“The game is then up with Lee,” he confidently added, “unless he comes out of Richmond, avoids you, and fights me, in which case I should reckon on your being on his heels....  If you feel confident that you can whip Lee outside of his intrenchments, I feel equally confident that I can handle him in the open country.”

Grant promptly adopted the plan, and by formal orders directed Sherman to execute it.  Several minor western expeditions were organized to contribute to its success.  The Union fleet on the coast was held in readiness to cooeperate as far as possible with Sherman’s advance, and to afford him a new base of supply, if, at some suitable point he should desire to establish communications with it.  When, in the middle of January, 1865, a naval expedition captured Fort Fisher at the mouth of Cape Fear River, an army corps under General Schofield was brought east from Thomas’s Army of the Tennessee, and sent by sea to the North Carolina coast to penetrate into the interior and form a junction with Sherman when he should arrive.

Having had five weeks for rest and preparation, Sherman began the third stage of his campaign on February 1, with a total of sixty thousand men, provisions for twenty days, forage for seven, and a full supply of ammunition for a great battle.  This new undertaking proved a task of much greater difficulty and severer hardship than his march to the sea.  Instead of the genial autumn weather, the army had now to face the wintry storms that blew in from the neighboring coast.  Instead of the dry Georgia uplands, his route lay across a low sandy country cut by rivers with branches at right angles to his line of march, and bordered by broad and miry swamps.  But this was an extraordinary army, which faced exposure, labor and peril with a determination akin to contempt.  Here were swamps and water-courses to be waded waist deep; endless miles of corduroy road to be laid and relaid as course after course sank into the mud under the heavy army wagons; frequent head-water channels of rivers to be bridged; the lines of railroad along their route to be torn up and rendered incapable of repair; food to be gathered by foraging; keeping up, meanwhile a daily average of ten or twelve miles of marching.  Under such conditions, Sherman’s army made a mid-winter march of four hundred and twenty-five miles in fifty days, crossing five navigable rivers, occupying three important cities, and rendering the whole railroad system of South Carolina useless to the enemy.

The ten to fifteen thousand Confederates with which General Hardee had evacuated Savannah and retreated to Charleston could, of course, oppose no serious opposition to Sherman’s march.  On the contrary, when Sherman reached Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, on February 16, Hardee evacuated Charleston, which had been defended for four long years against every attack of a most powerful Union fleet, and where the most ingenious siege-works and desperate storming