h it occurred elsewhere, was
yet entirely typical. In forty days an infantry division of eight
thousand men repaired a hundred miles of rail and built a hundred
and eighty-two bridges.

Sherman took a month to advance from Columbia in the middle of
South Carolina to Bentonville in the middle of North Carolina.
Here Johnston stood his ground; and a battle was fought from the
nineteenth to the twenty-first of March. Had Sherman known at the
time that his own numbers were, as he afterwards reported, "vastly
superior," he might have crushed Johnston then and there. But,
as it was, he ably supported the exposed flank that Johnston so
skillfully attacked, won the battle, inflicted losses a good deal
larger than his own, and gained his ulterior objective as well
as if there had not been a fight at all. This objective was the
concentration of his whole army round Goldsboro by the twenty-fifth.
At Goldsboro he held the strategic center of North Carolina, being
at the junction whence the rails ran east to Newbern (which had
long been in Union hands), west to meet the only rails by which
Lee's army might for a time escape, and north (a hundred and fifty
miles) to Grant's besieging host at Petersburg. Sherman's record is
one of which his men might well be proud. In fifty days from Savannah
he had made a winter march through four hundred and twenty-five
miles of mud, had captured three cities, destroyed four railways,
drained the Confederate resources, increased his own, and half
closed on Lee and Johnston the vice which he and Grant could soon
close altogether.

Nevertheless Grant records that "one of the most anxious periods
was the last few weeks before Petersburg"; for he was haunted by
the fear that Lee's army, now nearing the last extremity of famine,
might risk all on railing off southwest to Danville, the one line
left. Lee, consummate now as when victorious before, masked his
movements wonderfully well till the early morning of the twenty-fifth
of March, when he suddenly made a furious attack where the lines
were very near together. For some hours he held a salient in the
Federal position. But he was presently driven back with loss; and
his intention to escape stood plainly revealed.

The same day Sherman railed down to Newbern over the line repaired
by that indefatigable and most accomplished engineer, Colonel W. W.
Wright, took ship for City Point, Virginia, and met Lincoln, Grant,
and Admiral Porter there on the twe