Delicately nurtured women, reared in ease and luxury, cheerfully chose to starve in thread-bare garments while they sent their silver and jewels to the government to enable it to continue the struggle. They bade their husbands and sons and brothers to remain at the front and never sheathe their swords unless in an honorable peace; and forthwith the stripling of tender years and the gray-bearded grandsire, bowed with the infirmities of time, went forth to perform prodigies of valor upon the last sanguinary fields of the dying Confederacy. The President of the Confederacy was too wise a man not to realize the significance of the situation at that time. He fully realized the awful suffering of his people. He saw his armies driven from the West, the lines of the Confederacy daily contracting. He saw the last hope of foreign intervention die and he witnessed the birth, even in the government, of a strong spirit of hostility to himself. What this must have meant to a man of his sensitive, kindly nature we may readily guess, but to the world his attitude was most admirable. Calm, resolute, majestic he stood at the helm, steering the foundering craft of state through the last storm as steadily, as resolutely as though he knew a haven of safety instead of destruction to lie just beyond. [Illustration: Mr. and Mrs. Davis in 1863] Early in 1864 it became apparent that such an effort as had never been made before to crush the Confederacy was impending. General Grant was transferred to the East, and early in the spring with a magnificent army of 162,000 began his advance upon Richmond. The great Confederate chieftain, Lee, with a force one-third as great confronted him, and then began that mighty duel which must always remain the wonder and admiration of the world. In the Wilderness Lee struck a staggering blow, which halted the advance and doubled up the Federal army. Grant announced that he proposed to fight it out on that line if it took all summer, straightened his lines and began the campaign, which one may more readily understand if he will imagine some Titan armed with a ponderous hammer, confronting a wily, agile antagonist, who must rely upon a rapier sharp, indeed, but slender to a dangerous degree. Incessantly through those spring days the forests rang with the clamor of blows. At Culpepper and Spottsylvania and North Anna the hammer fell and was parried by the rapier, Grant always moving by the flank and seeking to out-maneuver his antagonist and always failing to do so. By June, the two armies in their side-stepping tactics had reached Cold Harbor, where Grant in a great frontal attack lost 13,000 men in a few moments, which must have convinced him that it would take longer than all summer to fight it out on that line, as he then and there abandoned it and adopted a new one. In three months he had lost 150,000 men and was not so near Richmond as McClellan had been in 1862. XXVI. Sherman and Johnston