tire by way of the
mountains and relieve the pressure against Johnston, now in command
of Bragg's Army, or to unite with Lee and defend the approaches to
Richmond.

A counsel of war was held in Richmond between the President, General
Bragg as the military advisor of his Excellency, General Lee, and
General Longstreet, to form some plan by which Grant might be checked
or foiled in the general grand advance he was preparing to make along
the whole line. The Federal armies of Mississippi and Alabama had
concentrated in front of General Johnston and were gradually pressing
him back into Georgia.

Grant had been made commander in chief of all the armies of the North,
with headquarters with General Meade, in front of Lee, and he
was bending all his energies, his strategies, and boldness in his
preparations to strike Lee a fatal blow.

At this juncture Longstreet came forward with a plan--bold in its
conception; still bolder in its execution, had it been adopted--that
might have changed the face, if not the fate, of the Confederacy.
It was to strip all the forts and garrisons in South Carolina and
Georgia, form an army of twenty-five thousand men, place them under
Beauregard at Charleston, board the train for Greenville, S.C.; then
by the overland route through the mountain passes of North Carolina,
and by way of Aberdeen, Va.; then to make his way for Kentucky;
Longstreet to follow in Beauregard's wake or between him and
the Federal Army, and by a shorter line, join Beauregard at some
convenient point in Kentucky; Johnston to flank Sherman and march
by way of Middle Tennessee, the whole to avoid battle until a grand
junction was formed by all the armies, somewhere near the Ohio River;
then along the Louisville Railroad, the sole route of transportation
of supplies for the Federal Army, fight a great battle, and, if
victorious, penetrate into Ohio, thereby withdrawing Sherman from his
intended "march to the sea," relieving Lee by weakening Grant, as
that General would be forced to succor the armies forming to meet
Beauregard.

This, to an observer at this late hour, seems to have been the only
practical plan by which the downfall of the Confederacy could have
been averted. However, the President and his cabinet decided to
continue the old tactics of dodging from place to place, meeting the
hard, stubborn blows of the enemy, only waiting the time, when the
South, by mere attrition, would wear itself out.

About the 10th