ammunition without stint. After dark, he threw his men on rafts and steamboats across the river to the South Carolina shore. The night was dark, with a fierce gust of wind deadening the sounds of the wagons and the tramp of the troops. As morning broke, the attention of the enemy was excited at last by unusual sounds, and his pickets were advanced on the extreme left of the line. Meeting no opposition, they pushed still further, crawled through the abatis, floundered through dikes and ditches, scaled the first line of works, and found it deserted. All the ordnance stores and supplies which Hardee could not transport, had been destroyed before the evacuation; he had burned the ship-yard and sunk two ironclads; but all the rest of the uninjured city fell into the hands of the enemy. Sherman announced his success in a characteristic despatch. He wrote to President Lincoln: "I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton." And thus ended the story of the march to the sea. ments, Gen. Sherman wrote: "We have consumed the corn and fodder in In his official report of his achievethe region of country thirty miles on either side of a line from Atlanta to Savannah, as also the sweet potatoes, cattle, hogs, sheep, and poultry, and have carried away more than ten thousand horses and mules, as well as a countless number of their slaves. I estimate the damage done to the State of Georgia and its military resources at one hundred millions of dollars; at least twenty millions of which has inured to our advantage, and the re mainder is simple waste and destruction." " CHARACTER OF GEN. SHERMAN. 615 The North exhibited its characteristic measure of greatness by taking Sherman's "march from the mountains to the seas" as the greatest military exploit of modern times. It fitted the Northern idea of magnitude. It was, of course, "the Great March," as everything the North admired, from a patent-machine to an army, was "the great." But it is difficult for a sober historian to find in the easy marches of Sherman through Georgia, any great military merit, or to discover in the excessively vulgar character of this commander any of the elements of the hero. Where there is nothing to oppose an army, the mere accomplishment of distances is no great wonder or glory. From the time Sherman left Gaylesville to the day he encountered the lines around Savannah, he never had a thousand men on his front to dispute his advance; he had nothing to threaten his rear beyond a few bodies of Confederate horse; he moved through a country so full of supplies that his own commissariat was scarcely taxed to subsist his army; he himself telegraphed to Washington: "Our march was most agreeable," and compared it to "a pleasure-trip." And yet this pleasant excursion the North insisted upon amplifying as a great military exploit, to be compared with Napoleon's march to Moscow, and other splendid adventures of invasion, while the chief excursionist was raised to the dignity of a hero. Sherman is an example of the reputation achieved in the North by intrepid charlatanism and self-assertion. He had elements of Northern popularity outside of the severe circle of military accomplishments. His swagger was almost irresistible; he wrote slang phrases in his official despatches; his style was a flash Fourth-of-July tangled oratory, that never fails to bring down the applause of a Northern mob. It is the office of history to reduce the reputations of the gazette. The man who is now known in Northern newspapers as a hero of the war and luminary of the military age will scarcely be known in future and just history, further than as the man who depopulated and destroyed Atlanta, essayed a new code of cruelty in war, marched so many miles, achieved much bad notoriety, and ended with a professional fame mediocre and insignificant, holding a place no longer conspicuous in the permanent records of the times. CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE EXCHANGE OF PRISONERS, AND THEIR TREATMENT IN CAPTIVITY.—EXCEEDING INTEREST OF IT. THE WASHINGTON GOVERNMENT RESOLVED TO MAKE A CASE OF REBEL BARBAR ITY." THE SITE, ARRANGEMENTS AND DISCIPLINE OF THE ANDERSONVILLE PRISON.~ EXPLANATION OF THE SUFFERING AND MORTALITY THERE.—EXTRAORDINARY PROPOSI TION OF THE CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT TO RELEASE WITHOUT EQUIVALENTS AND WITH OUT FORMALITY ALL SICK AND WOUNDED FEDERAL PRISONERS. SECRETARY STANTON DEAF TO THE ORY OF THE SUFFERERS.—HIS GREAT GUILT.—EXCHANGES RESUMED UNDER GEN. GRANT'S AUTHORITY.-REPORT OF THE JOINT SELECT COMMITTEE OF THE CONFED ERATE CONGRESS, APPOINTED TO INVESTIGATE THE CONDITION AND TREATMENT OF PRIS ONERS OF WAR.-NORTHERN PUBLICATIONS ON THIS SUBJECT.-REFUTATION OF 66 RAW HEAD-AND-BLOODY-BONES STORIES.-HUMANITY OF THE CONFEDERATE AUTHORITIES.A TERRIBLE RECORD OF FEDERAL CRUELTIES.—BARBAROUS PUNISHMENT IN NORTHERN PRISONS.-LAST HUMANE PROPOSITION OF COMMISSIONER OULD.-HIS LETTER TO GEN. GRANT.—A COMPLETE RECORD OF JUSTICE AND HUMANITY ON THE PART OF THE CONFED ERATES. THE exchange of prisoners taken during the war; their treatment in their places of confinement North and South; the incidents of the cartel, altogether, constitute so large and interesting a subject that we have re served its treatment for a separate chapter. On the exposition of this intricate matter depends much of the good name of the Confederates and the contrary title of the enemy; and it may be remarked that no subject which tended to keep alive a feeling of bitterness and animosity between the THE WOOL-COBB NEGOTIATION. 617 Northern and Southern people was more effective than recrimination about the cartel, and the alleged cruelty to prisoners of war on both sides. The exposition we propose to make is mainly by a chain of records, extending through the war, thus best securing authenticity of statement, and combining these documents in a unity of narrative, so as to place before the reader a complete view and a severe analysis of the whole subject. In the first periods of the war, and with the prospect of its early termination, but little account was taken of prisoners captured on either side. Indeed, some time elapsed at Washington before any lists were kept of these captures; and after the first remarkable battle of the war, that of Manassas, in 1861, it was actually proposed (by Mr. Boyce of South Carolina), in the Provisional Congress at Richmond, to send back the Federal prisoners taken on that field without any formality whatever. The Fort Donelson capture, however, appeared to have developed for the first time the value and interest of the exchange question, and was the occasion of remarkable perfidy on the part of the Washington authorities. Just previous to these important captures, Gen. Wool, on the Federal side, had declared, in a letter dated the 13th February, 1862: "I am alone clothed with full power, for the purpose of arranging for the exchange of prisoners," and had invited a conference on the subject. Gen. Howell Cobb, on the part of the Confederacy, was appointed to negotiate with him; and the two officers decided upon a cartel by which prisoners taken on either side should be paroled within ten days after their capture, and delivered on the frontier of their own country. The only point of tenacious difference between them was as to a provision requiring each party to pay the expense of transporting their prisoners to the frontier; and this point Gen. Wool promised to refer to the decision of his Government. At a second interview on the 1st March, Gen. Wool declared that his Government would not consent to pay these expenses; when Gen. Cobb promptly gave up the point, leaving the cartel free from all of Gen. Wool's objections, and just what he had proposed in his letter of the 13th February. Upon this, Gen. Wool informed Gen. Cobb that "his Government had changed his instructions," and abruptly broke off the negotiation. The occasion of this bad faith and dishonour on the part of the enemy was, that in the interval they had taken several thousand prisoners at Fort Donelson, which reversed the former state of things, and gave them a surplus of prisoners, who, instead of being returned on parole, were carried into the interiour, and incarcerated with every circumstance of indignity. In the second year of the war a distinct understanding was obtained on the subject of the exchange of prisoners of war, and the following cartel was respectively signed and duly executed on the part of the two Governments. This important instrument of war invites a close examination of the reader, and is copied in full: |