All this occurred just before Grant's final and decisive blow was delivered. Earlier in the war this conflict would have been everywhere heralded as a great battle. In the spring of 1865—so used had the country become to such things—it was a scarcely noticed incident in the siege operations about Petersburg.
[CHAPTER LIX]
The End
While all this was going on around Petersburg, Sherman, under Grant's instructions, was carrying out the other part of the lieutenant general's program. After securing possession of Savannah he pushed troops forward to Pocotaligo, a point on the Charleston and Savannah railroad about midway between the two cities. From that position he could move with equal ease against Charleston, Augusta, or Columbia and the cities and towns north of Columbia.
General Joseph E. Johnston had been grudgingly recalled to the command of such Confederate forces as could be assembled in that quarter for the purpose of offering resistance to that advance northwardly which Sherman obviously intended. But for a time Johnston could not know or safely conjecture by which of the three lines of march that were equally open to him, Sherman would elect to move. Consequently for a time Johnston was compelled to scatter his meager forces widely, holding them in such readiness as he could for concentration when his enemy's purposes should be disclosed.
On the first of February Sherman began his march. Carefully spreading reports that Charleston on the one hand or Augusta on the other was his destination, he moved swiftly upon Columbia, the capital city of South Carolina.
It was Sherman's plan in this northward march to keep the sea always at his back. He arranged for the fleet to coöperate with him from beginning to end, to bring supplies to the several points along the coast that were held by the Federals and to preserve to him at those points secure places of refuge to which he might retreat in the event of his encountering disaster in the field. His tactics were precisely those adopted by Cornwallis in his contest with Greene in 1780, but with the modern improvement of a navy driven by steam and therefore far more certain and precise in its operations than that which supported Cornwallis could be.
Sherman entered the city of Columbia on the seventeenth of February. Thus far he had encountered no opposition except such as the alert Confederate cavalry under Wade Hampton could offer. For as yet the uncertainty as to whither Sherman planned to go compelled Johnston to keep his own forces scattered over a line that stretched all the way from Augusta to Charleston.
It was in South Carolina, of which Columbia is the capital, that secession had been born. It was here that South Carolina had proclaimed her withdrawal from the Union and her independent sovereignty. It was here that the war which had cost so much of life and treasure and sacrifice and suffering had been born. There was very naturally, among the now victorious men of Sherman's command, a specially vengeful feeling toward South Carolina and still more against its capital city.