again, he retired quickly into the line of works which had for many weeks been preparing to give him the means of protecting Atlanta, the great railroad junction which the instinct of the commander on either side told him was vital to the Confederacy. Here on the 17th July Johnston was suddenly superseded by a telegraphic dispatch from Richmond, and the campaign, so far as he was concerned, was over. Hood who succeeded, a man described to Sherman as "bold even to rashness," a character his adversary does not contradict, at once laid aside the Fabian policy which had caused, nominally at least, the disgrace of his predecessor, and commenced a series of those of fensive strokes which Johnston had avoided, and which were repulsed with such crushing effect as forever to discredit his temerity, and finally ended in his drawing off the shattered remains of his army and leaving Atlanta to the Federals, with Georgia open, and the road free through that state and the Carolinas to the rear of Lee at Richmond, a route Sherman was steadily pursuing when the war came to an end with the surrender of the Army of Virginia to Grant.

Of the details of the works from behind which this singular struggle was carried on, enough has been said. Its general course is vividly told in a dispatch of Sherman's, telegraphed by him to Washington when he was about half-way, and intended as a summary of the events of the first six weeks.

"We continued," he says, to press forward on the principle of an advance against fortified positions. The whole country is one vast fort, and Johnston must have at least fifty miles of connected trenches, with abattis and finished batteries. We gain ground daily, fighting all the time. Our lines are now

in close contact, and the fighting is incessant, with a good deal of artillery fire. As fast as we gain one position, the enemy has another all ready; but I think he will soon have to let go Kenesaw, which is the key to the whole -country."

The letting go did indeed happen, but not for more than a fortnight afterwards; and the rate of progress being so infinitesimal at the strongest points, it is not surprising to learn that it took full ten weeks to force Johnston back from Dalton to Atlanta, a distance of just eighty miles as the crow flies, the average rate therefore being but a very little over a mile a

day. But though thus slow, it was not the less sure. And as this long series of struggles went on with the one invariable result of a retreat on the Confederate side, Sherman grew, as his correspondence shows, more confident than ever in his superiority. Thus, on arriving in front of the bridgehead on the Chattahoochee River, the last great obstacle before the lines of Atlanta, he tells us: "I knew that Johnston could not remain long on the west bank [where his army held the strong works covering the main passage], for I could easily practise on that ground to better advantage our former tactics of intrenching a moiety of our army in his front, and with the rest cross the river, and threaten either his rear or the city of Atlanta itself." And to Halleck he wrote: "I propose to study the crossing of the Chattahoochee, and when all is ready to move quickly; as a beginning I will keep the troops, &c., well back from the river, and only display our picket line. . . We have pontoons enough for four bridges, but as our crossing will be resisted we must manoeuvre." And manoeuvre he did accordingly; but Johnston, who little expected his own coming supersession, and who had determined to make his real stand behind the Peach-tree Creek, a stream flowing near Atlanta, abandoned his works in front of the Chattahooche when he found his adversary turning him once more by a passage higher up, and retreated to the final position which he was holding when ordered to resign his command to Hood. At this point, and indeed throughout the events of this long struggle, there is, except on one head, to be noticed later, such an undesigned and striking coincidence between the narratives of the two commanders as convinces the reader of the perfect honesty of each from the testimony of the other. As we said at the outset, each knows how to respect his adversary's qualities. But as suspicion has often been thrown on the praise bestowed on a general by his opponent, it may be permitted us to inquire independently how far each fully came up to his allotted task.

As to Sherman, we have at hand a very fitting standard of comparison. General Grant himself took the personal leadership in Virginia, where Lee, with an army nearly equal in strength to that of Johnston, had to cover Richmond, as his

comrade Atlanta. If the country was more difficult, and therefore more suitable for defence, than that on the Georgian frontier, on the other hand Grant had nearly half as many men again more in his fighting force than Sherman, with trains fully proportioned to their need. Though well aware of the resources his adversary so well knew how to draw from the dense nature of the terrain, he had not the patience of Sherman in accommodating himself at once to the system of warfare that circumstances seemed to impose on both alike. He crossed the Rapidan, therefore, on the direct way from Washington to Richmond, determined, as he himself expressed it, "to fight it out on this line." Again and again he threw himself on his stubborn foe to be beaten back with loss; with heaviest loss of all in his fifth and last attempt to gain a direct passage to Richmond in the Battle of Cold Harbor. Finally, he was forced, after losing over 50,000 men in these endeavors to break down his adversary's guard by main force, to cross the James to the south side of Richmond. And here, only after another fruitless effort to surprise the Confederate lines, which cost him thousands of lives, he set himself to besiege Richmond by the same slow process of burrowing investment which had proved successful in his hands at Vicksburg. The excuses offered for these proceedings are two: the necessity he saw for wearing down the hitherto victorious army of Lee by constant "attrition," and his desire to meet President Lincoln's personal wish of keeping the advancing army between Washington and that redoubtable enemy. The latter is of course disposed of in the view of any fair critic by the fact that, however desirable this may have been, it proved simply impossible to cover Washington consistently with carrying out the required advance on Richmond. It should never have been put forward by General Grant's friends at all. Any real defence must lie in the fact that Lee could certainly much less well afford to lose men than his adversary, and that though he defeated the latter again and again, with a total loss of over 60,000 men, during the months of May and June, it cost him 20,000 of his lesser numbers to do this. Giving this consideration the fullest weight, however, it is not the less certain that in some of his actions Grant threw NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXIII., No. I

