Atlanta. Efforts were made to
concentrate all available forces against him at Augusta to his
north-west. Making feints against Augusta on the one side, and against
the city and port of Charleston on the other, he displayed the
marvellous engineering capacity of his army by an advance of
unlooked-for speed across the marshes to Columbia, due north of him,
which is the State capital of South Carolina. He reached it on
February 17, 1865. The intended concentration of the South at Augusta
was broken up. The retreating Confederates set fire to great stores of
cotton and the unfortunate city was burnt, a calamity for which the
South, by a natural but most unjust mistake, blamed Sherman. The
railway communications of Charleston were now certain to be severed; so
the Confederates were forced to evacuate it, and on February 18, 1865,
the North occupied the chief home of the misbegotten political ideals
of the South and of its real culture and chivalry.

Admiral Porter (for age and ill-health had come upon Farragut) was
ready at sea to co-operate with Sherman. Thomas' army in Tennessee had
not been allowed by Grant to go into winter quarters. A part of it
under Schofield was brought to Washington and there shipped for North
Carolina, where, ever since Burnside's successful expedition in 1862,
the Union Government had held the ports north of Wilmington.
Wilmington itself was the only port left to the South, and Richmond had
now come to depend largely on the precarious and costly supplies which
could still, notwithstanding the blockade, be run into that harbour.
At the end of December, Butler, acting in flagrant disobedience to
Grant, had achieved his crowning failure in a joint expedition with
Porter against Wilmington. But Porter was not discouraged, nor was
Grant, who from beginning to end of his career had worked well together
with the Navy. On February 8, Porter, this time supported by an
energetic general, Terry, effected a brilliant capture of Fort Fisher
at the mouth of Wilmington harbour. The port was closed to the South.
On the 22nd, the city itself fell to Schofield, and Sherman had now
this sea base at hand if he needed it.

Meanwhile Grant's entrenchments on the east of Richmond and Petersburg
were still extending southward, and Lee's defences had been stretched
till they covered nearly forty miles. Grant's lines now cut the
principal railway southward from the huge fortress, and he was able
effectually