President Lincoln addressed another matter that was causing him no small amount of distress, namely the execution of deserters from the army. He had been able to save individual soldiers from the firing squad, but on March 11 the president signed a proclamation that all deserters “shall be pardoned.” There was a condition, though: in order to earn the president's pardon, a deserter would have to return to the army and finish his enlistment.
According to the proclamation, “all deserters returning within sixty days…shall be pardoned on condition of returning to their regiments and companies or such other organizations as they may be assigned to until they shall have served for a period of time equal to their original term of enlistment.”1 Lincoln once claimed that he made more life and death decisions than all of his predecessors put together. He had just made another one.
On Sunday, March 11, Confederate cavalry left Fayetteville, North Carolina, riding over the bridges across the Cape Fear River. General Sherman's troops occupied the town as soon as the enemy left and began systematically destroying the arsenal and everything in it, along with anything else that might be useful to the Confederates.2
The men had a personal incentive for wanting to wreck the Fayetteville Arsenal—the factory turned out well over one million .58 caliber minié balls per year, lead bullets that were the infantryman's primary ammunition. Breaking up the arsenal meant that the Confederate army, including Joe Johnston's men, would be receiving at least a million fewer bullets to shoot at them. The destruction went on all day Sunday.