to interrupt communication by road to the southwest. There
could be little doubt that Richmond would fall soon, and the real
question was coming to be whether Lee and his army could escape from
Richmond and still carry on the war.

The appointment of Lee as General-in-Chief was not too late to bear one
consequence which may have prolonged the war a little. Joseph
Johnston, whose ability in a campaign of constant retirement before
overwhelming force had been respected and redoubted by Sherman, had
been discarded by Davis in the previous July. He was now put in
command of the forces which it was hoped to concentrate against
Sherman, with a view to holding up his northward advance and preventing
him from joining hands with Grant before Richmond. There were
altogether about 89,000 Confederate troops scattered in the Carolinas,
Georgia, and Florida, and there would be about the same number under
Sherman when Schofield in North Carolina could join him, but the number
which Johnston could now collect together seems never to have exceeded
33,000. It was Sherman's task by the rapidity of his movements to
prevent a very formidable concentration against him. Johnston on the
other hand must hinder if he could Sherman's junction with Schofield.
Just before that junction took place he narrowly missed dealing a
considerable blow to Sherman's army at the battle of Bentonville in the
heart of North Carolina, but had in the end to withdraw within an
entrenched position where Sherman would not attack him, but which upon
the arrival of Schofield he was forced to abandon. On March 23, 1865,
Sherman took possession of the town and railway junction of
Goldsborough between Raleigh and New Berne. From Savannah to
Goldsborough he had led his army 425 miles in fifty days, amid
disadvantages of ground and of weather which had called forth both
extraordinary endurance and mechanical skill on the part of his men.
He lay now 140 miles south of Petersburg by the railway. The port of
New Berne to the east of him on the estuary of the Neuse gave him a
sure base of supplies, and would enable him quickly to move his army by
sea to Petersburg and Richmond if Grant should so decide. The
direction in which Johnston would now fall back lay inland up the Neuse
Valley, also along a railway, towards Greensborough, some 150 miles
south-west of Petersburg; Greensborough was connected by another
railway with Petersburg and Richmond, and along this line Le