y by dissipating its most cherished
resources. For fully a month the army was practically lost, so far as
communication with the North was concerned. Then it struck the sea at
Savannah, captured that beautiful city, and, in the celebrated
despatch which actually reached President Lincoln on Christmas Eve,
General Sherman presented to the President and the country "the city
of Savannah, as a Christmas gift."

Savannah taken, the more difficult march northward was determined
upon, so as to make a junction with Grant before Richmond, and end the
war by one final and tremendous stroke. The "Campaign of the
Carolinas," as this northward march was called, was a really greater
achievement than the march to the sea, for it was against more
formidable natural odds, and was done in midwinter. The distance
covered, from Savannah to Goldsboro, in North Carolina, was four
hundred and twenty-five miles; five large rivers were crossed, three
important cities were captured, and the Stars and Stripes were once
more flung to the breeze above the ruins of Fort Sumter. And yet, in
fifty days from the start, the army reached Goldsboro, "in superb
order," and concluded what Sherman himself designates as "one of the
longest and most important marches ever made by an organized army in a
civilized country." It was a great achievement, but it was without the
novelty, the mystery, and the dramatic qualities of the earlier
cross-country campaign, and so it has come to pass that the first has
been the most famous, and Sherman's march to the sea has gone into
history as one of the romances and glories of the War of the
Rebellion.

The campaign of the Carolinas fitly ended, as had the march to the
sea, in victory; and the successes at Averysboro and Burtonville
culminated on April 26, 1865, in the surrender, near Raleigh, of
Johnston, and the last organized army of the Confederacy.

The war was over. Sherman's army marched northward to Washington,
where, on May 24, 1865, on the second day of the famous Grand Review,
General Sherman and his victorious army marched past the presidential
reviewing stand--"sixty-five thousand men," says General Sherman, "in
splendid physique, who had just completed a march of nearly two
thousand miles in a hostile country." Then came the disbandment;
Sherman bade his "boys" good-by in a ringing farewell order; the men
departed to their waiting homes, and the splendid "Army of the West"
was a thing of the past.

Aft