away vast numbers of lives without inflicting compensating loss. This was admittedly the case in the Battle of Cold Harbor, already mentioned; and was hardly less so in the attempt made a fortnight later to carry by a coup-de-main the Petersburg lines to the south of Richmond when the army first approached them.. Sherman, as we know, followed an altogether different course from first to last. The material result was that the whole fighting of May and June cost him but 16,800 men in all, while Johnston lost 9,300 (exclusive of prisoners, the number of which is disputed), and was therefore far more seriously diminished in proportion to his adversary. It has been said that Sherman took a full month longer to work his way up to the Atlanta lines than Grant to those of Petersburg. But the reply to this is more favorable to his reputation than anything yet stated; for he had no strategic choice as to his general line of advance on Atlanta, whilst Grant, with a large fleet at his command and the sea to work from, might have landed at the outset on the Richmond peninsula, or in the River James before Peters burg, without any fighting at all. To be plain, there would be hardly any comparison between these two generals if they were judged by their performances in 1864. Grant's unwearied energy and tenacity in the western campaigns during the dark days of the Union cause had well earned for him the high place he held. He had had the extraordinary merit in a general of raw troops of not allowing that he could be beaten, and so winning back their confidence in themselves. But a strong prejudice against the Army of the Potomac, which, having never served with, he believed had not been boldly enough handled; a desire to prove his own personal superiority over the great general whom the Union had learnt to dread; and possibly a just belief that on strategical grounds it was necessary at all costs to hold closely to a foe so full of resource and combination: these may account for his conduct in the spring of 1864, but they cannot wholly excuse it. And the proof of Sherman's great superiority in the particular warfare which tested the abilities of both so equally was that, although it did take him some weeks longer to get in sight of the city which had become his 'objective,' he could, on arriving before it,

3

write confidently of the fine spirits of his troops, and the steady continuance of active operations, which would soon place Atlanta in his hands; while at the very same time Grant had to sit down before Richmond with an army so dispirited by its losses, that it was necessary for it to remain intrenched and almost motionless for the next seven months, until famine and suffering had done their slow work on the defenders. Then indeed, but not till then, the investors of the Confederate capital felt their full advantage, and reinforced and fully supplied with all that could make troops efficient, they were once more ready and eager to make the outflanking movements which stretched Lee's line until it broke, and compelled him to succumb to his fate. Resting on this year's history viewed singly, Sherman must be pronounced a very master of the art of war in a close and wooded country, superior by far to his bolder but less sagacious chief, and unmatched anywhere unless it be by Lee himself, or the general who so stoutly opposed him.

If men were to be judged of solely by the difficulties they overcome, independently of the direct results achieved, then General Johnston might fitly head the list of great American commanders; for on his side was neither the supreme military power wielded by Grant, nor the prestige which made Lee almost independent of those who nominally controlled him; much less the harmony of thought and action with his superior that assisted Sherman from first to last. A dictatorial President, puffed up, as his despatches show, with mistaken belief in his own military judgment, and advised by the very officer whom Johnston had superseded, was from the moment of the latter's appointment disposed to interfere with his arrangements and prescribe his strate

gy.

His supplies came from various States, and were collected by officers not directly responsible to him. The very reinforcing of his army by troops unused elsewhere, so as to give him such a force as was actually needful for the defence of Georgia, was at first (as has been shown) made contingent on his carrying out a desperate if not wholly impracticable advance into the hostile lines. His men, to whom he came as a stranger, were neither attached personally to their chief, like the Army of Virginia, nor improved in disci

