Captain Semmes commanded the Alabama, and off Cherbourg he sent a challenge to the Kearsarge, commanded by Captain Winslow, who accepted it, and so worked his vessel that the Alabama had to move round him in a circle, while he filled her up with iron, lead, copper, tin, German silver, glass, nails, putty, paint, varnishes, and dye-stuff. At the seventh rotation the Alabama ran up the white flag and sunk with a low mellow plunk. The crew was rescued by Captain Winslow and the English yacht Deerhound, the latter taking Semmes and starting for England.
This matter, however, was settled in after-years.
The care of the sick, the dying, and the dead in the Union armies was almost entirely under the eye of the merciful and charitable, loyal and loving members of the Sanitary and Christian Commissions, whose work and its memory kept green in the hearts of the survivors and their children will be monument enough for the coming centuries.
In July, 1864, the debt of the country was two billion dollars and twenty cents. Two dollars and ninety cents in greenbacks would buy a reluctant gold dollar.
Still, Abraham Lincoln was re-elected against George B. McClellan, the Democratic candidate, who carried only three States. This was endorsement enough for the policy of President Lincoln.
Sherman's army of sixty thousand, after a month's rest at Savannah, started north to unite with Grant in the final blow. "Before it was terror, behind it ashes."
Columbia was captured February 17, and burned, without Sherman's authority, the night following. Charleston was evacuated the next day.
Johnston was recalled to take command, and opposed the march of Sherman, but was driven back after fierce engagements at Bentonville and Averysboro. On March 25 Lee decided to attack Grant, and, while the latter was busy, get out of Richmond and join Johnston, but when this battle, known as the attack on Fort Steadman, was over, Grant's hold was tighter than ever.
Sheridan attacked Lee's rear with a heavy force, and at Five Forks, April 1, the surprised garrison was defeated with five thousand captured. The next day the entire Union army advanced, and the line of Confederate intrenchments was broken. On the following day Petersburg and Richmond were evacuated, but Mr. Davis was not there. He had gone away. Rather than meet General Grant and entertain him when there was no pie in the house, he and the Treasury had escaped from the haunts of man, wishing to commune with nature for a while. He was captured at Irwinsville, Georgia, under peculiar and rather amusing circumstances.
He was never punished, with the exception perhaps that he published a book and did not realize anything from it.
Lee fled to the westward, but was pursued by the triumphant Federals, especially by Sheridan, whose cavalry hung on his flanks day and night.
Food failed the fleeing foe, and the young shoots of trees for food and the larger shoots of the artillery between meals were too much for that proud army, once so strong and confident.
Let us not dwell on the particulars.
As Sheridan planted his cavalry squarely across Lee's path of retreat, the worn but heroic tatters of a proud army prepared to sell themselves for a bloody ransom and go down fighting, but Grant had demanded their surrender, and, seeing back of the galling, skirmishing cavalry solid walls of confident infantry, the terms of surrender were accepted by General Lee, and April 9 the Confederate army stacked its arms near Appomattox Court-House.
The Confederate war debt was never paid, for some reason or other, but the Federal debt when it was feeling the best amounted to two billion eight hundred and forty-four million dollars. One million men lost their lives.
Was it worth while?
In the midst of the general rejoicing, President Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre, April 14. The assassin was captured in a dying condition in a burning barn, through a crack in the boarding of which he had been shot by a soldier named Boston Corbett. He died with no sympathetic applause to soothe the dull, cold ear of death.
West Virginia was admitted to the Union in 1863, and Nevada in 1864.
The following chapters will be devoted to more peaceful details, while we cheerfully close the sorrowful pages in which we have confessed that, with all our greatness as a nation, we could not stay the tide of war.
CHAPTER XXIX.
TOO MUCH LIBERTY IN PLACES AND NOT ENOUGH ELSEWHERE. THOUGHTS ON THE LATE WAR WHO IS THE BIGGER ASS, THE MAN WHO WILL NOT FORGIVE AND FORGET, OR THE MAWKISH AND MOIST-EYED SNIVELLER WHO WANTS TO DO THAT ALL THE TIME?
When Patrick Henry put his old cast-iron spectacles on the top of his head and whooped for liberty, he did not know that some day we should have more of it than we knew what to do with. He little dreamed that the time would come when we should have more liberty than we could pay for.
When Mr. Henry sawed the air and shouted for liberty or death, I do not believe that he knew the time would come when Liberty would stand on Bedloe's Island and yearn for rest and change of scene.
It seems to me that we have too much liberty in this country in some ways. We have more liberty than we have money. We guarantee that every man in America shall fill himself up full of liberty at our expense, and the less of an American he is the more liberty he can have. Should he desire to enjoy himself, all he needs is a slight foreign accent and a willingness to mix up with politics as soon as he can get his baggage off the steamer. The more I study American institutions the more I regret that I was not born a foreigner, so that I could have something to say about the management of our great land. If I could not be a foreigner, I believe I should prefer to be a policeman or an Indian not taxed.