With it, they lost their last link
with the outside world, and the blockade which Lincoln had proclaimed
nearly four years before was at length complete.
All hope of success now utterly vanished for the Confederates.
Even Lee knew it, and he might have advised the South to lay down
arms, but Jefferson Davis, the Southern President, doggedly refused
to own himself beaten. So the war continued.
On the 1st of February, Sherman set out from Savannah on a second
march. This time he turned northward, and carried his victorious
army right through the Carolinas. The march was longer by more
than a hundred miles than his now famous march to the sea. It was
one too of much greater difficulty. Indeed, compared with it, the
march to the sea had been a mere picnic.
The weather now was horrible. Rain fell in torrents, and the army
floundered through seas of mud. Along the whole way too they were
harassed by the foe, and hardly a day passed without fighting of some
sort. But, like an inexorable fate, Sherman pressed on, destroying
railroads, and arsenals, creating a desert about him until at length
he joined forces with Grant.
In the midst of this devastating war while some states were fighting
for separation, another new state was added to the Union. This was
Nevada. Nevada is Spanish and means snowy, and the state takes its
name from the snowy topped mountains which run through it.
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