Return, ye wandering sinners, home.”
In the Southeast, Sherman, flanking Johnston at Dalton in Georgia, forced him through May and June southwards, delivering battles and defeats,—which were not ordered,—at Resaca, Dallas, Pine Lost, and Kenesaw Mountains, until at last he shoved him behind the great southern knob, Atlanta, whose converging iron lines held the main door of the Lower Confederacy. Here Johnston disappeared, and the Confederate powers put a Hood over the head of the assailed Southeast; but all in vain. Sherman, pounding about the iron-covered Hood with heavy blows through July and August, cleft the head-piece in two; and on the 2d of September cast him out, and, seizing the great iron knob, opened wide the door.
On the 15th of November Sherman advanced through Georgia to the sea, taking a swath sixty miles wide, rolling up winrows at Milledgeville, cutting down thistles, burdocks, and noxious weeds with his well-whetted scythe, until, on the 21st of December, he reached the farther side of his great hay-field at Savannah. Gathering its crop into one bundle, he despatched it to Mr. Lincoln with this epistle: “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty guns, plenty of ammunition, and also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.” Truly cotton now had become very worsted.
In June, that British scorpion, the Alabama,—which had been hatched out at Liverpool in the spring and summer of 1862, while the British telescope was steadily turned in another direction, and which for two years had left its red slime all over the seas, stinging to death, as it wriggled in its venomous course, sixty-four peaceful American vessels,—was, by a single blow from the Kearsarge, sent to a sulphureous grave in the Channel which washed its birthplace. Diplomatic naturalists have ever since been disputing over the species and quality of this reptile; while all agree, that, whether warm blooded or cold, it is not desirable that its kind be perpetuated. Its poisonous carcass is still coiled in offensive knots around the international diplomatic lattice-work of the two nations.
During August, Admiral Farragut pried open the iron-set jaws of Mobile Harbor, drawing its teeth,—Forts Morgan, Gaines, and Powell,—real molars as they were, producing spasms which threatened lockjaw to the obstinate patient.
While the red autumn leaves were falling through the North, Confederate brands were whirled, some out of Canada, others from Northern cities, upon the bank of St. Alban’s, in Vermont, on warehouses in Buffalo, Detroit, and New York, on hotels in Cleveland, and on steamboats on the Lakes. The real sap in the Davis tree was now running down, and the top branches were shedding their crimson colors earthward.
While these paling evidences of the fall were multiplying, Mr. Lincoln was re-elected President, by two hundred and twelve votes out of two hundred and thirty-three. Andrew Johnson, then fifty-six years old, who had both early and late in life handled the goose,—the one kind as acceptably as the other,—and had been himself cruelly plucked through the war by the masked plunderers in Tennessee, was placed in the easy nest of the Vice-Presidency. His first getting in was so awkward, that it was manifest something had turned his head.
Sherman, taking breath at Savannah, again swung his effective scythe through the thin crop, lying between that city and Charleston, which was cut down, like a rank burdock, February 18, 1865. Then turning northwards, he gathered in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina; turned up to the sunlight dank villages, all unused to Northern implements,—cheered as he went by sable faces,—until at last he halted at Fayetteville, March 11, 1865, to take a hearty shake of the hand with his fellow-mowers, General Terry and Admiral Porter. From Wilmington, he again whetted up his keen blade and cleared the Southern field. Johnston, Beauregard, Bragg, and Hardee manifested a disposition to stop him at Bentonville; but a blow sent them reeling from his path, and he went vigorously forward, garnering blessed harvests for his country and himself.
Cotton down.
(p. 512)