1865] IF THEY STRUCK A VEIN. 633 had added thereto the greater crime of assaulting women, had been summarily dealt with by some of those whose wives and daughters they had outraged, and whose homes they had made desolate; and he informed General Hampton that in retaliation he had ordered a number of Confederate prisoners of war to be put to death. To arrest this brutality General Hampton promptly informed him that, "for every soldier of mine murdered by you, I shall have executed at once two of yours, giving in all cases preference to any officers who may be in our hands," and adding, with a view to check the inhuman system of burning the houses of those citizens whom they had robbed, that he had ordered his men "to shoot down all of your men who are caught burning houses." This notice and the knowledge that General Hampton would keep his word, produced, it is believed, a very salutary effect, and thereafter the fear of punishment wrought a reform which the dictates of honor and humanity had been powerless to effect. The historian of Sherman's "Great March," in his illustrated narrative of that expedition, describes both with pen and pencil the manner in which "with untiring zeal the soldiers hunted for concealed treasures. . . . Wherever the army halted," he writes, "almost every inch of ground in the vicinity of the dwellings was poked by ramrods, pierced with sabers, or upturned with spades," searching for "valuable personal effects, plate, jewelry, and other rich goods, as well as articles of food, such as hams, sugar, flour, etc. . . . It was comical," adds the chronicler, "to see a group of these red-bearded, barefooted, ragged veterans punching the unoffending earth in an apparently idiotic but certainly most energetic way. If they struck a vein,' a spade was instantly put into requisition, and the coveted wealth was speedily unearthed. Nothing escaped the observation of these sharp-witted soldiers. A woman standing upon the porch of a house, apparently watching their proceedings, instantly became an object of suspicion, and she was watched until some movement betrayed a place of concealment. The fresh earth recently thrown up, a bed of flowers just set out, the slightest indication of a change in appearance or posi * General Hampton's letter to General Sherman, February 27, 1865. tion, all attracted the gaze of these military agriculturists. It was all fair spoil of war, and the search made one of the excitements of the march."* The author of the work from which the foregoing is an extract was an aide-de-camp on the staff of General Sherman. The playful manner in which he describes these habitual acts of plunder of "plate, jewelry, and other rich goods" from private and undefended dwellings, shows that not only was such conduct not forbidden by the military authorities, but that it was permitted and applauded, that it was practiced "wherever the army halted" under the eye of the staff-officers of the General commanding, and was looked upon as one of the pleasurable "excitements of the march." Indeed, so agreeable was the impression made by these scenes of robbery of women's "rich goods" that he has adorned his narrative with a full-page illustration, exhibiting a plantation home surrounded by soldiers engaged, as this staff-officer humorously terms it, in "treasure-seeking," while the lady of the house-its only apparent occupant-stands upon the veranda, with hands uplifted, beseeching them not to steal the watch and chain which they are taking out of a vessel which they have just dug up. That the foreign mercenaries, of which the Federal army was largely composed, should have been guilty of such disgraceful conduct, when free from the observation of their officers, is conceivable; but it is difficult to imagine that, in the nineteenth century, such acts as are described above could be committed habitually, in view of the officer of highest rank in the army of a civilized country, and not merely pass unpunished or unrebuked, but be recorded with conspicuous approval in the pages of a military history. The advance of the enemy's columns across the Catawba, Lynch's Creek, and the Pedee, at Cheraw, though retarded as much as possible by the vigilant skill of our cavalry under Generals Hampton, Butler, and Wheeler, was steady and continuous. General Johnston's hope that, from the enemy's order of moving by wings, sometimes a day's march from each other, he * "The Story of the Great March, from the Diary of a Staff Officer." By Brevet Major George Ward Nichols, Aide-de-Camp to General Sherman. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1865, pp. 112, et seq. 1865] THEIR WONTED ENERGY AND DASH. 635 could find an opportunity to strike one of their columns in the passage of the Cape Fear River, when the other was not in supporting distance, was unhappily disappointed. On March 6th, near Kinston, General Bragg with a reënforcement of less than two thousand men attacked and routed three divisions of the enemy under Major-General Cox, capturing fifteen hundred prisoners and three field-pieces, and inflicting heavy loss in killed and wounded. This success, though inspiring, was on too small a scale to produce important results. During the march from the Catawba to the Cape Fear several brilliant cavalry affairs took place, in which our troops displayed their wonted energy and dash. Among these the most conspicnous were General Butler's at Mount Elon, where he defeated a detachment sent to tear up the railroad at Florence; General Wheeler's attack and repulse of the left flank of the enemy at Hornesboro, March 4th; a similar exploit by the same officer at Rockingham on the 