pline to the same degree as their adversaries; a defect alone sufficient to account for the many Confederate failures of the latter part of the war. His chiefs of corps, on one important occasion at least, at Resaca, seemed to challenge his views with that absence of respect for authority which augured ill for the endurance of their men if tested by adversity. In all these points, therefore, he was at a striking disadvantage as regarded his opponent; yet with these against him, and with but one-half the number of the Federals, he contrived to hold them back, led though they were with such versatile skill and unwearied energy as the records of modern war can hardly match, for nearly two months and a half, in the advance which an active pedestrian could have made in as many days. Surely this is of itself a sufficient testimony to his powers of leadership. One day of faltering when halted, one hour of hesitation when it became necessary to fall back, might have brought instant ruin to him and his army. To a sober mind it needs no argument to show that he was right in refusing to rush wildly forward into Tennessee, to suffer such a defeat as the Confederates met before Nashville later in the war, when the State was comparatively stripped of troops, and Sherman far away: and that he was right in keeping a strict defensive during the actual campaign, seems sufficiently proved by the fatal results that attended the transfer of his army into the hands of the hard-fighting general who so speedily ruined it. What he might have ventured had a rasher or less wary commander, such as Grant himself for instance, been before him, is as impossible to say as it would be to declare what would have been the result to Lee had Sherman taken the place of Grant in Virginia. As things actually were disposed, it is not too much to declare that Johnston's doing what he did, with the limited means at his command, is a feat that should leave his name in the annals of defensive war at least as high as that of Fabius, or Turenne, or Moreau.

As we have spoken of one question on which the two commanders, in their narratives, differ widely, it is but fair to state what that is. It concerns the total losses suffered by the Confederates during their retreat, and its proportion to that of their enemies. Writing before his former ad

versary, and anxious to make good his cause against those who, certainly with as little justice as good sense, had stripped him of his command, Johnston undoubtedly over-estimates the latter largely, making it, from such doubtful evidence as "the statements of prisoners and publications in the newspapers," possibly six times as great as his own. The vastness of this error appears to have arisen from his impression that, as the attacking side in intrenched work suffers notoriously the most, so this must have been the case throughout the advance on Atlanta. It was so indeed, to some extent, as Sherman's own comparison of the Federal of ficial statements with those cited on the other side by Johnston, sufficiently shows. But the proportion of his enemies disabled, which Johnston would have made fifty thousand, was really not one-third of that number; and this strange error is useful as showing that the mere guesses, even of the most experienced and skilful, cannot in such matters be relied on. This unintentional exaggeration, for such we fully believe it, has been made a serious charge against Johnston's character by those about President Davis, whose interest it was to damage it; and, as presently shown, it was the only one of several adduced that had any basis of truth.

The proportion of losses which Johnston himself insists on as a test of his generalship, naturally includes a consideration of that on his own side. And this brings us to the only point on which the narratives of the two commanders cannot by any means be reconciled. For whilst Sherman very properly reduces that on his own side by fair proof to its proper dimensions, he is hardly less inclined than his adversary was to swell that of the other. Writing, however, with Johnston's narrative before him, he had no reason that could excuse a guess at the numbers of killed and wounded. The Confederate commander, however, gives no numerical statement of his missing, or, in plain words, prisoners; and Sherman, therefore, proceeds (Sherman, vol. ii. chap. xvi.), to do this for him, by means simple enough certainly, but, as it seems to us, curiously inaccurate. He takes the numerical strength of the Confederates known as captured, no less than 13,000 in all, for the whole campaign of four months and a half, and then assumes that in May and

ex

June "a due proportion" of these, over 5,000 in fact, might have been taken from Johnston, and should be charged, as it were, to his account. But this whole campaign, it should be noted, included the bloody series of actions before and around Atlanta, in which General Hood's bold offensive movements were made, and turned out so ill for his cause. What his fruitless attacks were in their direct results is shown in such reports as that of General Logan (Sherman, vol. ii. p. 90), which states, "six successive charges were made against my lines protected by logs and rails, and they were six times gallantly repulsed, each time with fearful loss to the enemy." Such unsuccessful charges would account for any number of prisoners; whilst Johnston's cautious tactics cluded the possibility of losing many. To charge him on the authority of a vague general return with "a due proportion" of Hood's losses, seems to us not merely unhistorical, but extremely unjust to a distinguished enemy. Johnston's own account of the matter, written before this, and in answer to attacks made on him at Richmond, is simple and straightforward enough, and as it agrees exactly in general bearing with the description of his tactics furnished by his adversary, we prefer to adopt it unhesitatingly as the fairer estimate. After explaining that the rumor of a large number of prisoners being taken, first arose in the South from the practice of leaving on the 'returns of strength' all those the corps present had lost in the two previous years, he gives the facts in detail, as follows:-"The only prisoners taken from us during this campaign that I heard of," (he is speaking of course wholly of his own period of command) were a company of skirmishers of Hardee's corps, and an outpost of Hood's," (some two hundred men), " captured about the middle of January, and a few taken from the right of Walker's and left of French's skirmishers on the 27th. As we usually fought in intrenched lines, which were always held, the enemy rarely had an opportunity to take prisoners ;”—a remark so justified by common sense that we strongly suspect that had Sherman here been acting as a disinterested critic, instead of being fired by the spirit of controversy, he would have been the first to assent to it. As it is, he has been plainly led away by the desire to prove too much,