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that he lost his head in the end." Then he broke out into simple advice to Stephens as to the action he could now pursue. He had to report to Congress afterwards that the conference had had no result. He brought home, however, a personal compliment which he valued. "I understand, then," Stephens had said, "that you regard us as rebels, who are liable to be hanged for treason." "That is so," said Lincoln. Well," said Stephens, we supposed that would have to be your view. But, to tell you the truth, we have none of us been much afraid of being hanged with you as President." He brought home, besides the compliment, an idea of a kind which, if he could have had his way with his friends, might have been rich in good. He had discovered how hopeless the people of the South were, and he considered whether a friendly pronouncement might not lead them more readily to surrender. He deplored the suffering in which the South might now lie plunged, and it was a fixed part of his creed that slavery was the sin not of the South but of the nation. So he spent the day after his return in drafting a joint resolution which he hoped the two Houses of Congress might pass, and a Proclamation which he would in that case issue. In these he proposed to offer to the Southern States four hundred million dollars in United States bonds, being, as he calculated the cost to the North of two hundred days of war, to be allotted among those States in proportion to the property in slaves which each had lost. One half of this sum was to be paid at once if the war ended by April 1, and the other half upon the final adoption of the Constitutional Amendment. It would have been a happy thing if the work of restoring peace could have lain with a statesman whose rare aberrations from the path of practical politics were of this kind. Yet, considering the natural passions which even in this least revengeful of civil wars could not quite be repressed, we should be judging the Congress of that day by a higher standard than we should apply in other coun tries if we regarded this proposal as one that could have been hopefully submitted to them. Lincoln's illusions

were dispelled on the following day when he read what he had written to his Cabinet, and found that even among his own ministers not one man supported him. It would have been worse than useless to put forward his proposals and to fail. "You are all opposed to me," he said sadly; and he put his papers away. But the war had now so far progressed that it is necessary to turn back to the point at which we left it at the end of 1864.

Winter weather brought a brief pause to the operations of the armies. Sherman at Savannah was preparing to begin his northward march, a harder matter, owing to the rivers and marshes that lay in his way, than his triumphal progress from Atlanta. Efforts were made to concentrate all available forces against him at Augusta to his north-west. Making feints against Augusta on the one side, and against the city and port of Charleston on the other, he displayed the marvellous engineering capacity of his army by an advance of unlooked-for speed across the marshes to Columbia, due north of him, which is the State capital of South Carolina. He reached it on February 17, 1865. The intended concentration of the South at Augusta was broken up. The retreating Confederates set fire to great stores of cotton and the unfortunate city was burnt, a calamity for which the South, by a natural but most unjust mistake, blamed Sherman. The railway communications of Charleston were now certain to be severed; so the Confederates were forced to evacuate it, and on February 18, 1865, the North occupied the chief home of the misbegotten political ideals of the South and of its real culture and chivalry.

Admiral Porter (for age and ill-health had come upon Farragut) was ready at sea to co-operate with Sherman. Thomas' army in Tennessee had not been allowed by Grant to go into winter quarters. A part of it under Schofield was brought to Washington and there shipped for North Carolina, where, ever since Burnside's successful expedition in 1862, the Union Government had held the ports north of Wilmington. Wilmington itself was the only port left to the South, and Richmond had now come

to depend largely on the precarious and costly supplies which could still, notwithstanding the blockade, be run into that harbour. At the end of December, Butler, acting in flagrant disobedience to Grant, had achieved his crowning failure in a joint expedition with Porter against Wilmington. But Porter was not discouraged, nor was Grant, who from beginning to end of his career had worked well together with the Navy. On February 8, Porter, this time supported by an energetic general, Terry, effected a brilliant capture of Fort Fisher at the mouth of Wilmington harbour. The port was closed to the South. On the 22nd, the city itself fell to Schofield, and Sherman had now this sea base at hand if he needed it.

Meanwhile Grant's entrenchments on the east of Richmond and Petersburg were still extending southward, and Lee's defences had been stretched till they covered nearly forty miles. Grant's lines now cut the principal railway southward from the huge fortress, and he was able effectually to interrupt communication by road to the southwest. There could be little doubt that Richmond would fall soon, and the real question was coming to be whether Lee and his army could escape from Richmond and still carry on the war.