7th; the attack and defeat by General Hampton of a detachment on the 8th; the surprise and capture of General Kilpatrick's camp by General Hampton on the morning of the 10th, driving the enemy into an adjoining swamp, and taking possession of his artillery and wagon-train, and the complete rout of a large Federal party by General Hampton with an inferior force at Fayetteville on the 11th. As it was doubtful whether General Sherman's advance from Fayetteville would be directed to Goldsboro or Raleigh, General Johnston took position with a portion of his command at Smithfield, which is nearly equidistant from each of those places, leaving General Hardee to follow the road from Fayetteville to Raleigh, which for several miles is also the direct road from Fayetteville to Smithfield, and posted one division of his cavalry on the Raleigh road, and another on that to Goldsboro. On the 16th of March General Hardee was attacked by two corps of the enemy, a few miles south of Averysboro, a place nearly half-way between Fayetteville and Raleigh. Falling back a few hundred yards to a stronger position, he easily repelled the repeated attacks of these two corps during the day, and, learning in the evening that the enemy's corps were moving to turn his left, he withdrew in the night toward Smithfield. Early in the morning of the 18th General Johnston obtained definite information that General Sherman was marching on Goldsboro, the right wing of his army being about a day's march distant from the left. General Johnston took immediate steps to attack the head of the left wing on the morning of the 19th, and ordered the troops at Smithfield and General Hardee's command to march at once to Bentonville and take position between that village and the road on which the enemy was advancing. An error as to the relative distance which our troops and those of the enemy would have to move, exaggerating the distance between the roads on which the enemy was advancing and diminishing the distance that our troops would have to march, caused the failure to concentrate our troops in time to attack the enemy's left wing while in column; but, when General Hardee's troops reached Bentonville in the morning, the attack was commenced. The battle lasted through the greater part of the day, resulting in the enemy's being driven from two lines of intrenchments, and his taking shelter in a dense wood, where it was impracticable for our troops to 'preserve their line of battle or to employ the combined strength of the three arms. On the 20th the two wings of the Federal army, numbering, as estimated by General Johnston, upward of seventy thousand, came together and repeatedly attacked a division of our force (Hoke's) which occupied an intrenched position parallel to the road to Averysboro; but every attack was handsomely repulsed. On the next day (21st) an attempt by the enemy to reach Bentonville in the rear of our center, and thus cut off our only route of retreat, was gallantly defeated by an impetuous and skillful attack, led by Generals Hardee and Hampton, on the front and both flanks of the enemy's column, by which he was compelled to retreat as rapidly as he had advanced. In this attack, General Hardee's only son, a noble boy, charging gallantly with the Eighth Texas Cavalry, fell mortally wounded. On the night of the 21st our troops were withdrawn across Mill Creek, and in the evening of the 22d bivouacked near Smithfield. On the 23d the forces of General Sherman and those of General Schofield were united at Goldsboro, where they remained inactive for upward of two weeks. 1865] DECIDED TO SEEK A NEW BASE. 637 On the 9th of April the Confederate forces took up the line of march to Raleigh, and reached that city early in the afternoon of the same day closely followed by the Federal army. CHAPTER LII. Siege of Petersburg.-Violent Assault upon our Position.-A Cavalry Expedition.Contest near Ream's Station.-The City invested with Earthworks.-Position of the Forces.-The Mine exploded, and an Assault made.-Attacks on our Lines.-Object of the Enemy.-Our Strength.-Assault on Fort Fisher.Evacuation of Wilmington.-Purpose of Grant's Campaign.-Lee's Conference with the President.-Plans.-Sortie against Fort Steadman.—Movements of Grant further to Lee's right.-Army retires from Petersburg.-The Capitulation.-Letters of Lee. AFTER the battle of Cold Harbor, the geography of the country no longer enabled General Grant, by a flank movement to his left, to keep himself covered by a stream, and yet draw nearer to his objective point, Richmond. He had now reached. the Chickahominy, and to move down the east bank of that stream would be to depart further from the prize he sought, the capital of the Confederacy. His overland march had cost him the loss of more men than Lee's army contained at the beginning of the campaign. He now, from considerations which may fairly be assumed to have been the result of his many unsuccessful assaults on Lee's army, or from other considerations which I am not in a position to suggest, decided to seek a new base on the James River, and to attempt the capture of our capital by a movement from the south. With this view, on the night of June 12th he commenced a movement by the lower crossings of the Chickahominy toward the James River. General Lee learned of the withdrawal on the next morning, and moved to our pontoon-bridge above Drury's Bluff. While Grant's army was making this march to James River, General Smith, with his division, which had arrived at Bermuda Hundred, was, on the night of the 14th, directed to move against Petersburg, with an additional force of two divisions, it being supposed that this |