two Houses of Congress might pass, and a Proclamation which he would in that case issue.  In these he proposed to offer to the Southern States four hundred million dollars in United States bonds, being, as he calculated the cost to the North of two hundred days of war, to be allotted among those States in proportion to the property in slaves which each had lost.  One half of this sum was to be paid at once if the war ended by April 1, and the other half upon the final adoption of the Constitutional Amendment.  It would have been a happy thing if the work of restoring peace could have lain with a statesman whose rare aberrations from the path of practical politics were of this kind.  Yet, considering the natural passions which even in this least revengeful of civil wars could not quite be repressed, we should be judging the Congress of that day by a higher standard than we should apply in other countries if we regarded this proposal as one that could have been hopefully submitted to them.  Lincoln’s illusions were dispelled on the following day when he read what he had written to his Cabinet, and found that even among his own ministers not one man supported him.  It would have been worse than useless to put forward his proposals and to fail.  “You are all opposed to me,” he said sadly; and he put his papers away.  But the war had now so far progressed that it is necessary to turn back to the point at which we left it at the end of 1864.

Winter weather brought a brief pause to the operations of the armies.  Sherman at Savannah was preparing to begin his northward march, a harder matter, owing to the rivers and marshes that lay in his way, than his triumphal progress from Atlanta.  Efforts were made to concentrate all available forces against him at Augusta to his north-west.  Making feints against Augusta on the one side, and against the city and port of Charleston on the other, he displayed the marvellous engineering capacity of his army by an advance of unlooked-for speed across the marshes to Columbia, due north of him, which is the State capital of South Carolina.  He reached it on February 17, 1865.  The intended concentration of the South at Augusta was broken up.  The retreating Confederates set fire to great stores of cotton and the unfortunate city was burnt, a calamity for which the South, by a natural but most unjust mistake, blamed Sherman.  The railway communications of Charleston were now certain to be severed; so the Confederates were forced to evacuate it, and on February 18, 1865, the North occupied the chief home of the misbegotten political ideals of the South and of its real culture and chivalry.