The appointment of Lee as General-in-Chief was not too late to bear one consequence which may have prolonged the war a little. Joseph Johnston, whose ability in a campaign of constant retirement before overwhelming force had been respected and redoubted by Sherman, had been discarded by Davis in the previous July. He was now put in command of the forces which it was hoped to concentrate against Sherman, with a view to holding up his northward advance and preventing him from joining hands with Grant before Richmond. There were altogether about 89,000 Confederate troops scattered in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, and there would be about the same number under Sherman when Schofield in North Carolina could join him, but the number which Johnston could now collect together seems never to have

exceeded 33,000. It was Sherman's task by the rapidity of his movements to prevent a very formidable concentration against him. Johnston on the other hand must hinder if he could Sherman's junction with Schofield. Just before that junction took place he narrowly missed dealing a considerable blow to Sherman's army at the battle of Bentonville in the heart of North Carolina, but had in the end to withdraw within an entrenched position where Sherman would not attack him, but which upon the arrival of Schofield he was forced to abandon. On March 23, 1865, Sherman took possession of the town and railway junction of Goldsborough between Raleigh and New Berne. From Savannah to Goldsborough he had led his army 425 miles in fifty days, amid disadvantages of ground and of weather which had called forth both extraordinary endurance and mechanical skill on the part of his men. He lay now 140 miles south of Petersburg by the railway. The port of New Berne to the east of him on the estuary of the Neuse gave him a sure base of supplies, and would enable him quickly to move his army by sea to Petersburg and Richmond if Grant should so decide. The direction in which Johnston would now fall back lay inland up the Neuse Valley, also along a railway, towards Greensborough, some 150 miles south-west of Petersburg; Greensborough was connected by another railway with Petersburg and Richmond, and along this line Lee might attempt to retire and join him.

All this time whatever designs Lee had of leaving Richmond were suspended because the roads in that weather were too bad for his transport; and, while of necessity he waited, his possible openings narrowed. Philip Sheridan had now received the coveted rank of Major-General, which McClellan had resigned on the day on which he was defeated for the Presidency. The North delighted to find in his achievements the dashing quality which appeals to civilian imagination, and Grant now had in him, as well as in Sherman, a lieutenant who would faithfully make his chief's purposes his own, and who would execute them with independent decision. The

cold, in which his horses suffered, had driven Sheridan into winter quarters, but on February 27 he was able to start up the Shenandoah Valley again with 10,000 cav. alry. Most of the Confederate cavalry under Early had now been dispersed, mainly for want of forage in the desolated valley; the rest were now dispersed by Sheridan, and the greater part of Early's small force of infantry with all his artillery were captured. There was a garrison in Lynchburg, 80 or 90 miles west of Richmond, which though strong enough to prevent Sheridan's cavalry from capturing that place was not otherwise of ac count; but there was no Confederate force in the field except Johnston's men near enough to co-operate with Lee; only some small and distant armies, hundreds of miles away with the railway communication between them and the East destroyed. Sheridan now broke up the railway and canal communication on the north-west side of Richmond. He was to have gone on south and eventually joined Sherman if he could; but, finding himself stopped for the time by floods in the upper valley of the James, he rode past the north of Richmond, and on March 19 joined Grant, to put his cavalry and brains at his service when Grant judged that the moment for his final effort had come.

On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln took office for the second time as President of the United States. There was one new and striking feature in the simple ceremonial, the presence of a battalion of negro troops in his escort. This time, though he would say no sanguine word, it cannot have been a long continuance of war that filled his thoughts, but the scarcely less difficult though far happier task of restoring the fabric of peaceful society in the conquered South. His difficulties were now likely to come from the North no less than the South. Tentative proposals which he had once or twice made suggest the spirit in which he would have felt his way along this new path. In the inaugural address which he now delivered that spirit is none the less perceptible because he spoke of the past. The little speech at Gettysburg, with