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,