was even more serious than the North's casualties. Nonetheless, Lincoln was profoundly
disturbed by the carnage and failure. The Speaker of the House, Schuyler Colfax, found him
pacing his office, his long arms behind his back, his dark features contracted still more with gloom,' explaining:Why do we suffer reverses after reverses? Could we have avoided this
terrible, bloody war? ... Is it ever to end?' Francis B. Carpenter, who was painting his First
Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln, described him in the hall of the
White House, clad in a long morning wrapper, pacing back and forth a narrow passage leading to one of the windows, his hands behind him, great black rings under his eyes, his head bent forward upon his breast-altogether ... a picture of the effects of sorrow, care and anxiety.' All the same, the noose was tightening round the South. Davis himself felt it. Even before Gettysburg, he had personally been forced to quell a food riot of hungry women in Richmond. Unionist troops overran his and his brother's property, taking the whites prisoner and allowing the blacks to go. Some 137 slaves fled to freedom leaving, on Davis' own estate, only six adults and a few children. His property was betrayed by a slave he trusted, the soldiers cut his carpets into bits as souvenirs, they drank his wine, stabbed his portrait with knives, and got all his private papers, spicy extracts from which duly appeared in the Northern newspapers. In Richmond, Davis had to sell his slaves, his horses, and his carriage just to buy food-ersatz coffee, pones or corncakes, bread, a bit of bacon. Jeb Stuart, Davis' best cavalry commander, fell, mortally wounded. He had one good general, Lee, marking Grant; but Lincoln had two-and Sherman now took Atlanta, moved through Georgia, burning and slaughtering, and on December 21, 1864 was in Savannah, having cut the Confederacy in two yet again. By Christmas much of the South was starving. Davis had made Lincoln's job of holding the North together easier by proclaiming, for four years, that he would not negotiate about anything except on the basis of the North admitting the complete independence of the South. Now he again insisted the South wouldbring the North
to its knees before next summer.' On hearing this rodomontade, his own Vice-President,
Alexander Stephens (1812-83), told him in disgust he was leaving for his home and would not
return-it was the beginning of the disintegration of the Confederate government.
Much of the South was now totally demoralized by military occupation. Sarah Morgan of
Baton Rouge, who kept a diary, described the sacking of her house:
one scene of ruin. Libraries emptied, china smashed, sideboards split open with axes,
three cedar chests cut open, plundered and set up on end; all parlor ornaments carried off.
[Her sister Margaret's] piano, dragged to the center of the parlor had been abandoned as
too heavy to carry off; her desk lay open with all letters and notes well thumbed and
scattered around, while Will's last letter to her was open on the floor, with the Yankee
stamp of dirty fingers. Mother's portrait half cut from the frame stood on the floor.
Margaret, who was present at the sacking, told how she had saved father's. It seems that
those who wrought destruction in our house were all officers!
The destruction in Georgia was worse. Like Grant, Sherman was a decent man but a fierce,
killer general, determined to end the war and the slaughter as speedily as possible and, with this
his end, anxious to demonstrate to the South in as plain a manner as he could that the North was
master and resistance futile. He cut a swathe 60 miles wide through Georgia, destroying
everything-railroads, bridges, crops, cattle, cotton-gins, mills, stocks-which might conceivably
be useful to the South's war-effort. Despite his orders, and the generally tight discipline of his
army in action, the looting was appalling and the atrocities struck fear and dismay into the
stoutest Southern hearts.