This turned out to be a much-needed day of rest for the president, a quiet day of relaxation and not much in the way of activity. He did discuss the possibility of offering a cabinet post to his former vice-president, Hannibal Hamlin, and also attended a meeting with his cabinet. But he sent no communiques on March 10, wrote no letters, and does not appear to have made any nominations or endorsements.

Abraham Lincoln was worn out by the spring of 1865, almost on the brink of exhaustion, and often complained about being tired. He had also lost weight, and appeared to be still losing weight; his face was heavily lined from anxiety and fatigue. An officer on General George Gordon Meade's staff took one look at the president and said that he was “the ugliest man I ever put my eyes on,” and also that he had an “expression of plebeian vulgarity in his face.”1 Lincoln's secretary John Hay had a great deal more sympathy regarding the president's appearance, along with more understanding on the subject of what made him appear so old and worn-out.

John Hay had known the president for the past four years and was well aware that it had been the pressures and worries of the war—“the great conflict in which he was engaged and which he could not evade,” is the way Hay put it—that had ground Lincoln down and made him an old man while he was still in his fifties. “Under this frightful ordeal his demeanour and disposition changed,” Hay would write, “so gradually that it would be impossible to say when the change began; but he was in mind, body, and nerves a very different man” at the end of the four years that produced Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Antietam, Shiloh, and a score of other battles that cost horrible numbers of lives.2

The war, which Lincoln feared would produce additional battles and even more loss of life, was moving toward Virginia, but was not moving very quickly. General Sherman and his army made their way toward Fayetteville but were slowed dramatically, sometimes to a full stop in places, by the weather and especially by the mud that turned all the roads into bogs and swamps. None of the roads were paved, which meant they had to be covered by fence rails and felled trees—called corduroying—to make them even halfway safe for the horses and wagons and artillery that had to pass over them. The mud was so deep and so cloying that sometimes the logs would disappear into it after the army had driven over that section of road. It was very slow going, but General Sherman was determined to get to Fayetteville and was not about to let anything as insignificant as a sea of mud get in his way.³

At Kinston, about eighty miles away from Fayetteville, Jacob Cox's men managed to hold their line against Braxton Bragg's repeated attacks. Finally, on March 10, Bragg decided that enough was enough and broke off his attack. He marched his men off to join Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Tennessee. General Johnston was hoping to link up with Robert E. Lee's army, if and when Lee was able to slip away from Grant at Petersburg and escape to North Carolina, and he would be needing all the men he could find.

The atmosphere was becoming noticeably warmer as the month of March went on, and not just in the meteorological sense.