All now admitted that cotton was very mixed and seedy.
Division Third.
Cotton Worsted. January 1, 1864, to April 14, 1865.
What the Confederate Stool—not of Repentance, but of Mars—stood on, and how braced and steadied.—The Daisies and Corn-blooms beneath it.—The broken Industries, harried Life, and disrupted Ties of Unionists in the Border States.—Tragedies.—Grant Commander-in-Chief.—His Plan to break up the Nightmare.—Work ahead.—Jubal E. Early and his Raids.—The Year of Jubal E.—Sherman at Atlanta.—The Southern Knob seized, and the main Door burst open.—An unprotecting Hood; how it was pounded and cleft.—Sherman’s Swath through Georgia.—A Christmas Gift to Mr. Lincoln of a Sheaf.—The Scorpion Alabama; its Hatching out; its slimy, wriggling Course, and sulphureous End.—The Iron Jaws of Mobile pried open, and its Teeth drawn.—Autumn brands at the North.—Tokens of the coming Fall.—Andrew Johnson and the Goose.—Grant breaks Things at Petersburg and disturbs J. Davis in Church at Richmond.—Flight of the Latter with corruptible Treasures.—Negro Troops enter Richmond.—Light Suggestions thereupon.—A Meeting at Appomattox Court-House.—Leaving bloody Instructions, Lee goes to College.—J. Davis in Court and his Sentence.—A Thunder-Clap and its Victim.—Death of Abraham Lincoln.
The Confederate stool—not of repentance, but the iron stool of grim Mars—now stood on three legs. One rested on Southern Arkansas, braced by some eighty thousand regular soldiers; one on Georgia, propped by General Johnston and a large force, drawing their supplies from the corn-cribs of that empire State of the South; and the third and strongest, planted on the Rapidan, and steadied up by the well-sinewed arm of General Lee. Between these rude legs, however, were springing already along the furrows made by the ploughshare of strife the sweet-eyed daisies. Corn gathered its golden blooms out of the dreadful phosphates which had been strewn over so many fields.
Yet while nature’s healings were already anointing the ragged wounds of incisive war, over other and wide districts came ills which almost defied the bungling surgeries and irregular apothecary appliances that were wasted upon or unwisely aggravated them. In these districts predatory bands hovered over and constantly lit upon disorganized and broken industries, as crows cawingly follow a disrupted herd of buffaloes or swoop upon the wounded which fall out of the straggling march. The harryings of cattle; the plunder of farmsteads, of bean-patches,—nursed by the patient labor of suddenly made widows,—and even of houses seemingly secure from their proximity to villages; wayside murders from concealed coverts; midnight shots at men asleep in bed, or treacherously called out on pretended errands of charity, and hewn down, frayed and fretted the lives of those who still clung to the Union throughout the Border States. There were daily tragedies, sadder than the tinselled shows of the stage. There were masqueraders who danced through desultory cruelties at which even the readers of novels, languid over ordinary stories, enkindle into activity and excitement, and family feuds encrimsoning their way into living sorrows and eventually into tales, which in mercy we call fictions.
The winter and spring of 1864 pendulated with balanced successes and reverses to either combatant.
In March, General Grant was made Commander-in-Chief, and immediately set on foot a plan to wake up the uneasy sleeper and free him from the nightmare. This plan was to start simultaneously, and to keep in motion, the various corps of the Federal army; Sherman’s one hundred thousand at Chattanooga against Johnston’s army in Georgia; Banks’s and Farragut’s in conjunction against Mobile; and Grant himself, united with Meade, against Lee and Richmond: thus shredding, at the same time, the still suspended cotton curtain, and preventing its busy stitchers at one point from assisting those making repairs at another. Meade crossed the Rapidan, May 4th, and advanced towards Richmond, giving Lee a very lively hunt through the Wilderness for a month, and at length driving him over the soupy and astonished Chickahominy. At the same time Grant, holding his spirited team well in hand, drove up also towards the Confederate capital, until he halted on the south side of the James.
Soon after, in order to divert attention from that long-coveted spot, Richmond, General Jubal E. Early made into Maryland a raid, which he repeated in July, but from which he was sent whirling back into the Shenandoah valley. He renewed his experiments again in September and October, but was finally chased out by Sheridan and his centaurs, who seemed to mount the wind, and, on their rapid and supperless rides to live off condensed night air.
Along the hyperborean lines rang the warning after the discomfited Confederate:—
“The year of Jubal E. is come,